This Troubled World was officially published on 3 January 1938 to good notices and brisk sales. Reviewed generously in the Sunday New York Times on 2 January, it was hailed as a valuable, tough-minded assessment of the world’s grave problems. “Without sentimentality or undue optimism,” ER discussed alternatives to disaster and concluded with a fervent appeal for a fundamental transformation “in human nature.” A contribution to international understanding, this slim book’s strength was “in its poise… its quiet forceful courage.”
Within a month, Tommy wrote Anna, the “little book on peace has been very successful.” It earned the book’s advance “and a small amount besides.” This Is My Story continued to do well, and “the year closed with 20,000 copies sold. The fan mail on both books has been very encouraging, and so has the press.”
Suddenly it had become acceptable—even laudable—to be America’s most ardent public citizen, and First Lady. ER had been elected the “outstanding woman of 1937” by a vast majority in “the mail poll” conducted by a popular NBC announcer, Howard Claney. She now inspired editorials of praise for all her work and her controversial positions.
In Ohio, The Canton Repository called her “the foremost individualist among all the First Ladies” and honored her because “she has lived her own life with a freedom that smashed precedent, traveling widely as she willed, speaking her own mind on every occasion and engaging in activities so diversified they are a little staggering.”
A reporter for The Denver Democrat attended one of her lectures on youth and recommended it to “every boy and girl in our land.” The apex of ER’s lecture, he wrote, was her definition of success—which was a description of herself: to cultivate and express “one’s talents and powers to the utmost,” and to use “those powers for the welfare of the community.” Then she spoke “of the hope of youth for peace and of America’s mission to help bring peace to the world and at that the vast audience rose in tumultuous applause as a personal tribute to a great woman….”
ER never referred to her public achievements, although she wrote her daughter about a personal achievement: “I’m getting really good on make up. You won’t know me!”
Domestic life was untidy and strained as the New Year unfolded. Earl had been ill at her New York apartment for days, and ER was “really worried about him.” “Hick has been ill with a very bad throat.” Tommy has been “miserable ever since Christmas.” “Missy also has been miserable.” “Pa seems fine however!”—although he was still preoccupied with Betsey, and everybody was worried about Harry Hopkins. James told ER that Harry “sits & looks at his wife’s picture for hours & can’t be roused, & then is too gay. I’m sorry for little Diana.” ER wrote her daughter, “I am the only healthy person I think in these parts!”
With her household laid low, ER was pleased to spend more time with her brother at 11th Street. He was just then in good spirits and, Tommy wrote, had become a dependable ally: “Hall has been particularly sweet to [your mother], always meets her when he knows she is coming to New York, etc., and I know that gives her a lot of pleasure.”
Relations with Hick plunged to a new level of distress. At work Hick felt attacked by gossip and lies, fantasies and innuendos. The situation ate into her heart, and she felt powerless. She confessed to ER that it had been going on ever since she walked into the World’s Fair headquarters, on 4 January 1937. Hick struggled to protect ER from the rumors, but they were the source of her anguish, and she could not keep it inside any longer: ER had gotten her the job, and she was miserable; actually angry. If only ER had encouraged her to resume her career. ER was fifty-three, in control of her life and destiny; Hick was forty-four, locked into the prison of a job she hated, when she could be in Madrid or Berlin or Moscow. ER had tried to control Hick, order her life, restore her health, protect her bank accounts. It was all a vast mistake, and she was very sorry.
Then Hick regretted the intensity of her outburst:
I’m sorry I talked to you with such bitterness…. It wasn’t fair, but—since I did say it—it’s true. I’ve felt this way for nearly a year…. I’ll try not to talk about it any more. You shouldn’t be such a good listener.
Their anguished correspondence went on for a month. Initially ER tried to minimize the source of Hick’s grief: “I doubt if the whisperings and side-long glances are all that you imagine but when one is sensitive one suffers doubly.” Then she wrote: “Dearest, I hate all this you are going through and I know in some way it is connected with us.” ER hoped Hick might find “another job soon and that it is so remote from our influence that you will be relieved from that blight!”
But Hick was not pleased by ER’s response. ER replied to a lost letter:
It seems so hard that life should be so little worth living to you when so many people love and depend on you but I have felt as you do and I keep hoping that someday things will change for you and seem more worthwhile.
While ER tried to soothe Hick, her own spirits were frayed: “I don’t like the [social] ‘season’ nor the White House.” But FDR’s 7 January speech “was very good.” The president reasserted leadership and seemed out of the doldrums. He opposed “predatory” monopolies and promised continued reforms. Ickes noticed that FDR’s Democratic enemies did not applaud; they sat grim-faced throughout: The “war is on fiercer than ever between the reactionaries and the liberals” within the party.
On 16 January, ER wrote of Mrs. Baruch’s death, “which must have been very sudden for I did not know she was ill. It was a curious relationship and yet he had affection for her and was always thoughtful so I imagine he will miss her.” Although they traveled separately, Bernard Baruch was devoted to Annie Griffen Baruch, a mysterious figure John Golden remembered as a “laughing vibrant” former showgirl, and others found austere and reclusive. Her death was sudden, and Baruch was bereft. He told a friend no one could take her place: “My wife was the most wonderful woman in the world.” But she was uninterested in public affairs, and Baruch turned his attention to women most involved with them—including and increasingly ER.
In mid-January, Hick’s depression lifted after good conversations with Commander Flanagan about her excellent work, and her correspondence with ER became more expansive. When Hick finished reading This Is My Story, she wrote:
I think it is probably a much better book than even I realized while you were writing it. I am so proud of you! And I think the last chapter, over which you had such a struggle last summer is the best chapter in the book. Somehow it brings back and very near the you that I love. A very big person. And yet—what a hellish state of mind you were in when you were writing that chapter, last summer!
In the same letter, she was contrite about her outbursts:
I was hurt—yes. But you have also done a thousand things to make life easier and happier for me. And I’m deeply grateful. So don’t, please, feel—as you seem to feel sometimes—that you have failed in your relationship with me…. As I look back over these last five years—I don’t think anyone ever tried harder to make another human being happy and contented than you have tried with me….
ER replied with a determined finality that left little room for renewed fantasies:
Your Tuesday night letter was a great pleasure and I’m glad you like This Is My Story—Of course dear, I never meant to hurt you in any way but that is no excuse for having done it. It won’t help you any but I’ll never do to anyone else what I did to you. I’m pulling myself back in all my contacts now. I’ve always done it with the children and why I didn’t know I couldn’t give you (or anyone else who wanted and needed what you did) any real food I can’t now understand. Such cruelty and stupidity is unpardonable when you reach my age. Heaven knows I hope in some small and unimportant ways I have made life a little easier for you but that doesn’t compensate….
