Wherever ER went that autumn, three issues dominated her thoughts: the unprecedented human suffering in Hitler-occupied Europe, the need to combat racial injustice throughout the United States, and the domestic Red Scare. She considered it a profoundly dangerous time that required continual learning and activity to confront these threats to democracy.
Since the early 1930s her friend Clarence Pickett, head of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and his wife, Lilly, had been ER’s chief informants about conditions in Europe. Their travels in Germany and their Quaker colleagues provided firsthand reports and analyses that she used to guide her contributions and private efforts.
In 1934 Pickett had visited a celebration in Worms to mark the synagogue’s nine hundredth year of service. He observed, “Jews were in Germany before Christ’s time. They love Germany. Most Jews will remain in Germany . . . driven in on themselves, but they will suffer through.” Later from Vienna he had reported on pitiable scenes of humiliation and weeks of reported suicides. When Kristallnacht took place in November 1938 he told her about brutality and destruction throughout Germany, when twenty thousand German Jews were rounded up and sent to camps.
Hitler’s race laws transformed the meaning of citizenship, religion, and being German. A Jew, Hitler declared, was not a follower of a religion or faith but a member of a pestilent race. One drop of Jewish blood poisoned the bloodstream; one Jewish gene polluted the pool. Only “Aryans” could be German citizens. Studies were undertaken to find “hidden” Jews, families who were secular, Unitarian, Catholic, or Quaker, who had for generations been German, assimilated or converted, or of mixed marriages and parentage. Mischlingen and intermarrieds were no longer safe, no longer citizens. It was no longer possible to convert or assimilate. For ER, all hope expired in Poland, when countless Jews were herded into synagogues, set aflame, and burned to ash.
From September to December 1939, as the Nazis massacred fifty thousand civilians and rendered millions more homeless refugees, the world looked on, whispering concerns but unready, unable, or unwilling to respond to the victims of atrocity. In the United States, the prevailing fervently anti-interventionist isolationists roared any public sympathy into silence and indeed fueled a crusade against “un-Americanism” that targeted trade unionists, New Dealers, and young people. ER herself, still restrained by FDR’s slowly evolving international policies, wrote little about refugees, the slaughter of civilians, or the suffering of war.
The unfolding European tragedy was met in the United States by growing anti-Jewish, anti-Communist fervor. Nazi sympathizers were gaining momentum. Father Coughlin’s popular radio program had an audience of over a million Catholics and pro-fascists each week. Congressmen made hysterical speeches against “refugee hordes” who sought to undermine and overthrow America on behalf of Jews and Communists. When Nazis occupied new territory and Hitler’s race laws were imposed, domestic fascists celebrated—on the radio, in Congress, at mass rallies. ER found it upsetting and frightful.
Moreover, Hitler’s laws cast a harsh light on America’s own pattern of discrimination. Who was a full citizen? Who could vote? Who was “Negro”? Who was American? What did it mean to be “white,” Jewish, Christian, Communist, or un-American? ER considered the range and shades of her friends and allies in the NAACP, from Mary McLeod Bethune to Walter White. Sometimes her head swirled with the insanity of it all.
ER believed that fulfilling the promise of America’s democracy required enlarging it so that it embraced everyone. And she never wavered in her conviction that to resist fascism and Communism, it was essential to save and expand the New Deal, to end racial violence, bigotry, and discrimination, and to support youth and the youth movement. While increasingly shrill voices equated calls for racial justice with Communism, her friends in the youth movement were trying to fulfill the American promise. They were radical, but they considered themselves American activists for democracy.
They opposed bigotry, segregation, the poll tax, and all racial divides. They proved, both in their spirited meetings and in their daily lives, that it was possible to respect one another, work closely together, and form friendships across racial and religious boundaries. Their fresh intensity stirred her. Many AYC leaders were Jewish or of Jewish descent. Some were religious and belonged to Young Judea, which sought a Jewish homeland in Palestine; others were secular, agnostic, or spiritual. And by 1939 they were all being reviled as Communist Jew traitors.
From September on, ER publicly condemned Communists whose deeds proved they were not loyal to the United States. For instance, Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party of the United States, had openly avowed that his “first allegiance is to Russia”—for which she criticized him. It was “impossible to remain neutral,” she wrote repeatedly to correspondents. “Hitler and Stalin combined are a very great danger to us. It is not just a question of boundaries, population, or raw materials. . . . You cannot insulate yourself from ideas. . . . In the end I prefer to die fighting for freedom than to live under a Nazi or Communist regime.”
But she also believed that civil liberties applied to all political parties, and that the right to speak and dissent, to march and rally, were sacrosanct. She accepted the AYC’s right to have Communist members, since to limit the rights of any one group was to endanger the rights of all. And she was convinced that her AYC friends were not in fact Communists, and that the AYC was not Communist-dominated. She had personally asked J. Edgar Hoover whether there was any hard evidence that her friends were Communists, and he told her there was nothing specific. Then she met with her friends privately to ask them to explain their political views.
I told them that since I was actively helping them, I must know exactly where they stood politically. I knew well that the accusations might be false, since all liberals are likely to be labeled with the current catchword. . . . In every case they said they had no connection with the communists, had never belonged to any communist organizations, and had no interest in communist ideas. I decided to accept their word, realizing that sooner or later the truth would come out.
ER’s great friend and benefactor Bernard Baruch was a secular Jewish-American and a southern patriot. He had long supported various programs now condemned as “Communist”—most notably, the schools and health centers at Arthurdale, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, as well as the AYC. And he too had long been assailed by American bigots. In 1919 Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent had assailed him specifically as the leader of an “international Jewish conspiracy.” Throughout the 1930s those charges were renewed by the KKK, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, Dudley Pelley, and various leaders of fascist groups in the United States. Now a primary target, viciously slandered as a predator-Jew-capitalist, Baruch wrote:
These attacks never hurt me as much as did the discriminations my children suffered. My two daughters were brought up in the Episcopalian faith of their mother. Yet they were refused admission to the same dancing school their mother had attended. Even when the pastor of their church intervened, they were denied admission to several private schools for girls.
It was not easy to explain to my children why they were suffering such senseless discriminations. Instead of allowing these things to embitter and frustrate them, I told them to take these discriminations as spurs to more strenuous achievement—which is how I myself have met the problem of prejudice.
ER believed Baruch would understand the AYC’s politics and appreciate its goals. So when it was attacked, she turned to him for advice and support. Although he did not particularly approve of its style and disliked some of its members personally, he never refused her requests. After 1938 ER was not merely a casual friend of the AYC—she was its most generous supporter. With funds derived from Baruch, as well as from her broadcast and lecture fees, she helped finance its operations—mostly anonymously, through the AFSC.
• • •
During the last week of October, the Dies Committee viciously attacked ER’s closest allies in various New Deal agencies. Dies insisted there were more than 569 Communists on the government payroll, and that they aimed to destroy America. Federal employees with radical sympathies had no protection or privacy. Dies’s agents raided the Washington office of the American League for Peace and Democracy, claiming it was a Communist front. The committee then released a list of hundreds of federal workers who were members, and in late October the New York Times published their names, positions, and salaries. Included on this list was Oscar Chapman, who had helped organize the Marian Anderson concert on 9 April 1939.
