World War I, the “war to end all wars,” fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” had concluded with a hard, vengeful, unforgiving peace that wantonly reordered national boundaries and communities. Now there were new victims and conquerors, treacherous and confused alliances, silent or careless bystanders, appeasement and collusion. The map of the world created at Versailles was being burned to ash, drenched in blood. All geographic borders and imperial designs were to be reordered. Hitler had moved slowly, step by step. He paused and waited after every victory. Hearing no protest, seeing no opposition, he had moved on, from the Rhineland in 1936 to Spain, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Now Warsaw had been bombed. ER, involved with planning the 1940 campaign season for the Women’s National Democratic Club with its leaders, Dorothy McAllister and Mary Thompson Evans, could not help but be affected by news of Poland’s invasion. Under other circumstances, she might have felt invigorated by making plans with spirited Democratic women. But part of her heart remained each day with the people in the bombed-out villages of Poland. With every newspaper report, her mind followed the agony of women and children fleeing their burned homes, past fields of dead soldiers, who had ridden horses and farm animals to slaughter by German trucks and tanks. There was no escape from the relentless, mechanized Blitzkrieg.
The Democratic women had planned a broadcast for the next week to be held at the White House and feature the president. But FDR told his wife that “in the present crisis he must only speak as the President of all the people, and not as the representative of a particular party.” ER agreed to speak in his stead, and the unprecedented radio event was moved to the club’s headquarters.
The war news caused her to reflect upon her years in school in England during the Boer War. En route to Sweetwater, Tennessee, she wrote her column in the dining car behind a Roanoke newspaper, which provided
a good shield behind which I could observe my neighbors. The train was filled with young girls, all pretty and full of life, evidently returning to school or college. One of them wore a thin gold chain with a cross on it around her neck. It took me back to my childhood when my grandmother gave me a similar one, and I thought of the people who lovingly bestow such a gift, with a prayer in their hearts that it may protect the child. Well, youngsters are going to need those prayers, for they are facing a troubled world.
• • •
The carnage in Poland raised essential questions about U.S. priorities and ended fantasies about isolation: “We must not forget that what we do at home has an effect on the world situation.” The New Deal must be expanded, and Nazism must be defeated.
ER’s mid-September trip coincided with an “orgy of massacre” against Polish civilians. Old people and children, infants in houses, priests and intellectuals were entrapped and burned; prisoners of war were ordered to dig mass graves and were machine-gunned into them; pillage and rape abounded as Nazi killer units, the SS Einsatzgruppen, stormed through Polish towns and villages. There were three million Jews in Poland; in many towns they were herded into synagogues, to be incinerated. The bombing of Warsaw, which continued for weeks, was reportedly most severe on 14 September, coinciding with the Jewish New Year: in Nalewki, the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, “the synagogues were filled.”
Months before the war erupted, in February 1939, Hitler had declared that war would have one result: “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” By mid-September, the SS was calling the program of “racial extermination” a process of “cleansing and security measures,” and it resulted in the slaughter of Poles, Catholics, Jews, and all “suspicious elements.”
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Germany’s chief of military intelligence, and General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of the German army in Poland, witnessed conditions at the front with horror. These “old school” officers felt disgraced by the wanton brutality and by the unlawful mass civilian executions. Blaskowitz wrote to Berlin that widespread abominable acts threatened the morale of his troops: “Every soldier feels disgusted by these crimes committed in Poland.” But such crimes reflected the new order, and Blaskowitz was soon relieved of his command. No further military complaints followed.
ER’s columns for that week focused on her speaking tour in the South, where she had good audiences. In Gadsden, Alabama, she was impressed by a library for cotton mill workers, a trade school for poor white boys, a nursery school staffed by NYA girls, and other NYA projects for hundreds of formerly neglected young people that now promised meaningful work. Aware of her duties as the election season loomed, ER found time for a cordial lunch with Senator Lister Hill (D-AL) and other politicians.
She and Tommy then toured the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. At Tuskegee’s impressive teaching hospital, ER met the physician in charge “of the infantile paralysis work and attended a little ceremony in the chapel. Everyone present carried away the choir’s singing in their hearts. The work done here for young colored people is outstanding in the South.” They also visited a “gout hospital for colored veterans, a really fine institution, which, however, is already filled to capacity,” and the new parole board, which boasted for the first time “a woman member.”
After her lecture, sponsored by the Parent Teachers Association, she boarded a train to her next lecture in Danville, Virginia. Then she and Tommy continued to Washington for one overnight. ER was touched to be met at Union Station by her brother Hall and several of his friends. Their breakfast on the White House porch was “a very pleasant beginning to a busy day.”
But her mood was blighted when her husband told her at dinner that the Soviets had entered Poland at six o’clock that morning, 17 September. Those who recalled ex–foreign minister Maxim Litvinov’s six-year effort to forge a united front against Nazi aggression were stunned by Russia’s perfidy. In addition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Russia had had a nonaggression pact with Poland. Now, William Shirer wrote, “Soviet Russia stabs Poland in the back, and the Red army joins the Nazi army in over-running Poland.”
ER wrote to Aunt Maude Gray, “The attack on Poland by Russia has depressed FDR. He feels we are drawing nearer to that old decision, ‘Can we afford to let Germany win?’ Stalin and Hitler are much alike, aren’t they?”
