In September, war clouds gathered at a furious pace and New Dealers struggled to avert political ruin, after the collapse of congressional support for social reform. FDR resumed his purge campaign to end the conservative domination of Congress by condemning the South’s reliance on peonage and poverty. In a series of stunning speeches, he compared fascism in Europe and feudalism in the South, “both controlled by oligarchy” which allowed people no rights or freedoms.
During the summer, his startling words infuriated antiunion, states’ rights conservatives and thrilled ER’s allies as they organized the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. But FDR’s opponents won their primaries by large margins, and now the campaign turned ugly. New Deal issues of economic security were replaced by tirades for white supremacy—rand tirades against communism, foreigners, foreign ideas. For both ER and FDR it was a harrowing campaign season.
All political activity suddenly stopped, however, as they dealt with son James’s emergency surgery. On 9 September, ER flew with James to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Because of Harry Hopkins’s recent surgery, ER feared the worst and felt that nobody was giving her accurate information. “Betsey arrived this morning and the situation is most confusing to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that I like facing facts and I hate living unrealities!”
To everybody’s relief, James’s bleeding ulcers were not life-threatening. Although both parents were by his side at the Mayo Clinic and ER had flown up with him and stayed for the duration, James did not mention his mother’s presence:
Father came to Rochester to see me before I went under the knife, and remained there several days until I was out of danger. He was in my room, squeezing my hand, soon after I came out of the anesthetic….
ER also described the hospital vigil:
Franklin, with his usual necessary entourage, arrived the morning of the operation. He was very calm, as he usually was in a crisis, and chatted as though nothing were on his mind. I can be calm and quiet, but it takes all the discipline I have acquired in life to keep on talking and smiling and to concentrate on the conversation addressed to me. I want to be left alone while I store up fortitude for what I fear may be a blow of fate…. I still remember waiting through the operation that morning and then waiting some more until the doctors came with the laboratory report that said nothing malignant had been found. They told James the nervous strain was bad for him, and he accepted their advice not to return to his duties at the White House.
His marriage in shambles, and his health diminished, James resented ER’s unwanted advice and excised her presence from his life. For ER, it was only the first ordeal of a turbulent autumn.
On 12 September, in the presidential railroad car on a siding near the Mayo Clinic, ER and FDR listened to Hitler’s violent rhetoric—threats against Czechoslovakia and grotesque lies about Czech persecution of Germans living in the Sudetenland. On 15 September, ER wrote with disgust: “Hitler patting himself on the back because Chamberlain is going to see him makes me sick. Just the same if war can be averted by flattering him why it is worth doing.”
For weeks, war seemed imminent. France vowed to mobilize if Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia; Britain vowed to follow France if France mobilized. At first, Hitler only demanded the Sudetenland, a mostly German-populated area of Czechoslovakia carved out of the heart of the former Hapsburg Empire. A rich industrial nation that extended from the Elbe to the Moldau, Czechoslovakia contained areas that Germany, Hungary, and Poland considered their rightful territory. To legitimize his claims, Hitler railed against imaginary offenses against birthright Germans by Czechs, Slovaks, and Slovenes, who were less than human.
France and England intended to prevent war by compromise and capitulation. With James out of danger, ER and FDR rushed directly back to the White House. ER wrote Anna that FDR and the State Department were in continual communication to see if the United States might prepare a useful statement to forestall war “and the tension in the house is great.”
ER had long believed Hitler would never be satisfied, as she had said when he absorbed Austria. Europe’s disunity, England’s appeasement, and America’s isolationism encouraged Hitler’s ambitions. ER joined those among FDR’s advisers who urged him at least to signal his moral commitment to England and France and his opposition to the demise of democratic Czechoslovakia.
The crisis peaked after the Nuremberg Rally when the the nineteenth meeting of the League of Nations Assembly opened at Geneva—and Czechoslovakia was not even on the agenda. Only Maxim Litvinov at Geneva, on 21 September, reaffirmed his country’s treaty with Czechoslovakia.*
Someone told journalist William Shirer, as they walked around Lake Geneva, to look at the “beautiful granite sepulchre! Let us admire its beauty.” As they paused to contemplate the League’s contours, he said; “There, my friend, are buried the dead hopes of peace for our generation.”