The night the story hit the press, ER was participating in a panel on “The Challenge to Civilization” at Helen Rogers Reid’s Herald Tribune Forum, whose purpose was to oppose fears of Communist-Nazi-Fascist “Termites” who bored from within. One panelist, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, told the audience of more than five thousand that he wanted to receive reports of “sabotage, espionage, or neutrality violation,” but he urged Americans to avoid “a witch hunt.” Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wondered what was unneutral about “repeal of the embargo.” While Harvard University president James Conant emphasized “academic and political freedom of the mind,” he cautioned against “becoming more intensely class conscious” and suggested a return to the promise of universal education and “social mobility.”
ER told the crowd she was not afraid to meet or speak with Communists, so long as she remained free to speak about democracy. In her talk, “Humanistic Democracy—The American Ideal,” she articulated the distance between our national facts and American rhetoric. Everyone should be able “to come into the world healthy and strong,” but “too many mothers were without adequate food or medical care.” Every child should have the opportunity to be educated, she said, and “to earn a living under decent working conditions,” but we “fall far short of that ideal.” Until these basic democratic rights were made real, the threats of Communism and fascism would persist. Yet we could not suppress adherents of these isms, their right to speak or organize, without suppressing “our own freedoms.” “It is not enough to say we believe in the Sermon on the Mount,” she concluded, “without trying to live up to it.”
She worried that FDR was too engrossed in the war at the expense of domestic issues. “Pa agrees wholeheartedly when you say we must not neglect domestic affairs,” she wrote Anna, “but he is so full of the war. . . . Perhaps when [repeal of the embargo] is out of the way he will be freer in mind.”
When ER resumed her autumn tour, she used it partly to emphasize those New Deal issues that seemed no longer to interest her husband. In Texas she spoke to the Altrusa Club, a women’s group that she belonged to that provided job training and support for young girls and older women—including counseling and comfort “in a home for unmarried mothers.” She met with representatives of the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. She visited a CCC camp where seven hundred Indian boys were trained to do soil conservation work, and Indian girls were taught to revive traditional Indian crafts and beadwork. She was given a belt of “exquisite workmanship” that celebrated the skills of “our native Indian groups.”
At the Texas State College for Women in Denton, she dedicated “a little chapel in the woods” with magnificent stained glass windows. More than ninety local “NYA boys” and the college’s art students had built it to illustrate the many services “performed by women,” from motherhood to industry. She took the opportunity to caution her audience of four thousand that such monuments to art and the spirit were endangered, and she told them that the future depended on their vision and actions. It was, she said, up to each individual to show the world that “a democracy can work when the day of peace comes.” Her address, called “A Typical Day in the White House,” was broadcast across the Southwest.
ER celebrated the creativity and excellence of individuals whose talents were discovered by and trained in the arts programs the New Deal funded. Such individuals needed a well-rounded education. Both sports and the arts were vital to society, since they not only provided opportunities for talented individuals but also helped build community. Nurturing the arts required local, state, national, and individual support. A homesteaders’ group in Tennessee supported mountaineers whose craft and folk-music festivals inspired the young; the Florida State Music Teachers Association formed a club of twenty thousand professional musicians to benefit music education, orchestral opportunities, and a “congenial home for retired musicians.”
Although signs of distress and poverty in Missouri and Nebraska were disturbing, ER was heartened by NYA programs that trained white and colored youth in stonework, which had resulted in an “epidemic” of new stone houses. Several judges in the Ozarks sponsored this project, with the result that “delinquency has been cut down 65%.” Too often homeless, orphaned, abused children were designated “delinquents,” but ER was adamant: across the country, we must care for our hurt, abandoned, needful children.
During her tour, on 27 October, the Senate finally voted 63 to 30 to repeal the arms embargo. ER wired her husband, “Delighted all went well in the Senate, Much Love.” Several days later another moment of private jubilation came when the House passed the 1939 Neutrality Act and FDR signed the legislation, which at long last lifted the embargo. Now the United States would be able to sell desperately needed supplies to Great Britain and France. FDR considered the law a triumph. ER was relieved by the victory, but to her great dismay, her friend Caroline O’Day had again voted against it. An absolute pacifist, O’Day agreed with those World War I antimilitarists like Oswald Garrison Villard and Norman Thomas who were allied with isolationists like Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who declared that repeal and cash-and-carry “would suck the war right into our front yard.”
ER returned to Hyde Park to vote in the November election, and conferred with her husband. He still wanted her to write nothing about conditions in conquered Europe, or about the secret negotiations and private conversations regarding long-range but vague plans for potential havens. But she was now free to write about the refugee situation. In her column, she compared the urgent appeals from “war refugees in different parts of the world” to the good work done in each locality by community chest drives:
I wish very much that we could have some central organization, now coordinating civilian relief, make the contacts necessary . . . for adequate care of refugees in our own country and help other nations whose refugee loads are far greater than ours. . . . Think of sixty million Chinese war refugees! “Bowl of Rice” parties held all over the United States under the auspices of the United Council for Civilian Relief in China.
Such efforts could be coordinated “for the Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Czecho-Slovakian and German refugees.”
An American journalist in Bucharest, Romania, wrote a long letter to ER that detailed “the deplorable conditions” faced by refugees in Eastern Europe. Ann Cardwell, wife of Paul Super, national secretary of the Polish YMCA, had been residents of Poland for over seventeen years. While she and her husband were safe in Romania, they had witnessed firsthand the deplorable plight of the refugees:
It is of these Poles I want to write you. From the hour we left Warsaw we have been traveling with crowds of them. The roads have been full of trucks, cars, wagons, motorcycles, bicycles, . . . people afoot.
There were no rest rooms, flies swarmed. . . . It was extremely difficult to prepare food for babies and young children and no place to bathe or rest but in the homes of kindly people. Nowhere would Poles take money from us, American guests, though we were abundantly able to pay. But a word more about the children. We do not see how half of them could survive this awful retreat. Then there were the old and the ill, who could endure it no better. It was dreadful to see the wan, worn faces.
Cardwell warned of the winter to come and the impossibility of survival.
In addition to the unsanitary conditions of such life, there was constant danger from bombs and machine guns. Since coming here we have talked with a young doctor who was in charge of a train load of women, children and wounded soldiers being taken out of Krakow before the city fell. And he told of how . . . they had to stop [repeatedly] to take out the dead—8, 10, 12 at a time. The German planes continually bombed the train though it was evident that it was filled with people being evacuated. . . .
How many Poles have escaped from Poland nobody knows. None has come because he was a coward. They have come as did we, to avoid falling into German or Russian hands. . . . Every person I meet among the refugees tells me a tale of tragedy. . . . More, these people are stunned by the passing [of Poland], even though it will be but temporary, of the state their ancestors and they fought through 150 years to restore and rebuild on the basis of respect for personality and human rights. The material and social advance accomplished in the 20 years of freedom was little short of marvelous.
My husband and I will stay here and do everything we can, he as head of the Polish YMCA and director of the American Y relief work for Poles, I to help wherever I can, chiefly . . . by writing. We have little more than the clothes we have on, having had to leave everything in our beautiful Warsaw house, now without doubt a mass of ruins. . . . But these people must have money or die. . . . Romania, it seems, will let them stay here. . . .
