Shortly after the Dies Committee tried to disgrace the AYC in November 1939, ER agreed to write the foreword to a book celebrating the AYC written by one of its leaders, Leslie Gould. Bennett Cerf, president of Random House, had agreed to publish the book when it was discussed at a Val-Kill picnic on 7 December 1939.
In her foreword to American Youth Today, ER wrote:
This is a book which I think it is high time to publish. . . . The author naturally sees it through sympathetic eyes, but he has, I think, given a picture which is historically correct. . . .
He is a little too kind about me . . . and a little too unkind about the President. He forgets that in spite of the President’s words on one occasion, he has given the young people real support and understanding many times, and that without his willingness to stand behind me, I would frequently be unable to do many of the things which I have done for them.
As you read these pages, you will realize that youth is youth and cannot be expected to see things in the light of experience, or to act with the calmness of age. Youth’s great contribution is its enthusiasm and its fire, and this contribution to the future should never be belittled. . . .
I have no great illusions about the perfection of any organization or of any group. I do believe, however, that a group which is honestly trying to help young people in their own communities to get together and face such problems as unemployment, recreation and health, should receive cooperation and understanding.
ER’s words were written after her most grueling and painful encounter with the AYC, during their much-heralded Citizenship Institute, which she did much to promote and enable.
• • •
More than five thousand young people from every state and many nations were expected to attend the Citizenship Institute, planned for Lincoln’s Birthday weekend 1940. The four-day marathon was billed as “a monster lobby for jobs, peace, civil liberties, education and health.” Specifically, the AYC would lobby for passage of the American Youth Act, which would earmark millions of dollars for jobs and vocational training for young people.
ER helped prepare by cajoling friends, associates, hotel owners, and the army to provide rooms, blankets, food, and general support. She imposed on every Washington hostess, every government official for housing, meeting rooms, and entertainment. She housed twenty delegates at the White House and persuaded cabinet and congressional wives to house many more. At her urging, the officers of Fort Meyer provided “cots for 150 boys.” She was especially pleased to have gotten Colonel George S. Patton to put up many boys “in the riding hall,” where she had recently visited the horse show.
She arranged for a fleet of buses to transport the delegates to meetings, helped get flags and costumes for their parade, and in every way looked after America’s visiting youth. On Friday there was to be a rally at the Lincoln Memorial and a meeting in the auditorium of the Department of Labor. She secured public spaces and meeting rooms in federal buildings, arranged for private meetings, luncheons, teas, and dinners all over town, including at the White House.
The Republican National Committee chair refused to participate in the Citizenship Institute unless the AYC purged all its Communist representatives. ER chided him, considering the idea of “purging” young Communists an un-American ploy. Since democracy assured Communists the right to “believe in the communistic theory,” no group had the right to expel them. Surely, ER said, “a youth organization must stand for the same tolerance and freedom of expression and representation that we as a nation have stood for under the Bill of Rights.”
On Friday, 9 February, the institute opened, haunted by the increasingly dismal news from around the world. Fear ruled the day; betrayal and bombs, exile and rivers of blood set the tone. The Nazi-Soviet Pact heightened the impact of war, which was felt everywhere: Ethiopia, Spain, China, Vienna, Prague, Poland, Finland.
That Friday Jack McMichael, a southern divinity student, AYC national chair, and one of ER’s closest AYC friends, gave the keynote address. He attacked FDR for neglecting domestic issues in favor of an enhanced military policy. America’s liberal leadership had vanished. Instead of continuing the good fight, liberals now advocated “retrenchment” and had become “international messiahs” who would lead America’s youth directly onto Europe’s battlefields.
McMichael said he regretted the ongoing disenfranchisement of and violence against black citizens. In the South, African-Americans were still denied their legal rights: race terrorism continued unabated. The Dies Committee targeted students and union leaders, but the Ku Klux Klan went on its way unmolested.
Edward Strong of Alabama, chair of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, agreed with McMichael: the Department of Justice ignored the Klan’s activities, and did nothing to protect black Americans from bodily harm or legal abuse.
AYC enemies had placed themselves strategically around the room: they included not only right-wingers but also New Deal supporters who were increasingly suspicious of the AYC leadership, and a group of self-styled youth patriots led by ER’s own cousin Archibald Roosevelt, boxing hero Gene Tunney, and a pamphleteer named Murray Plavner.
After the opening remarks, these adversaries rose to introduce parliamentary ploys to derail the meeting. Someone introduced a resolution to condemn the Soviet invasion of Finland. A serious scuffle ensued. Finally, two of the leading antagonists were forcibly ejected, and Archibald Roosevelt walked out after “a brief wrestling match with Joseph Cadden.”
The antagonists would continue to try to disrupt the meetings, interrupting with criticisms of FDR and creating disturbances. They were repeatedly ruled out of order. ER watched the tumult from the second row. Asked her opinion, she said, “My only comment is that this was a meeting with a pre-arranged program.” The Finland resolution, intended to create mayhem, was also ruled out of order. But the issue was bitterly divisive and defined the weekend.
Despite her private feelings, she defended the AYC against its enemies—specifically the organized right led by Father Coughlinites, Silver Shirts, and anti-Semitic ruffians. They had, ER wrote, “served only a destructive purpose.”
Nevertheless, the Friday meeting ended on a conciliatory and hopeful note, when recently appointed attorney general Robert Jackson responded to McMichael and Strong’s criticisms of the administration. In a vigorous speech that was broadcast nationally, he surprised the audience with welcome news. “For more than a week,” he said, “the Department of Justice has had an attorney in South Carolina gathering evidence [on Ku Klux Klan] activities. And less than a week ago the Department of Justice dismissed more than 100 indictments against WPA workers in Minnesota.* Perhaps the Department of Justice is not as heartless as you think.”