As their stormy month ended, ER devoted a column to emotional endurance. Someone had sent her a book of poetry by Patience Strong, Quiet Corner, which had encouraged her:
Do not heed the world, its taunts and jeers—
Lift your eyes and face the coming years—
All great things are bought with human tears—
So dream again.
ER concluded: “Eternal optimism makes it possible to dream,” and “how thankful we can be that this power was given to us poor humans.”
Energized by her honesty with Hick, ER planned FDR’s fifty-sixth birthday festivities with gusto: Unlike the year before, when she could think of nothing interesting to do without Howe, ER now orchestrated a gala event, with costumes and reminders of “some special incident” in their lives. FDR was “to guess” the incident, “and we will all keep score.” It was “a good dinner for Franklin… very jolly.” Then ER made the rounds of all seven benefit dances in FDR’s honor, and they were “very peppy this year.”
She also planned more adventurous evenings with Hick at the opera and theater. Lohengrin was, ER wrote, “a real joy,” and they attended WPA’s One Third of a Nation, on Ash Wednesday. ER supposed “I can get away with it on Ash Wednesday if I don’t write about it!” Hick wondered, “[D]oes one wear evening clothes on Ash Wednesday to the WPA theatre?”
These evenings were only partially successful, since Hick was still “bored with living.” She wrote, however, that “you were dear, and I did enjoy it. The play was quite swell, wasn’t it?” ER replied: “I know you are not feeling up to much but you were sweet. I love you.”
Throughout January and February, ER studied the international news with dread. Daily the headlines were dire. Fueled by betrayal and violence, the storms of 1938 howled through Europe’s statehouses like an evil nightmare with smoldering fumes. ER took solace in her work with the women’s peace movement. She hosted 450 Cause and Cure of War ladies at tea and met with Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape before she spoke at the “‘Cause & Cure’ conference,” where Carrie Chapman Catt and Ruth Bryan Rohde “both made good speeches….” ER sought to give publicity and legitimacy to the activist women of the peace movement.
At the last cabinet meeting of 1937, FDR had announced that “Romania had gone Fascist and Yugoslavia was on its way.”* Romania followed Hitler’s pattern and outlawed the Jews. Ickes wrote:
There has always been a heavy proportion of Jews in Romania…. Apparently they are having a [dreadful] time… and it is reported that the rich Jews are already leaving…. Unfortunately the frontiers of many countries are now closed to Jews.
Then, at the first cabinet meeting in January 1938, FDR suggested “some representation or protest” to Romania “about its treatment of the Jews.” But nothing was done.
Also at that first January cabinet meeting Vice President Garner reported that he had heard Joseph Goebbels announce that Germany “intended to pay no attention to treaties.” He wondered what purpose negotiations or agreements now served. These were the dreadful conditions ER addressed in This Troubled World. She wrote it six months before, with the hope it might prompt her husband to end trade with aggressor nations. She demanded aggressor nations be named, and be confronted by collective action by the remaining democratic nations. Finally, FDR seemed to heed her advice, and he made a bold gesture toward collective security which she had urged for so long.
On 11 January 1938, Sumner Welles approached Sir Ronald Lindsay in Washington with a “secret and confidential message” from FDR to Chamberlain. The president proposed a Washington conference of world leaders to discuss “the deterioration of the international situation” and its “Underlying causes.”
If England agreed, FDR would approach France, Italy, and Germany. Lindsay considered the plan “a genuine effort to relax” tensions. Churchill considered it a splendid gesture, “formidable and measureless.” But their ally Foreign Minister Anthony Eden was on holiday, and Chamberlain rejected the proposal. He preferred to recognize Italy’s occupation of Abyssinia, and he cared nothing about U.S. influence.
FDR’s effort was too late. Tom Lamont, who knew Chamberlain well, told Bullitt that if “any Englishman was anti-American, Chamberlain was that anti-American Englishman.” Chamberlain considered Roosevelt a shifty scoundrel; and he trusted Hitler, a gentleman. Winston Churchill, however, recognized FDR’s effort as the last hope: Its rejection ended the era of negotiation. Had FDR’s intent become public, he risked isolationist outrage. His political courage to involve the United States in Europe’s “darkening scene” endeared him to Churchill:
To Britain it was a matter almost of life and death. No one can measure in retrospect its effect upon the course of events…. We must regard its rejection… as the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war.
That Chamberlain, dull and inexperienced, dismissed “the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic” left Churchill “breathless with amazement.”
Repelled by Chamberlain’s action in his absence, Eden resigned. He too believed FDR’s gesture represented the last possible collective effort to prevent Armageddon. His resignation, on 20 February 1938, was momentous. Britain was now entirely dominated by appeasers.
Churchill despaired. It was the worst day of his career. In his long life of success and failure, he never felt so alone and overcome. On that night solely, 20 February 1938, he tossed sleepless in his bed “consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear.” Before his eyes marched the most painful visions, a long parade of death.
Hitler now had a free hand. Austrian by birth, Hitler had a vision of Germany as the mythical mystical lands of Siegfried and Thor. Every land upon which Germans ever lived was part of Greater Germany. Not just the territory lost at Versailles, such as the Rhineland, but all of it: the entire heart of Europe from the borders of the Holy Roman Empire through the Kingdom of Prussia (from Danzig to Königsberg; beyond the Polish Corridor from the Oder to the Vistula), and all the lands southward within the Hapsburg Empire, beginning with Austria, on to the lands of Sudeten Germans, Bohemia and Moravia, now “lost” to Czechoslovakia, and on through the Danubian Basin from Hungary to Romania.
In 1934, Mussolini opposed Hitler’s moves toward Austria, mobilized 500,000 Italian troops to protect its borders and preserve its independence. But in 1935, Hitler supported Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia; and in 1936 the military alliance to create fascist Spain terminated Mussolini’s opposition to the Anschluss.
Hitler had intended to absorb Austria from the beginning. It was promised on the first page of Mein Kampf: Austria was German; union was inevitable. For years, Hitler had bombarded Austria with a relentless political warfare campaign, and he contributed vastly to Austria’s Nazi Party. On 12 February 1938, with no organized centers of resistance left in Vienna, Hitler demanded an audience with Kurt von Schuschnigg to give him an ultimatum: the nazification of Austria, or invasion and military occupation— another Spain.