On 24 August, Anna Louise Strong had written to ER, “I think this [Nazi-Soviet] pact may have saved peace for the time in Europe and without the sacrifice of Poland.” An outspoken journalist and activist, Strong had always had ER’s respect. A minister’s daughter from Nebraska who earned a PhD from the University of Chicago, she devoted her life to feeding hungry children and supporting radical unionists. ER admired her robust manner and mountain-climbing escapades as well as her political enthusiasms. After going with the AFSC’s 1917 famine relief mission to postwar Europe, she worked to build support for the Soviet Union, and ER had been impressed by her reports from Spain. Strong was now married to Joel Shubin, a Soviet official.
Now ER, in her column, rebutted her: “A curious way to aid the cause of peace!” A month later she answered Strong’s letter point by point:
I know that you know Mr. Stalin and I do not know him, and you know the Polish situation far better than I do. I cannot help, however, being distressed at another army on the march, nor can I quite bring myself to trust a man who, as part of a government, wipes out a people’s religion, no matter how the church may have deserved correction, and it seems to me also that wholesale killings are hardly a help to civilization. . . .
Even if [Russia] could [not] conclude a trade treaty with Great Britain and France, did she have to sign up with Germany . . . ? It seems to me that it gave Hitler just the strength he needed to plunge Europe into this horrible war. Hitler might have done it anyway, but one cannot help wondering if these two men might not believe in some of the same things.
ER received war information from many sources, and all the news was ghastly. From Paris, Carmel Offie, Ambassador Bullitt’s assistant, sent a running river of gossip and military updates. He sent Missy LeHand, personal secretary to the president, a “piece of anti-aircraft shell which fell on the terrace outside the Ambassador’s office during our first air-raid.” Offie was amazed by the attitude of calm that seemed to blanket Paris: “Actually, this whole war seems absolutely pointless. I wouldn’t give Martha’s Vineyard for the whole of Europe but the fact is that a mad dog is loose on the Continent, so what is to be done about it?” He hoped Congress would immediately lift the embargo, since France had virtually nothing to fight with.
On 18 September, ER wrote Mary Dreier, “The war continues to be too awful.” But her focus now returned to domestic issues. That day she wrote her column in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where she was appalled by the most distressed mining conditions. As her train journeyed through “beautiful country,” where agriculture and industry converged, she was reminded that “a great nation at peace still has many problems to solve.” The coal mines were now closed in an area where “the extremes of wealth and poverty shook hands” even before these dreadful conditions emerged. For ER, war had only exacerbated the plight of the miners. As the gap between rich and poor widened, she wanted to see these matters addressed with “a sense of urgency.”
The Nazi-Soviet Pact had thrown U.S. Communists into disarray. For weeks, the Daily Worker failed to publish the facts of the pact and minimized international coverage. The Soviet newspaper Pravda had announced that Poland was in a state of collapse and chaos: the air force was destroyed, the army was rendered useless, industrial centers had been lost, the government had disappeared. It ignored all Polish resistance and the ongoing defense of Warsaw. According to Pravda, without “any effective help” from Britain and France, Russia was left to liberate and protect the “eleven million Ukrainians and Belorussians” who have lived under Polish rule “in a state of national oppression.” There were “happy days in the liberated villages,” Pravda noted, and the Soviet occupiers were “heartily welcomed” by “jubilant crowds.” In addition to what journalist Alexander Werth called Russia’s “orgy of rapturous articles,” the Russian law enforcement agency (NKVD) deported to the East hundreds of thousands of “hostile or disloyal” Poles, as well as 68,000 Polish officers—additional seeds of future wars.
But Anne O’Hare McCormick’s regular columns in the New York Times, vivid and prescient, stirred ER. The military “monster” that had shattered Polish cities was also terrorizing Romania and Hungary “into a useless stupor.” “Human life has been uprooted and blown about like dust in a pounding wind.” Europe was “crumbling.” “What chance of survival,” McCormick asked, has this new “prison house of conquered nations,” defined by massacres and plunder, hatred and unlimited destruction? “Hitler has let loose a war to begin all wars.” ER agreed with McCormick—“a wise observer of European affairs”—and journalist Dorothy Thompson that “in this war the seeds of other wars are being sown.” There seemed to be no end to the misery human beings were capable of inflicting on one another.
The West sent no aid in any form to Poland, even as the siege of Warsaw intensified. Since the declaration of war, Britain had dropped several million anti-Nazi leaflets over Germany and pursued German merchant ships, but without much success. There were no significant troop movements, no real action, no effort even to distract Germany from its relentless assault on Poland. Indeed, according to the New York Times, “to maintain a fighting front,” Polish troops had gone east on the assumption that Germany would “become fully engaged by the British and French on the west.” But, as Hitler gloated, “not a shot had been fired on the western front.”
British and French inaction in these months seemed like betrayal and appeasement. Anti-appeasers were in despair. In London, Harold Nicolson confided details of his “appalling depression” to his diary: “The whole world is either paralysed or against us. These are the darkest hours we have ever endured.” Britain, he discovered, was entirely unprepared for war. At dinner with several friends, he learned that every military branch was “frightfully short of ammunition. . . . [We] have in fact no Army, Navy or Air Force.” Winston Churchill—now restored to his old post as Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty—was making elaborate remilitarization plans for a long war, but nothing could be ready until the spring of 1940.
ER now considered those who continued to clamor for “America’s splendid isolationism” fools or cowards. The era of neutrality was over, at least ideologically. “I hope and pray that we will not have to fight with armed forces in this war, but we do have to fight with our minds, for this is as much a war for the control of ideas as for control of material resources. If certain ideas triumph, then what our forefathers founded in this nation in the way of ideas and ideals would receive a very serious blow.” Everywhere she went, she appealed to her audiences to pressure Congress to revise the Neutrality Act in order to get needed supplies to the United Kingdom and France.