Several New Dealers in FDR’s inner circle, including Ben Cohen and Tom Corcoran, hoped that Jackson would run for president later that year. At the Citizenship Institute he read a prepared speech that opposed any retrenchment on New Deal policies and supported the Allies. FDR had wrought great changes, culminating, said Jackson, in fundamental governmental powers that never existed before: the ability “to govern the powerful, [and] protect the weak.”
Jackson’s speech also affirmed the rights of youth: this was the time to have “your dreams and your adventures.” The correct role of elders was to provide “patient and understanding counsel.” He dismissed those who saw youth’s “spirit of social and political unconventionality” as some “terrifying” or “nightmarish plotting against government.” Nonconformity was neither treasonous nor the work of “radicals and communists.” At this moment, with depression ongoing and war raging, youth could hardly afford to be complacent. No “honest” observer should expect a “free and hopeful youth” to support the status quo when so much “involuntary unemployment,” so much insecurity and dependency on the part of the aged, and “so many injustices” lay before us all. Youth faced “an indefensible legacy,” Jackson said. But “before you look wistfully to any other form of government, let’s see what we can do with this American Government with its powers thus restored.” This democracy, enhanced by the New Deal, was “a great system for changing the status quo by peaceful and orderly means.”*
Pleased by Jackson’s speech, ER noted that most of the audience received it with cheering enthusiasm. She was relieved especially since earlier that day Joseph Lash, while attempting to speak in favor of the administration’s policies, had been persistently interrupted, actually “booed for fifteen minutes before he could continue his speech.” ER, aghast, understood that this was no ordinary meeting of activist youth, and their friends and mentors in government.
• • •
On Saturday, 10 February, the air was heavy in Washington, frosty, wet. It rained, hard and cold and bitter. Fingers were numbed; feet were sodden. Some students danced; some painted signs; some stayed in bed and clung to each other. FDR was scheduled to address the young people at the White House that day.
In the morning a young woman on horseback, dressed as the Joan of Arc of 1940, led a parade of America’s youth along Constitution Avenue. Almost six thousand young people marched: farmers and sharecroppers, workers and musicians, from high schools and colleges, black and white, Indians and Latinos, Christians and Jews, atheists and agnostics, freethinkers and dreamers, liberals and Communists. This extraordinary patchwork of American youth had arrived an hour early to hear the president. As they waited, they alternated between silence and song, as if in homage to the tensions behind the banners.
Banners for peace predominated: LOANS FOR FARMS, NOT ARMS. JOBS NOT GUNS. SCHOOLS NOT BATTLESHIPS. BURY THE SLUMS BEFORE THEY BURY US. HEED THE VOICE OF 20,000,000 / KEEP THE CCC CIVILIAN. ALL BOW DOWN TO MARTIN DIES, 57 KINDS OF LIES. ABOLISH THE POLL TAX. PASS THE AMERICAN YOUTH ACT. YES TO MORE SCHOOLS / NO TO WAR TOOLS. THE YANKS ARE NOT COMING.
Songs of protest filled the air. The students sang as they marched; they sang as they waited. Initially stirred by a sense of their own unity, the vigor of their banners, the certainty of their goals, and the wit of their parodies, they felt confident. For that moment, even in the rain, the future was theirs. But the rain was relentless, and the winds grew colder.
The White House lawn turned muddy. For over two hours, their banners still aloft but heavier and limp with rain, they waited patiently. FDR was to speak on a national radio hookup, and they were told there was an unfortunate delay. The mud grew softer and the rain came down harder. They sang more songs. ER wandered through the crowd, covered in rain cape and hood, giving warm words of greeting. She had persuaded FDR to speak, but now as the rain poured and the winds intensified, the mood changed from anticipation to anxiety. Finally Jack McMichael went to the microphone, set up on the South Portico, and led the crowd in “America the Beautiful,” chants for the Youth Act, and words of introduction:
Deep in the dream of Americans is a picture of the land of the free and the home of the brave. A land free of the misery of war and oppression. . . .
Now, more than four million young citizens are without work. Now, the doors to industry, yes, and even the relief rolls, are closed to them. Are we to rear a generation in hopelessness and despair? Now war, which brings nothing but death and degradation to youth and profit and power to a few, reaches out for us. Are we to solve our youth problem by dressing it in uniform and shooting it full of holes?
America should welcome and should not fear a young generation aware of its own problems, active in advancing the interests of the entire nation. In this spirit, [thousands] . . . have streamed into Washington. . . . They are here to discuss their problems and to tell you, Mr. President, and the Congress, their needs and desires. . . . I am happy to present to you, Mr. President, these American youth.
Finally FDR appeared on the balcony—with ER now beside him, leaning against a White House column. He looked at the crowd below and smiled, with an expression nobody had ever seen before. The audience was hushed and silent. Jonathan Mitchell, standing in the crowd beside his friend Michael Straight, whispered, “He doesn’t like the smell of the Albatross that his wife has hung around his neck.”
And then he began. FDR stood before the Youth Congress not to praise America’s young activists but to insult them, to administer not a blessing but “a spanking.” Joseph Lash, standing with a small group of former ASU allies, recalled a “tough, uncompromising speech. Clearly we did not enchant him. . . . We were welcome, as were all citizens. It was ‘grand’ we were enough interested in government to come to Washington,” where they had a guaranteed right to come and advocate change. In another country, under other governments, “this kind of meeting . . . could not take place.”