On 9 March, Schuschnigg resisted, and called for a plebiscite. But Hitler’s troops mobilized to cross the border. On 13 March, Hitler canceled the plebiscite and Schuschnigg capitulated: There was no resistance, no bloodshed. As Hitler’s army marched in, Austria’s police and military donned Nazi insignia, to join frenzied crowds who pelted 100,000 German troops with flowers as they invaded. Goebbels called it the Blumenkrieg, flower war. Vienna seemed a pageant of swastika banners and unbridled enthusiasm, as Austrians shouted: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” As Austrian citizens were transformed into Nazi subjects, there were also thousands of silent, grieving onlookers. For the moment, ignored and unphotographed, they had been rendered irrelevant: Austria’s new wastepeople, democrats, Jews, anti-Nazi dissenters, in flight and despair. Seventy-five thousand were quickly rounded up, subject to the most sadistic public humiliations; there were more than two hundred suicides a day, and “many sickening incidents.” When Churchill asked why the press failed to report that part of the story, London Times editor Geoffrey Dawson replied: “There is no doubt… the impression of jubilation was overwhelming.”
Thousands of Austria’s most esteemed citizens had been instantly transformed into German Jews, without rights, without respect. In a country where generations of assimilation obscured a tradition of seething Jew hatred, a mischlinge citizenry of high culture and affluence was transformed overnight into beggary by a circus of derision and contempt. Gleeful mobs taunted and brutalized aged Jews forced to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes, toilets with bare hands, reminding them of the forgotten promise of another century: Austria would be Judenrein—Jew-free.
Now as Hitler ushered his homeland into his Reich, maniacal Jew-hatred became once again fashionable in cosmopolitan Vienna, the crossroads of European culture. From the diaspora through the medieval crusades to the various pogroms of modernizing Europe, Hitler’s creed was familiar.
On 14 March, Churchill addressed the House of Commons: “The gravity” of the situation “cannot be exaggerated.” Vienna was the geographic link of Central Europe: “This mastery of Vienna gives to Nazi Germany military and economic control of the whole of the communications of Southeastern Europe, by road, by river, and by rail.”
In his vivid speech of doom and portent Churchill proposed a “Grand Alliance,” a united front “for mutual defence against aggression.” It “might even now arrest this approaching war.” Although Churchill spoke only of a united front comprised of the Little Entente with France and England, Russia responded immediately.
Maxim Litvinov condemned the Anschluss as a dangerous act of aggression; it threatened all nations between the Soviet Union and the Reich. Russia was ready “to participate in collective actions” to check further aggression and eliminate the “danger of a new world massacre.” On 18 March the USSR officially proposed a conference to discuss a pact to create a Grand Alliance. On 24 March Chamberlain rejected the idea. Harold Nicolson, among other members of Parliament, now joined Churchill in despair: “The Tories think only of the Red danger and let the Empire slide.”
Wounded by Chamberlain’s February rebuff, FDR said nothing about the Anschluss. ER read the papers in gloom; the “European situation” was cruel and incomprehensible. She used “Brotherhood Day,” sponsored by the National Council of Jews and Christians, to address Austria’s plight. The council had published “Ten Commandments of Good Will,” and ER recommended three of them particularly: “I will honor all men and women regardless of their race or religion.” “I will exemplify in my own life the spirit of good will and understanding.” And, “I will do more than live and let live, I will live and help live.”
She hoped that the new commandments would “sink into every heart and be remembered every day….”
On 15 March 1938, ER wrote FDR: “I fear this European situation has you all worried pink and I fear work is pretty bad but hope you’ll get away by the 20th….”
By mid-March all the news was terrible. The cabinet understood that “matters in Spain are going badly,” and Franco’s troops had reached the Madrid side of the mountains. Heavily reinforced by additional Italian troops, Germany’s “best” planes and most lethal “war machines” caused unlimited destruction. In China, Japanese forces had crossed the Yellow River, and in Russia the “terrible purges” continued. People were condemned for crimes of twenty years before. Ickes wrote that “it certainly looks as if Stalin had gone mad, and Russia is rapidly losing what sympathy she has had among liberals….”
It was a grim time, and FDR’s State Department, with few exceptions, was dominated by friends of fascism and appeasers. Rebuffed by England, his quarantine effort derided by isolationists and pacifists, FDR counseled continued silence. There was a sense of foreboding, but the rumbles were in the distance, and for the moment there was nothing to be done.
On 17 March, ER wrote again: “Evidently Europe is not giving you deep concern and you plan to get away….”
Throughout March, ER was on a lecture tour to promote This Troubled World—which had forecast the headlines and demanded urgent attention. She had warned that “future wars will have no fronts.” In Spain and China, war defied boundaries: “Gases and airplanes will not be directed only against armed forces.” They will be “used for breaking the morale… shelling unfortified cities, towns and villages, and the killing of women and children.” Modern war would involve “entire populations.”
In Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, ER promoted collective security and urged Americans to reconsider isolationism. The future demanded a new level of concern and activism. She sought to create a groundswell of public opinion to move her husband’s policy along. Everywhere she went, her message was the same, and she sold many copies of her book.
While nations everywhere readied their armies for war and plunder, she searched in vain for real leadership: “Few people are sitting down dispassionately to go over the whole situation in an attempt to determine what present conditions are, or how they should be met.”
Since 1924 she had deplored apathy as a cause of war and called for a World Court that would condemn “war as murder.” In 1934, she called for “an active crusade that women the world over must undertake… with the youth of our countries. We have got to face the fact that there are economic causes which bring about war.”
These economic causes had remained unaddressed since the disastrous Treaty of Versailles. International trade had been rendered too costly, tariffs too high, competition too unequal. Unless changes occurred, war would triumph; education was essential, a slow, wearying process that might seem “futile.” Nevertheless, ER insisted: “Faint heart, ne’er won fair lady, nor did it ever solve world problems!”
Not an absolute pacifist, ER rejected unilateral disarmament. She defended FDR’s 1937 determination to reoutfit the U.S. Navy and dismissed Jeannette Rankin’s plan to retire the Navy since we no longer intended to involve ourselves in overseas wars. That, ER said, was virtual suicide “in a world which is arming all around us.”
Convinced that Hitler and Mussolini had unlimited ambitions, ER told her press conference on 14 February 1938 that it was “unfortunately true that we live in a world where force is the only voice which carries conviction and weight.” She wished we lived instead “in a world where reason and patience prevailed,” but until “the strong nations of the world can agree to disarm, we must maintain our own forces.” She approved increased military spending and defended her husband’s $1.2 billion military expansion bill, although she noted: “I have always felt that taking the profits out of war was a very salutary thing.”
In March, she said a united front of democratic nations determined to stop aggression might still derail the rush to war and catastrophe. But now among world leaders only Maxim Litvinov voiced any hope for collective action.
With the League of Nations and World Court moribund, ER called, in her speeches and book, for some other negotiating body to resolve disputes and to be actually decisive: This was the heart of This Troubled World:
We need to define what an aggressor nation is. We need to have a tribunal where the facts in any case may be discussed, and the decision made before the world….
In total defiance of her husband’s policy, ER called for trade embargoes exclusively against aggressor nations, and when economic sanctions failed to deter an aggressor, a world “police force could be called upon.” This police force would not be an invading army, but a peacekeeping body, to prevent war, violence, mayhem.