In Czechoslovakia everyone expected Hitler’s bombers; the Czechs declared martial law in the five Sudeten districts and prepared to fight. American journalists reported what they could over one working phone at a Prague hotel as they witnessed “Jews excitedly trying to book on the last plane or train” out of their homeland.
On 14 September, Japan and Italy announced their commitment to Germany. Russia mobilized its fleet, and Chamberlain announced he would fly to Berchtesgaden to meet with Hitler.
On 15 September, Chamberlain agreed to the secession of the “German-speaking areas.” According to Shirer, the Czechs were “dumbfounded” by Chamberlain’s “sell-out.” In London, on 18 September, Daladier and Bonnet drew up an Anglo-French plan by which all areas of Czechoslovakia with majority German populations should be transferred to Hitler without a plebiscite—a total betrayal. Some imagined the Czechs would fight alone.
On 22 September, Chamberlain returned to Germany, only to be told even the Anglo-French capitulation was no longer sufficient. Shirer observed the meeting place at Godesberg: “The Swastika and the British Union Jack flying side by side in this lovely Rhine town—very appropriate, I find.” It was after all a Wagnerian town, filled with myths of frolic among “Wotan, Thor, and the other gods of the early Teutons.”
France refused to accept Hitler’s new terms; Britain again threatened to support France; both countries mobilized, as did Czechoslovakia. War seemed imminent.
Virginia Woolf wrote her sister, Vanessa Bell, that everyone in London “took war for granted. They were digging trenches in the parks, loud speakers were telling one to go and be fitted for gas masks…. Not much gossip, only eternal war talk.” All one’s friends, she wrote, believed London was to be bombed every twenty minutes with gas and explosives.
One of ER’s Allenswood chums cabled urgently: “Dear Eleanor, one word from America will save Europe. Your school fellow, Marguerite Few, Once Baxter.”
At one in the morning, 26 September, FDR sent a message to Chamberlain, Daladier, Czech President Edvard Beneš, and Hitler urging continued negotiations: “Should hostilities break out the lives of millions of men, women and children in every country involved will most certainly be lost under circumstances of unspeakable horror.” Europe’s economic systems would be shattered; its social structures would be wrecked:
On behalf of the 130 millions of people of the United States of America and for the sake of humanity everywhere I most earnestly appeal to you not to break off negotiations…. Once they are broken off reason is banished….
The three democracies assured FDR they wanted peace, but Hitler was bellicose: Versailles’s injustices and the League’s failure “to carry out its obligations” doomed peace. It all depended entirely on Czechoslovakia’s decision.
FDR sent a personal appeal to Mussolini and another to Hitler to suggest a wider conference.
On 27 September the French army and British fleet partially mobilized; more than two million Czech soldiers fortified the German border. Mussolini proposed another conference, at Germany’s request. On 29 September, the Munich Conference convened. Nicolson was convinced that Hider sought time after Britain and France mobilized their navies, and Britain reaffirmed its alliance not only with France but with Russia.
Chamberlain, Daladier, Hider, and Mussolini met without Czech, Russian, or U.S. representatives. At 1:00 A.M. on 30 September, Hider obtained everything he asked for. “Daladier and Chamberlain never pressed for a single concession from Hitier.” Czechoslovakia, “asked to make all the sacrifices” for Europe’s peace, “was not consulted here at any stage of the talks.”
Chamberlain returned to London triumphant, claiming “peace with honour,” delighted to report that Britain and Germany had pledged “never to go to war with one another again.”
Winston Churchill spoke of “total and unmitigated defeat.” Leonard Woolf called it “peace without honour” and imagined it would last perhaps six months. Parliament, by an overwhelming majority, upheld the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.
ER wrote her husband: “The poor Czechs! I don’t somehow like the role of England and France do you? We can say nothing however for we wouldn’t go to war for someone else—”
FDR agreed with his wife, and at a cabinet meeting compared the “outrage” committed at Munich by Britain and France to Judas Iscariot’s. He believed British public opinion opposed Chamberlain’s peace-at-any-price diplomacy, and he anticipated a long and tragic air war, with England, France, and Russia united and the United States neutral, though economically supportive of the Allies.