Then came a set of dreary statistics, followed by a rehash of old achievements and a list of warnings: Do not expect Utopia; do not seek panacea, “handouts” to guarantee jobs or training. This administration could solve the nation’s problems only “as fast as the people of the country as a whole will let us.” The “final word of warning” seemed a specific insult, lodged in contemptuous tones: Do not deal with subjects “which you have not thought through and on which you cannot possibly have complete knowledge.”
FDR defended his call for a loan to Finland and attacked those who opposed it—as New York’s Youth Council had, on the grounds that it was an attempt to lead the United States into an “imperialistic war.” FDR called that “unadulterated twaddle,” based in small part on “sincerity” but also “on 90 percent ignorance.”
Several people booed and hissed, while others hushed them.
FDR went on: 98 percent of the American people wanted to support Finland. To discuss a U.S.-Soviet war over Finland “is about the silliest thought that I have ever heard advanced in the fifty-eight years of my life.” “All of you,” he assured the crowd, “can smile with me on this.” Nobody smiled. He then criticized the Soviet Union: whatever his former hopes had been for the future of “that experiment,” it was today “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.”
The boos began again.
Some in the AYC were called Communists, FDR noted. He acknowledged the right of Americans to advocate “ideals of theoretical communism,” but they also had the “sacred duty” to confine their visions to our constitutional framework. He was sure they all agreed with him and would be at it long after “I am gone from the scene. . . . So I say to you, keep your ideals high, keep both feet on the ground, and keep everlastingly at it.”
The crowd stood silently, stunned and disheartened; many were near tears.
FDR raised his hand in a flippant gesture, turned, and walked into the darkness of the White House on Pa Watson’s arm. ER followed silently behind. For the student activists who had traveled so far, memories of that bitter day would never fade.
A great range of student and future leaders were in that crowd. My own friends, activists, and, notably, founders of Women Strike for Peace—Bella Abzug, Amy Swerdlow, Mim Kelber, and Victor Teisch—said they never forgot what seemed to them a blunt dismissal by a man they had so admired, who had turned so completely into a careless politician. According to Michael Straight, FDR had ignored the “hopeful and constructive” address that had been prepared for him. Education commissioner John Studebaker and Aubrey Williams had both drafted suggestions for the speech, but FDR had discarded them. Instead, he “scolded the delegates in a rebuke that extended beyond the Left to the liberals and to his own wife.” Joe Lash considered the president’s speech a specific rebuff to his wife: “The young people had begun to irritate him,” and ER’s efforts to defend them “irritated him even more.” But he could not reproach her directly, Lash noted, and in a speech broadcast nationwide that he had written himself, he confronted the differences between them. It was the first time he publicly displayed his antagonism.
Woody Guthrie, who had “hoboed in from Galveston Texas” to Washington that day, was staggered when FDR called the students’ “trip and the stuff that they stood for ‘twaddle.’ It come up a big soaking rain and he made the kids a 30-minute speech in it.” On the spot, Guthrie wrote a song: “Why Do You Stand There in the Rain?”
It was raining mighty hard in that old capitol yard
When the young folks gathered at the White House gate. . . .
While they butcher and they kill, Uncle Sam foots the bill
With his own dear children standing in the rain.
ER admired Guthrie and evidently never objected when this song was sung in her presence. But one Guthrie song that members of the AYC repeatedly sang during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact really annoyed her:
Oh, Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt.
We damned near believed what he said.
He said, “I hate war and so does Eleanor,
But we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.”
People closest to FDR were deeply distressed by his performance. Anna wrote a letter to her mother, unusually dismayed by her father’s words. ER replied:
I felt as you did about Pa’s speech to the American Youth Congress, tho’ I wish they had better manners about it! Many of the youngsters are inclined to believe well of Russia but that is because they are so afraid of all propaganda & feel Russia in Finland may be a victim of that. [Russia] helped Spain and they don’t trust [Herbert] Hoover’s efforts for Finland since he did nothing for Spain or Czechoslovakia or Poland or China. They think “well the Finnish government was fascist once we know.” I found them not communist except for a few city groups, and not concerned about communism which was forced down their throats at every turn but deeply concerned about getting a job and finding out how they could help themselves and each other in their respective communities to do this. Pa lost their support and will have to win it back. I’d like to show Pa [your letter] but I wont for the sake of family peace!
ER wrote Anna nothing of her own ordeal during the Citizenship Institute. The afternoon FDR was booed, she attended a plenary session where John L. Lewis scorned FDR in general, and the paternalistic condescending tone of his address in particular:
FDR gave you statistics that indicate improvement. I reject such statistics, while 12 million Americans are still unemployed.
FDR dismissed your views as “twaddle.” Your resolution on Finland was substantially the same as the mineworkers’ resolution. That is not twaddle; that is democracy.
Every sentence was greeted with gusts of approval, whistles, and cheers. In the end, Lewis urged America’s youth to leave the cold embrace of the Democratic Party and join his Labor’s Non-Partisan League.
ER’s inner torment, both at her husband’s humiliations and at the savaging of her own beliefs in such hostile fashion, can only be imagined. Yet while Lewis hurled contempt at her husband, ER sat passively knitting. On his way out, Lewis paused to greet her. He leaned over, hand extended. As they shook hands, there was a momentary intake of breath throughout the filled-to-capacity auditorium—a pause of courtesy on a bitter day.
As the afternoon proceeded, ER’s hopes for the AYC were restored. Speeches by the young delegates themselves were important, fact-filled, and galvanizing. Harriet Pickens of the YWCA, daughter of NAACP officer William Pickens, spoke for civil rights and decried a Mississippi proposal for free but censored textbooks for grades one to eight. All references to “citizenship and voting rights” were to be deleted for Negro children. According to Lash, Harriet Pickens’s “speech was a cry from the heart.”