ER even criticized FDR’s limited Good Neighbor Policy. Although it ended “a bullying, patronizing attitude” toward Latin America, hemispheric progress was only a beginning: “We cannot be entirely satisfied with anything [that] does not include the world as a whole, for we are all so closely interdependent….”
If we really wanted peace, ER insisted, we had to confront reality: The time to fight for peace was before war broke out. She counseled long-range goals that involved “a change in human nature.” Women understood how each individual family fight needed to be personally negotiated. Imagination, understanding, respect were key: Nations too often spoke of religious freedom, but “meant freedom only for their kind of religion.”
ER considered the peace process akin to mountain climbing. There were no shortcuts from peak to peak. Humanity required patience, “vision and persistence,” to make “peaceful quiet progress… laboriously up the side of the mountain.”
Ultimately, she concluded, humanity must understand that “what serves the people as a whole serves them best as individuals.” Unless we work to “change human nature… we are going to watch our civilization wipe itself off the face of the earth.”
ER could not believe that anyone who had witnessed the last war, which had ended only twenty years earlier, could bear the thought of another: “I believe that anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would think of suicide.” Sometimes she felt despair about the “utter futility of human experience, feeling how deadly stupid we are.” She wondered why our past experiences did not better inform our present policies:
How can we study history, how can we live through the things that we have lived through and complacently go on allowing the same causes over and over again to put us through those same horrible experiences? I cannot believe that we are going to go on being as stupid as that. If we are, we deserve to commit suicide—and we will!
ER acknowledged the glamour and excitement of war. A friend had recently boasted to her that he could recruit young men anywhere to go to war in any part of the world. But, she countered, we needed to tell the truth about the ravages of war, the suffering and waste.
ER called herself a “practical pacifist.” She toured the country speaking with peace societies, protesting war toys, calling for the elimination of profits in the munitions industry. She called for “government ownership” of munitions factories and wondered if the opponents to this idea were not self-interested investors “whose interests lie in this particular business.”
Influenced by the Nye Committee and such books as The Merchants of Death, ER considered the arms trade and “private profit a great incentive” to war. In a democracy, she argued, freedom of the press and public accountability should combine with government ownership or “the strictest kind of government supervision” to control that profitability, “thus removing the incentive for constantly seeking and creating new markets” for war. Then we might consider world disarmament, with inspection procedures, but “very gradually I am sure,”
ER ended her essay and lectures with a call for love as a principle in life, and in diplomacy:
We can establish no real trust between nations until we acknowledge the power of love above all other powers….
We must reach a point where we can recognize the rights and needs of others, as well as our own rights and needs.
For ER this involved a great spiritual revival, a “new code of ethics” based on “an awakening sense of responsibility” for others. If our civilization merited preservation, “then our people must turn” to love, “not as a doctrine but as a way of living.”
You laugh, it seems fantastic, but this subject [love] will, I am sure, have to be discussed throughout the world for many years before it becomes an accepted rule. We will have to want peace, want it enough to pay for it, pay for it in our own behavior and in material ways. We will have to want it enough to overcome our lethargy and go out and find all those in other countries who want it as much as we do….
Love was for ER the great driving principle of life, and politics. She did not consider it an endless battleground, but a continual arena for study, compromise, pleasure, fulfillment, and negotiation. While ER lectured about peace, she continued her negotiations with her loved ones.
When ER toured the Southwest, Hick spent time at the White House entertaining little Diana Hopkins, who moved her deeply. She wrote three pages about Diana’s efforts to cope with her loneliness in that great house, concluding: “You know there are only three members of this household for whom I have any affection; they are you, Tommy and Mabel.”
ER was particularly irked to have no communication from her husband: “I’ve not had a line from the WH. No letter, no wire, nothing since I left a week ago Sunday. I’ve wired & written twice and I am now going on strike!”
But on 17th March, FDR telephoned, and she also received his letter. She was relieved to hear; it was their thirty-third anniversary. But her reply was cool: Her lectures went well, and “the audiences are very good.” She was sorry to hear his wisdom tooth had to be removed, and hoped “it gives you as little trouble as mine gave me.” She sent FDR “best wishes for the 17th and much love.”
Things were strained in their partnership. ER wrote her daughter that FDR had telephoned, “the first word from the WH since I left! All seems well….”
Actually all was not well. ER was still angry about Betsey’s role in the White House, which contributed to Betsey’s marital difficulties. She and James were now estranged, which only seemed to intensify FDR’s closeness to Betsey. ER was mystified to hear that he now planned to go to Warm Springs with Betsey at the end of March.
ER wrote Anna in confused and veiled tones:
James is doing 2 weeks with the Marines…. there is a chance that Bets may go with Pa to Warm Springs. I don’t understand it all but it seems very pleasant all around so I shouldn’t worry I suppose!”
With Tiny in California on the 17th, ER visited NYA and WPA projects, including a crippled-children’s hospital, “one of the best I ever saw…. This is a busy world!” It was also a successful tour.
In letters to her husband, ER downplayed the public significance of her lectures. But FDR’s friend James Metcalf wrote the president with enthusiasm. He and his wife, Adelaide, who was vice president of the California Federation of Democratic Women’s Study Clubs, had been dazzled by ER’s address: “It’s my opinion that your Wife is bringing you nearer to the People than you’ve ever been before—and during the past five years you’ve been closer to the Heart of the Nation than any of your predecessors.”
FDR appreciated that ER’s work benefited him in countless ways. He relied upon her ability to get out and meet the people, and he trusted her to introduce controversies and her own convictions, not only to test the political climate but to move public opinion. But their disagreements were often profound, and every program they both cared about was under siege by aggressive conservatives in Congress.
During the spring of 1938, ER’s concerns focused on the “work projects” of the National Youth Administration and the WPA. She wanted them to meet “the needs of different racial groups.” ER’s priorities were not among FDR’s priorities, and their gravest differences remained the world crises.
On the 18th, Hick wrote of her visit with FDR:
My dear: I thought I told you I had seen the President last Sunday…. He was very cordial and asked me to stay to lunch…. He didn’t seem to be particularly worried about the European situation…. But he was apparently very much concerned-about the tax bill….
ER left her West Coast tour to meet FDR and his party in Warm Springs, where Betsey’s presence made her feel irrelevant. She wrote Hick that it seemed “too much trouble to go and swim alone,” and besides she had to go to Fort Benning “to see FDR drive by the troops.”
Everything about the visit annoyed ER. She felt trapped, and useless. Harry Hopkins was also there, recovering from cancer surgery. He was thin and weary, and ER worried about him, “but for Diana’s sake I hope I am all wrong.”