And so, Mrs. Roosevelt, in the name of humanity, I appeal to you to do what you can for these people who have been robbed of their all and driven from their home. Russia, I know has urged all Poles to return, saying that Russia will take care of them. The Poles know the Bolsheviks well, and . . . cannot trust themselves to Russia. It is to England, France, and America they must look for help. If England and France give their sons and share their sufferings and loss of war, surely America will come forward with relief funds. I am not addressing you . . . as the wife of the President, but as a woman deeply interested in human decency.
The next week in her 14 November column, ER celebrated the creation of a new Polish relief organization: “I was very glad to see this morning that a committee had been set up again, with Dr. Henry MacCracken as chairman, which will undertake relief work for the Poles. I hope that everyone who can, will help this committee.”
While cautious discussions about refugees and safe havens continued, FDR offered refuge to several European leaders: “The United States would be glad to receive former [Polish] President Mościcki if he cares to visit this country.” Since Hitler’s next targets would be Holland and Belgium, FDR personally invited King Leopold of Belgium and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands. He wrote Cordell Hull, “In view of the fact that Leopold is an old friend of mine and that I have ancestral Dutch connections it would be a decent thing to do.” FDR assured the monarchs that “Mrs. Roosevelt and I would gladly look after their safety and well-being and . . . we would regard them as members of our own family.”
Rumors of impending attacks accelerated so furiously that even Dora Forbes, SDR’s ninety-three-year-old sister, reluctantly agreed to leave her Paris home. Carmel Offie wrote Missy LeHand, “We were very glad Mrs. Forbes left. She looked very well,” and her behavior was “magnificent.” Offie “could have died laughing when the night before she left she asked the Ambassador whether he would not lend her $100 and a portable radio; otherwise she would not leave. . . . She was very nice indeed to both of us, and especially the Chief” and evidently left Bullitt and Offie with treasured tokens from her beloved home and “many kindnesses.”
Avenues of safety, access to escape, were rapidly closing. On 15 November, ER wondered if “we will ever return to the day . . . when little was thought of passports.” On 19 November Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland, announced that “the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw must be shut off from the rest of the capital.” It would be barricaded and walled off, since Jews carried “diseases and germs.” William Shirer was told by a friend just returned from Warsaw that “Nazi policy is simply to exterminate the Polish Jews.” They were herded in massive numbers to eastern Poland, along with “several thousand Jews from the Reich,” without access to food, shelter, or warmth, sent there simply “to die.”
Safe now in Paris, America’s ambassador to Poland, Tony Biddle, and his wife, Margaret, worked closely with the Polish government in exile and performed vital relief services for refugees from everywhere. For over a year, Biddle had reported the daily horrors of “unchecked Nazism.” Shortly after Kristallnacht, he had cabled Cordell Hull that almost half a million Jews in Hungary were subjected to various new laws of cruelty, 900,000 Jews of Romania faced “increasing pressure . . . as its Fascist government mimicked Nazi measures.” In Poland, 3.5 million Jews were in desperation.
Tony Biddle, a staunch humanitarian in the State Department, represented a distinct minority. His warnings had gone unheeded in 1938, and his reports were ignored in 1939. Privately, he and his wife did as much as they could. “Margaret has been [wonderful] with the Polish refugees,” Offie wrote, “and also for French refugee children who have been evacuated from the large cities. She [donated] blankets, medicines, tobacco, etc. to the Poles.” Margaret also sent the French prime minister Édouard Daladier a check for a million francs “to give a little happiness to some of the soldiers for Christmas. And she does it all anonymously.”
Given the isolationist, antiwar fervor that dominated U.S. politics during a critical election year, private efforts may have been the only efforts possible. Throughout the autumn, ER’s audiences everywhere asked one question: could the United States “stay out” of Europe’s wars and Europe’s miseries? Her answer was always the same: the United States was connected to Europe’s wars and miseries in myriad ways. The only way to “stay out” was “to protect and enlarge our own democracy . . . from assault both within and from afar.”
The United States, still “on the outside” of war, was in a position to evaluate the situation created in part by “patriotic” lies. We should, ER wrote, notice “how many people are being taken in, and try to study how a method can be evolved whereby in the future leaders cannot fool their people. . . . Will we ever learn to use reason instead of force in the world, and will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?”
In her effort to stem the rising tide of bigotry and anti-Communism within the United States, ER answered the many letters sent to her in the hope that her words would contribute to activist democracy, which she considered essential for humanity’s survival. In November 1938 a Yale University instructor, William Mulvey, wrote that he deeply appreciated her “poise and patience during this period of turmoil and tribulation.” But he had been profoundly shocked to hear her say, concerning “the Jewish situation,” that she hoped we “‘will remain as free of prejudice and tolerant as we have been.’ Have you unwittingly disregarded the present deplorable status of the Negro in the United States? Or, have you completely given up the whole problem?” He could not believe either could be true, but her “broad statement must surely have caused despair and derision in the hearts of twelve million beleaguered colored folk.” He considered “our prevailing attitude of passive indifference even more deadly than the old active antagonism.”
ER replied:
I think we are in grave danger in this country of being swept away by a fear of communism, which has been inculcated by various groups . . . into a panic which will bring us greater prejudice and intolerance. We have been making some progress even in the South as regards the Negro, but at the moment there is a general attitude of fear which will affect every solution which I had in mind. . . . That is why I have reiterated on every occasion that we have to live up to the traditions of our country as expressed in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence even though I know in many cases we have fallen short. . . . I am far from giving up the problems of the Negro situation or any other. I am too old not to realize that lost causes usually are won in the end.
In September 1939 Mulvey wrote again, this time to ask if, in this new era dominated by “the brawls of busy little men abroad,” something more significant could not be done to alleviate the suffering and neglect that still dominated America’s “Negro problem.” In this more rambling letter, which in part seemed to blame the victims for their own inaction, he suggested the “modern weapon” of propaganda: “Prejudices are built up by propaganda. Why can’t they be torn down with the same agent?”
In reply, ER disagreed that Negroes were inactive:
Most of the educated ones I know are interested in bettering the lives of their people and are leading them in a kindly and sane manner. A few, of course, are fanatical but we white people have fanatics too.
It is a long process of education for both white and colored. They should have better pay for their work and an equal chance at education before the law. The white man especially in the South must learn that keeping the Negro at a low economic level keeps him down too. . . .
I agree we must keep hate out of our thinking—both white and colored and remain sane as only by keeping our democracy at peace can we have a real influence toward a permanent peace. We can all help by maintaining a fair and honest and unprejudiced attitude.
Convinced that the United States could have no influence on democracy abroad while lynching and bigotry at home continued, ER agitated publicly and privately to end inequality in all its forms. When Walter White told her about a campaign to keep Negro workers out of new shipbuilding jobs, she asked Admiral E. S. Land of the Maritime Commission to do something “to make the labor unions take a little better attitude [regarding] an even break to the workers of different races” and perhaps “insist on fairness both for skilled and unskilled laborers.”
She encouraged Walter White and the NAACP to revive the anti-lynching law effort and supported his resolution. White wrote:
It is our conviction that before the US sets forth again, directly or indirectly, to preserve democracy beyond the borders of the US it must wipe out such undemocratic practices as lynching. . . . Negroes, who are the chief sufferers from lynching, will be among those American citizens called upon once again to fight for democracy. Congress must see to it that there is no repetition of what took place during the first world war when relatives of Negro soldiers, fighting in France for democracy, were seized by mobs in the US and lynched, some of them being burned at the stake.
