In April and May, while FDR labored over New Deal legislation and the economy continued to sag, he addressed monetary issues with a suddeness that startled many—and had profound international implications.
On 19 April, FDR took the United States off the gold standard. Paper money would no longer be redeemable in gold; the dollar would fluctuate; U.S. prices would rise.
FDR considered it a boon for domestic market prices, whatever its consequences on international trade. But higher U.S. prices would further curtail foreign commerce, already diminished by the world Depression. FDR was unconcerned: After all, Britain went off the gold standard in 1931. Budget director Lewis Douglas, however, was horrified and threatened to quit. With images of runaway inflation raging in his mind, the kind of inflation that had devastated Germany in 1923, he wailed: “This is the end of Western Civilization.”
ER was not convinced that “Western Civilization”, was doomed; but international peace was threatened if Europe could not sell its products, correct its economy, and pay interest on the large wartime debt owed to the United States—a matter of grievous contention. ER worried about the impact FDR’s decision would have, especially on England and France. She wrote a critical column for the Women’s Democratic News to explain the situation and urge women to consider the grave international implications of her husband’s decision:
Great excitement is caused … by the President’s announcement that no further gold exports will be permitted … until at least foreign countries now having a depreciated currency return to the gold standard…. This action … puts us practically on a parity with Great Britain and other countries that have gone off the gold standard….
While we may undertake many measures to improve our national conditions, those of us who are really thoughtful, know that the world is too closely bound together … ever to really prosper unless we all of us enjoy a certain amount of well being together….
Also in April, FDR held meetings in Washington with representatives of eleven nations in preparation for the London Economic Conference. His sole priority was America’s fiscal strength, but he sought also to be a world leader. He had no specific strategy, and was surrounded by advisers who disagreed completely. ER worried. He seemed to support each of the diplomats who left his office, smiling and satisfied. But, she knew, they disagreed with each other.
By May, ER felt exhausted, almost despondent. She craved a vacation, and went upstate with Nancy Cook, Earl Miller, and his wife, Ruth. “We all played pool,” and since ER and Nan were “novices,” they “furnished the hilarity of the evening.” ER and Earl took a three-hour drive to visit a camp on Chazy Lake that he planned to rent for the summer. ER “promised to spend two weeks with” Earl and his party in September: “It will be very restful & yet plenty to do.”
On her way home, ER had a curious experience, she wrote FDR, “with a young tramp.” Unemployed, witty, and earnest, he approached ER for money as she sat in her car and waited for gas. She asked him why he didn’t go into the CCC. He had tried, but the CCC required a home address. ER gave him $10 and her New York City card, with a specific invitation to call on her at five o’clock that Monday. He could pay her back when he got a job. Nancy Cook bet the First Lady that she would never see him or her money again.
He rather charmed ER, and she thought her husband should know that while she might “never see him again,” he might in fact “turn up” at the White House, or in New York. If he did, she wanted her husband to do everything possible “to get him in a reforestation camp,” or onto some other suitable project. “He probably won’t turn up but he might!”
Al Kresse did turn up, That Monday, as she pulled up to the East 65th Street house, a guard told her that “a bum had been hanging around saying Mrs. Roosevelt told him to meet her…. I don’t know where he could have got that calling card of yours.” She saw him on the corner, invited him for dinner, called a friend at Bear Mountain Park to take him into the CCC, and said, “You are going to work tomorrow. Where are you going to sleep tonight?”
She invited him to stay. Hick was horrified: “Sistie and Buzzie are sleeping in the nursery. There’s nobody else here but you and me. How do you know he won’t kidnap the children?”
ER had considered it all, and locked the elevator doors. But she trusted the young stranger. Al Kresse flourished in the CCC and became a supervisor. She entertained him and his parents at the White House; they corresponded for years, and she became godmother to his daughter.
People were not “tramps” or “bums” to ER. They were people with hopes, needs, unknown abilities. She trusted human nature, and believed in change. She opened her heart, took risks with caution, and was rarely disappointed—except by those who reviled the unemployed as if they were a different species.
The next week, for example, she enlivened a dull dinner for senators: “I threw bomb shells at them about federal control & setting minimum standards.” She wanted homeless youth respected and decent wages ensured.
For all her enthusiastic work, in her most private life ER was disturbed. She did not know what her husband planned to do about the international issues which most concerned her, and her family life was diminished by her children’s marital woes. She blamed herself, and wrote Hick:
I don’t seem to be able to shake the feeling of responsibility for Elliott and Anna. I guess I was a pretty unwise teacher as to how to go about living. Too late to do anything now, however, and I’m rather disgusted with myself. I feel soiled, but you won’t understand that.
ER had been troubled by Elliott’s behavior for over a year. In May 1932 she wrote FDR:
I wish I knew what to do for Elliott and Betty. He is so utterly inconsiderate—and lacking in care and gentleness. I am writing to him today to try to make him understand certain things but I can’t say that I feel very hopeful.
Then in March 1933, not quite twenty-three, Elliott abandoned his family. In April, after worrying about his whereabouts for weeks, Betty called with relief: Elliott had “reached Little Rock!”
“Well, my dear,” ER wrote Hick, “there will be no misunderstandings between us.”
The press was filled with details, and her mother-in-law became incensed and judgmental: “And so news of our family is out and about.” SDR blamed ER for her grandchildren’s troubles, and they released in her a tremendous surge of bitter memory. Hick sought to calm ER’s spirits, and ER was grateful:
Hick darling what a dear you are! Your letter warmed my heart and made me a little ashamed. What have I to be depressed about! I hate to see the kids suffer, but I know one has to, and I suspect they suffer less than I sometimes think…. I never talked to anyone. Perhaps that was why it all ate into my soul, and I look upon so many more emotions more seriously. … I was a morbid idiot for many years! Only in the last ten years or so have I made friends to whom I talked!
While FDR relied upon his wife to handle family crises, ER relied upon Hick for emotional advice concerning affairs of the heart. She sent a draft of a letter to Elliott, because “you see his side better than I do perhaps, and I do want to help him and not be too hard,” “too preachy,” or “austere.”
ER considered Hick wise about emotional issues, in a way she herself wanted to be: “I love you on Elliott & you are just right.” Her children’s upheavals caused ER to reflect on the pain that accompanies human relations: “I’m feeling tonite that the greatest responsibility anyone can have is that of making someone else suffer, and I suppose we all do it. Lord, keep me from it ever again is going to be my daily prayer.”
Ironically, ER had no idea how actually tormented Hick felt just then by her Associated Press colleagues, who pressured her to reveal what she knew about the Roosevelt family problems. She refused, and her emotional conflicts mounted as her position as star reporter unraveled. When Hick confided in Louis Howe, he told her that it was wrong for a reporter to get too close to her source. Throughout April and May, while ER leaned upon Hick and planned their summertime escape, Hick suffered in silence.