While ER was discontent in Warm Springs, Hick was in New York, with evenings at the opera and theater: Tristan, which was “lovely beyond description,” and Pins and Needles: “Isn’t it the freshest thing?” It “makes the average Broadway musical show look sick.”
ER also loved Pins and Needles and was “so glad” Hick agreed. On the 30th, Hick told ER that Edna Gellhorn had written that Martha had returned to Spain: “The glorious little fool.”
April began with Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams working all day to prepare their defense of WPA and NYA costs before Congress. “Quite an ordeal,” ER noted, but worth it. FDR responded favorably.
During the winter, unemployment had soared, arid New Deal programs seemed doomed by FDR’s budget cuts. By April 1938, the U.S. economy had lost “two-thirds of the gains made since March 1933.” FDR’s romance with a balanced budget finally ended, and he called for emergency appropriations.
With an estimated twelve to fourteen million unemployed, FDR returned to his election promises. On 14 April, he asked Congress to increase relief expenditures by $3.7 billion: $1.25 billion for WPA, $150 million for the Farm Security Administration, $50 million each for CCC and NYA. He wanted the U.S. Housing Authority to have $300 million of additional slum clearance projects, and an additional $100 million federal aid to highways, and an additional $37 million for flood control, and more. These funds were to ensure the well-being of the majority of Americans and to guarantee the survival of American democracy: Around the world democracy disappeared, because people grew “tired of unemployment and insecurity.”
To abandon our purpose of building a greater, a more stable and a more tolerant America, would be to miss the tide and perhaps to miss the port. I propose to sail ahead….
Henry Morgenthau disagreed, and threatened to resign. But Congress complied. ER was relieved. It had been a year of delays, a long period of inaction and loss. Now the fair labor standards bill, which promised minimum wages and maximum hours of work and outlawed child labor, stood a chance.
After the Anschluss, ER began to confront directly the rising tide of anti-Semitism at home and abroad. She wrote earnest letters of explanation to promote “tolerance” and supported countless Jewish organizations. Every letter sent to her received attention. She pursued visas, sought to reunite families, protested deportation proceedings, worked to find people jobs, housing, general support.
She endorsed the work of a small group of women in Irvington, New Jersey, representing the Daughters of Israel Malbish Arumim Society, who asked her to greet contributors of “clothing and other necessities” for the poor in a souvenir journal to be distributed at their annual concert and ball. On 11 April she sent greetings to the Glen Cove Jewish Ladies Aid Society, working to repair their temple. In May she hosted a tea for the ladies of B’nai B’rith at the White House. One of her guests that day, Doris Bernstein of Chicago, expressed the sentiments of many: “Your charm and your marvellous hospitality will remain with me for years….”
Nazi victories in Europe had a dramatic impact on U.S. politics. Fascist groups were strong throughout the country, and anti-Semitism became more virulent. In the United States, no less than in Europe, a renewed Red Scare was under way. As in 1919–21, when the anticommunist reign of A. Mitchell Palmer enabled agents to sweep through America’s cities against Reds and suspected Reds, unionists and immigrants were once again rounded up, hounded, threatened with deportation.
In January 1938, the National Council of Jewish Women appealed to ER to consider “the tragic plight” of two endangered young people.
Born in Germany, Karl Ohm became a U.S. citizen in 1929. While he was Protestant, his wife was Jewish. In October 1932, Ohm was arrested during a demonstration called by the International Labor Defense to protest “an unusually severe sentence meted out to a Negro.”
Upon his release, deportation charges were filed. He admitted being a member of the ILD, explaining that in Germany, “all of the great professors” were members, even Albert Einstein. He “did not think it a crime,” and he had never been a communist.
The case went to the Labor Department for interpretation. Extensions were granted, but on 1 January 1938 they had expired, and he was ordered to sail back to Germany. Were he expelled from the United States as a communist, having also married “a Jewess, there is no question as to what his fate in Germany will be.” The Labor Department granted him voluntary departure to any nation “not adjacent to the U.S.” Both England and Belgium refused visas.
Lillian Strauss, headworker of the New York section of the National Council of Jewish Women, appealed to civil libertarian lawyers Morris Ernst, Carol King, and Arthur Garfield Hays; to labor activists Rose Schneiderman and Vito Marcantonio; and to others. All the old questions were again on America’s political agenda. Did communists deserve free speech? Since the Communist Party was “a legal party,” why was “it a crime for an alien to be interested”?
According to Strauss, Frances Perkins’s Labor Department still enforced the law amended during the Red Scare in 1920, “making the deportation of aliens mandatory,” if they were communists. Although Ohm had never been a communist, he was about to be stripped of his citizenship and deported.
Ohm was a popular masseur; his only crime had been to protest “an injustice.” He had been brutalized by the police and required several stitches. Everything about the case stirred fear for the future. Would ER do something?
We are assisting refugees to escape from abroad and to adjust to a newer and freer life in our country. Can we sit passively by and permit our government to send this young man… back to his certain fate into the welcoming arms of Mr. Hitler?
ER referred the case with a plea to Perkins; she sent it off to James Houghteling, commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because Ohm’s membership in a subversive organization “appeared somewhat unconclusive,” Houghteling canceled the deportation order. With profound gratitude, Strauss wrote that ER’s interest and assistance had freed the couple “from a five year bondage of fear and spiritual suffering.”
Other examples of random violence associated with the renewed Red Scare were sent to ER that spring. Upton Sinclair appealed to her to join civil libertarians dismayed when Socialist leader Norman Thomas was rudely pulled off a platform and arrested by New Jersey police while he attempted to address a rally for the Workers Defense League. When his wife tried to find out where they were taking him, she was punched in the face.
Arthur Vanderbilt, president of the American Bar Association, defended Thomas, and many prominent Americans spoke out against the outrage, including Alf Landon. Upton Sinclair asked ER to inform Mayor Frank Hague, an official of the National Democratic Committee, that it was impolite “in a democracy” to punch “a lady.”
Throughout 1938, ER opposed the rising tide of violence and bigotry in America. She was distressed by Congress’s assaults on the New Deal and the sweeping intentions of its new House committee to investigate un-American activities, launched in March under the chairmanship of Texas Democrat Martin Dies.
ER personally campaigned to allow German composer Hanns Eisler and his wife, Lou Eisler, into the country. A well-known radical who protested fascism everywhere, Hanns Eisler had condemned racism in America and wrote The Ballad of Black Jim with Bertolt Brecht in 1932. Its vivid depiction of the oppression of a Negro subway rider “In Manhattan/In Manhattan” was lambasted. But Eisler’s supporters vowed he was no communist.
ER sent Sumner Welles the many papers brought to her by someone she considered “a perfectly honest person.” He was “very much disturbed” because the State Department had “told the Cuban Consul that they do not wish to admit [the Eislers].” He was certain they would consider “our form of Government ‘heaven.’” ER believed the Labor Department “did not examine the case carefully enough. Why not do it all over again and bring it out in the open and let the Eislers defend themselves?”