Furious and humiliated to have been excluded from the negotiations, Russia abandoned Litvinov’s quest for collective security and declared a policy of complete isolation.
On 4 September, at a ceremony in Bordeaux for Americans who had fought during World War I, William Bullitt said if war broke out in Europe “no one can say or predict whether the U.S. would be drawn into such a war.” That statement might have given Hitler pause. But in mid-September, FDR rejected Bullitt’s warning:
Ambassador Bullitt’s speech does not constitute a moral engagement on the part of the U.S. toward the democracies…. To include the U.S. in an alliance [with] France and Great Britain against Hitler is an interpretation by the political analysts one hundred percent false.
From Hitler’s perspective, his victory at Munich was total: The United States was out of the picture; Europe was in disarray and opposed to a Soviet alliance. During the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s chief of staff, was asked by the Czech counsel: “Would the Reich have attacked Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Western Powers had stood by Prague?” Keitel answered: “Certainly not. We were not strong enough militarily. The object of Munich was to get Russia out of Europe, to gain time, and to complete the German armaments.”
Also, the United States had sent mixed signals to the Allies about supplies. According to French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet: “At the moment of the Munich crisis, Ambassador Bullitt told me that the U.S. could not sell us the airplanes which we had asked them for.”
Internationalism was dead; the Soviets were bitter; the Poles and Hungarians marched to Berlin for their new territories to be carved out of Czech borderlands; and Hitler planned his next move.
Churchill, still the loudest voice for resistance against Hitler in Britain, assessed the damage of Munich and foretold tragedy:
All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness.
I find unendurable the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany….
[We] have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far… the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged…. This is only the beginning….
The cruel personal humiliations of Jews instituted in Austria were repeated in Czechoslovakia and intensified everywhere throughout the greater Reich. During the spring and summer of 1938, there was widespread panic and flight. As the Czech crisis mounted, ER received an urgent letter from Gertrude Ely.
One of ER’s least known but most interesting friends, a philanthropist and pillar of Bryn Mawr society, Ely had spent part of the summer in Germany and Austria, and since her return she had received letters of anguish and hope from both Christians and Jews. She sent “one of many” to ER from “a well known archaeologist in Berlin.” Ely was impressed especially by his “unselfishness.” “He is not a Jew himself,” and Ely thought his letter would move ER as she had been moved: “It is almost impossible for us to realize over here the utter despair of most of those people.”
Ely’s correspondent, Dr. Emil Forrer, had been one of countless guests at her Bryn Mawr place, Wyndham Barn, known for sparkling conversation and evenings of music. His purpose was to introduce her to the needs of “a neighborly Jewish family with son and daughter of 16 and 17 years.” The father had lost his business and was cut off from all work by a new law to take effect 1 October. Survival depended on their leaving Germany. For this they needed an affidavit that they would not become “a burden to the state,” and they knew no one. “They are all extremely industrious and assiduous,” all clever, able, good at everything.
[The] daughter takes care of the big garden, the chickens and rabbits which they have; she could go as housemaid. The mother could sew or do tailoring for other people…. They wish to remain together and they would prefer some position out in the country….
He therefore begged Ely for affidavits for these four people, the Fritz Putziger family: “I am the only hope for them, and you the only hope for me.”
ER wrote Gertrude Ely of her interest, but said she had at the moment nothing really to offer, beyond her recommendations about the humanitarian work of Clarence Pickett’s American Friends Service Committee.
Although FDR wanted to help find compatible spaces for refugees, he did nothing to ease the rigid refugee rules. The United States was locked into a particularly vicious anti-Semitic, frankly racist campaign. Moreover, members of his State Department were unsympathetic to refugees.