On 19 September, Hitler marched into and “liberated” Danzig, which had been ripped from Germany at Versailles. Crowds greeted him so “hysterical with joy” that it recalled his entry into Vienna, where he had been showered with cheers and flowers; the reception convinced him that “Almighty God has now given our arms his blessing.”
The next day Hitler chose the nearby resort town of Zoppot to finalize his eugenics, or medical-cleansing, program. On 21 September, surrounded by his personal physician and the chief medical officers of the Reich, he decided to secure the “purity of German blood” through the elimination of all medically impaired and mentally deranged patients deemed incurable. Painless gas was the preferred means of “euthanasia.” This program, centered at a clinic in Berlin at 4 Tiergartenstrasse, known therefore as Operation T4, was headed by a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Würzburg, Werner Heyde. Soon seven euthanasia centers were built, for the elimination of imperfect newborns and young children and “feebleminded and asocial” adults.
On 8 September FDR issued a proclamation of “limited national emergency.” He asked for no new legislation, no new executive authority. But then by executive order he authorized increases in the army, navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard; earmarked a considerable sum “for the reparation of Americans caught in the war zone”; and added 150 officers to the Department of Justice “to be used in the protection of the United States against subversive foreign activities within our borders.” Then he called Congress back into session to reconsider the embargo provisions of the Neutrality Act of 1935.
On 21 September, FDR appealed to Congress, saying there was no exclusive “peace bloc.” During the 1920s and 1930s the United States had led many peace efforts because it understood that “any war anywhere necessarily hurts American security and American prosperity.” But the Neutrality Act, he said, had been a deviation from established principles of “neutrality . . . and peace through international law. . . . I regret [that the Congress passed] that act. I regret equally that I signed that act.” He requested from Congress a new policy, called cash-and-carry, by which the United States would sell arms to Britain in exchange for cash; Britain would provide the transportation: “All purchases [will] be made in cash, and all cargoes [will] be carried in the purchasers’ own ships, at the purchasers’ own risk.” This cash-and-carry policy, he said, could avoid a repeat of such incidents as the 1917 sinking of the Lusitania.
Finally, he urged Congress to repeal the arms embargo in the Neutrality Act of 1935.
“Darker periods may lie ahead,” he warned. “The disaster is not of our making; no act of ours engendered the forces which assault the foundations of our civilization. Yet we find ourselves affected to the core; our currents of commerce are changing, our minds are filled with new problems, our position in world affairs has already been altered.” In such circumstances, it was vital to protect American interests.
Rightly considered, this interest is not selfish. The peace, the integrity, and the safety of the Americas—these must be kept firm and serene.
In a period when it is sometimes said that free discussion is no longer compatible with national safety, may you by your deeds show the world that we of the United States are one people, of one mind, one spirit, one clear resolution, walking before God in the light of the living.
But the House declined to repeal the arms embargo, by only two votes, 159 to 157.
ER and Tommy had listened to FDR’s address to Congress on the radio while traveling to Illinois. Afterward ER wrote her husband, “Your message was grand and came over very well, even on the train.”
She had hoped to be sent to Europe for the Red Cross to create a refugee relief effort. Because of the atrocities associated with Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, Secretary of State Hull and Red Cross head Norman Davis had vetoed ER’s plan to go to war zones for purposes of rescue and refuge.
• • •
During her first press conference of the fall, on 27 September, ER stressed that hemispheric peace and U.S. security depended on the repeal of the “dangerous” embargo clause. For Americans to believe they can “go scot-free,” she told the press conference, was to fail to appreciate “the responsibility that lies on us as one great nation at peace. That responsibility is to be thinking seriously of what we can do to alleviate suffering for civilian populations. . . . The only nation that can think of what to do for a future peace is the U.S., so . . . we have a so much greater responsibility than just to think of how we can keep out of war.” During her travels, she said, many people “come up to me and say, ‘Oh, let them stew in their own juice. It’s none of our concern, as long as we can stay out of it.’ That always gives me a horrible, sinking feeling, because you can’t help but suffer when all the rest of the world is suffering.” She had not met one person in the country who did not want to keep out of war, but she insisted Americans must “lead”—be imaginative in thought and action, to work for a lasting peace.
Asked if she was still a pacifist, she replied, “I have never been a pacifist in the sense that I don’t believe in defending this country, but I am most anxious to do everything possible to prevent war wherever one possibly can.” What had she meant when she said during her tour that “one should not think only of one’s own skin and one’s own pocket book”? “In the end,” she replied, “if the skins of the rest of the world are removed and the pockets of the rest of the world are empty, we will grow thin and lean.”
Did “the foreign situation” ensure her husband’s third term? ER demurred, suggesting the reporter consult the president. Had the president ever criticized her columns? someone asked. The first lady laughed: he “never said a word about a thing [I] wrote. . . . We are very careful about not trying to influence each other.” What about their frequent use of the same expressions? ER replied that it was “natural,” since they “were enormously interested in the same things. We do talk things over in a general way. We argue about everything in the world.” After all, “we do not just sit at meals and look at each other.” But while they talked about everything, she “never tried to influence the President in anything he did and . . . he had not tried to influence her.” They took it for granted that they would each do what they “considered the right thing.” Their marriage represented the best possible alliance of independence and deep connectedness. They both grew within it, while drawing closer and farther apart.