ER was aware of Hick’s conflict, but minimized her agony. Protected by her own economic security, marital and class privilege, she encouraged Hick to consider other work, and future diversions: “I’m planning our trip.” “FDR doesn’t care which time I go off with you, so, having talked with him, I’m sure of being free and you can arrange for whichever two weeks you want. What fun we’ll have just doing nothing—or doing anything. Some day we must see Europe!” In July, they would go north to Canada.
In May, Elliott announced his intention to divorce Betty and marry a woman he had just met. ER wrote Hick that her heart ached for Betty, who had “offered to give me back my pearls (which I did not take) & was swell” in many ways. ER agreed to meet Elliott in Los Angeles for a family conference. As she prepared to leave, her mother-in-law tormented her with accusations. Displeased by her grandchildren’s divorces, unable to control their decisions, the family matriarch blamed her daughter-in-law privately, and publicly. Although their political alliance had strengthened as “Mama” increasingly supported ER’s activities on behalf of poor and disenfranchised Americans, she continually goaded her concerning the children and relentlessly criticized her mothering.
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, founder of the Council on Foreign Relations and a “Hudson River” family friend, recalled one lunch shortly after the election, at the Big House presided over by SDR. Lord and Lady Astor and Amelia Earhart were among, the guests, when a grandson needing money arrived “without notice.” Miffed, though not discourteous, she told Armstrong: “I always like having the children, but don’t like having extra vegetables picked just on the chance they may come. They never bother to telephone…. But of course they have had no bringing up.”
In a moment of self-reflection, ER admitted that Sara Delano Roosevelt’s taunts wore her down: “My zest in life is rather gone for the time being. If anyone looks at me, I want to weep, and the sooner this western trip is over, the better…. I get like this sometimes. It makes me feel like a dead weight and my mind goes round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run, and I can’t, and I despise myself. I can’t get away from thinking about myself. Even though I know I’m a fool, I can’t help it!… You are my rock, and I shall be so glad to see you Saturday night. I need you very much as a refuge just now.”
While Father got all the credit for the good times, Mother carried the burdens on a daily basis, and always the blame. ER felt worst about Elliott, her father’s namesake: Elliott was the baby she carried in 1909, when she was filled with grief after the death of the first baby Franklin. She believed everything her son did was somehow her fault; and nobody in her family discouraged that thought.
On 1 June, ER had an ordinary day: She rode in the morning with Elinor Morgenthau and Esther Lape, who had spent the night to discuss the international situation; held a press conference to express her dismay that work camps for women were insufficiently enrolled; met with the head of the art department of Howard University to discuss new programs for “teaching art to the Negroes.” At five o’clock “all the world came to tea,” and at six she “shook hands with a group of champion spellers.” That evening, she received an honorary law degree and spoke at the commencement of the Washington College of Law.
But no matter what she did, she was distracted by her impending meeting with Elliott.
On the evening of 2 June, ER left for her first transcontinental flight—which, she wrote Hick, was perfect.
Deep in her thoughts as she flew to her son, ER was surprised to be bothered by the press at each refueling stop. “I must say that if all of us showed the same energy that the press photographers do there would be no stone left unturned anywhere in this country. I was even asked to get up and out of the plane at three and again at four o’clock in the morning so that pictures might be taken.”
Although the details are lost, her meeting with Elliott was satisfactory, and ER liked his fiancée, Ruth Josephine Googins of Fort Worth, Texas. Charming, and determined, she wanted to marry Elliott “without delay.”
Upon her return to New York, ER encountered two irritating letters from her mother-in-law and they had an unpleasant telephone conversation. When they met, ER confided to Hick, she had been “most agreeable superficially, but really horrid, so I am not proud of myself!”
ER wrote her husband in July:
Dearest Honey … I can’t believe he’s getting married for he has no job but I’m writing Anna to find out if he actually needs money. I think it is better to let him fend for himself but I don’t want him to borrow from others or to give the impression to others that we won’t give him anything….
Upon her return from California, her family crises ongoing, ER turned her attention to the international situation. Closest to her heart was the fight for the World Court and cooperation with the League of Nations, which she continued to believe was the world’s best hope against the devastations of war. While Senate opposition had kept the United States out of the League and in a diplomatic state of relative “isolation,” Eleanor Roosevelt was in the leadership of a vigorous band of women and men who, since the 1920s, kept the World Court idea before the nation.
Although FDR publicly shied away from international controversy and said not one word in support of the World Court after 1932, ER never wavered from her conviction that “America, by some form of cooperation with the rest of the world, must make her voice count among the nations for peace.”
As a board member of the bipartisan American Foundation, ER continued to agitate the cause with an unlikely team who disagreed on many issues but were longtime friends and fervent internationalists. It included Hoover’s secretary of state Henry Stimson, Elihu Root—Taft’s secretary of war, and most persistent champion of the World Court, and New York Herald Tribune publisher Helen Rogers Reid. It was led by ER’s great friends Esther Lape and her partner, international lawyer Elizabeth Read, author of International Law and International Relations, a leading college text used in over 570 universities. Read was also ER’s personal tax accountant and financial adviser.
ER’s surprisingly close alliance with Helen Rogers Reid, later known as the heart of New York Republicanism, survived all differences during the White House years. Their friendship was rooted in old family loyalties, as well as in Reid’s liberal and feminist vision. Born in Wisconsin, Helen Rogers was a Barnard graduate who became social secretary to Elisabeth Mills Reid, wife of Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune and ambassador to the, Court of St. James from 1905 to 1912. She continued to work as Mrs. Reid’s social secretary, commuting between New York and London for eight years, until she married her boss’s only son, Ogden Mills Reid, in 1911.
An ardent antifascist, Helen Reid was one of the first American publishers to give full attention to the German situation as it unfolded. On Sunday, 19 March 1933, the New York Herald-Tribune Magazine published a long and bitter analysis of “Hitler’s War on Culture” by leading German intellectual Dr. Lion Feuchtwanger:
In the land of Lessing and Goethe free scope is being given to man’s destructive urge. School children are being taught prayers of hatred against other children. A concerted attack has been made upon the arts….
The universities of Germany have been transformed into hotbeds of extreme nationalism….
The apostles of Fascism … have made man’s worst instincts their god and they have stirred senseless racial hatred to fever pitch. They declare that the Jews are to blame for everything. Hitler declares that “the Jews have conquered Europe and America,” and are now embarked on an effort to conquer Asia….