Many letters ER received were filled, to her dismay, with contempt and disdain for various minorities. Congressional Democrats were still dominated by the “solid South,” which demanded political silence regarding racial justice. Indeed, attempts to improve the lot of the Negroes, Dixiecrats claimed, would destroy New Deal programs and Democratic unity. Nevertheless, ER kept issues of race and New Deal progress at the forefront of her considerations. She was disappointed that these issues were no longer visible on her husband’s agenda while he focused on aid to Britain, military rearmament, and his new library.
ER and her husband were increasingly at odds as she was more routinely kept out of political conversations and denied access to international deliberations. While the couple rarely confronted their differences on race and refugees, tensions between them escalated. ER understood that her primary purpose was to accommodate and facilitate her husband’s preferences, which she made every effort to do. Still, their political distance amplified their private grievances.
The week before Thanksgiving the Roosevelt family turned its attention to plans for the FDR presidential archive. The cornerstone was laid at Hyde Park on 19 November. ER’s column devoted to this occasion was circumspect, as the lunch at the dedication of the library revealed a growing separation between her court and the president’s. She was specifically hurt by his cavalier dismissal of her performance as official hostess, though the “very simple” ceremonies had rather pleased her. Before the event, however, she had heard a resounding “crash and discovered that one of the card tables around which some people were sitting, had collapsed and all the china had fallen to the floor! It was too bad to break the china, but I had to laugh, remembering the table which collapsed when the King and Queen were with us.”
ER wrote nothing of her own feelings, but Tommy sent Anna the full story:
We had a funny time on Sunday—funny now. . . . Your father and the [library’s fundraising] committee made up the lists of people to be invited, etc. Missy and Tully apparently had a hand in it—neither [Edith] Helm nor I were invited to anything. No one asked our advice and the lists were given to our social bureau to send out. . . . Your mother asked how many for lunch and was told it was a selected few. . . . Your grandmother added a few of her pets. I was to have lunch at the cottage for some of our pets. Your mother asked your father who was quite calm and said the people would not expect lunch and when asked what they were supposed to do between l:30 and 3, he said blandly: “Oh, they can just wander around.” November in the country! [Everyone arrived] cold and hungry. They were given sandwiches and coffee, ice cream and doughnuts. . . . Your mother said she deliberately kept out of the dining room so she wouldn’t have to be embarrassed. The selected few, of course, had a good lunch which your grandmother had planned. I never saw your mother so mad!
Riled, ER mounted her horse for a long afternoon ride.
Tommy concluded by mentioning the strains on the once great Val-Kill friendship among ER, “the Cook and the Dickerman,” as Tommy referred to Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. While emotionally their friendship had dissolved by 1938, politically they were still connected. Personally, at Val-Kill, Tommy explained to Anna, they “leave us very much alone,” but Marion Dickerman still expected every convenience when she stayed at the White House, which she did for the labor hearings. “I urged your mother to say the house was being cleaned, or any excuse . . . but your mother didn’t think she could do that, so Dickerman . . . ordered cars and generally made herself at home. I don’t see how anyone could have such thick hide. Your mother has certainly made it unmistakably plain that she doesn’t want anything to do with them.”
Now the toxic dynamic threatened to poison ER’s planning for the 1940 election season. “Your mother and her friends Agnes Brown Leach and Dorothy Schiff Backer,” Tommy wrote, “are keen to start ‘state operations.’” But Leach and Backer refused to work under Nancy Cook. Backer, a generous funder, said she would give much less than before since “nothing is done” under Nancy’s direction. ER and her allies wanted Nancy removed.
Whatever her private feelings and disappointments, from Warm Springs ER listed her reasons for gratitude on Thanksgiving:
I am thankful that I live in a democracy and that it is in the United States of America. I am thankful we are not at war. I am thankful that more of our citizens are thinking about their government today and are realizing their obligations to that government.
I am thankful that I can think as I please, and write as I please and act as I please. . . . I am thankful that in this country, courage can still dominate fear. I am thankful for the answering smile of the passer-by, and the laughter of children in our streets.
Even here in Warm Springs, where many people are facing handicaps which must give them moments of stark terror when they are alone, they can still manage to meet the world with a smile and give one the feeling of a marching army with banners flying.
Thanksgiving revitalized ER’s spirits. Whenever she felt wounded by her husband’s thoughtlessness, or became impatient or distrustful of his political strategies, she considered his heroic determination, his steadfast vision, and his unwavering pleasure in so many things despite his great physical limitations. She loved to watch him in the pool, where his strong arms and torso muscles camouflaged his useless legs, and where he shouted and played with children and adults at various levels of impairment, his own merriment and spirit always in the lead.
Still, race remained an immediate issue of concern for ER during this Thanksgiving visit. Earlier that year FDR had built a new school and infirmary in Warm Springs, “where the patients needing hospital care are housed,” but they were to be segregated. ER decided to build a similar brick school for the area’s many children of color. The Thanksgiving dinner entertainment was integrated and included a chorus from Tuskegee Institute, which was “enjoyed by all.”
Recently, in New York, ER had met with the white Quaker educator Rachel Davis DuBois and been excited by the vision and the pioneering multicultural work of this lifelong activist for peace, women’s rights, and racial harmony. DuBois’s work, inspired by their mutual friend Jane Addams, seemed to ER immediately essential. As a high school teacher in New Jersey, she had been alarmed when her students used racial and religious differences to attack one another. So she decided to create a program “to introduce practical steps . . . for teaching children tolerance and democracy.” She created a Service Bureau for Intercultural Education to show how all groups contributed to America’s power. New York City’s board of education had recently adopted her program.
DuBois’s work, ER wrote with enthusiasm, would benefit “school systems throughout the country. . . . The first step, of course, is to reach the teachers and through them to capture the children’s imagination. To do that, all modern progressive methods are being used. Radio scripts and dramatic episodes are being published . . . and even television will soon be called upon to contribute.” The U.S. Department of Education sponsored and broadcast one of DuBois’s radio series called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” which won the annual award of the Women’s National Radio Committee as the most original program for 1938–39.
During this election season, ER was the only person close to the administration who was determined to discuss hatred and bigotry and their corrosive effect on democracy. But making progress required a movement, and she was relieved that bold visionaries like DuBois worked with Quakers, the NAACP, and WILPF to strengthen that movement. Upon returning to Washington after Thanksgiving, ER had a new demand when she met with various political groups: youth must be added to leadership positions in each organization. If that did not happen, the movement for change and betterment would atrophy and fail.
ER did not criticize her husband’s failure to promote these issues. Instead, she sought to work with him to elect a liberal Democrat as the next president. Although not for publication, she bluntly told anyone who asked that she opposed a third term for him. At the time, she believed he preferred not to run again and that he looked forward to new work in retirement.
After Thanksgiving, ER turned her attention to the needs of refugees. She invited refugee singers and musicians to play at the White House and met regularly with refugee artists and scholars. As she became increasingly active with émigré organizations, she urged her column readers to contemplate “the refugee problem from the point of view of gain to us in the long run,” not just the momentary cost of accommodating their needs, and she advocated a welcoming attitude toward them. Impressive studies showed that “the volume of refugees entering this country to take up permanent citizenship under the quotas was [generally] balanced by the number of foreign people departing from our shores.” Moreover, while “in the old days, a vast majority of people coming in were in the unskilled labor group,” that had changed: “at present it is the educated, highly skilled in both professional and technical work” who arrived in the United States. They brought the skills and means to start businesses, which could “employ some of our own unemployed citizens. It is not, therefore, as one-sided a business as we think. People are not throwing Americans out of work to employ refugees.”