In London, Joseph Kennedy counseled complete uninvolvement. London’s radical newsletter published by left investigative journalist Claude Cockburn, The Week, quoted Kennedy as assuring his Cliveden friends that U.S. policy was “a Jewish production” and FDR would “fall in 1940.” Kennedy was ecstatic over Munich: “Isn’t it wonderful?” he crooned to an astounded Jan Masaryk, then Czechoslovakia’s minister to London: “Now I can get to Palm Beach after all!”
While more flamboyant than most, Kennedy’s views were shared on every level of FDR’s State Department. Even Cordell Hull, who had a Jewish wife, wanted to do nothing, to say nothing, to upset Hitler or Mussolini. William Bullitt’s repeated anti-Semitic outbursts horrified more sensitive ears. As ambassador to Russia, Bullitt had described Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov’s press secretary and later ambassador to the United States, Constantine Oumansky, as “a wretched little kike…. It is perhaps only natural that we should find the members of that race more difficult to deal with than the Russians themselves.” From Paris, Bullitt’s correspondence with his colleagues continued to be sprinkled with curious details about Jews, often unsubstantiated, generally in “poisonous” tones.
Bullitt’s State Department colleagues shared his views, and they had more immediate authority over the future of “that race.” Jay Pierrepont Moffat, assistant secretary of state and division chief for European affairs (1933–40), consistently opposed sanctions against Germany and argued for increased business and trade with Hitler. Educated at Groton and Harvard, Moffat was incensed when Harvard’s president, James Conant, withdrew an invitation for Hitler’s primary publicist, Ernst Hanfstaengl, to be honored at Harvard’s 1934 commencement. Good Cambridge fellows ought to resist the pressure of “all the Jews in Christendom [who] arose in protest.” Moffat was consistent. While posted to Warsaw he advised a colleague to be wary of Litvinov: He had “the malevolent look of an untidy Jew.”
In Dublin, Ambassador John Cudahy originally worried little about Nazi violence and had earlier compared Hitler’s brownshirts to college boys, not unlike a “fraternal order.” Later more repelled by atrocities, he nevertheless intended to see the situation “realistically”:
[The] handling of the Jews, [while] shocking and revolting, is from any realistic or logical approach a purely domestic matter and none of our business. It is not stretching the analogy too far to say that Germany would have just as much warrant to criticize our handling of the Negro minority if a race war between blacks and whites occurred in the United States.
In a climate of rapidly escalating hatred, ER and her friends at the AFSC were rudely treated when they demanded official changes in U.S. refugee policies. After November 1938, it became one of ER’s most abiding issues.
Even before the European tragedies and the refugee crisis were added to ER’s agenda, Hick wrote with wonder:
How do you manage to do all you do, anyway? There is one thing, though, that makes life easier for you. That is that you always have servants. You don’t have to cook or wash dishes or make beds or fix the laundry. All those things take so much time—and so much energy. Just keeping people fed, and the house in order. Seeing that the fire in the fireplace doesn’t go out….
ER replied that all busy women needed staff: “I think I should give you as a Xmas present an efficient maid to move from city to country with you and take care of you. It would be more useful than money towards your car, wouldn’t it?”
No matter how difficult or elusive Hick became, ER trusted her, needed and enjoyed her company. She relied on her for honest advice as she had on Louis Howe. She offered various dates and persisted despite Hick’s repeated refusals. “Your work sounds hectic and so does your social life!” “I am anxious for a glimpse of you and sometime before long I’d like an evening!”
On the 21st they finally lunched together after weeks apart; ER wrote:
It was good to see you today. I do love to talk to you for you are stimulating…. I went back and did two columns and Hall made me look at some movies of the German plane and then I picked up Cousin Henry [Parrish] and drove out here [to the Parrishes’ country place, Llewellyn Park, in Orange, New Jersey] in quite a storm and wondered if you were having more rain and wind. It seemed to be clear tonight….