People ask, how could this great civilization have been brought to “the verge of ruin almost overnight? … Greatest is the amazement” of the world’s ten million Jews “who have always looked up to Germany as the spiritual home of world culture….”
Feuchtwanger believed Hitler’s rise began with the war in 1914. “For more than four years nations worshiped force and exalted might…. The barbaric instincts and atavistic impulses … have taken deep roots….”
Then came “the bitterness of defeat.” “German Nationalists believed they could not have failed”; rather, they were betrayed by a “domestic foe,” a “demoniac power … and they found this demoniac power in the Jew….
“German super-nationalism” coupled with militarism now rules, and blames the Jews for everything: Hitler sees them reflected in every window, on every screen, responsible for the World War, its outbreak and its loss; for Bolshevism and capitalism.
As Hitler declares war on Jews, he decrees war on culture. He insists that Germany suffers “from too much education…. What we need is instinct and will … For our liberation we need more than an economic policy and industry; what we need is pride, spite, hatred, hatred, and once more hatred.” He calls himself the Trommler (the drummer) and calls for agitation, nighttime torchlight parades, and random acts of brutality and violence to drum up hatred.
In ER’s circle, Lion Feuchtwanger’s article became the subject of intense discussion. Something frightful was happening that required international scrutiny. The World Court recognized the international conventions to protect racial, religious, and linguistic minorities. But in March, FDR decreed that national events within Germany and other nations were beyond the range of U.S. interests.
FDR’s refusal seriously to consider them was tied to his election deal with William Randolph Hearst, the American Foundation’s chief publishing enemy since 1924. Indeed, Helen Rogers Reid once wrote Lape that nothing could be done to “harness Hearst.” He had the power to make and break leaders, to dictate policies.
In 1932, FDR’s nomination was achieved because of Hearst’s support, and FDR believed his future success depended on keeping that support.
Hearst explained his attitude clearly in a letter to his former wife, Millicent Hearst:
I became alarmed at Gov. Roosevelt’s internationalistic attitude. I feel very deeply and intensely on this subject. I cannot see that entangling ourselves in European affairs is going to do us any good in any way, while there are possibilities of such utter disaster as are terrifying to contemplate.
The possibilities of being involved in a world war, and of being on the losing side, and of having our country subjected to crushing indemnity, and even deprived of some of its territory, is something that should make us hesitate at being overaltruistically interested in European complications.
Hearst decided to support FDR when he “came out with a very fine letter denying any desire to involve our nation in foreign entanglements. This was most reassuring and allayed my fears….”
Hearst’s support assured Roosevelt’s nomination, and he concluded his letter: “I am glad to have had a hand in accomplishing it…. I will work everywhere for him, in our papers and over our radios and in the news reels….”
After 1932, only ER, Lape, and their circle continued their World Court campaign for “ratification now.” By the summer of 1933, “Delay” on the World Court was established bipartisan policy.
FDR’s deal with Hearst—who delivered California and Texas—was faithfully kept. ER knew that it included FDR’s agreement to turn his back on the World Court, all “entangling alliances,” and multilateral efforts. Initially, when she learned of his convention promise, it had made her so furious she did not speak with her husband for days. FDR was so upset by his wife’s stony silence that he called ER’s friend and one of his champions, Agnes Brown Leach, to come for a visit and mollify her. Leach arrived, but supported ER.
For months it was unclear where FDR really stood regarding Europe’s 1933 efforts for disarmament and international economic accord. He insisted only that his options were restrained by “pragmatic” politics: Hearst’s support, Senate support. FDR would take no leadership risks concerning international relations that might threaten his domestic programs.
Daily, ER agonized over the dire headlines of aggression and betrayal out of Germany and Japan. Now her husband’s policy seemed even to depart from Hoover’s “nonrecognition” policy against aggressor states: FDR’s new isolationist sentiments insisted upon absolute neutrality, and a refusal even to name the aggressor.*
In the spring of 1933, the US was silent as Japan moved deeper into China, stopping only thirteen miles from Peking before negotiating a truce on 31 May 1933.
Although FDR frequently recalled his family’s close commercial ties with China, he did not suggest an arms embargo, or any other public response, even when Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in April. The western world was passive while the Soviets worried about their eastern territories, and Japanese militarists announced their “Imperial Destiny,” which included East Asia, the South Seas, and the entire Western Pacific.
At the same time, all the news out of Germany was ghastly. Throughout April and May, ER clipped articles and filled FDR’s basket with horror stories and urgent notes. Hitler made bellicose speeches, decried the punitive, vindictive Treaty of Versailles, and demanded full equality in armaments—either through French arms reduction or through German rearmament.
On 1 April, Nazis announced a national boycott of Jewish businesses and professions. Gangs of Nazis roamed the streets in Berlin and beat women and men seated at cafés and in parks; in other cities they brutalized Jews at random. On 7 April, Hitler obliterated the constitutional government, and henceforth he reigned supreme.
On 2 May, Nazis invaded and destroyed labor union offices, confiscated their funds, files, and property, arrested every union leader, and declared unions (active in Germany for over fifty years) dissolved. On 10 May, Nazi students at the University of Berlin ended a torchlight parade with a massive book burning that included the works of every notable German writer and scholar, including Albert Einstein, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig, as well as others, including H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair.
Also in May, Franz von Papen announced that Germany had obliterated “the term pacifism.” Before a vast Nazi rally, Papen, who as military attaché in Washington during the Great War had been accused of sabotaging U.S. transportation facilities, declared: “The battlefield is for a man what motherhood is for a woman!” Hitler was scheduled to address the Reichstag the next day, 17 May, and many feared he would officially repudiate Versailles and announce full rearmament at that time. England and France had unofficially agreed to declare sanctions if he did.
Finally, to ER’s great relief, FDR ended a month of silence with an “Appeal-to the Nations.” Drafted with the help of Louis Howe and others, it echoed her sentiments for real disarmament and was sent to fifty-four nations and published throughout the world:
Despite “the lessons and tragedies of the World War,” military weapons ”are today a greater burden upon the people of the earth than ever before.” The reason for such insanity was fear of “aggression” and “invasion.” Modern technology changed everything. War planes and heavy tanks threatened civilians everywhere. Therefore, “the ultimate goal of The Disarmament Conference must be peace,” which depended on the “complete elimination of all offensive weapons, and a solemn and definite pact of non-aggression.”
FDR’s speech was received jubilantly by citizens’ groups around the world, and respectfully by national leaders. Hitler even recast his 17 May speech to respond to FDR’s challenge: War represented “unlimited madness,” destruction, the “collapse of the present social and political order.” Confident that England and France were not serious about disarmament, Hitler rhetorically accepted the president’s proposal:
Germany is entirely ready to renounce all offensive weapons if the armed nations, on their side, will destroy their offensive weapons…. Germany would also be perfectly ready to disband her entire military establishment and destroy the small amount of arms remaining to her, if the neighboring countries will do the same…. Germany is prepared to agree to any solemn pact of nonaggression, because she does not think of attacking but only of acquiring security.