On 28 September Warsaw fell to the Nazis. German troops did not immediately occupy the Polish capital, but they took prisoner 140,000 Polish soldiers and massacred Warsaw’s civilian leadership, rounding up over 10,000 teachers, doctors, librarians, priests, journalists, writers, business leaders, and landowners for slaughter.
From the U.S. embassy in Paris, Carmel Offie sent details to the White House. American ambassador to Warsaw, Anthony “Tony” Biddle, and his wife had arrived on 24 September and “are now living at the Embassy Residence.” Bullitt was trying to restore their spirits: “The stories they tell are, to say the least, gruesome.” John Cudahy, who had been U.S. ambassador to Poland from 1933 to 1937, told Missy LeHand, “If you feel sad think of me. . . . No trace can be found of my former secretary, or her mother. And a family I knew best of all has vanished without a trace. Everyone in the Eastern half of Poland have lost every stick of their possessions, and I suppose with the few exceptions of Pro-Germans, everyone in German occupied Poland is little better off.”
Twenty-two million Poles were now under Nazi rule. Two days later Pravda published a photograph of Molotov and Ribbentrop signing the “German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty.” Poland, the borderland of rolling plains and industrial resources, was dismantled and partitioned again, for the fifth time in history. In exchange for including Lvov and its nearby oilfields on the Soviet side of the new border, Russia promised to supply Germany 300,000 tons of oil a year.
ER wrote nothing about these specific events, but every morning she read several newspapers and enjoyed columns by journalists such as Anne O’Hare McCormick, who railed against Soviet expansion and was particularly disturbed about Lvov. McCormick considered the fate of that town, formerly Lemberg in the Hapsburg Empire and the center of the Ukrainian independence movement, “even sadder” than the fate of Warsaw. The specter of Communism throughout Eastern Europe, the reason so many appeasers preferred Hitler to a treaty with Russia, was for McCormick the primary fear: “Hitler has released forces he is powerless to control.” The weak Central European states, like Romania, “are more vulnerable to Soviet than to Nazi penetration. . . . The Nazi-Soviet alliance is a merger of the forces of destruction.” They are united in “revolt against European civilization.”
Britain did not believe the Nazi-Soviet alliance would last, and most of Britain’s leadership, as well as public opinion, preferred war to a servile peace with Hitler. But U.S. ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy counseled FDR to avoid providing any support for the doomed nations. The Soviets were prepared to take over the Balkans and the Baltic States, and the Nazis were ready to move on Belgium and Holland. Kennedy was certain there was nothing to be done. He believed Churchill would do anything to get the United States into the war, but Britain would “go down fighting”—it could not possibly win.
Some argued that the German people were prepared to remove Hitler, Kennedy wrote to FDR, but that could result in chaos, and Germany could turn Communist. Then this nation of eighty million hungry people would be an even greater “menace to Europe.” Surely the United States did not “want any part of this mess.”
He urged FDR to reconsider his commitment to the putative democracies. The coming war would not be “a holy war.” After all, Kennedy insisted, democracy in France and England hardly existed: England was not a democracy “in our sense of the word,” having always been ruled by its “governing class.” And “France is ruled by a dictatorship which has just this week made illegal one of the largest Parliamentary parties,” the Communist Party, and expelled elected Communist members from Parliament.
The United States had nothing to gain, Kennedy advised, nothing to win, and no reason to support “a hopeless struggle” that could only end in “the complete collapse of everything we hope and live for,” no matter who won. Therefore “we should curb our sentiments and sentimentality and look to our own vital interests,” which lay in the western hemisphere. “It may not be convenient for us to face a world without a strong British Empire. But . . . we shall have to face it . . . and the leadership of the English-speaking world will, willy-nilly, be ours.”
Kennedy visited his friend Nancy Astor, finding her fully committed to Britain’s war effort and vigorously allied with Stella Reading, ER’s great friend who founded the Women’s Voluntary Service in 1938. They “wanted to know when America was coming in and of course I told them we weren’t coming,” he wrote his wife, Rose. “So perhaps, dear, you went home [to the United States] at the height of your husband’s popularity.”
ER disagreed entirely with Kennedy’s defeatist isolationism. His willingness to sacrifice Britain rendered him a pariah, even in FDR’s eyes. To an antiwar correspondent who believed that one “who goes to war for an ideal sacrifices his ideals,” she replied, “I agree with you in theory but I would rather die than submit to rule by Hitler or Stalin, would not you?”
• • •
During her autumn tour, most of ER’s columns dealt with the people she met, the books she read, and her observations. She kept busy lest she plunge into one of her “Griselda moods,” never far from her heart these bitter days. As she worked to fortify the people who benefited from and worked for New Deal agencies, she fortified herself. She believed fervently that war and civil war arose when countries neglected the real needs of the people.
She was disheartened to see, firsthand, how economically depressed parts of the country remained. The New Deal had achieved much in housing, employment, and hope, but as she traveled through West Virginia, its failures and limitations were apparent.
We passed first through a coal-mining section . . . with bad housing and underfed children. Then, for a time, a rather fertile farming country. Later, some small oil and natural gas wells. Just before we reached Glenville, some badly eroded hillsides. . . . They have been denuded of trees and are now being used as pastures or cornfields. But shortly there will be no soil on which anything can grow. Strange that people will not realize that lack of soil conservation eventually means not only loss in land productivity but deterioration in human beings.