ER had driven through the preliminary head winds of the ferocious hurricane of 1938, which coincided with the Munich crisis. She wrote Hick the next day: “I do hope you found the Danas, Ross, and the ‘little house’ safe. I fear all the Beach people suffered and Fire Island and West Hampton sounded horrible. Doesn’t one feel helpless when nature gets going?”*
For weeks, everybody around ER focused on the great eastern storm of 1938. It only moderately wrecked the Hudson River Valley: “Our cellars here are flooded and no furnace but it isn’t very cold!” It had, however, bashed Long Island, Connecticut, and the coast. Neither Hick nor Esther Lape could write or think of anything else. From Coram to Mastic it looked like the ravages of a typhoon combined with a biblical flood. It seemed to Hick “that there could hardly be a tree left standing in the woods.” She arrived at the entrance to the Dana place just as dark was falling:
I started in on our road, drove about a block, with branches of fallen trees sweeping the top of the car, and found myself blocked. A huge pine lying right across the road. I can hardly describe to you my sensations. It was dark now. Not a sound—not even any katydids. And that tree lying there, the branches so green and fresh. It was like looking at a person who had just died.
With one feeble flashlight, Hick and a young neighbor set out on foot; they “climbed and crawled over what seemed like a solid mass of fallen trees” for over a mile.
I shall not soon forget that night, my dear. The further we went, the more hopeless it seemed to me. I did not see how any living thing could have survived….
Finally, after about an hour and a half, we came to a tractor. We were almost up to the Dana house by this time, and they had managed to clear the road that far. They had literally sawed their way through the thick trunks of big trees!
From that point on, we ran…. Then I saw a light. And I heard a motor running—the Danas’ Delco [generator].
Well—I found them all alive, even Prinz, who had had a narrow escape. All camped in the Dana house, which wasn’t hurt at all….
But the trees, dear—not a single one of those beautiful old locusts around the Little House is left. And practically every tree around the Dana house, including that beautiful old apple tree in the courtyard. The houses stick up now, wholly bare. Ella says the place looks like a brand new real estate development….
Although no one perished, Hick and her friends were plunged in gloom:
For the time being, at least, all that I loved so much down there is gone—the peace and the beauty of it. Maybe it will come back some day…. I pray that it will. That place down there and what it gave me—they were about the only things left in the world that I cared about…. Why is it that as soon as I get to care about or depend oh any one or anything it must always be taken away from me?…
ER mourned the devastation, but at the White House “the hurricane is eclipsed by the world situation which keeps FDR on edge all the time.” “No one can think of much else these days.” ER was philosophic: FDR had decided because of Europe’s uncertainty not to go “to HP tomorrow and of course he is right but if we are in for a long pull, we’ll have to do many of these normal things or everyone will go under.”
The ferocity of nature’s storm, which destroyed so much everyone close to ER valued, only highlighted the madness of war, which would destroy everything. ER sent Hick her autumn itinerary through the Northeast, which had not been canceled by the storm. She planned to visit Esther and Elizabeth en route. Their place in Connecticut “suffered much as yours did…. In case you have forgotten, my love again, Madame.”
The hurricane of 1938 was the most vicious storm since the great hurricane of 1815. For ER’s friends the international news made the storm of the century both metaphor and portent.
On the 27th, two days before Munich, when war still seemed certain, Hick apologized for having written “so feverishly yesterday about my troubles.”
After all, with another world war imminent, little things like a house in the country and trees, with the peace they contributed to one individual, aren’t so very important, are they?…
I wonder if you feel as depressed about the whole thing as I do…. I do think the President’s message [urging continued negotiations] was swell….
ER replied: “F said he’s done the last thing he can do and we can all pray something moves Hitler tomorrow. What a mad man!”
As she proceeded through the Northeast, ER observed the wreckage philosophically:
I don’t know that it will cheer you, but nature does cover up her ravages quickly as I realized in France after the war and next spring you will find new beauties which it is impossible to imagine now.
She felt more foreboding about Europe. After the Munich agreement, FDR cabled Chamberlain: “Good man.” But ER doubted the pact served any significant purpose. She wrote Anna:
Pa’s second message was grand and so well timed. I feel of course that Hitler having acquired all he wanted this time will begin again to get the next thing he wants when he is ready to do so. Therefore we have only postponed a war unless we are prepared to let Hitler and his ideas dominate Europe. It does not seem to be our business really and yet I wonder if we can remain uninfluenced by the growth of those ideas.