Then, on 22 May, Norman Davis, chair of the U.S. Geneva delegation, announced that the United States was willing to consult multilaterally “in case of a threat to peace with a view to averting conflict,” and if in agreement with the determination, then to join in a “collective effort to restore peace.”
ER and her friends were delighted by Davis’s announcement and interpreted it as FDR’s long-awaited commitment of involvement with the League in the interests of peace. For isolationists, it was a declaration of war.
Within days, however, FDR renounced both his own words and those of Norman Davis. He had meant to limit his promises to “consultation,” not to extend them to a “collective effort.” There could be no departure from “longstanding and existing policy.”
For the moment world opinion hung suspended, confused by FDR’s torrent of contradictory words throughout April and May. His “bland statements filled with pious nothings” caused some to believe FDR had no international policy at all. Isolationists were pleased; his internationalist friends were confused.
On 30 May the Disarmament Conference prepared to recess, after fifteen months of acrimony and hope. Attention shifted to the forthcoming London Economic Conference to open on 12 June.
The most immediate source of international tensions was the outstanding war debts virtually all Europe owed to the United States. England, France, Germany, and Russia were broke. Germany could not pay its reparations to the Allies, and the Allies reneged on their payments to the United States. England agreed to make a “token payment.” FDR abhorred the word “token,” and Ramsay MacDonald agreed to dicker about the amount of partial payment. Only Finland fully paid its World War I debt in 1933.
America’s Depression was part of a worldwide disaster. In 1931, Hoover had declared a one-year moratorium on debt payments. But he also signed the devastating Smoot-Hawley tariff law, which raised U.S. tariffs so high that European goods were no longer viable in the American market. Conditions worsened everywhere.
The London Economic Conference, which FDR also inherited from Hoover, was planned to end economic warfare, reduce tariffs, create a unified program to combat the global Depression, and begin the long journey toward international trade security and currency stabilization, which many believed would create a climate for peace through international commerce and fair market prices.
ER considered these among the most urgent issues on the world’s agenda, and she wanted her husband to assume a leadership role at the London Conference. After all, both Roosevelts had long agreed that nothing happened in isolation: Economically and politically, European events profoundly affected the United States; and U.S. policies concerned Europe, where fear of unstoppable inflation and fiscal havoc predominated. Memories of Germany’s 1923 inflation, when a wheelbarrow of worthless paper might buy milk or eggs, now haunted especially nations still on gold. Also, since 19 April, when FDR had taken the United States off gold and ended gold exports, America’s cheap dollar had wiped out Britain’s competitive advantage in the world trading market. France and Germany, still on gold, their currencies already devalued, faced fiscal disaster. In addition, there was wild speculation in money, stocks, and commodities as the dollar bounced about, in the hope that US prices might rise.
European leaders, both on and off gold, wanted to establish some new ratio, some international stabilization that would avoid wild swings in currency value and market prices. Currency stabilization was more important than the exact ratio or value of the dollar or pound, and FDR sent several delegates to the London Conference who agreed with that position.
In the Women’s Democratic News, ER expressed her own concerns regarding these issues:
Countries which have been impoverished by war are in debt to us. We have the major portion of all the gold in the world in this country. The only way in which other nations can pay their debts is by sending us goods. Our tariffs make this impracticable and in order to prevent our sending them goods, they have begun to build up their tariffs and so our trade is growing less and less.
There were times, during the spring of 1933, when ER and FDR seemed to be two internationalists in total agreement. On occasion, FDR even sounded like a League-loving Wilsonian. In May he wrote Joseph Tumulty, who had been Woodrow Wilson’s personal secretary: “I wonder if you realize how often I think of our old Chief when I go about my daily tasks. Perhaps what we are doing will go a little way toward the fulfillment of his ideals.”
Then he took a firm stand against Hitlerism. On 8 June 1933, he telephoned sixty-three-year-old history professor William E. Dodd at his University of Chicago office: “This is Franklin Roosevelt. I want to know if you will render the government a distinct service. I want you to go to Germany as ambassador.”
Southern and scholarly, Dodd was president-elect of the American Historical Association. Born in North Carolina, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in 1900, and spoke German fluently. A liberal Democrat, he was best known for his histories of the old South, biographies of Nathaniel Macon and Jefferson Davis, and a celebratory biography of Woodrow Wilson. With Ray Stannard Baker he also edited The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson.
FDR explained that he selected Dodd because of his reputation as “a liberal and as a scholar,” and especially for his work on Woodrow Wilson: “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.” A dedicated antifascist, Dodd became one of FDR’s most controversial appointments.
On 31 May, Secretary of State Cordell Hull embarked for London with enthusiasm, convinced that his mission was to achieve fiscal stabilization in a world of depression and economic chaos. He believed FDR fully supported his intention “to lower trade barriers and stabilize the currency exchange.”
After all, FDR had publicly announced that the World Monetary and Economic Conference was of “vital importance to mankind.” Failure at this conference would be, FDR declared, “a catastrophe amounting to a world tragedy.” Ramsay MacDonald believed the “fate of generations” was involved: “We must not fail.”*
At her 15 June press conference ER urged all women to realize they “have a special stake in watching national and international news. Every woman should have a knowledge of what is going on [in London]. It does affect the future amicable relations between the nations of the world. It has been stated that the debt question is not to be discussed. But whatever does come out will be vitally important to every woman in her own home.”
Unknown to his wife, unknown to his secretary of state, throughout May FDR had encouraged Ray Moley to put the brakes on Hull’s efforts. Appointed assistant secretary of state, responsible directly to FDR, Moley was an ardent economic nationalist who deplored free trade. Hull’s State Department resented his presence, and his views. Unlike Hull, Moley argued that tariffs served useful domestic purposes. London must not be allowed to limit America’s fiscal independence.
FDR’s immediate goal in 1933 was to ensure higher prices for American farm products and manufactured goods. To limit cheap goods from abroad, he even raised certain tariffs, most notably on cotton, higher than Smoot-Hawley levels. Fiscal nationalists were delighted. But there was no agreement among FDR’s international team, not among his six official delegates nor among his fifty advisers. FDR had sent them off with no instructions, and there was no clearly established policy. Each delegate sailed away with the illusion that the president supported his own particular interest.