In Carbondale, Illinois, “two very kind and enthusiastic young men” working for the NYA gave her a tour. Although Illinois had “risen to fifth place among oil-producing states,” it was still one of America’s most depressed regions, much to her grief. The farming and mining populations were both “at a very low ebb,” and “one of the counties near Carbondale has the greatest number of people on relief in any one county in the U.S.” But there were also hopeful signs of community renewal: the region’s flourishing NYA project not only employed but educated “boys who never had an opportunity for acquiring any work skill or getting any job” beyond that of “temporary day-laborer.” In addition to programs for gardening and “subsistence farming” skills, the boys were being trained “in auto-mechanics, electrical wiring, woodworking and iron work. They have the advantage of being near a State Teachers’ College which is cooperating in every way.” There were also wonderful “monuments to WPA work—a paved and widened main street, a fine armory, other lasting improvements.”
On a return swing through West Virginia, ER visited the Red House, a resettlement community built under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. She believed in the value of these projects, like Arthurdale, that were new communities of comfort and dignity. She was pleased that the Charleston Business and Professional Women’s Club sponsored a handicrafts project for local women to learn “various handicrafts” for home consumption and sale. As she set out all the changes under way, ER made a compelling plea to her readers: “I wish more people . . . would take an interest in their government homestead, for there is so much that can be done for these communities if people nearby lend a hand. I have never felt that the government should be expected to carry the burden alone.”
Also in West Virginia, she visited a WPA project that included a Crippled Children’s Hospital, with a pool to benefit all the children of the region: “The pool is one of the most delightful I have ever seen.”
After that, she returned to Washington for a brief visit. She dashed in to see her husband in his office on 28 September but wrote nothing of their conversation. Most of her time “was spent in a truly feminine and frivolous matter—getting my hair done.” In her lightning stopover, ER was happy to see that young Diana Hopkins and her ailing father, Harry, were “in such good spirits. Diana is evidently a good companion.”
After the Washington stopover, ER resumed her tour, reaching Wilmington, Delaware, and Reading, Pennsylvania. The new public address systems now found in most halls helped keep her “voice on its natural pitch. This is to me a great relief!”
Finally she reached New York City, where she visited art galleries, attended a reception for women sculptors and painters, and visited the World’s Fair twice in three days. Although she did not mention Hick, those two visits were in part to see her great friend. Hick’s work at the fair so absorbed her that she was in an uncommonly good mood. Between the fair and her weekend place on Long Island, she seemed uncomplaining and satisfied.
At the General Motors pavilion, ER found the recent discoveries in science on display to be “the most encouraging thing I have seen.” In a world only recently introduced to electricity and telephones, the rapid changes in transportation and communication would open vast opportunities for employment and comfort “if our scientists are able to delve further into the mysteries which lie all about us in the universe.”
Friday night she saw Philip Barry’s new play, The Philadelphia Story, advising her readers that “[Katharine] Hepburn and all the cast do so well that this play deserves its great success.” Saturday evening she and her unnamed company (presumably including Aunt Maude Gray) returned to the World’s Fair to see Billy Rose’s Aquacade, an extravaganza with music, dance, and swimming: “It is so delightful that it should not be missed by anyone.”
ER then set off for Seattle, for a long-planned visit with daughter Anna and her family. She was “thrilled” that Anna had encouraged the visit, as she was eager to see her grandchildren: Sistie, Buzzy, and six-month-old John. “People ask me about them everywhere! I am dying to see ‘little’ John who must be a monster!”
To be with Anna’s children and see how quickly they grew seemed to ER the perfect antidote to the world at large: “It certainly is fun to visit one’s children. I found myself marveling at the strength of my youngest grandchild. He is the most friendly, happy baby. . . . The older children are fascinated by him and when he grows up I suppose it will be hard to keep them from spoiling him.” ER also enjoyed a walk with Anna, Sistie, and their two Irish setters. “‘Jack’ never forgets me and greeted me warmly, but ‘Jill’ is a fickle lady and took very little interest in my arrival, but she has no objection to be petted, which some will say is a woman’s trait.”
On the flight from Seattle to San Francisco, ER read the October issue of the Survey Graphic, devoted to “the schools of our country.” Thirty-one educators and experts had been asked about the most basic questions of democracy “with which we are all concerned”:
1. What are the goals of our schools? Are they meeting the tests of American education in the American way?
2. Are our children learning how to think for themselves as citizens of a democracy, or are they likely to fall in line behind a rabble rouser?
3. Can we cut across economic and racial barriers and really provide equal opportunities?
ER considered these questions fundamental to democracy’s survival, yet over 800,000 children “did not attend school last year.” Either there was no school in their neighborhood because the community was too poor, or the family was too poor to provide books, shoes, clothes, or the means to send them to school. In addition, because of economic demands, in “certain parts of our country, the school year has been curtailed.” Although “some great men succeeded without schooling,” most came under the influence of “a great teacher who pointed out the way whereby they might educate themselves.” In her own life, Marie Souvestre at Allenswood had inspired vision, commitment, and deep learning. Today, in too many places, “we are giving little thought to the development of great teachers,” ER lamented. “We think more about curtailing their salaries than we do about improving their qualifications. A really good teacher can never be [sufficiently] paid, and they do not develop well on starvation wages.”
In San Francisco, ER spent most of her time with her dancer friend Mayris “Tiny” Chaney, whom she had met through Earl Miller. They went to the West Coast World’s Fair, which was spectacular. The grounds were filled with exotic, wild, colorful flowers and extraordinary plants; the art exhibit featured a great range of contemporary artists and old masters; and the Asian and Pacific Island exhibits were unique. The next day ER visited Tiny’s new hat shop and “bought for myself two winter hats.” Then they went off to Chinatown and Gump’s “to see the miniature silver display.”