Throughout the spring, ER’s attention returned to Europe. In one column she wrote:
I have reached a point where I open the paper every morning with apprehension…. It seems incredible that human beings can risk another world upheaval when they realize what the last one meant to everyone.
Although ER never referred to specific nations in print, on 17 March she wrote privately to Elinor Morgenthau about the terrible and depressing situation in Austria and Spain.
In Europe, the Anschluss changed everything. The cruelty of Austria’s Nazis emboldened fascists everywhere and became the new model of behavior: hard, immediate, personal, pitiless.
Only one syndicated woman columnist was more popular than Eleanor Roosevelt in 1938: Dorothy Thompson, who appeared in more than a hundred newspapers. Virtually alone among America’s leading columnists, she was “On the Record” with outrage at FDR’s silence. In Austria, “every gallant soul I have ever known—from the highest aristocracy to the last intelligent trade union leader—is dead, murdered or a suicide; or is in prison, in concentration camp, or in exile.” The complacent west, the leaders of liberal democracy, she wrote, must confront critical choices: Take “a last stand against heavy odds” or go “under for generations.”
Thompson earned her reputation as Cassandra by continually blasting the official policy of “ostrichism” and appeasement. She detailed both Hitler’s excesses and the “‘cowardice’ that sustained it.”
The aftermath of Germany’s victory and the agonies of Vienna’s Jews were well known in Anglo-American circles. By the spring of 1938 Churchill was no longer alone in Parliament when he warned of unbridled Nazi ambitions, flaccid British defenses, coming world disaster.
Harold Nicolson, who had been partly responsible for Czechoslovakia and other geographic changes at Versailles, began to meet with Churchill in small groups of anguished concern. Indeed, by February, Nicolson felt he could no longer support appeasement, or represent his own National Labour Party—which “has behaved like worms and kissed the Chamberlain boot with a resounding smack.” He offered to resign as vice-chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
On 25 February he reported the extraordinary scene to his wife, Vita Sackville-West. After a singularly nasty event in a packed room, it was determined that his resignation would embarrass the government. At least Nicolson and his allies might wait until public “feeling had diminished.” Then:
Winston in all his majesty rose and said that they were being mean and petty… and he must insist on a vote, either Yes or No. They then voted. Those in favour of our not resigning were unanimous except for one little vicious hand against. That hand was the hand of Nancy Astor.
We then adjourned in some excitement. In’ the corridor a friend of mine called Alan Graham [Conservative MP, 1935–45] came up to Nancy and said, “I do not think you behaved very well.” She turned upon him and said, “Only a Jew like you would dare to be rude to me.” He replied, “I should much like to smack your face.” I think she is a little mad.
Coincidentally, that same day ER and Nancy Astor were together on an international hookup broadcasting to the world on the importance of women in world affairs. The broadcast was sponsored by the International Federation of Business and Professional Women, and neither ER nor her friend Lady Astor said anything very controversial. All seven women, including representatives from Italy, France, Norway, and Switzerland, emphasized the importance of peace.
Nancy Astor advised women to “help preserve freedom” and to protest against materialism and the concept that might makes right. ER spoke last and very briefly. She called upon women to work for peace and declared that neither men nor women should be deprived of educational opportunities or their full rights as citizens under law.
Although Nancy Astor had created a transatlantic stir in 1937, when she proclaimed that peace would be advanced by an Anglo-German accord, her views were then not very different from those expressed by FDR’s personal envoys to Europe. Bill Bullitt struggled to arrange a French-German accord, and Joseph Kennedy—recently appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—became immediately identified with Lady Astor’s Cliveden circle.
ER never understood FDR’s diplomatic choices. She considered Bullitt untrustworthy and unpredictable, “clever” but mercurial. She ultimately came to despise Joe Kennedy, but in 1938 merely distrusted him. At a dinner in December, attended by Dorothy Schiff Backer, ER asked why FDR had appointed “that awful Joe Kennedy,” who was by then not only a known enemy of the New Deal but a continual critic of FDR personally.
Although Henry Morgenthau had written in his diary that FDR “considered Kennedy a very dangerous man,” when ER confronted her husband, he threw his head back and laughed: “Appointing an Irishman to the Court of St. James” was “a great joke, the greatest joke in the world.” Evidently, nobody else laughed.
ER was also troubled by FDR’s abrupt removal of William Dodd from his post in Germany just before Christmas. Dodd hated fascism, refused to attend Nazi ceremonies, boycotted the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, presented insulting lectures on Jeffersonian democracy, and stayed largely in his study writing his history of the South. At Bullitt’s suggestion, Dodd was replaced by Hugh Wilson—considered much more acceptable in German circles.
Moreover, there had been no breach between the Roosevelts and the Astors. In 1937, Nancy Astor dined at the White House when she was in the United States on a private trip to visit her brother. And Nancy was known to be loyal to her old friends. It was, therefore, understandable that Felix Frankfurter turned to her for help when he learned that his most beloved eighty-two-year-old uncle, Dr. Solomon Frankfurter, an esteemed scholar and chief librarian at the University of Vienna, was among the 76,000 herded into concentration camps during the first days of the Anschluss.
All his earlier letters to FDR from England and Palestine in 1933 and 1934 concerning Hitler and Europe had been blithely ignored, simply lost in the blather of other business. Now the situation was urgent, deadly. Rather than risk the wobbles of State Department scrutiny, and a slow, careless, or devious response. Frankfurter turned to Lady Astor. Her reputation for audacity had in no way been tarnished by her newer reputation as a pro-German leader of the “Cliveden crowd.”
Asked to intervene with her “German friends,” she wrote Frankfurter in May:
Dear Friend:
The minute I received your wire I spoke to the German Ambassador in London, and gave him, in no uncertain terms, our views on arresting aged scholars. He promised to do what he could. Three days afterwards, having heard no more, I talked to him again and warned him that unless I received good news of Herr Frankfurter, I should go myself to Vienna! He assured me that it would be alright. As you know, your uncle was released on 28th March. The Ambassador [von Ribbentrop’s successor, Herbert von Dirksen] tells me that he was only imprisoned a few days as a result of some unguarded remarks.
Deeply grateful, Frankfurter nevertheless used the occasion to inquire about Nancy Astor’s views, and an extraordinary exchange on Cliveden and appeasement ensued. But in England, Nancy Astor’s collaborationist views were challenged by the news, which worsened daily, and cracks in the wall of appeasement began to appear in London where Harold Nicolson dramatically reflected ER’s views. On 6 June 1938, Nicolson confided in his diary:
Our isolationists must see by now that isolation is not enough….
Chamberlain (who has the mind and manner of a clothes-brush) aims only at assuring temporary peace at the price of ultimate defeat….