ER was particularly stirred by the vigor and eloquence of Dorothy Height. An NYU graduate, journalist, and social worker, Height represented the Christian Youth Council. “War is an outrage and a sin. It violates the very fundamentals of Christianity,” Height said. “For Christian young people there is no alternative. We join with the young people of America and the world in working for . . . a true peace which transcends race, nation or class.” An African-American student leader and YWCA officer, Height had worked closely with Mary McLeod Bethune since 1937 at the National Council of Negro Women and had been one of ten AYC leaders who worked with ER to make the Vassar World Youth Congress a success. ER admired her as an independent force within the AYC.
The first lady was also impressed by Louise Meyerovitz’s vigorous words on behalf of Young Judaea:
Tactics of anti-Jewish persecution which proved so successful in Germany are being transplanted to the United States. One group has been used as an entering wedge. When that group is done away with, another group is selected until all the people who oppose the suppression of freedom are put off the map. The threat of war paves the way for dictatorship and rule by decree. It endangers the freedom of life of all the citizens, including American youth of Jewish faith.
Frances Williams’s concluding presentation appealed to ER most of all. As AYC administrative secretary, she represented the leadership’s vision, which gave ER abiding hope in the group. Williams’s emphasis on civil liberties and full citizenship rights for all included fearful warnings about new anti-alien and sedition laws, the end of free speech, press, and assembly, and the march of repression in troubled times, which particularly targeted labor’s rights through corruption, vigilantism, and terror. Democracy itself was in a state of siege, Williams warned, and academic freedom and all minority rights were imperiled. ER agreed with Williams, and with the AYC, on most issues.
But the meeting was entirely divided between those who wanted to support Britain and France and those who were so pro-Soviet that they declared Britain and France imperialist enemies. ER’s close friend Abbott Simon, the legislative chair, recently returned from Europe, declared France to be “a semifascist state,” where Spanish refugees lived in squalor and misery and were forced to repatriate to “the firing squads.” An Indian student asserted: “We in India [see] no difference between German fascism and British or French imperialism.” Several others gave speeches to make it clear that “the Yanks are not coming.”
That was “the harsh setting” ER faced on Sunday night, Lash later noted, when she rose to address the final session, titled “How War Affects American Youth.” For this most controversial session, ER had previously agreed to answer questions from the floor.
In the past she had entered AYC events accompanied by AYC leaders. That night she arrived on the arm of her son FDR Jr., with harsh lights of newsreel cameras upon her, in a long black evening dress, and a corsage of orchids given her by AYC leaders.
“When I rose to speak,” she remembered, “I was greeted with boos, but that made no difference to me. I waited until I could be heard and then remarked that since they had asked me to speak and I had listened to all the other speakers, I thought in return they had an obligation to listen to me.” According to Leslie Gould, newspaper accounts “made it a giant boo demonstration . . . of antagonism and disrespect to Mrs. Roosevelt.” Actually, the response was aimed at the first question, “on the sore spot of Finland” asked by “one of the disturbers” who had wrangled with Joe Cadden the night before.
The audience of over two thousand remained politely quiet throughout, after she held up her hand to cut their initial reaction short: “I want you neither to clap nor hiss until I have finished and then you may do whichever you like.”
She took the first question from her cousin Archibald Roosevelt: “Don’t you think that a congress truly representative of American youth should be willing to pass a resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Finland?”
No. I don’t think you should go on record for anything you don’t believe in. . . . However, I think it is only fair to say that I do not think you fully understand some of the history underlying many situations. . . .
I agree with you that a stand should have been taken when Ethiopia was attacked. I agree with you in your sympathy for Spain; I agree with you in your sympathy for China and Czechoslovakia. I also have sympathy for Finland. Even though you may think that the government which came into Finland originally had certain fascist tendencies, I think it has been clearly proved that the government . . . is what the Finns want it to be. In all fairness, I think, however, it should be said that there is no excuse for a big nation invading a little nation which has not been attacked by that little nation. . . .
Therefore, our sympathy as a free people should be just as much with the Finnish people as it would be with any other small nation which is invaded.
ER answered every question put to her for over an hour—gravely, sincerely. She chose, above all, to defend her husband’s remarks. She tried to explain the administration’s failure to end unemployment: it “is a world question—a basic economic question. The administration does not know the answer. The administration program is to do what seems possible, do it fairly and continue to look for the answer.” She agreed that all programs so far, the “increased social security legislation,” the NYA and WPA efforts, were “a drop in the bucket.” On the subject of economic retrenchment for social programs, she turned the question to a failure to organize public opinion. She called upon the audience to rally movements in their home to communicate “because Congress is responsive to you.”
On the hope for continued neutrality and aid to belligerents, she was vigorous: “I do not want to see this country go to war again. . . . But domination of any great part of the world by any great nation is always a danger.” She did not know what constituted “adequate defense.” “I want to see war abolished,” she declared. But when wars were being fought, defenses were needed. To a mounting rumble of protest, she continued:
You never go to war unless the nation wants to go to war. You cannot because Congress is responsive to the nation. . . . You are not the only ones who don’t want war. I don’t think there are any older people in this country who want war, and certainly none of us who know what war is like. . . . Do you think that the President wants war? Then you forget that we have four sons who are just the age to go to war.
The United States, she said, was in no position to criticize struggling nations facing war “when we do so little.” She wondered if Abbott Simon had been “fair to criticize France” when the Wagner-Rogers bill to bring in refugee children, “all of whom were to be paid for, the money had been acquired,” had been defeated “because the people of this country would not back it.” The United States, therefore, was in no position, she insisted, to sit in “harsh judgment on other nations.”