In San Francisco the Western Union strike hampered ER’s ability to file her column. “How can we ever hope that different races will sit down and in a spirit of justice and goodwill consider [their] difficulties . . . if we in our own country cannot even persuade groups with different interests to meet and arbitrate their difficulties?” To ER, the surest way “to prevent war,” a question she was asked over and over again by women particularly, was to “desire justice and goodwill at home. We cannot have peace unless we begin with the individual and we must build up machinery to bring this peace about. . . . There must be representatives of varying points of view. There must be disinterested people who listen and patiently try to solve the difficulties. There must be a place for discussion. This is true at home and true in international affairs.” ER wanted all the human stories behind the picket lines told, to give “management a better understanding of the actual human needs.” Until we understood and respected each other and our differences, there was little hope for peace.
Her son James flew up from Los Angeles with several friends to have lunch and tour with his mother. They returned together to Los Angeles, where James now worked for Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn. In September, he had separated from his wife, Betsey. Everyone feared impending divorce, and Sara Delano Roosevelt had taken the news very hard. ER was glad that FDR had gone to Hyde Park to be with his mother.
After her time in California, ER flew to Fort Worth, Texas, to visit her son Elliott and her “very attractive” grandchildren. “I am always fascinated when I hear Tony, aged three, solemnly address me as ‘Grandmother Roosevelt.’” ER went with Elliott’s wife, Ruth, to listen to FDR’s radio broadcast, then flew home for her birthday week.
On 7 October her daughter-in-law Betsey’s father, Dr. Harvey Cushing, first Sterling Professor of Neurology at Yale University, suddenly died. ER flew to New York, where she met SDR to take the noon train to New Haven for the funeral. “It seems to me that the unexpected is always happening in life. One never knows from day to day what fate may have in store.”
Surrounded by work and grief, ER was uplifted by art exhibitions and an exciting new musical organization called the Little Symphony Society of Philadelphia. Directed by Esther Lape’s friend Leopold Stokowski, this orchestra was to provide accompaniment for emerging soloists “in a great music center” and offer guest conductors opportunities to premiere new works. It meant “an opportunity for young musicians to be heard, which has been difficult,” and ER considered it a thrilling development.
The eleventh of October 1939 was ER’s fifty-fifth birthday. She reflected on her life as the world she loved plunged once again into the madness of war. Twenty-one years earlier the Great War had ended with her marriage in disarray because FDR loved another woman. ER had been in a crisis of gloom, unable to eat, lonely, and afraid. But new friendships, new interests, new work, and bold political activity had helped her out of her despair. She had created a new life within the hearth of her old one. Her travels and contacts enabled her to ward off her “Griselda moods,” and the good work she was able to do in partnership with her husband advanced the best of their shared vision.
ER had a full and happy birthday. Bernard Baruch sent an admiring birthday telegram: “May you be spared many years to bring happiness comfort and courage to those who are privileged to call you friend and to those countless thousands who are bettered by what you say and do and stand for.” She received a mountain of cards, letters, and more telegrams filled with good wishes, so many that she thanked her friends in her column. She “deeply appreciated” their kind thoughts, although so many of her correspondents asked her “actually to do something definite” that she would not be able to respond personally. In “a very busy day, all these good wishes were a very pleasant background to many activities.”
Actually, ER was happiest when she was busiest, especially when she felt needed. On her birthday she met with Frances Perkins at the Department of Labor about jobs and training for youth and had an informative lunch. Perkins seemed “very jittery about ‘reds,’” due to the continual assaults on her and her department by the Dies Committee—it was “getting on all their nerves,” ER observed. Throughout October, the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, chaired by Martin Dies (D-TX), was railing against liberal Democrats and administration officials. The “Committee has been running hog-wild lately and has become a danger of the first magnitude,” remarked Harold Ickes. Recently in Washington and Chicago, it had raided various organizational headquarters “under the pretense of serving subpoenas . . . and then simply walked out with all written records and lists.” Ickes compared Dies to A. Mitchell Palmer, who had committed the Red Scare outrages at the end of the last war. Dies was now “an actual menace” who threatened “to give out names of prominent New Dealers in the Administration connecting them with communistic activities. I know perfectly well that he will try to smear me.” That very week Dies investigated the Spanish Refugee League Campaign Committee, which Ickes chaired. Furious, Ickes noted that he knew no Communists and had never read Karl Marx. He had every right to help collect money for “Spanish refugees who are miserably circumstanced in France.” That week ER wrote about the need to send relief to Chinese and Spanish civilians.
Her sons Jimmy and Elliott, her brother Hall, and several other guests were at the White House for ER’s “pleasant” birthday party. Her husband gave her a check, with a note on which he had scrawled in a bold large hand, “E.R.: Many Happy Returns! With this goes the necessary for a good ‘Green’”—a reference to the new lawn around the swimming pool at Val-Kill. FDR’s abrupt scribble, lacking their customary salutation of love, is a curious anomaly in their correspondence. Had he made a more loving toast? Had he even attended her birthday dinner? There is no evidence of his presence or any other exchange that day.