ER’s column on refugees was blasted by those who claimed refugees were agents of Communism, anarchism, and un-Americanism, while others said too many of the refugees were Jews. Bigotry was as epidemic in the United States as it was in the heart of once-enlightened Europe—now dominated by Nazi parties. But ER persevered in her effort to extend her network of activist allies.
More than a thousand activists and educators celebrated her at New York’s Hotel Astor, for the 135th anniversary dinner of The Churchman, a journal of religious activism that was also being honored that night for its campaign against anti-Semitism. Dr. Henry Leiper said that those clerics who employed Nazi propaganda were a “disgrace to their calling.” The great danger to democracy, in his view, came not from enemies within or without but from its friends’ “indifference and blindness.”
Most of the evening was dedicated to ER. Dr. Frank Kingdon, president of the University of New Brunswick (now Rutgers University) said she was “the kindliest of American women, who occupies so unique a place in American life that no other individual can be compared to her.” The journalist Dorothy Thompson said, “Few people received universal admiration, and virtually nobody universal affection. . . . I doubt if any woman in the whole wide world is so beloved.”
The bestowal of the award, noted the New York Times, was “a condensation of the praise” that had been showered on the first lady at the dinner: “To Eleanor Roosevelt, apostle of good-will, for her achievement in abolishing time and space in the pursuit of happiness for all, for her understanding and love of people, and her daring to believe in the potentialities of their best.”
Receiving all these compliments, in addition to the award, felt “somehow a bit unreal,” ER said afterward. “When you sit and hear people whom you admire and respect, say things [you feel] cannot apply to you, and find that you have to get up and accept all this—well, it is disconcerting.” The praise songs that accompanied her award genuinely “bewildered” her.
Speaking to those assembled, ER said she wanted to make it clear that she did nothing extraordinary, just what came to hand. She answered letters, calls, and appeals. She went out and met the people who made up America, to see what they needed and wanted. “Anyone would have done what [I] had done, given the opportunity.” Her goal was simply to promote “better understanding among neighbors.”
Though she remained self-deprecating, this public recognition of and praise for her efforts, in the name of the principles and causes closest to her heart, was a proud and gratifying moment. It also fueled her energies for the battles ahead, giving her “courage to keep on trying to be more worthy of all that has been said,” as she acknowledged in her column.
ER would need that courage.
• • •
On the railroad platform that night, while she was waiting for the midnight train to Washington, she encountered some of the AYC leaders who were her friends. They had been summoned to appear the next day before the Dies Committee, which continued to scrutinize allies of the New Deal for links to un-American activities.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact had created tensions and disarray within the AYC and other leftist organizations. Some members remained committed to the Communist dream, believing that the pact had bought Stalin time to build Soviet defenses. In their view, the West had refused all Soviet efforts to form a united front against fascism because it preferred a German-Russian bloodbath, the better to preside over an extended imperial future. Others were horrified by the pact and felt personally betrayed by Stalin’s new partnership with Hitler, who promised annihilation for their families, their parents, and themselves.
This internal conflict served the Dies Committee’s purposes, as former Communists volunteered to ruin, often with lies and exaggerated calumnies, those who remained in the party’s thrall.
In its new round of hearings, the Dies Committee proceedings appalled her, violating her sense of American justice and fair play. That it could get at the “truth” seemed doubtful, since its smear campaign had splattered virtually every decent philanthropist and liberal in Washington. A confidential list of individuals who were allegedly “communist or subversive or un-American,” prepared by the FBI for the committee, amused both ER and FDR. It contained the names of every notable New Dealer and included future secretary of war Henry Stimson, the 1936 Republican nominee for vice president; Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox; and the president’s own mother. “Franklin and I got particular amusement out of the inclusion of her name,” ER recalled. They could picture SDR’s “horror if she were told that the five or ten dollars she had given to a seemingly innocent relief organization put her among those whom the Dies Committee could easily call before it as belonging to subversive organizations.” FDR was repelled not only by the publication of government employees’ names but by the methods employed to obtain them, including break-ins and records thefts. He “denounced the committee’s methods as sordid.”
Moreover, when the committee investigated people who were without “influence or backing,” its “questions were so hostile as to give the impression that the witness had been hailed before a court and prejudged a criminal.” It resembled “intimidation,” and “Gestapo methods.” That show trials had found a happy home in America was not something ER could accept silently. Such tactics never harmed “the really powerful, but they do harm many innocent people who are unable to defend themselves.”
On Wednesday morning, 30 November 1939, the Dies Committee was to question ER’s young friends in the AYC leadership. Summoned to appear within twenty-four hours, they were allowed no time to prepare. ER had decided, with FDR’s approval, to show up and provide moral support for them. Unaccompanied and unannounced, she entered the committee room. “Mrs. Roosevelt appeared at the hearing . . . at about 11:15 A.M., [and] looked around for a seat,” the Times reported. “She wore a stunning dark-green silk dress with matching woolen coat, gloves and felt hat. Her coat and hat were trimmed with Persian lamb.”
Joseph Starnes of Alabama, presiding over the committee in Dies’s absence, noticed her and stopped the testimony: “The chair takes note of the presence of the First Lady of the Land and invites her to come up here and sit with us.”
“Oh, no thank you,” she replied. “I just came to listen.” She found a seat between William Hinckley and Jack McMichael, the current and former chairs of the AYC, who along with Joseph Cadden, the executive secretary, were waiting to be called.
After Starnes’s initial courtesy, the committee ignored her, although as the morning session ended, Jerry Voorhis, of California, a representative sympathetic to the New Deal, asked her if she wished to testify. She replied, “It’s just a question if I can contribute anything to you.”
Then Starnes announced a lunch break until three in the afternoon. ER invited the AYC delegation to lunch at the White House.
Finally at four p.m. the committee called the AYC witnesses. Hinckley, Cadden, and McMichael defended their movement and attacked the committee’s witch-hunt procedures. After the intense questioning, which all observers believed went as well as could be expected, Hinckley was given permission to read the AYC’s petition to discontinue the Dies Committee immediately.
When the long day was over, ER invited the AYC delegation to dine at the White House and stay the night. Joseph Lash of the American Student Union (ASU), who was to testify the next day, was among the group. At the dinner, he later recalled, “in addition to the ‘gutter-snipes,’ as someone had dubbed us,” Hollywood stars Melvyn Douglas and his wife, Helen Gahagan, were present, as were the progressive assistant attorney general Norman Littell and his wife, Katherine; Aubrey Williams, “the embattled head of the NYA who was having almost as much trouble with Mr. Dies as we were”; and Williams’s boss, Colonel Francis Harrington, head of the WPA.
FDR was eager to hear about their experiences and listened pensively to their accounts. He “chuckled, roared,” and suggested he might “be slipped into the hearings under a sheet.” Melvyn Douglas replied that he would be most welcome “as a Ku Kluxer.”
For ER, that dinner party was a “pleasant interlude,” but all was not celebratory that night. On 30 November the Soviets invaded Finland with twenty-six divisions and over 465,000 troops and bombarded Helsinki, the recently redesigned capital city of glass and hope. Unlike the Nazi air raids on Poland, the Soviet attack on Finland was met with significant international protest. Photographs of the damage to Helsinki were published worldwide, accompanied by the details of hospitals overwhelmed by civilian casualties: “One girl, Dolores Sundberg, twelve years old, had both her legs smashed to ragged stumps, and died on the operating table.”