In conclusion, ER thanked the AYC for its patience and courtesy. “I am very, very fond of many of your leaders,” she said, “and I am sure I would like to know all of you personally.”
It had been a frank, painful, courageous evening. There were no easy answers, no simple solutions. The audience gave her a standing ovation. All observers agreed that, both for ER and for America’s youth, it had been an exhausting, extraordinary ordeal.
ER’s feelings about the event ranged from depressed to philosophical. In the end, she confided to Hick, she answered their questions “in a way which was not too popular & there was considerable hissing. FDR made them very sore, more by the way he said things than by the things he said & it is especially hard to stand in the rain & ‘take it’ when you feel as sensitive as youth does.” Then John L. Lewis “walked away with them,” and “I brought them down to earth . . . which wasn’t pleasant either. However, when all is said & done it was remarkable to have so many come & talk & listen & I think it was a great experience for them & I learned much myself.”
Hick was unforgiving. Imagine! To hiss ER! All the Democratic leaders Hick met as she traveled for the party to build support for the 1940 election, and explore FDR’s third-term possibilities, were wild with outrage. What nerve, Hick declared, “after all you have done for them! It does make them look sort of bad.”
Dewey Fleming of the Baltimore Sun observed: “The nation probably has not seen in all of its history such a debate between a President’s wife and a critical, not to say hostile, auditorium full of politically minded youths of all races and creeds.”
Betty Lindley wrote to Anna: “I went to all the sessions of the American Youth Congress—and I’m still boiling mad. They were impudent, closed-minded and destructive. . . . And how they can talk! Your mother was magnificent Sunday evening when a bunch of rigged-up questions were handed to her to answer.”
ER’s closest friends were aghast throughout the weekend. The young people’s rude behavior toward FDR made Tommy livid. At tea, immediately after that event, she confronted several AYC leaders: “How dare you insult the President of the United States?” Before dinner, FDR sent for Tommy. It was unusual for her to be summoned to his study. As she entered, he looked up from his papers and whispered intently, “Thank you, Tommy.” While her outrage consoled FDR, he sought to comfort his wife. Later that evening, he leaned over to ER and with his most disarming smile said, “Our problem children are always unpredictable, aren’t they!”
ER left almost immediately for an unprecedented vacation in Florida. She had never before departed just to get away, to heal her heart, and to assess her changing alliances and friendships. Safe and secluded at a beach house that Earl Miller had borrowed from a friend, with Tommy and her partner Henry Osthagen, ER did little but read, ruminate, and relax. She swam and wrote her columns, enjoyed the good cheer and playful games Earl invented, and filled her days with an abandon she had never before allowed herself.
For the next two weeks ER’s columns were datelined “Golden Beach, Florida”: “Here I am installed in a very comfortable house . . . and our holiday has already begun.” She launched her time off with a visit to Mary McLeod Bethune’s college in Daytona Beach. Until then, “I never realized what a really dramatic achievement” Bethune-Cookman College actually was. Founded in 1905, with five dollars, faith in the future, and “five little girls” enrolled in what was then called the Literary and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, the college now “ministers to the needs of 100,000 Negroes from Daytona south, and it takes 250 students.” Bethune-Cookman trained “leaders who will return to their communities and serve their people.” Bethune’s vision and achievement profoundly moved ER, who alerted her readers that “like all other colleges, they still need a great deal—a library building, for instance, and many more books . . . a substantial endowment fund,” and new buildings to keep up with its splendid growth. ER ignored the fact that her visit and call for donations rankled Dixiecrats. Subsequently she would visit Bethune-Cookman College many times and support it in various ways.
While on vacation, she told her readers that except for her columns, she would have no social engagements “or duties of any kind” for the duration. It “is really a very nice feeling, but not having experienced it very often in my life, it makes me feel a bit guilty. . . . In any case, I am going to enjoy every day as we live it.” The next day she wrote her daughter, “I’m getting a good tan & doing nothing social. Henry [Osthagen] & Earl are having some friends for cocktails today & yesterday Tommy, Earl & I went to see ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ otherwise I’ve lived on the beach in a bathing suit.”
But in her columns, she ceaselessly struggled to work out her feelings about the Citizenship Institute. She wrote about sitting on the beach with nothing to do: “My husband likes the ocean from the deck of a ship, even when the vessel rolls and pitches so much that most people retire to bed. My own appreciation of the ocean is always enhanced by being on dry land.” Actually, she preferred to drive along the coast, “close to the beach, or high above it.” She never wrote that she hated the sand, which she did, and besides, “it does not seem to me particularly warm here,” but she was assured it would get warmer. She enjoyed her days on the beach. “I should record that during the past twenty-four hours I have spent many of them lying in the sun and find it very pleasant.” Moreover, such enforced relaxation heightened her interest in local conditions. Notably in segregated Florida, she was drawn to issues of race. A local effort to introduce retraining schools for unemployed workers excited her imagination, and she suggested it for all communities.
The new Association for the Study of Negro Life and History seemed to her spectacular:
There is nothing which gives one so much pride as to be familiar with the achievements of one’s own race. There is so much today in literature and art which can give the Negro people a sense of the genius and achievement of their race, but too often their history is forgotten. I think this association will promote goodwill and respect between neighbors of different races in our own country.
As always, human suffering and issues of respect for others dominated ER’s thoughts. The film version of The Grapes of Wrath struck her as “well done,” but she feared it did not convey the full reality of people’s suffering. She was particularly moved by Mrs. Joad’s question to Tommy when he returned from prison: whether he had “been hurt so much that he is just ‘mean-mad.’ I have felt people were ‘mean-mad’ at times and wondered if life were not treating them so harshly that they were unable to retain any of the qualities which make people lovable and that make life worth living.”