FDR spent part of that afternoon in a momentous meeting with Dr. Alexander Sachs, who appealed for government support for new experiments in atomic physics. A Wall Street economist and director of the Lehman Corporation, the Russian-born Sachs had impressed FDR in the past with his economic advice. Now Sachs appeared on a different mission. He had been trying to arrange a meeting with the president since 2 August, when Albert Einstein agreed with Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi that the United States needed to be prepared to face specific challenges from Nazi laboratories, based on research they had once all done together.* That same day, Einstein had written in a letter to FDR:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Szilard and Fermi in America—that it may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. . . .
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. . . .
You may think it desirable to have some permanent contact between the administration and the group of physicists now working on chain reaction in America. . . .
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines. . . . That [Germany] should have taken such early action might be understood on the ground that the son of the German Undersecretary of State, von Weizsacker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
In addition to Einstein’s letter, Sachs gave FDR a memo written by Szilard and a letter of explanation and urgency he wrote himself. Nobody else was in the room, and there is no record of the discussion. But as soon as Sachs left, FDR summoned his senior aide Edwin “Pa” Watson, handed him the three documents, and said, “Pa, this requires action!”
Action was taken slowly over time, but for several years little was done with the support of U.S. military assistance. Meanwhile misery, suicide, and death prevailed in Poland and all Nazi-occupied territories. As the numbers of the dead, wounded, plundered and dislocated rose, Hitler called it the Sitzkrieg, while Senator William Borah called it “the phony war.”
Engorged by his victories, Hitler issued a series of horrific edicts. He signed an amnesty order to release all SS officers who had been arrested by army authorities on charges of depraved brutality against civilians and mass executions of old people and children. Warsaw was designated Poland’s “General-Government,” with Cracow the new capital. It would be ruled by Hans Frank, a vicious Nazi who initiated an “Extraordinary Pacification Program” whereby thousands of leaders, teachers and intellectuals, priests and potential “subversives” were summarily executed. Frank also instituted a “Housecleaning Plan” specifically to remove Jews. Ordinary Poles were systematically forced from their homes, farms, and businesses. Unable to take their possessions, they were purposefully rendered destitute—“so poor the Poles would want to work in Germany.”
The “methods employed” during the forced removals, General Field Marshal W. Keitel noted, were “irreconcilable with all our [German] existing principles.” While Germanic Poles were removed to German provinces, special Jewish “reservations” were created where Jews deported from Vienna, Czechoslovakia, Baltic ports, and western Poland were to be dumped, along with groups of stray Jews, some of whom had been captured in Hamburg as they waited to board ships for the United States.
Many Jews fled eastward, across the River Bug, to the Soviet side—and were surprised to see Jews fleeing west, imagining that Nazi rule might be “less burdensome” than Communist rule. Throughout occupied Poland the “New Order” meant Nazi work camps for all Jewish males, aged fourteen to sixty. By December 1939 there were twenty-eight labor camps in the Lublin area, fourteen near Warsaw, twelve near Cracow, and dozens more scattered across the plains. In Lodz, where 200,000 Jews lived, Goebbels announced the “surgical task” of removal and slaughter. The insane nightmare had begun. Evidence was sent to ER and FDR through many sources, including photographs and newspaper cuttings.
On 11 October, ER’s great friend Caroline Astor Drayton Phillips (Helen Astor Roosevelt Robinson’s cousin, FDR’s second cousin), a member of ER’s World War I–era biweekly Sunday dinner “club,” left for Rome to join her husband, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, William Phillips. She wrote in her diary, “I go, not without fear and dread, into the black cauldron of war, which is Europe, glad to be going to my dear William, but in every other way, most unwillingly.”
Within weeks Caroline Phillips’s diary was filled with details out of Poland: “Dreadful reprisals by the Germans. . . . The Polish Ambassador told William about an old Polish Countess in Danzig, aged seventy, who was taken out and shot for having burned a table [for warmth and fuel] in her own house. Everything is considered to be German property now. They are trying . . . to kill off as many Poles as possible. There are now 30,000 Polish refugees in Hungary and 10,000 in Romania.”
On 22 November she recorded the account of trusted visitors; airplanes were bombing “peasants working in the fields,” “women and children fleeing from Warsaw”:
The Germans kill everyone, far more than the Russians do. The Russians confiscate all the estates of the nobles but only rarely shoot them, but the Germans shoot them and take the property and shoot and loot the peasants also. They said the Bolshevik soldiers were more humane than the German ones. They also told us that the Polish doctors attending wounded German airplane pilots found they had all been drugged with morphine and other drugs and that it is well known that they send them up with very heavy drinks as otherwise they could hardly stand all the killing they have to do.
For all the reported agony, the “phony” war continued for almost eight months. The British called it the “the Bore War”—a “bloody bore” of waiting, tension, and discomfort. Churchill called it “the Sinister Trance.”
ER, silenced by her husband’s political needs and his own secrecy regarding refugee negotiations with international and business leaders, avoided public discussion of the situation. In early October FDR wrote to Secretary of State Hull with his “original” observation that as the war continued “there will be, in all probability, more Christian refugees than Jewish refugees.” Since so many “of them will be Catholics, the Vatican itself may [decide] to take an active interest.” He wanted discussions with American Christian organizations, as well as European groups. Moreover, he envisioned sending a “special Minister or Ambassador” directly to the Vatican, in order to put “the whole refugee problem on a broad religious basis, thereby making it possible to gain the kind of world-wide support that a mere Jewish relief set-up would not evoke.”
Then on 17 October FDR held a White House Conference on Political Refugees. The president addressed the delegates with a sense of urgency: there would be between ten and twenty million refugees “before the European war was over.” Places of “permanent settlement” would be needed. That was now to be the immediate task of an Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, under the direction of Paul van Zeeland, Belgium’s former premier.