But while they were at sea, FDR suddenly abandoned the reciprocal trade bill before Congress. He had simply decided to request “no action.” Cordell Hull’s hopes for international agreement based on reduced tariffs had depended on that bill. It would have provided clear evidence that the United States was sincere in its commitment to positive action. Hull was devastated: “I left for London with the highest of hopes but arrived with empty hands.”
William Bullitt, appointed on 20 April special assistant to the secretary of state and executive officer of the U.S. delegation, was appalled. On 11 June he sent FDR an “ultra-confidential” cable to report Hull’s complete collapse. Bullitt had “rarely seen a man more broken up, and his condition was reflected in that of Mrs. Hull, who literally wept all night.” FDR sent a reassuring cable, which enabled Hull to remain and try to achieve something. After all, delegates from sixty-six nations had assembled to consider alternatives to fiscal chaos, economic despair. The need was great, and for the moment goodwill was in the air.
On 16 June, Congress adjourned, and ER and SDR traveled to Groton for young Franklin’s graduation. In addition to his diploma, he received first prize from the Debating Society and another for combined excellence in scholarship and athletics. Several Roosevelt cousins also graduated, and three of TR’s grandsons also won prizes. But if ER spoke to her relatives, she failed to mention it.
FDR was supposed to attend, but last-minute congressional details and lunch with Dodd prevented his leaving Washington until the next day in time for homecoming festivities. ER had already left for a week at Val-Kill while, from Groton, FDR and his sons embarked on a sailing adventure that would culminate in his first visit to Campobello since 1921—when he contracted polio.
James had chartered a forty-five-foot schooner, Amberjack II. Papa would be skipper; James, FDR, Jr., and John would be crew. FDR charted and piloted his own course. They would sail around Cape Cod and north-northeast to the Bay of Fundy, a total of 360 nautical miles.
The schooner was accompanied and protected by patrolling Navy planes overhead and Navy escorts including two destroyers and the cruiser Indianapolis, each with facilities for telegrams, information, and emergencies. A Coast Guard cutter with White House and Secret Service staff sailed behind, as did two press boats. One carried wire service and motion picture photographers. The other, the Mary Alice, carried four of FDR’s favorite White House correspondents: Ernest Lindley of the New York Herald Tribune, Bill Murphy of the New York World, John Herrick of the Chicago Tribune, and Charles Hurd of The New York Times.
They all had strict orders to keep out of sight, except when invited. The Mary Alice revelers were, however, frequently invited—since they were well stocked with a case of bourbon. FDR’s stores were dry, and the weather was cold and drear.
Hanging over them all, during long days of storm and relentless fog that kept the president’s party idled and off-course, were the events unfolding at the London Economic Conference. FDR kept in touch through the communication facilities on the Indianapolis, both with his official delegation and with various experts he had called together for advice.
Baruch and Herbert Bayard Swope, Baruch’s confidant and former editor of the old New York World, were the most ardent internationalists. One of FDR’s last acts before he left Washington was to write Swope on 16 June:
Would be delighted if you could accompany Raymond Moley for short visit to London. I am sending him soon and feel your presence would be exceedingly helpful to him in many ways. I should be personally grateful to have you do this, having confidence as I do in your judgment and your wide knowledge of international affairs….
Evidently, FDR had second thoughts about Moley’s economic nationalism, and wanted Swope to join the fray. But it is impossible to fathom FDR’s motives, because he rejected every proposal both his London and New York teams, after days of argument and compromise, considered sound. He could not accept any monetary restraint that would adversely affect U.S. commodity prices. On 17 June, he cabled Hull: “We must retain full freedom of action … in order to hold up price level at home.”
Then on 20 June, FDR sent what could only be regarded as an insult to his own banker team: “It is my personal view that far too much importance is being placed on existing and temporary fluctuations. Remember, that far too much influence is attached to exchange stability by banker-influenced cabinets.”
Upon receipt of that cable, George Harrison packed his bags and left London. The others remained faithful and hopeful that some good, some agreement, could be achieved. Telegrams and telephone messages went back and forth during days of confusion as FDR sailed on.
While her husband sailed and dissembled, away from her questioning insistence and churning emotions, ER relied upon Baruch, who kept her informed. ER spent the week in the relative tranquillity of Val-Kill with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, distracted and agitated.
Earl Miller visited, and had a calming effect. Occasionally she was able to write when Earl worked on his reports. But her letters to Hick were filled with discontent; she simply could not concentrate: “I wish I could work as you do, but I can’t….”
By the time she left with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook for their trip to Campobello to open the house and assemble the staff for FDR’s much-anticipated homecoming, ER was distraught by the confusion in London.
Although the drive north was pleasant and their tour through northern New York, Vermont, and Maine was mostly “glorious,” ER was in a sour mood.
When they arrived at Mary Dreier’s home on Mount Desert Island in Maine, ER discovered that a large party was planned for the next afternoon, and she wrote with dismay: “I don’t dare tell Nan, but this is not my idea of a holiday!”
The next morning ER awoke to discover that “FDR and the whole fleet” had anchored outside Mary Dreier’s home in Southwest Harbor. ER worried that it was “rather overpowering for Mary Dreier, but she seemed pleased.” ER’s three sons went ashore for breakfast, and FDR invited ER and her party aboard the Amberjack II for lunch. By all accounts it was a “joyous reunion,” and nobody discussed the London Economic Conference.
After FDR’s detour to Mary Dreier, he continued his cruise while ER headed directly for Campobello to make the beds and prepare the great welcoming picnic to celebrate FDR’s first visit in twelve years. Friends and neighbors gathered, including Louis Howe, Henry Morgenthau, the governor of Maine, and Norman Davis, who had returned with messages from the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Blanketed by fog, ER wrote Hick:
I hope we have good weather … when Franklin and his fleet [arrive]. I love the place and like people I like to see it at its best. Fog is nice if you know a place and are with someone you like. It is like a winter storm. It shuts you in and gives you a close & intimate feeling & adds to the joy of your fire. But you don’t want to meet a new place in a fog any more than you want to be intimate with a new acquaintance.
ER loved Campobello in all weather: the brisk sea air, the pebbled beaches and extreme tides, the mysteries of the green-and-gray mists, the incomparably azure blue skies that followed the thickest fogs. Campo had been the first home ER furnished and arranged herself. Sara had purchased a rambling, comfortable twenty-four-room house in 1909 for her children’s use. Her home was next door, separate and distinct. With no telephone and no electricity, for ER, Campo remained a refuge.
For a time on 27 June, the sun appeared and ER went sailing with Dickerman and Cook. She wrote Hick: “I’m sitting in the bottom of the boat, sniffing salt air & every now and then looking over the water to my green islands & grey rocky shores. I do think it is lovely, & I wonder if you will…. Do you like sailing? Or don’t you?”