At the White House, FDR said the Soviets had done “a terrible thing.” Lash “shared that view,” but his AYC colleagues were silent. Some clamored to have the U.S. ambassador recalled from Moscow, but FDR opposed that, saying that to sever diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union would make it impossible “to play a constructive role” in whatever peace efforts might emerge. On that point the AYC members agreed with him.
After FDR withdrew, the party moved upstairs to discuss the plight of liberals, who were without leadership on domestic issues now that the war dominated FDR’s concerns. Aubrey Williams, Helen Gahagan, and Melvyn Douglas sought to reforge a popular liberal movement to win the fall election and save the New Deal. Lash found ER “down to earth and practical” as she considered measures “to pull liberals together” for 1940.
Before they left, filled with gratitude for ER’s support, Aubrey Williams looked hard at the youth leaders, and said: “Don’t let her down; it will break her heart!”
When the party finally broke up, ER went to her desk, “piled high with mail.” Late that night Bernard Baruch called from South Carolina to say if she “needed help he would come right up.” At breakfast, ER told her AYC friends that Baruch had offered his home if the “youngsters needed a rest” and said if “there were any expenses, he would be glad to cover them.”
That morning, as the Dies Committee hearings resumed, ER sat with Lash “and spoke with him confidentially” until he was called. According to the Times, “newsreel agencies had cameras, sound equipment and special lights ready for the possibility” that ER would testify, but instead “the elaborate equipment was used to record bits of Lash’s testimony.” ER’s “costume today was all black except for a vivid red scarf.”
For two hours Lash was interrogated by J. B. Matthews, a former Communist now on the Dies Committee staff. Lash and Matthews had actually worked together as Young Socialists, and Lash knew him well. “All of us on the left had gone through many changes,” Lash later reflected, and Matthews “was now on his final journey to the far right.”
Lash had gone to the hearings “with a divided soul,” he subsequently wrote. The ASU had been organized at Columbia University during Christmas 1935 and included the Student League for Industrial Democracy, a Socialist Party organization allied with Norman Thomas; the National Student League, an arm of the Communist Party; and a number of unaffiliated liberal clubs and student societies organized on college campuses throughout America, such as the Harvard Peace Society. Among the original officers were Lash; James Wechsler, director of publications; and Molly Yard, treasurer.
Matthews noted that Communist Party chair Earl Browder had called the ASU a “transmission belt” for the party. Lash insisted it was not. There were Communists in the ASU, he acknowledged, but they did not dominate.
Congressman Jerry Voorhis pressed Lash: why did the ASU allow Communist participation? The ASU was democratic and always supported majority decisions, Lash said. It was concerned with civil liberties, academic freedom, basic and real human needs, peace, and culture. It did not care “what students think,” it cared only that “they should think” and be actively concerned about “social problems.” And it would be “unfair” to “sacrifice the Communists to the lions right now,” when everything was in flux.
Voorhis said Communist policy was unpredictable. Lash replied, “Well, they can’t predict what I’ll think either.” To which a Daily Worker reporter called out, “Hear! Hear!”
At a moment when the questioning became harsh, even vitriolic, ER stood and moved from the back of the room to the press table. “I took a pencil and a piece of paper, and the tone of the questions changed immediately,” she later wrote. “Just what the questioner thought I was going to do, I do not know, but my action had the effect I desired.”
Fearlessly, Lash submitted a chronology of his life thus far. In 1929 he had joined Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party. Then he had gone to Spain to fight for the Loyalists—and resigned from the Socialist Party because of all he had witnessed there. Yes, he still blamed the “profit system” for many domestic problems and did not consider it “disloyal” to favor changes in an unjust economic system.
Someone on the committee accused Lash of having been a poor soldier during the Spanish Civil War because he could not sing in tune or keep in step. Resentful, Lash burst into song with gusto:
If you see an un-American lurking
far or near,
Just alkalize with Martin Dies and
he will disappear.
The New York Times summed up the scene: “The Dies committee heard words and music today, while Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt looked on with manifest amusement as Joseph Lash warbled.”
As she listened to Lash’s spirited testimony, ER was impressed by his directness and interested in his occasional discomfort; she felt her faith in the young man was vindicated.
ER’s young friends had been subjected to contemptuous vitriol by congressmen and reporters and had done well. But her commitment to youth, and her personal admiration, were now focused upon Lash, who seemed such a needful, earnest, and genuinely good young man. In fact, their meeting during the Dies Committee hearings marked the beginning of one of the most important friendships in her life.
On 6 December Lash wrote to thank ER for “your great kindness to me last week. I know that you have not wanted to stir up another hornets nest by befriending the ASU. And so I am all the more grateful for your appearance . . . when I testified. I regret that I did not do a better job. When one’s political opinions are in a violent state of flux, one should go to a hermitage rather than before a Congressional Committee with its thousand tongues.”
ER replied, “I appreciate your note very much and was very glad to go to the Dies Committee hearing when you testified. I had a feeling that your political opinions were not completely clarified, but I think on the whole you did a pretty good job. If you ever feel that you would like to see me and talk over things, either in New York or here [Washington], I shall be glad to have you come either alone or bring any one you want with you.”
Perhaps it was Lash’s integrity—his concern for his former friends, now his opponents, as well as for the future—that stirred ER deeply. Perhaps it was simply that they agreed profoundly on issues, while so many other young people she had trusted, daughters and sons of friends, and other AYC members, now disappointed her. He had renewed her faith in youth and in its potential both to spark change and to stay committed to one’s ideals.
After the Dies Committee hearings, various politicians who agreed with its approach attacked ER personally for her appearance at the hearing. A group of Republican women assailed her presence as “horrifying” and “indecent.” The borough president of Queens, George Harvey, declared that AYC members should be sent to concentration camps, yet the first lady had had them for tea at the White House. Harvey said he did not believe in “free speech for Reds” because they stood for “sedition, treason, rebellion.” He would not let a Red speak anywhere in Queens, and he was relieved that many of the city colleges and universities now banned them as well.
But others applauded ER’s determination to defend America’s civil liberties during the growing witch-hunt atmosphere. In 1939 America’s political climate was as discordant and divided as any in Europe, becoming ever more accusatory and dangerous, filled with wild, threatening rhetoric and laced with occasional acts of random, sickening racial and labor violence. In that atmosphere, ER’s support for her much-maligned friends seemed to many a reflection of her valor and steadfast decency. She called for calm, discernment, and especially the survival of democratic values. Civil liberties meant very little unless they prevailed during moments of war and tension, when disagreements were most sharply revealed.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a double-edged sword. It cut liberal-left united front alliances to shreds. New Deal liberals were stunned to see their former radical allies fall supine before Soviet aggression in Poland and Finland. The pact drove Communists into a new and strange union with isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, and anti–New Deal Republicans. Communists could now be attacked as Red Nazis.