People of the governing classes think only of their own fortunes, which means hatred for the Reds. This creates a perfectly artificial but at present most effective secret bond between ourselves and Hitler. Our class interests, on both sides, cut across our national interests. I go to bed in gloom.
Nicolson was even more distressed after he met an Austrian “who had just got away from Vienna, and what he said made me ill.” He wrote Vita:
[Nazi soldiers] rounded up the people walking in the Prater on Sunday last, and separated the Jews from the rest. They made the Jewish gentlemen take off all their clothes and walk on all fours on the grass. They made the old Jewish ladies get up into the trees by ladders and sit there. They then told them to chirp like birds. The Russians never committed atrocities like that. You may take a man’s life; but to destroy all his dignity is bestial…. The suicides have been appalling….
England’s official policy of unconcern was consecrated by widespread Hitler worship. Social conversation revealed British support for every atrocity. Nicolson noted that Unity Mitford adored but “does not hope to marry Hitler…. Hitler likes her because of her fanaticism. She wants the Jews to be made to eat grass.”
Hitler counted on such approval. In the United States such views were represented by a wide range of congressional and diplomatic opinion, and during these critical days they were most dangerously expressed by Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy in England. According to Nicolson, Lindbergh’s exaggerated report of Nazi airpower froze Britain’s nerve.
ER was revolted when America’s most celebrated hero became a major propaganda weapon for Hitler and accepted a Nazi medal for his services to the Reich. On 22 May, Lindbergh visited Sissinghurst and detailed the findings of his European tour. Nicolson recorded:
He says that we cannot possibly fight since we should certainly be beaten. The German Air Force is ten times superior to that of Russia, France and Great Britain put together. Our defences are simply futile…. He thinks we should just… make an alliance with Germany.
Nicolson “discounted” Lindbergh’s report: After all, “he believes in the Nazi theology.” It was “all tied up with his hatred of degeneracy and his hatred of democracy as represented by the free Press and the American public.” Nevertheless, Nicolson wrote in his diary, England was “outmastered in the air.” Despite the evening news, which celebrated “a perfect summer day,” Nicolson considered it “the most anxious and unhappy day that I can remember.”
While the sun encouraged the azaleas and irises at Sissinghurst, ER too had moments of respite from the horror reported from Europe each day. In the country in May, she worked in her garden at Val-Kill; the violets were in bloom, and she pruned her exquisite apricot rose bushes. One morning as she watched the birds fly from tree to tree from her outside sleeping porch, she wondered “if they are getting their breakfast, or building their nests, or just working up an appetite with early morning exercise.”
But when she saw a newsreel of the devastation in China and the bombardment of Barcelona, she felt “positively disgusted with human beings. How can we be such fools as to go senselessly taking human life in this way? Why the women in every nation do not rise up and refuse to bring children into a world of this kind is beyond my understanding.”
Since ER’s Lysistrata solution of a women’s strike for peace coincided with a major effort to persuade FDR to lift the embargo, we can only wonder what the words between them actually were. Several days after that newsreel, she “lunched with a friend high up in the Empire State Building. We sat at a window looking out over the city, which always takes my breath away.” But as she gazed down at the city she so admired, a “horrible thought” intruded, and she wondered “what it would be like with planes flying over it dropping bombs….”
News of stalemate, the bravery of the Loyalist army and underequipped International Brigades, and the suffering Spanish people captured her imagination. In 1938 she spent more time with the young activists of the American Youth Conference, who planned to go or had just returned from Spain. According to Joseph Lash, whom ER had first met in January 1936 at a White House tea attended by five members of the AYC National Council after a meeting to promote the American Youth Act, ER’s sympathies were “passionately engaged upon the Loyalist side. She loved to hear the ‘Six Songs of the International Brigade’ and for many years kept on her desk a little bronze figure of a youthful Spanish militiaman in coveralls that was a symbol of the Republican cause.”
FDR’s continued insistence on a strictly enforced blockade against Loyalist Spain remained incomprehensible to her. Now, bipartisan liberal opposition was aroused. Even isolationist senators Borah and Nye, who had opposed it as unjust and unneutral, now promoted legislation to end the embargo. ER was hopeful. Ickes met with Chicago Tribune correspondent Jay Allen, who was fired because of his reports from the front: “Jay Allen came in to see me yesterday…. He is outraged over our embargo on munitions…. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this is a black page in our history.”
Ickes blamed the president’s policy on career State Department officials who “sit at the feet” of Britain’s Foreign Office. Jay Allen called FDR’s neutrality policy “an instrument of wanton destruction” with devastating long-term consequences.
On 12 May, Ickes met with FDR and asked about rumors he was “ready to lift the embargo.” FDR replied that he was “opposed to doing anything about it.” Ickes protested that “the embargo should never have been imposed.” But FDR was adamant. He said Spain could not afford to buy munitions even if the embargo was lifted, and they could not pass through the now closed French frontier.
[FDR] said frankly that to raise the embargo would mean the loss of every Catholic vote next fall and that the Democratic Members of Congress were jittery about it and didn’t want it done.
So, Ickes wrote with disgust, that ended the story:
This was the cat that was actually in the bag, and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever. This proves up to the hilt what so many people have been saying, namely, that the Catholic minorities in Great Britain and America have been dictating the international policy with respect to Spain.
But the story did not end for ER. She donated money for aid to private groups, especially the American Friends Service Committee, and continually fought propaganda that praised Franco’s war against anti-Catholic communists.
Toward the end of May she listened to Ambassador Claude Bowers’s broadcast from the U.S. embassy at St. Jean de Luz:
I was very much impressed by the tragic things which he related as everyday occurrences in the lives of Spanish children. Probably a million children, undernourished, inadequately clothed, many dying from the slow torture of starvation, many sick and many wounded and many fatherless and motherless and homeless….
She joined Bowers’s plea for Americans to “live up to our past reputation… [and] care for the children of other nations, no matter what our attitude might be toward the government involved.”
But aid for refugees and orphaned children was no longer enough. In June, ER sought to circumvent her husband’s blockade and participated in a rather wild escapade with her brother Hall. On 21 June 1938, Bill Bullitt wrote a “Personal and Confidential” letter to FDR:
This is a very private letter which requires no answer.
Some days ago I received a telegram from Mrs. Roosevelt informing me that Hall was coming to Paris and asking me to do anything I could for him.
Then France’s new foreign minister, Georges Bonnet, a peace-at-any-price appeaser, told Bullitt that the Spanish ambassador “informed him that the Spanish Government could buy more than one hundred planes in the United States at once for immediate delivery to Spain via France” and wanted the French frontier reopened to military shipments. Bullitt was astounded to hear that FDR personally “approved the sale of these planes to the Spanish Government and that you were arranging for the evasion of the Neutrality Act.” Bullitt expressed his “skepticism to Bonnet and telegraphed the [State] Department for immediate instructions.”