But FDR was fogbound and anchored off dreary Roque Island on Lake-man Bay, where he had been stilled for three nights and two days. During that time all the news from London was dreadful. The dollar soared to $4.30 in relation to the pound; the gold nations thought they would be wrecked if no agreement, no simple statement of intent, was made. France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, clamored for a sign of goodwill.
From New York the circle around Woodin’s bed, including Baruch and Dean Acheson, urged FDR to make a positive statement concerning stabilization. Norman Davis sailed out to the Amberjack II with the same message—the future of the Geneva Conference depended on the success of the London Conference. Everything depended on economic trust, evidence of goodwill. Hull sent urgent telegrams. And for all the press reports about Hull’s upset over Moley’s arrival, Moley’s private conferences with Ramsay MacDonald, Moley’s usurpation of Hull’s rightful role, there was now little disagreement over the need for FDR to agree to what was, after all, a most modest proposal. Moley’s cables were now the most urgent of all, and his subsequent memory the most vivid: “On the day I landed at Plymouth, the dollar was at its greatest discount since our War between the States.” Then on 28 June, the dollar went up to $4.43:
France and the gold-standard countries were groveling in the dust, howling for something, anything, that might save them from being pushed off gold….
England and France weren’t talking about stabilization at $4.00 any more…. They would have fainted with relief had they known that Roosevelt had indicated to me on the Amberjack on June 20th that he’d be disposed to authorize stabilization with a high of $4.25 and a low of $4.05.
FDR’s bargaining tactics had succeeded beyond his wildest imagining. … [Now they] asked only that he make some gesture—some small gesture—that would in no way limit his freedom of action on the dollar and that would, nevertheless, tend to discourage the mad exchange speculation of the preceding three weeks.
The gold countries had drawn up a “declaration,” with England’s agreement. Moley “was amazed as I examined it. It was brief, simple, and wholly innocuous.” And it reflected one of FDR’s own policy statements: “a statement that gold would ultimately be reestablished as a measure of international exchange value, but that each nation reserved the right to decide when it would return to a gold standard and undertake stabilization.”
Moley believed FDR “would be overjoyed to learn that he had beaten the gold countries and England down to this.” England’s chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, visited Moley at the U.S. embassy to lobby this perfectly “harmless declaration” which would nevertheless “quiet the panic” of the continental nations.
Then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, vastly “more emotional than Chamberlain,” explained to Moley in “vivid terms” the origins of Europe’s inflation phobia, the bitter suffering after the war due to uncontrolled inflation. They had seen it, lived it, it was not a banker’s bad dream. “Fear of it, fear that the U.S. would push their currencies off the gold and into inflation, was sweeping over Holland and Switzerland and France. The consequences of fear, unchecked, might even be revolution in those countries. The moment was critical. It would cost Roosevelt only a meaningless gesture to dispel the psychoses threatening Europe.”
Europe’s inflation, the great inflation of 1921–23, now haunted all decisions regarding Europe’s future. In 1921 the Allies decreed that Germany owed 132 billion gold marks in wartime reparations. Payment of Germany’s reparations would enable Europe to pay its own debts to the United States. But Germany resisted with a “wheelbarrow” inflation that destroyed the economy. Personal security disappeared, savings evaporated, everything was rendered worthless as the mark, four to the dollar before 1914, seventy-five to the dollar after Versailles, went from 500:1 to 750:1, and then millions to one, up and up 20 percent higher each day during the 1923 inflation, until the government called a halt in 1924 when currency was pegged at four trillion marks to the dollar.
After dramatic changes in government, by a stroke of the pen the mark was restored: four to one. But the damage had been done. Germany would never be the same. For most Germans the inflation was Germany’s revolution. Small businesses went bankrupt; millions of people were unemployed. For a time the madness was replaced by the appearance of stability and the hope of international reconciliation. But discontent and nationalist enmity seethed, ready to erupt during the renewed wave of international depression that followed 1929.
In 1928 the National Socialist Party received only 2.8 percent of the vote in a Reichstag election. But everything changed with the worldwide Depression. Financial insecurity impassioned Nazism. Few in Europe now doubted the force of Hitler’s overwhelming power, or the dangers of unbridled economic inflation.
On Thursday, 29 June 1933, Moley’s cable demanding a positive response reached FDR. Telephone conversations between Moley in London and Baruch, Woodin, Acheson, and also George Harrison, who joined them after he left London, revealed that all FDR’s advisers were now in agreement. The hours passed. All day Friday and Friday night there was nothing but silence and delay. Saturday morning’s silence was broken only by a telephone message: FDR’s answer would be again delayed.
On Thursday, 29 June, FDR decided to defy the fog and after breakfast sail ashore. He lifted anchor at 8:30 A.M., determined to best the weather; he was calm and happy. The Indianapolis gave him a twenty-one-gun salute, and he was jubilantly greeted by the Coast Guard cutter Cuyahoga, the local herring fleet, and every yacht and rowboat in the area. FDR arrived precisely on schedule at 4:00 P.M., just as the fog lifted, “as if some giant, invisible hand had raised a curtain” to bear witness as FDR sailed his schooner through the dangerous Lubec Narrows and tacked across choppy Passamaquoddy Bay.
What might have been a triumphal dinner, filled with cheer and high spirits, was instead fraught with family tensions that erupted into unpleasant disagreement. Their friends were surprised by ER’s vehemence after so much care and effort had gone into preparing her husband’s return to his beloved island.
Although the records of that meal are sparse, Marion Dickerman and Henry Morgenthau remembered that ER believed it a mistake to send Moley to London. It humiliated and belittled Hull; “it weakened Hull’s position.” Moreover, the First Lady did not trust Moley’s ambitions, and she warned FDR that he represented a “threat to the President’s own power and prestige.”
The next day, Friday, 30 June, ER invited the four reporters from the Mary Alice for lunch “and an afternoon of relaxation.”
According to Charles Hurd, the First Lady “greeted us on the beach, and we walked up the path to the cottage.” After lunch, the president “suggested a game of cut-in bridge.” But they played “for only an hour or so” and then FDR said, “I think it might be more interesting to talk for a while.”
The journalists had been “trapped.” FDR’s conversation “must have been conceived as spontaneously as a message to Congress.” He talked bluntly about torpedoing the London Conference. It was off the record, not for attribution, a conversation among friends. But he suggested a Campobello byline. He wanted the story out, and he wanted it explained clearly.