During her vacation, “in the midst of a world which seems to provide one at every turn with new tales of horror and suffering, a story has come to me which has nothing to do with war.” Korea was suffering due to “the mercilessness of nature.” A protracted drought and heat wave had resulted in famine. Korea’s chief winter food is rice and “‘kimchi,’ a kind of pickled cabbage.” Their cotton crop failed, and the people of Korea “are starving, freezing and dying.” ER again asked for donations. “Perhaps you will send an occasional check to . . . the world’s suffering people.” And she acknowledged, “It seems hard to sleep at night because the stress of homeless, hopeless people haunt one’s dreams.”
Several books lifted her spirits. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, dedicated to airline pilots and “their dead,” left her with an intensified understanding of real courage—which involved “a zest for life [no less than] contempt for death.” Indeed, the book was not about contempt for death at all but about responsibility. Without responsibility, “contempt for death is the sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance.” ER agreed with Saint-Exupéry’s definition of responsibility: “It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one’s comrades. It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.” His words caused her to observe “some of our young people today, who rather clumsily express their desire to keep this country at peace and continue . . . to make life more worth living.” Their attitude stemmed from their sense of responsibility for world conditions. Their courage to accept that responsibility, she concluded, was probably the courage most needed today.
She exhorted her readers to consider the most needful issues before every community, recommending Elsie Clapp’s new book, Community Schools in Action, and she wondered what might be done to improve the plight of handicapped children. The National Society for Crippled Children’s Easter seal drive was on, and the need was more urgent than ever. Each state required significant federal aid for the care, education, and treatment of physically handicapped children. Almost two million children in the United States “needed special education, and less than ten percent” received it.
• • •
ER’s Florida sojourn coincided with FDR’s vacation cruise aboard the Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal. As he neared Colón, Panama, to “inspect the Atlantic defenses and cross to the other side,” he sent a cable addressed “Dear Babs.” Concerned about her well-being after their public ordeal, he was unusually instructive: “I was glad to get your telegram. . . . Do get a real rest even if some of the mail gets ‘acknowledged’ instead of answered.” He anticipated splendid fishing, “and I’ve already had lots of sleep and some sunlight.”
Their vacations also coincided with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles’s mission to visit British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier, as well as Mussolini and Hitler. As FDR’s personal emissary, bypassing ordinary diplomatic channels, Welles undertook this desperate, controversial, fact-finding trip in an effort to forestall worldwide catastrophe, keep Italy neutral, and pursue every hope that might lead to negotiations for disarmament and a just and durable peace.
In Berlin, Hitler’s swagger “horrified” Welles. The Nazis, in a triumphant and celebratory mode, greeted him with contempt and exhibited no interest in FDR’s overture. Indeed, their manner toward Welles was “arrogant and brutal,” Nicolson was told. As European antifascists prepared for Hitler’s next step, Welles departed for England.
England’s strategy was still uncertain. In London, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy foretold defeat and disaster if America joined Europe’s war. Harold Nicolson’s parliamentary allies were horrified by Kennedy’s evident willingness to accept a negotiated peace on Hitler’s terms. “In this he will have the assistance of the old appeasers,” the Communists who followed the meanderings of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and “left-wing pacifists.”
In France, a strange torpor, a brooding national fatigue, seemed to cloud political vision and sway public opinion. Communists and unionists were being arrested, hounded, and isolated, while fascist fifth columnists were ignored. Ambassador Bullitt’s assistant Robert Murphy said the Communists were the primary appeasers. The fifty Communist deputies in Parliament, before being jailed the previous September, had “faithfully followed Moscow’s lead” and opposed France’s preparations for war. In Paris, Ilya Ehrenburg was more agitated by France’s continuous disregard for Nazi atrocities: the only outrages it seemed to notice were those committed by Russia in the Soviet-Finnish War. Those who proclaimed it useless to “die for Danzig” now proclaimed it “necessary to die for Helsinki.” Those who considered it impossible to fight on the Rhine now considered it possible to fight for Vyborg. Yet nothing was done; no troops marched; no tanks moved; no planes flew overhead. French generals opined that France was safe, protected and forever secured by the Maginot line.
When Welles returned to Washington, he pleaded for more military and economic aid for France. His plea bitterly exacerbated State Department rivalries. William Bullitt, who considered himself FDR’s primary European adviser, was aghast at Welles’s assignment, taking it as a slap in his face, undermining all his efforts for more aid to France. His resentment of Welles grew into a destructive hatred that permanently affected U.S. policy.
The diplomatic community now had no doubt that Hitler’s goal was world conquest. The democracies would need to do far more in unity and with vigor to block his next moves. ER was keenly aware of that; at the AYC, she had rejected Abbott Simon’s criticisms of France. We were, she said, all responsible for this situation: how can we criticize others when we ourselves have done so little?
It was at the bleakest point of her Florida vacation that she received a cable from Stockholm signed by twenty-four international women’s organizations, representing “various ideals and political views.” It was “addressed through me to all American women.” The organizations agreed on a resolution calling upon all women everywhere to focus on “the consequences of a total war in all its inhumanity.” Given current conditions, “women of all countries” must unite “to stop the process of devastation and prevent the impending catastrophe which threatens humanity.”