FDR considered this resettlement program an enormous challenge. It was too late “to speak of small settlements. . . . The picture should be in terms of a million square miles occupied by a coordinated self-sustaining civilization.” FDR had a long-range fantasy of postwar resettlement that required unlimited investments—from governments and business leaders. He believed it could be done, at least partly, on a profitable basis: “It is my judgment that 50 percent of the cost can properly be financed on a business basis but that the other 50 percent would have to be given—not loaned—in the form of gifts from governments and individuals.”
The president understood Britain’s opposition to continued large-scale resettlement in Palestine, and at this conference Britain withdrew its offer of British Guiana as a potential homeland for European Jews. FDR had no intention of changing America’s own restrictive immigration laws and sought a “supplemental national home” in one of the many unpopulated or “vacant spaces” on earth. His rhetoric aggravated American Jews, who favored Palestine.
While Britain and France now intended to consider refugees from Germany “enemy aliens,” Germany was building its own “resettlement” camps in Poland. Despite FDR’s rhetorical conclusion, imploring leaders to “lift a lamp beside new golden doors and build new refuges for the tired, for the poor, for the huddled masses yearning to be free,” the conference was futile. With no consideration for the immediate crises, the delegates left in despair and sorrow.
At her press conference, ER avoided mentioning her husband’s conference on refugees, or that on 13 October she had attended a B’nai B’rith luncheon to celebrate the Washington chapter. Nor did the journalists who covered the first lady bring up the subject. However, when asked how she felt about being called a “warmonger,” she replied fully that it was now clearly a matter of “self-defense” to be “concerned about what is happening . . . in the rest of the world.” The past taught that “a breach of the peace anywhere is a menace to peace everywhere.” She hoped “we never will have to go to war,” but she was not “a prophet.” The time to have worked against war was before the war broke out, through an international peace organization. Implying that it was too late, she said, “You must look to the future now.” But it was urgent for everybody to take a real interest in their own community and broaden democracy, “to make democracy work” by their own active participation. Disarmament, for example, would work only if “all nations cooperate.” Therefore all questions of war and peace and of this war’s impact on American democracy were connected.
• • •
One immediate threat to democracy was the burgeoning Red Scare, unleashed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. While no significant antifascist or anti-Nazi movement was under way, ER and her young friends became primary targets of the new crusade.
On 6 September 1939, FDR told his cabinet that “someone who knew Goebbels well” had just reported that the Nazi chief of propaganda believed Germany would destroy Poland “within a very few days and [would] then quickly smash both France and England, largely from the air.” When FDR’s informant asked Goebbels “What next?” he replied, “You know what is next, the United States.” To the suggestion that 3,500 miles of distance made that boast absurd, Goebbels retorted, “It will come from the inside.”
On 6 September 1939, FDR had issued an executive order that empowered the FBI to monitor all dangers, subversion, and rumors of subversion—to check “espionage and subversive propaganda” and block “sabotage.” For that purpose the FBI staff was to be increased “by 150 operatives,” and all “local officials throughout the country” were ordered “to cooperate in this campaign.” The Attorney General asked all citizens to report any information they may gather on such activities to the nearest FBI. Clearly, the order was intended to target those allied with both Nazis and Communists. But only Communists and “fellow travelers” interested FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Dies.
The Dies Committee led the crusade, accusing ER of hosting a “Red Tea” at the White House for young Communists, meaning the American Youth Congress and its leaders. ER, their friend and advocate, publicly acknowledged that she supported the AYC and participated in their conferences at Vassar and other places. But she was convinced that her young friends, whom she knew “as individuals,” were not Communists. There was nothing “reprehensible” or disagreeable about their meetings, where controversial issues were fully and frankly discussed.
Then on 27 September rumors that FDR had ordered a “Red purge” rocked Washington. Allegedly he sought to “purge the Federal payroll of Communists” and sent the Department of Justice an order to begin the process. Dies considered it a victory for his committee and leaked the story, but Justice Department officials refused to comment. ER dismissed it as a publicity stunt, and nothing immediately happened.
But throughout the autumn of 1939 attacks against her became more insidious. For weeks, she was asked about the expansion of “subversive groups.” She had seen “no evidence of un-American activities in her travels about the country,” she replied. There was “little to fear” from Communist groups, so long as “all of us make an effort to live our democracy day to day.” Moreover, she said, the United States needed to do more to improve the conditions “of migratory workers,” help them to organize, see to their needs during harvest season, and provide necessary “mobile schools and better camp” facilities.
In France, the first months of the war seemed to be fought not against Nazis but exclusively against Communists. On 27 September the French government outlawed the Communist Party along with “hundreds of societies, unions, leagues suspected of Communist sympathies. Mass arrests began.” Communist deputies were dismissed from parliament and prosecuted. Leftist journals and newspapers, including L’Humanité and Ce Soir, were closed down. Freedom of the press disappeared. But no similar action was taken against fascists.
For ER, France—the home of Marie Souvestre, the Enlightenment, and modern democracy—seemed doomed. The country had waited too long, she wrote, to address the crying needs of the people—poverty, dislocation, confusion. It had instituted no New Deal–like measures, and so the people turned to Communism—or fascism. And now even the Communists were under Hitler’s thumb. ER hoped that continued and extended New Deal reforms would block such a situation from developing in America.
But in this new era of raids and the Red Scare, begun in 1939 and supported by FDR, the president’s wife was to become, and remain, a primary suspect and target, even as she became increasingly anti-Communist.