ER dreaded the idea of a fascist peace, and she spent part of her days during the Munich crisis reading Thomas Mann’s book The Coming Victory of Democracy. She sent it on to Anna and John:
I’d like to know what you both think about it. I would like to get an opportunity to talk to [Thomas Mann] in the light of recent events, for he stirred many questions in my mind.
On 23 September, ER devoted a column to the profound shift she felt in her own thinking after she read Mann’s book. He had toured the United States in the hope that Americans would respond to the tragedies that now blanketed Europe. Thomas Mann no longer believed that democracy anywhere would survive unless it responded with vigor to the vile circumstances imposed by the fascists: “Force must be met with force.”
ER wrote that that was “what we had been doing from generation to generation.” She had believed that military violence in itself settled nothing, and was its own evil: an evil that always intensified the “bitterness that we built up before.” Now she felt that the alternative was to permit those nations that believed “exclusively in force, to have everything their own way.” The pacifist’s dilemma was troublesome:
If we decide again that force must be met with force, then is it the moral right for any group of people who believe that certain ideas must triumph, to hold back from the conflict?
ER rapidly moved toward a commitment to what was subsequently derided in the United States as “premature antifascism.” Before 1941 it was deemed un-American, practically treasonous, certainly radical or communist, really to oppose Hitler and fascism sufficiently to contemplate war as a lesser evil. It was the dilemma answered by thousands of Europeans who joined the International Brigades, by thousands of Americans who marched off to Spain in the Lincoln and Washington Brigades. ER was sympathetic to their decision and agreed with their purpose. But she hated war; it only spawned further war. There were no final victories. There had to be another way to settle conflicts. But Hitler was an aggressive madman, and Munich inflamed his ambitions.
Like other antifascists who opposed war, ER was torn about the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. “Czechoslovakia was set up in an arbitrary way” at Versailles, she wrote, “and my whole feeling is that the question should have been discussed in a calm atmosphere and not at the point of a pistol.” Her heart divided, she wrote an Allenswood chum, Helen Gifford, in Britain:
I feel with you that things are not definitely settled and I can well imagine that Mile Souvestre with her feelings about minorities might be very unhappy. However, I cannot help being glad that the countries involved did not send thousands of young people to be killed over this particular question.
The “deathwatch” of the summer and autumn of 1938 was informed by widespread knowledge of new munitions of destruction introduced since 1933. In 1929, Churchill had published The Aftermath, an amazing book of prescience: When the 1914–18 war ended, scientists and workers in a hundred laboratories, a thousand arsenals, and countless factories suspended their projects. “But their knowledge was preserved,” and they were poised to deliver weapons ever more “formidable and fatal.” From 1933 to 1938, they had created a new reality—already displayed in Ethiopia and Spain. Modern technology rendered military destruction “wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched uncontrollable.”
Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue… it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination…. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve… ready, if called on, to pulverise… what is left of civilization.
As ER read the newspapers, she was convinced that if peace failed, unspeakable tragedy would follow. But to grant Hitler all he demanded was not peace. Horrified by fascist military triumphs in Asia and Europe, she wrote Elizabeth Baker, an absolute pacifist:
I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality, when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war…. I am afraid conditions in the rest of the world are going to decide that for us.
In a world filled with propaganda, political warfare, lies, and deceit, America’s press was increasingly the only source of real news:
Everywhere people listened as I did to their radios and I think read the papers with the same avidity. Since then taxi-drivers, hair dressers, sales girls… have talked to me about the situation with intelligence and a knowledge which shows their deep interest.
Never before in history… have nations been armed for war and so close to war and yet not taken the first step, and I lay it largely to the awareness of the people and the force of public opinion on the leaders…. But as long as we have peace and an aroused public opinion, I shall hope that we may tackle our international problems with the same fervor which we are putting into the solution of some of our national problems.
After her lecture tour through New England, ER went south to Kentucky and Tennessee, returned to Washington for her birthday week, and spent a day in Charlottesville with her youngest grandson, FDR III, who was a delight:
A more placid, healthier baby I have rarely seen and even at three months old, he smiles back at you and, while you might object to a double chin in a year or so, it is really quite engaging in a baby!