As the 1940 presidential race neared, the New Deal agenda hung suspended by the twisted cross of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. FDR initiated a bipartisan campaign for war preparation, emphasizing a massive air and fleet buildup that required industry’s cooperation and participation, but he turned away from efforts to further the New Deal. Liberals were on the defensive, and activist New Dealers were confused, able only to wait for him to renew his commitment to their primary goals of job security, housing, education, and public health. Moreover, when FDR’s Justice Department began to compete with the Dies Committee in its crusade against Communists, the civil liberties record of the Roosevelt administration went virtually to smash. Loyalty oaths for federal workers were introduced in the Relief Act of 1939.
For months after the Dies Committee hearings, ER defended the AYC in speeches, in columns, and in replies to citizens’ critical letters. Her most earnest letters went to her closest friends, who were concerned about her reputation and worried about her judgment.
On 2 December she appealed to Baruch for a long-range financial aid package for the AYC. Baruch still disliked the tone used by the AYC leadership, regretted many of its actions, and never believed it was all that the first lady thought it was. And he defended the Dies Committee, saying, “no harm comes from these investigations if we get the truth.” He would not give the AYC a long-term commitment, but he gave it the money she requested to pay its rent and other bills, and he assured ER in a handwritten postscript to his letter of firm disagreement: “Please always be frank with me. We shall always be friends—as I have enlisted with you.”
In Philadelphia on 4 December, ER accepted the AFSC Humanitarian Award, presented by Curtis Bok, before an audience of more than a thousand Quakers, philanthropists, and citizens. Referring to the Dies Committee, she said that America owed to “all groups trying to solve their problems our sympathetic interest and attention. I doubt if putting them in a category, and trying to decide if this or that group is dangerous, will help solve their problems.” To the Quakers, she expressed her gratitude for the teaching she had received from them over the years: “It is an education to work with people who have ideals and live up to them, but are practical enough to make their ideals become realities.”
During these weeks of turmoil, ER hosted an evening of frolic and fun at the annual Gridiron Widows Party at the White House. She was particularly pleased that her great friends Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read would join her for the event and spend the night. Lape and a group of physicians had been campaigning for a national health care program, initially to have been part of the 1935 Social Security Act. Lape had asked ER to arrange a meeting with FDR, and after several postponements, ER wrote Lape that FDR “says that he does not want to get into any difficulty with the American Medical Association just now when he has so much to contend with.” Lape tore the letter in half and crumpled it. ER was relieved that Lape came to the White House party anyway. She and Lape were both determined to keep agitating for a national health care program.
Lape and Read thoroughly enjoyed themselves that evening, especially during ER’s star performance in an off-the-record skit, accompanied by Elinor Morgenthau, Bess Furman, Tommy, and Edith Helm. The theme of the evening was a Wild West “whoopee 1940 roundup,” filled with journalistas strutting their stuff for the first lady. According to press reports, all the skits, songs, and supper speeches were amusing. A jolly array of potential presidential wives were serenaded. The ER character was given the first and last song. The message of the first was that the Roosevelts were on their way out:
I’m waiting for the ’40 roundup.
Gonna saddle old Frank for the last time.
So long, old gals. I’ll ride in on
“My Day”. . . .
Git along, little Frankie, git along.
But in the “grand finale,” the situation changed: the Roosevelts were here to stay.
Oh, give me my home,
Where the New Dealers roam,
And the Congressmen vote as they may.
Where never is heard an encouraging word.
And the press keeps on printing “My Day.”
“We all had a pleasant time,” ER noted, “laughed at our own peculiarities as shown in the skits,” and thoroughly enjoyed the monologues. The next day she and her guests were entertained by a repeat performance of the Gridiron Clubists. “They were so proud of their songs, they invited their excluded wives and women colleagues.” The men, aided by show business professionals Moss Hart and Max Gordon, addressed a giant sphinx with FDR’s face and cigarette holder, with “Is He or Ain’t He?”
Will you run?
Or are you done?
Will you be eternally the one?
Music was a great solace for ER. Planning the Christmas festivities, she included many concert artists from Europe and noted that “we have developed a little in the past 25 years.” We no longer banish, as we did during the Great War, “music by composers who happened to be of this or that nationality. . . . The one thing which is above war, is art. We can still enjoy music and pictures and theatres and books, no matter what the nationality of the artist may be.”
In mid-December ER devoted a column to the 148th anniversary of the Bill of Rights: “I hope that every citizen in this country will read over those first ten amendments to the Constitution and keep them constantly in mind, particularly Articles IV, V, and VI.” Article VI guarantees criminals being prosecuted
certain rights. I am wondering if in the present day these rights should not be observed for all people, whether accused in a criminal case or whether merely accused through the public press. It seems to me that “the right to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense,” would be a safeguard to a great many people today who find themselves suddenly held up as dangerous citizens when they have not had an opportunity to be heard.
If you are not accused of being a Communist these days, you may be a Communist front and now you may be a Communist transmission belt. . . . I do not question that all three . . . exist, but I begin to wonder whether some perfectly innocent people may not be suffering because of the fears which are being aroused.
That same month, J. B. Matthews issued a blast against several consumer groups that ER had long been part of, including the League of Women Shoppers and the National Consumers League. Created to protect the health and safety of citizens, to keep poisons out of food and drugs, these groups were charged now by Matthews with being Communist “transmission belts.”
At a press conference, FDR censured the committee’s procedures, and ER “joined the President today in criticizing” the report. In its coverage, the New York Times quoted most of her Bill of Rights column. An illustrious group of educators, scientists, writers, and artists, including the novelists Dashiell Hammett and Theodore Dreiser and the anthropologist Franz Boas, joined ER to defend the Bill of Rights. The notables spoke with alarm of a “growing witch hunt” in the Dies Committee’s efforts to suppress dissident groups. “We have before us the example of many European countries where suppression of the Communist Party was but a beginning, followed by a campaign against trade unions, cultural groups, Jews, Catholics, Masons, and ending with the destruction of all freedom.”
Matthews’s attack on consumer groups was followed by his promise to investigate the influence of “Reds” in schools and teachers’ unions, then move on to “the domination of un-Americanism in Hollywood.” ER considered his Gestapo-like assaults to be the real menace. She was outraged that Congress emphasized the Dies investigations instead of examining the causes of poverty and unemployment. The real problem that faced America, she insisted, was that four million young people were out of school and out of work. Until something was done to find them jobs, they would be “a potential menace to their communities.” Work, she emphasized, was “the number one problem confronting youth.” Many colleges and high schools failed to prepare their students for meaningful work. She received countless letters from graduates who wrote, “We have nothing to sell. We are not [trained] to do a single thing. Please, Mrs. Roosevelt, what shall we do?” ER called for a business-industrial-educational alliance that would actually serve the needs of the nation, and the community.
Many Americans who had found gainful employment in the WPA had recently been laid off because of new regulations that severely limited the best training and job projects. A woman who had been with WPA for four years, but was now back on relief, wrote to ER of the loss of “personal pride and self esteem sacred to the individual.” Mindful of the outbreak of war in Europe, she concluded, “The long-time tragedies of peace may be more devastating, if allowed to continue, than those of war. . . . Until democratic society can find a dignified use for all the individuals who comprise it, there can be no peace.” ER agreed completely: “In a really successful democracy, those who want work should find work.”
In New York City to deliver a town hall lecture, “On the Problems of American Youth,” ER met with Joe Lash at her Eleventh Street apartment. They had corresponded since the Dies Committee hearings, and she sensed that he was “in trouble.” She had invited him to visit and discuss his difficulties in the ASU. Lash explained that the Communists now dominated and that he and his allies, including Molly Yard (the ASU’s “independent-minded chair”), Agnes Reynolds, and Jimmy Wechsler, were in the minority.