Hurd wrote that the reporters “could see why Roosevelt was disturbed…. [He] might be an internationalist, something of an Anglophile through family and friends, a cosmopolitan; but at this stage he was determined that the U.S. was not to be pushed around” by international bankers, financiers, bullies. For the most part, Europeans wanted “concessions” from the United States—even though they all, except Finland, had defaulted on their “past debts.” FDR noted that European bonds were held by private citizens; “American investors had trusted the debtor countries … and yet they had wound up with worthless and depreciated bonds….” Their “resentment” was understandable, “and furthermore … he agreed with it.”
FDR would accept no devaluation of the dollar “so that foreign governments could trade it at bargain prices in other markets.” In fact, FDR would accept nothing from the London Conference.
Hurd’s words are an ironic reminder of a letter FDR had written to Waldorf Astor in April. His mother would not be making her annual visit that summer: “I cannot let Mama go over because I am sure she would cancel all the debts!”
Each reporter left to write up the story, which hit the next day “like a bombshell.” Hurd’s New York Times story was reprinted throughout Europe, and wrecked the London Conference even before FDR sent the first of his own torpedoes directly to Moley, which finally arrived at three Saturday afternoon.
As Moley and Swope read FDR’s words they burst into laughter. It was an argument against “rigid and arbitrary stabilization,” which had nothing to do with the declaration at all. FDR pontificated that “so long as national budgets remained unbalanced currency would be unsound.” Above all, FDR insisted, American prices and currency “must be free” of foreign entanglements, international pressures.
In the end, Moley and Herbert Swope believed they needed above all to protect FDR from his own errors. “The message must be seen by as few people as possible.” As Bacon said, “kings cannot err.” They decided to issue a statement that said only that FDR rejected the declaration in its present form. Also to protect FDR, Hull ordered the minutes “kept of the meetings of the American delegation” in London burned.
ER escorted the journalists down the steep wooden steps to the beach with their tension and their story palpable in the air. She learned from them the news her husband had failed to confide in her. Once again she had been shut out of a decision that mattered to her deeply, and she returned to the house in a state of fury and gloom.
Eleanor Roosevelt arriving at the 1933 inaugural ball.
ER and FDR at the Coronado Hotel, California, 1934.
ABOVE: Sistie (Eleanor) and Buzzie (Curtis) playing on swings on the White House lawn.
ER and her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, at Campobello.
Head White House housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, and ER.
BELOW: Edith Benham Helm (standing), ER’s social secretary, and Malvina Thompson Sheider—”Tommy”—ER’s private secretary.
ER and Marion Dickerman at the White House.
BELOW: Nancy Cook and ER at Val-Kill.
The Women’s Press Conference in the White House, 1933.
FDR greets British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and his daughter, Ishbel, in Washington D. C., 21 April 1933.
Aboard the Amberjack in Maine. Back row (left to right): Frances Kellor, Mary Dreier, Marion Dickerman, Antonia Hatvary. Middle row (left to right), Nancy Cook, FDR Jr., John Roosevelt. Front row (left to right): ER, FDR, James Roosevelt.
Camp Jane Addams, a She-She-She camp at Bear Mountain, New York, for unemployed women.
Lorena Hickok, 1932.
At the White Top Music Festival, accompanied by Nancy Cook and the women of the press. Abingdon, Virginia, 12 August 1933.
FDR’s fifty-second birthday party—theme, “Dear Caesar”—30 January 1934. Seated (left to right) Missy LeHand, Tommy Scheider, FDR, Margaret (Rabbit) Durond, Stanley Premosil. Standing (left to right) Marvin McIntyre, Grace Tully, Thomas Lynch, Kirk Simpson, ER, Irvin McDuffie, Anna Roosevelt, Charles McCarthy, James Sullivan, Marion Dickerman, Louis Howe.
ABOVE: ER riding in Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C., with Elinor Morgenthau.
LEFT: ER and Elinor Morgenthau at a more formal moment, 1934.
ABOVE: ER and Hick in Puerto Rico, during the 1934 Caribbean trip.
RIGHT: Arriving in Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, March 1934.
Hick, on her fortieth birthday, with ER and Governor Paul Pearson in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, 7 March 1934.
ER with journalists on the Caribbean trip. (Left to right) Emma Bugbee, Dorothy Ducas, ER, Ruby Black, Bess Furman.
Touring Christiansted with Sammy Shulman, trip photographer.
FDR welcomes ER home from the Caribbean on their twenty-ninth anniversary, 17 March 1934.
Typical Arthurdale homes.
On board the USS Indianapolis, 31 August 1934. Left to right: ER, Betsey Roosevelt, FDR, James Roosevelt, SDR.
ER at Lake Roosevelt, Yosemite National park, with Ranger Forrest Townsley, during her vacation with Hick, July 1934.
RIGHT: Creating Arthurdale, 1933–36.
Relaxing at Chazy Lake, New York, with Earl Miller, August 1934.
ER the markswoman.
”I have to be tied and gagged, they’re making their movie, ‘The Lady and the Pirate.’”
Later on this flight over Washington with Amelia Earhart on 20 April 1933, ER was at the controls.
Walter White, NAACP leader.
ER and her new friend, dancer Mayris “Tiny” Chaney.
She sat by herself in her blue-and-white room overlooking the bay and contemplated her husband’s decision, while he hosted “a gay cocktail party” for his sons and the twenty-two houseguests that had arrived from all over to greet his return.
The party was prolonged, and dinner was delayed. ER waited two hours and then summoned the guests to the table. She was upset to find her teenage son no longer sober. That, compounded by her feelings about the doomed London Conference, unleashed a public scene: She “upbraided her husband … harshly, angrily, as if he were a naughty little boy.” He became petulant: “You can’t scold me this way…. It is not my fault and I didn’t know what time supper was.”
Curiously, several of FDR’s biographers actually blamed his wife’s anger for his truculent message to London. But FDR had already made his decision, and ER’s bitter behavior signified her disappointment and distress. She felt personally betrayed. To the end of her life, ER referred to the international failures of 1933 with regret and wonderment:
We once had a delegate [Norman Davis], a very fine man, a very valuable public servant, who used to go to the disarmament conferences in Geneva, and I used to wonder why no one took any interest in his going or the slightest interest when he returned. We didn’t seem to care what he did or what happened….
ER wrote that she learned one very important lesson during the summer of 1933:
I came to the conclusion that … just having a few people in the government take an interest in trying to achieve peace is never going to achieve peace, that it has to be done by the interest of the people, and unless all the people—the men who work on the farms, the men who work in the factories, the scientists and teachers, and all the people who make up a nation—take an interest, we will fail….
After FDR left the next day on the Indianapolis, ER, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman drove Norman Davis to the train in Maine. His calming words and a magnificent sunset created a healing drive down, “and I recaptured a little serenity.”