Then Hall telephoned Bullitt to announce that he was in Paris, with his son Daniel, who wanted to volunteer in Spain. Bullitt invited them to a ball, and Hall arrived for an urgent conversation:
When Hall came in at 4:15 this afternoon, he said that he, acting through Harold Talbott of Cleveland, had managed to gather for the Spanish Government approximately 150 new and second-hand planes of various makes—all of which he specified. He said that he had discussed this transaction with you and that it had your entire approval. He stated that you and he and Jimmy had discussed all the details and that you had agreed to wink at the evasion of the Neutrality Act involved, because of your interest in maintaining the resistance of the Spanish Government against Franco….
Bullitt “expressed no opinion” to Hall, but informed him that U.S. policy “was to oppose absolutely the giving of licenses for shipments of planes to Spain via France.” Hall “replied that you had thought of writing to me,” but since “he would arrive in Paris as quickly as a letter you had preferred to have him explain the matter to me by word of mouth.” The conversation continued:
I informed Hall also that the French Government had closed the frontier to Spain absolutely; that the French Government had a real hope that the volunteers might be withdrawn at last from both sides in Spain and that the British were pushing for an armistice pending the withdrawal of volunteers. I told him that I could not imagine a moment more unpropitious for an attempt to organize the shipment of planes to Spain in contravention of the wishes of the British and French Governments and our own Neutrality Act.
After Hall left, Bullitt received confirmation from the State Department and a telegram from Sumner Welles that U.S. policy was unchanged.
Bullitt concluded his query about this familial effort to bypass FDR’s blockade:
I have not the slightest desire to know what lies behind this expedition of Hall’s, and I am writing this letter for your own eye and no one else’s, merely because I feel that since your name has been used by the Spanish Government in its conversations with the French Government, you ought to have a full account of the facts.
FDR would not have advised ER or her brother to contact Bullitt if he had wanted the planes to get through. Bullitt believed air travel rendered “Europe an absurdity.” As he flew from Munich to Venice, he “crossed Austria in fifteen minutes.” But instead of considering European amity and unity, these “dinky little European states” faced the future submerged in “national hatreds” and on the brink of “destroying themselves completely and handing Europe over to the Bolsheviks.”
That, in the end, dictated all appeasement efforts, including FDR’s committment to the blockade—which was ignored only to allow US supplies to reach Franco.*
ER never acccepted the abandonment of Spanish democracy, and she referred to it again and again. Even during her visit to London during the war, at a small dinner party hosted by the Churchills, attended by Tommy and Henry Morgenthau, among others, ER and Winston had “a slight difference of opinion,” which she detailed: When the prime minister asked Henry Morgenthau if the United States was now sending sufficient supplies to Spain, ER interrupted to suggest “it was a little too late.” The time to send supplies to Spain had been when it might have been possible “to help the Loyalists during their civil war”:
Mr. Churchill said he had been for the Franco government until Germany and Italy went into Spain to help Franco. I remarked that I could not see why the Loyalist government could not have been helped, and the prime minister replied that he and I would have been the first to lose our heads if the Loyalists had won….
I said that losing my head was unimportant, whereupon he said: “I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine.”
At that moment Clementine Churchill “leaned across the table” to agree with ER: “I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.” Her remark evidently “annoyed” the prime minister who exploded: “I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I’m not going to change now.” It was not a congenial dinner: “Mrs. Churchill then got up as a signal that dinner was over.”
With their effort to get planes through the blockade aborted, Hall and his son Danny went to Spain. Danny stayed for six weeks to interview members of the International Brigades. He described his efforts in letters home. He stayed for a time with the brigade that had just crossed the Ebro and was resting after a long battle. At night “as many as fifty or sixty bombers and pursuit planes” were overhead. Ill-equipped, mostly in sandals, the men were nevertheless “in good spirits.” Danny asked why they had come, “Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, Austrians, Poles, and expatriated Germans and Italians.” He was surprised that most of their answers were the same: “to fight fascism.” He asked if they were communists, and if they were fighting for communism. About 30 percent said they were communists, but “invariably” they said they were “fighting to give Spain a chance to work out her own government.”
Danny interviewed Alvah Bessie, who had been fired from the Brooklyn Eagle because the Roman Catholic Church objected to his reportage. When he told Bessie he was writing down every word, Bessie said, “Please don’t make it too silly.” And tell them: “I’m more of a pacifist than ever, we all are; that’s what we’re fighting for mostly. The world doesn’t realize what it’s doing allowing fascism a free hand.”
Her nephew’s observations, along with those of everyone she spoke with during the spring and summer of 1938, confirmed ER’s convictions.
For so long muffled about international events, ER was now in active opposition to her husband’s policies. Although there is no record of her words with FDR over Hall’s airplane expedition, which she supported, she was blunt about her support for Spain.
In recognition of her support for Loyalist Spain, she was given a gift of Goya’s famous series Los Proverbios, eighteen etchings, drawn from the original plates in Madrid and completed on 9 November 1937. According to Herbert Matthews, the New York Times columnist in Spain:
The idea of this edition was primarily to raise foreign currency for the hard-pressed Loyalists, but also to prove that reverence for Spanish art was as great among the so-called “Reds” as among their critics abroad. So, the famous engraver Adolfo Ruperez was commissioned to make 150 sets of the four great Goya series.
The first five of these, on Antique Japan paper, were destined for very special presentation, and were accompanied by a map of Madrid to indicate “where bombs had dropped while the work was being done.” Set Number Two went to Eleanor Roosevelt.
She insisted on her right to keep it, despite loud public protests that she was partisan, unneutral, anti-Catholic, procommunist. ER declared: “I am not neutral…. I believe in Democracy and the right of a people to choose their own government without having it imposed on them by Hitler and Mussolini.”
*Romania’s king appointed a fascist premier, although his party “won only nine percent of the vote… thus disregarding the popular will of his country.” The Nazi press already had sixty newspapers there, and Romania received aid from Germany and Italy. It represented the end of France’s alliance with the Little Entente.
* If she knew of it, ER must have been particularly galled by the one-sided nature of the blockade that strangled democratic Spain: Franco’s Insurgency was supplied by Standard Oil, the U.S.-owned Vacuum Oil Company in Tangier, and the Texas Oil Company (Texaco) from the beginning; and on credit, which was contrary to the neutrality legislation. According to Herbert Feis, Franco received 1,866,000 metric tons of oil and 12,800 trucks from the U.S. between 1936 and 1939—on credit. According to Herbert L. Matthews: “No oil was sold by American companies to the Republicans, ostensibly on the theory that Loyalist ports were unsafe whereas the Insurgent harbors were open and protected.”