In February 1940, public opinion polls revealed overwhelming opposition to U.S. involvement in the European war. A Gallup poll showed that 85 percent of America wanted to stay out. When asked, if Germany appeared to be “defeating England, should the United States declare war on Germany?” 71 percent answered no. Fortune’s poll found that while 85 percent thought America might be drawn into the war, 38 percent believed it would be because of “business interests” or government manipulation; 14 percent because of Allied propaganda; and 34 percent because “we hated Hitler.” Only 1.2 percent thought “we must help the democracies.”
One point two percent—the figure staggered ER. In that bitter context, she spent her last evenings in Florida in the company of Martha Gellhorn, who flew over from Cuba. Gellhorn updated ER about Finland and gave her a copy of her new novel, A Stricken Field, a collection of stories about Czechoslovakia that were rooted also in Gellhorn’s feelings about Spain. She was, ER rhapsodized, one of America’s best foreign correspondents and “an exciting person. . . . She has seen so much in Europe and felt it as only a really good writer can. I enjoyed every minute of our talk.”
Gellhorn, like ER and Joe Lash, regarded Spain as the moral compass. It was where antifascist people of courage turned for hope. An entire generation of activists, writers, and artists had met there and boldly fought dreadful evil. Ilya Ehrenburg explained Spain’s moral impact on the world.
It was difficult to breathe in the disturbed and humiliated Europe of the thirties. Fascism was advancing, and advancing unhindered. Every country, and even every man, hoped to save themselves singly, save themselves at all costs, achieve safety by silence, buy themselves off. . . . And then suddenly, a people arose that accepted battle. It did not save itself, nor did it save Europe, but if . . . there still remains any meaning in the words “human dignity,” it is thanks to Spain. Spain became the air that allowed people to breathe.
Only Spain and Finland, Gellhorn felt, had stood up against evil and fought back. After she left Finland, she had stopped in Paris because she had learned that France had arrested some of Spain’s most intrepid heroes, including Germany’s bold antifascist writer and Spanish Civil War hero Gustav Regler. Gellhorn had pleaded for his release from a French detention center for enemy aliens, without success. Perhaps ER could do something? she now asked. ER would, of course, do her utmost. Ultimately Regler was released and found sanctuary in Mexico.
• • •
As ER considered the herculean tasks that faced contemporary youth, her thoughts turned to great teachers and to her own great teacher, Marie Souvestre. ER’s love for literature, history, geography, music, and the arts had all been enhanced by Madame Souvestre, whose love of learning and of life had inspired her students with a passion for life’s enchantments. As she ruminated and read on vacation in Florida, she recalled all those maps she was meant to memorize—the geography lessons and history lessons, the wars without end that humanity has endured. Friends from her student days were now endangered as Europe entered a state of siege. She quoted at length Mary Ellen Chase’s celebration of great teachers, A Goodly Fellowship, because Chase’s “conception of the good teacher agrees with my own.”
For ER, “teaching and being taught are always inextricably woven together, for there is really no better way of learning,” and good teachers, who “must really love” their subjects, were in a perpetual state of learning. Chase referred to a great teacher, whom ER knew and admired—William Allan Neilson, a Shakespearean scholar and president emeritus of Smith College. ER thought “all of us will do well to remember” Neilson’s farewell address to the students of Smith, because he named the enemy—the elusive enemy, he
who always puts the body before the spirit, the dead before the living; who makes things only to sell them; who has forgotten that there is such a thing as truth, and [who] measures the words by advertisement or by money; who daily defiles the beauty that surrounds him and makes vulgar the tragedy. . . . The Philistine, the vulgarian, the great sophist, all the greedy, selfish, egocentric manipulators [with] outposts inside us persecuting our peace, spoiling our sight, confusing our values . . .
A certain very popular educator, an “enchanting classicist,” had recently been in urgent need of help. The extraordinary Dr. Vera Lachmann was the headmistress of an academy in Berlin-Grunewald “for half-Aryan and Jewish boys and girls.” She had founded the school in April 1933 and maintained it despite “mounting difficulties,” until the Nazi government ordered it closed on 1 January 1939. After that, she gave private lessons, volunteered with Kate Rosenheim and other concerned Germans who worked to secure shelter for Jewish children abroad; in the spring she gave a lecture series on Rilke. Her sister Nina took the last scheduled flight out of Berlin to London in July, but Vera explained to her worried friends that she intended to remain in Berlin so long as she might be useful to others.
Amid mounting rumors that Jewish scholars, attorneys, and physicians had been rounded up by the Nazis and had subsequently disappeared, Dr. Lachmann’s German friends and colleagues persuaded her to try to leave. U.S. friends organized to rescue her and petitioned the U.S. consul in Berlin for an “ex-quota visa.” But such visas were limited to university faculty, and despite appeals from many scholars and from Vassar College’s president H. N. MacCracken, who offered Lachmann a “generous contract” to teach at Vassar, the State Department was unwilling to grant her a visa.
After months of delay, her friends turned to ER. President MacCracken explained the situation in detail: “Dr. Lachmann, who is a cousin of Erich Warburg of New York, was deprived of her position owing to her race, and since 1933 has conducted an advanced school for Jewish students driven from universities and gymnasia in Germany.” But the U.S. consul refused to consider her school “an academy, seminary, college, or university.” Vassar’s president included a letter from Radcliffe dean W. K. Jordan, assuring the State Department that “the academic board of Radcliffe College considered the instruction to be equivalent to that offered students regularly enrolled in an American college.” Her school was equivalent to a gymnasium, and Erika Weigand, a Radcliffe student who studied at Dr. Lachmann’s school from 1933 to 1935, had received college credits for her work. MacCracken assured ER that Dr. Lachmann was an esteemed scholar of “published works and recognized ability, and in every way the equal of other members of the Vassar faculty.”