ER replied that he was “not the only one having troubles with Communists” and showed him a recent Daily Worker attack on her: “Mrs. Roosevelt has it down to a science. She manages to ‘defend’ such progressive organizations as the American Youth Congress and to slap the Dies Committee, and at the same time to rail against Communists as ‘foreign agents’ . . . [She] is playing a very sinister and crafty game [and her aim is to] make it easier for the administration to sneak America into war.”
Lash replied, “The Communists know that you rather than the Dies Committee are their most dangerous foe.”
During this early meeting in their burgeoning friendship, Joe Lash took notes, as he would always do. When Lash said he and Molly Yard intended to leave the ASU, ER was concerned. She wondered about his future, suggested they meet again, and invited him to use her place at Hyde Park to rest, reflect, and restore his energies. Their relationship, defined by their shared quest for a better future, was launched.
After her town hall lecture, which was attended by over two thousand young people, ER left for Hyde Park for the holiday season. The next day Anna and her family arrived by train from Seattle, and ER noted their relaxed manner. “I think my daughter must have done a very remarkable piece of work,” ER told her readers, “for everybody including the father . . . and the baby looked well and cheerful. My recollection of traveling with babies is a succession of difficulties. The food was never right, they wouldn’t sleep when they should and altogether a twenty-four hour trip seemed endless. This family, after four days of travel, seemed rested and well and, wonder of wonders, entirely good humored. It is evident to me that each generation improves upon the last!”
ER’s holiday was festive and prayerful. Social events, films and escapades, and snow-filled frolics with four generations of family filled her days. From Hyde Park to the White House, it was a time of harmony. Private moments in New York City and quiet dinners with special friends—including ER’s annual holiday dinner with Hick—brought respite from her busy social calendar.
ER and Hick had not spent significant time together in recent months. Although they wrote and called regularly, Hick missed her exclusive time with ER. One morning she was relieved to hear ER’s voice: “I needed reassurance! I had wakened at 6, moaning and covered with a cold perspiration, dreaming you had died! . . . It would be so much better, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t love you so much! It makes it trying for you. You are very sweet to me always.” Still, Hick wrote to congratulate ER for an award as “leading statesman of the week” and for “standing by the AYC. . . . I’m darned proud of you.” She recalled their time alone in the country as “two perfect weeks. . . . I cant remember having had a happier time on a vacation—except that time you and I drove around the Gaspe Peninsula. We DID have a good time on that trip, didn’t we?” Hick let ER know that if she could not be alone with ER, she preferred to be alone.
She had even refused to attend the Gridiron Widows Party. “It’s sweet of you to invite me down,” she wrote, “but I think I’d better sit tight financially.” It was not only travel expenses, “but I’d have to get my evening things out, have them pressed, etc.” Yet in the same letter she described all she purchased with “the money you gave me for my vacation.” In addition to paying many bills, she had bought “new corduroy breeches and hunting boots” and felt “all dressed up” as she wrote her letter: “Gee I love clothes like these.” ER, always conscious that her schedule and obligations kept her from spending time with Hick, compensated by being sympathetic and as loving as possible. Their ongoing correspondence shows their continued affection for and trust in each other.
ER hated to be alone and was happiest when she was busy and her homes were filled, especially with young people. Soon after the Dies Committee hearings, when she hosted the AYC delegation, she wrote Hick that it seemed “funny not to have the house full of young people!”
ER’s commitment to her new young friends coincided with her growing disappointment over some decisions made by her son Elliott. In an October radio address, he had “lauded” the Dies Committee, saying it “has done more for the United States in the last two years than many able and sincere statesmen achieve in a lifetime. If it has done nothing else, it has made the people conscious of the fact that in their midst, perhaps in their own circle of friends, are men and women who despise everything this Government stands for.” And now he was campaigning for politicians who aggravated her husband, such as Vice President John Nance Garner. ER understood that all children have to rebel in their own way, and often in strange ways. She and FDR never publicly criticized their own children.
ER’s holiday was also marked by personal sadness—the sudden death of Heywood Broun, president of the Newspaper Guild. In a column, she expressed her “deep respect and genuine affection” for the controversial journalist: “he set us all a high standard in that he wrote what he really believed. . . . No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. He was critical sometimes, but almost always there was something constructive about his criticisms.”
Her 1939 Christmas message was in part a tribute to Broun’s advice, “Drink ye all of it.” She concluded, “This is the season for forgiveness and self-searching.” She urged everybody to “do something a bit unusual,” to go beyond “customary gifts” to families, friends, charities—and provide “unexpected pleasure.”
Her article of “inspiration especially for the children and youth of our time” was featured for Christmas Eve in the New York Times:
“Peace on earth, good-will toward men!” . . . He came into this world as a defenseless, helpless Baby, born in a stable and laid in a manger, because the world of His day had no room for the poor and He belonged to a group which was oppressed and harassed.
In the year 1939 the angels’ song will be repeated in homes and in churches throughout the world, perhaps even in forts and in trenches where men lie in wait to kill each other.
After all these years the world is still the same, a world in which groups of people are harassed and oppressed. A world in which there is danger, just as there used to be—danger even to the lives of little children.
Just as “the kings of old knew that their material power would not save them,” it was clear today that “comfort and ease” guaranteed nothing. Young people especially had that “vision of Christ in their hearts” and acted generously for good—“full of enthusiasm and bent on seeing happiness reign in the world.” But “Peace on earth, good-will toward men” would occur only when “this song in our hearts [entered] into our daily way of life.” Only then would the world become “a place of joy and peace!”
ER’s Christmas season was full, with tree-lighting ceremonies, children’s parties, church services, her columns, and a broadcast “right in the middle of dinner, but . . . I was back before the next course was served.” Stockings filled by Santa caused much excitement and merriment, a reading of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol edited by granddaughter Sistie and FDR. There was an afternoon ride in the park with family friend Harry Hooker, and an unusual newsworthy reality: “We tried very hard at dinner to make the President enter into a real, old-fashioned, family argument. But he said the Christmas spirit was upon him and he was not going to argue with anyone!”
During the week there were films, including Gone with the Wind, which dazzled everybody. Even critical SDR “sat through” the entire four-hour film—which ended at two a.m.! There were also meetings on youth and conferences on a new Institute on Human Relations sponsored by the National Council of Christians and Jews.
As the New Year approached, ER was surprised to be invited to succeed Heywood Broun as president of the Newspaper Guild. On 30 December she sent a telegram to decline: “Absolutely impossible for me to take full-time job so could not even consider the position.” She was also asked to consider the presidency of Bryn Mawr. She and Helen Taft Manning, President Taft’s daughter and the college’s dean since 1925, seemed to be serious contenders. Appropriately, Manning was named Bryn Mawr’s president.
On New Year’s Eve, ER wished everyone would make the effort in every locality to “meet the needs of the people,” so that “when peace comes again to the world, we may have a concrete contribution to make in proof that through democratic methods a great nation has been able to face its own problems, and at least attempt to solve them.” To match her wish, ER’s last act of the year was to give significant “financial and moral support” to launch Rachel Davis DuBois’s experiment in multicultural education in five New York high schools. ER believed this would aid boys and girls of different groups to respect and enjoy one another: “Fun and hard work would be combined.”