On her return, ER made plans to meet with the leaders of the international peace movement, including Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, and Lillian Wald. More immediately, like Hull and Moley, she sought to protect the president. She did not discuss FDR’s decision to wreck the London Conference. About her time at Campobello, she told her press conference only that there were a hundred people for a picnic, and she did women’s work: “I made all the beds for 22 people.” She did not add with anguish or wrath that men made momentous decisions, while women served in silence.
Sunday afternoon, 2 July, FDR returned on the Indianapolis to Washington, accompanied by his son Franklin, Henry Morgenthau, and Louis Howe. Homeward bound, FDR drafted yet another message to criticize the London Conference:
The sound internal economic system of a nation is a greater factor in its well-being than the price of its currency, or currency exchange rates, or any of the issues debated in London:
When the world works out concerted policies … to produce balanced budgets and living within their means, then we can properly discuss a better distribution of the world’s gold and silver supply to act as a reserve base of national currencies….
This was the specific “bombshell” that cashiered the London Conference. For many it was not only substantively shocking, it was arrogant and belligerent. Members of his own delegation were merely perplexed. They had no idea what it meant, or what kind of “jest” it was supposed to be. James Warburg resigned that week, because he could no longer interpret the president’s vision.
It was over. Never again during the 1930s would the effort to achieve economic international accord be made. The British were astonished. Ramsay MacDonald felt personally assaulted. He told Moley: “This doesn’t sound like the man I spent so many hours with in Washington. This sounds like a different man. I don’t understand.”
On 4 July 1933, The New York Times reported that the Nazi press praised FDR’s action. German leaders regarded the “death agonies” of the London Conference with satisfaction, “because they see the end of any united front against Germany.” They exulted that “the Americans merely turned the tables on the conference.” Hitler was pleased, since FDR’s policies confirmed his own: Economic nationalism ruled the day. One Nazi paper hailed “President Roosevelt’s truths,” because he “adopted an economic program which is the foundation of Chancellor Hitler’s policy.” One can only wonder what ER felt when she read those words.
FDR’s decision was championed by an odd assortment of observers, including Louis Howe and Henry Morgenthau—who evidently encouraged him to write the final bombshell as they cruised south to Washington on the Indianapolis. Ultimately Moley was pleased:
The United States “had for once gone to an international conference without making ridiculous concessions. And I was gratified that the President’s newly strengthened distrust of international ‘cooperation’ even in its mildest form had been, at last, unmistakably proclaimed.”
Above all, Hearst was vindicated. His primary fear was that the United States would cave in on the European debt. The United States now only hardened its position. In 1934, the absolute isolationist Johnson Act forbade U.S. citizens to lend money to, or buy securities from, indebted governments in default to the United States. This was considered a great victory by a wide range of economic nationalists, even though it prevented credits that would have revived U.S. export trade and destroyed the rationale for the “token” payments some nations had been conscientiously making. But the Johnson Act was discriminately applied; and the debts were never repaid.
More than hope for international cooperation ended when the conference closed forever on 27 July 1933. European statesmen no longer trusted the United States. British leaders, from MacDonald to Neville Chamberlain, who had personally appealed to FDR in June, now despised the president. Throughout the 1930s, they simply dismissed FDR’s sporadic diplomatic overtures as ridiculous and irrelevant. As ER feared most, a great opportunity for international leadership had been lost. Her husband had failed to take a risk for peace. Rearmament and economic nationalism would forevermore rule the day.
Surrounded by fascism, communism, and Europe’s economic and imperial rivalries, FDR built a stronger navy and an economy unfettered by international accords with European leaders he judged untrustworthy.
For veteran peace activists allied with Addams and Wald, the conference was a bitter portent. Oswald Garrison Villard, The Nation’s longtime editor, returned from Europe “to admit a sense of almost complete hopelessness…. The London Conference dealt a deadly blow….”
In London, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, as in Geneva, where he made the only substantial proposal for general disarmament, made the only substantial suggestion for general prosperity: Litvinov offered a billion dollars’ worth of business from Russia to prime business pumps in exchange for long-term credit.
Litvinov worked the room and walked away with stunning nonaggression treaties with neighboring states from Afghanistan to Estonia, and generous trade agreements with France, England, and the United States. Litvinov and Hull arranged for Russia to borrow $4 million with which to buy American cotton.
FDR, a man of endless imagination who enjoyed playing every angle, now considered alternatives to the specter of Japanese aggression in America’s Pacific ”sphere of influence” and Nazi Germany’s rearmament without collective opposition. He decided to explore the possibilities for U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. As if to make amends to his wife’s disappointed circle, he turned to Esther Lape and her American Foundation to initiate a study of Soviet-American relations.
Indeed, on the same day London received FDR’s bombshell, 3 July, the American Foundation issued a press release to announce the creation “of a Committee on Russian-American Relations.” The committee would extend the work of Esther Lape’s unofficial survey of national leaders and public opinion, conducted in June, which revealed “a genuine desire” for “trustworthy” information concerning our relations with the Soviet Union.
With her usual diligence and efficiency, Lape staffed her initial “Committee of Inquiry” with notable scholars, labor leaders, diplomats, and business leaders.
The purpose was to explore the terms “upon which other countries have recognized Soviet Russia; the collateral arrangements that have … accompanied or followed recognition; the extent to which there have been government guarantees of payments for goods sold to Russia; the facts as to the debts of the Czarist regime …; the confiscation of property of citizens of other countries; … Russian trade with other countries and the U.S.”
On 3 July, Lape wrote, FDR had read the initial report “personally, with obvious interest,” and urged her new committee to work tirelessly all that summer, to be ready for his projected but as yet unscheduled autumnal meeting with Litvinov.
In addition, FDR wanted his wife to know that he appreciated her concerns, expressed so forcefully at Campobello, and cabled Hull on the eve of his return: “Before you sail, I want you to know once more of my affectionate regard for and confidence in you.” He wrote nothing to Moley, nor did he say anything encouraging to Moley when they met. Moley knew that he had been personally “kicked in the face” and resigned as soon as possible without seeming to resign in protest.
FDR also encouraged ER’s team not to abandon their fight for the World Court. He wanted now to mollify his wife. As ER knew, above all, he wanted to keep his options open. There were circles within circles. No decision was final.
*When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, Hoover and Secretary of State Henry Stimson issued a policy of nonrecognition: the Stimson Doctrine, which gave moral support to China and affirmed that Japan was an aggressor nation. But it called for no action, neither economic sanctions nor arms embargo. FDR now called for stricter neutralism, which would not even designate the aggressor.
*Unknown to Ramsay MacDonald, the pacifist Prime Minister, was FDR’s executive order of 16 June 1933 to refurbish the U.S. Navy. See p. 132 and notes.