Erika’s parents, Frances Rhoades Weigand and Dr. Hermann Weigand, chair of Yale’s department of Germanic languages, sent personal letters to ER. “Vera Lachmann is not only our dearest friend,” Frances Weigand wrote, “but a person we dare not let the world lose.” Hermann Weigand added, “I believe Dr. Lachmann to be one of the most valuable people alive in the world today.” He thanked President MacCracken for “whatever you may be able to do to secure for this life the possibility of continued existence and a sphere of usefulness.”
ER was moved by these many appeals. This profoundly learned classicist had graduated magna cum laude in German literature and Greek philosophy from the University of Berlin in 1931. She was also a poet, whose splendid dissertation was a study of the Eddas, Icelandic political verse of the Middle Ages, which involved translation from Old Norse. In addition to her work as headmistress, she taught Greek, Latin, German, French, Hebrew, ancient history, and the Bible. ER sent her entire file to Sumner Welles, her only State Department friend, and promised Dr. MacCracken that she would ask them “to do all they can to help her.” ER’s last note on the subject, dated 11 September 1939, contained one sentence: “Dear Sumner: Thank you so much for what you are doing to help Dr. Vera Lachmann.”
That same day ER wrote her daughter, “I feel sick about the war & want so much to do something that looks beyond toward building a better peace. We can’t go on with ever recurring wars in a modern world.” She wanted especially to go to Europe to build a significant “refugee relief effort,” but all her suggestions were rejected.
Dr. Lachmann—a great and beloved teacher, an inspiration for so many, the Marie Souvestre of Berlin—was one life endangered in a world of lives in jeopardy. ER did what she could, one life at a time. In this case her effort was successful. The visa was granted, and on 16 November 1939 Vera Lachmann left Germany for New York, via Denmark and Sweden, where she boarded the Gripsholm for a twelve-day journey to her new life. ER could not foresee that over time Vera Lachmann would become a legendary American classicist, charismatic and inspirational, or that students around the country would sing her praises long after her death in 1985.*
• • •
ER prepared for the end of her beach vacation in a serene and contented mood. She wondered where the next battle would occur, and when it would begin; and she wondered how long it would take for Americans to heed the crisis. But her grand vacation had gone a long way to restoring her spirits: “Another heavenly day and I grieve my time here draws to an end.” On one of her last evenings, she enjoyed a perfectly frivolous Florida adventure, going off, with unnamed others, to the Royal Palm Club. “It is very attractive and there is excellent food and one of the best floor shows.” Tony Martin sang, the ladies of the chorus were most charming and “graceful and wear attractive costumes.” Martin was introduced to her, and wanted his picture taken “with our group.” ER entirely enjoyed the “spirit of carefree gaiety here which is contagious.”
Finally “the day has come to leave Florida and I am afraid this lazy life is going to be hard to shake off. I have discovered that there is much in a change of atmosphere. I imagine that the President most reluctantly neared his home port.” But he had already picked up the “threads of all state affairs,” and she was certain that when she flew into Washington “this evening I shall forget in the twinkling of an eye that there are such things as days which are not scheduled and hours when one can lie in the sun or sit and read a book. It has been a delightful holiday and I feel a deep sense of gratitude to the kindly people who were so considerate and allowed me such freedom.”
As she considered her return to state affairs, ER made two suggestions to her readers. Former president Herbert Hoover had proposed that the U.S. government donate $20 million for Polish relief, because when the war was over, all Europe “will be starving.” She agreed and wrote, “Unfortunately, it is always the little people who starve. They are starving now,” if not in Finland, where food was bountiful, certainly in Poland and probably in Germany, Spain, and Italy, and to some degree “even in France and England.” She urged her readers to heed Hoover’s appeal and also to support Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s crusade to encourage schoolchildren in every state “to share what they can with the children who are in want in other countries.”
Tommy had arranged for ER to stop in and visit Lape and Read in Connecticut—“so you can see for yourself that she is brown and rested,” she explained to Lape—but ER insisted upon being on “a very strenuous diet and I hope she wont stay on it too long because she works too hard.” Few of ER’s friends satisfied Tommy, a fierce mother-bear protector. Critical and acerbic, she distrusted almost everybody ER befriended and felt close only to Esther and Elizabeth. Regarding their time in Florida, she had mixed emotions:
I would not have had any personal satisfaction . . . if I were in her place, but then we are all constituted differently. Such unadulterated selfishness as I observed could hardly be matched, and an equal amount of what I would call unkindness and thoughtlessness, if not worse. I had a certain amount of rest—that is I worked every morning and loafed in the afternoons and evenings. However, it was not my idea of a vacation.
Tommy’s reference was to Earl Miller, who was unexpectedly accompanied by his new lady friend Simone von Haver.
ER returned to the White House in time to greet special guests who had converged for the anniversary of FDR’s inauguration. She enjoyed a breakfast reunion with the first family’s most steadfast friends, including Grace Howe, Louis Howe’s widow; Groton’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody, and his wife; and FDR’s mother. To celebrate, they attended a service at St. John’s Church, where a prayer impressed ER so deeply, she printed it in full in her column:
Our Father, who hast set a restlessness in our hearts, and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find; forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content, and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us, that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pity; make us sure of the goal we cannot see, and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us, and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try enough to understand them. Save us from ourselves, and show us a vision of a world made new. May Thy spirit of peace and illumination so enlighten our minds that all life shall glow with new meaning and new purpose; through Jesus Christ Our Lord.
ER carried that prayer with her and made copies for her friends. Her quest for “the hidden good in the world” on the road to “a world made new” would fortify her every day as she confronted a springtime of horror, one lonely step at a time.