That evening, 9 October, she dined with Aubrey and Anita Williams, Ellen Woodward, Josephine Roche, and others. There was much discussion about the state of the world. They agreed about many issues, and ER seemed relieved that both “Aubrey and Josephine Roche have a good deal of sympathy with Mexico in her present position in retaking her [oil] lands if she will pay in the future.”
Tensions over Mexico’s nationalization of its oil properties had simmered since April. FDR’s policy was to keep the region united against fascist penetration. His old Navy boss, Ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels, warned that Pan-American solidarity was needed to “save democracy. Oil ought not to smear it.” Despite Cordell Hull’s opposition to “communists” who disrespected and nationalized private property, and to agitation by oil interests, notably “Standard Oil,” which had “heavy investments in Mexico,” FDR supported President Lázaro Cárdenas’s right of eminent domain.
The economic implications of good neighborliness and America’s response to nationalism and anti-imperialist activities changed as Europe readied for war—and fascists turned for military commerce to resource-rich Latin America. Indeed, in August the State Department created two new bureaus to improve relations with Latin America—a Division of Cultural Relations and a Division of International Communications. The goal was to exchange teachers and students, cooperate in music, art, and literature, and initiate “international radio broadcasts.” Sumner Welles said it was a modest beginning, and “not a propaganda agency.” But the goal was to enhance Cordell Hull’s reciprocal trade agreements and culturally improve hemispheric relations, since there was known “penetration, economic and intellectual, of the German and Italian dictatorships in Latin America.”
On her birthday, 11 October 1938, ER received a poem from Harry Hopkins:
My Day is a dignified
column
It tells you right from
wrong
In the morning I’m dressing
in Frisco
At noon I lunch in
Hong Kong.
I fly way over Spain
Because Franco is a pain
And Hitler’s a terrible
mug
I tea with the Queen
And Kennedy’s spleen
The while I knit me a
rug.
I curtsy my best
And hop over Brest
And land at the White
House door.
My day’s hard on the legs
But I scramble the eggs
Bless you my children
once more.
Though ER thought she was inured to jokes about herself, she wrote to correct Harry:
I enjoyed your poetic effort, but I must take issue with you. I never could tell anyone the difference between right and wrong. There are too many shades for me to ever be sure! I only wish I could cover all the lands you suggest!
ER’s White House birthday celebration, without Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, even without Hick or Earl, was grand. FDR had arranged a splendid evening and gave her a birthday check with a jolly note: “Many Happy Returns! This is TOWARD the new ‘Lake Eleanor’ at ValKill. I will take you cruising on it.”
The check was to help defray the costs of the controversial dredging that ER had done, which had so annoyed Cook and Dickerman. It was a considerate gift.
Actually, ER’s fifty-fourth birthday seemed rather a state occasion. The New York Times ran two editorials celebrating her life and work. On 13 October, the paper surveyed her riding and sporting habits and noted that she “talks a great deal too.” But the previously critical tone reserved for such observations was now gone:
This is not in the tradition of the wives of former Presidents. But she is so patently sincere and unpretentious in all she says and does, so ebulliently a part of every activity she undertakes, so good-humored even in the face of criticism, that she remains today one of the most popular women who ever lived in the White House. At 54 she could command a landslide of votes as Mrs. America.
Other observers thought far beyond that. A poll taken by the New York League of Business and Professional Women nominated ER for governor of New York State, and at least one newspaper editorialized that ER should be nominated for president. Her nomination would avoid a third-term conflict for FDR, and in addition to “the prestige she may have won as wife of President Roosevelt, she merits the Presidency on the basis of her own personality and her performance.” Citing the careers of Catherine in Russia, Victoria in Britain, Isabella in Spain, and Wilhelmina in the Netherlands, the paper asked: “What sound reasons can be advanced against a woman for President of the U.S.?”
ER’s birthday also coincided with the Women’s National Press Club party honoring “Good Queen Eleanor.” According to the New York Times, “the most noteworthy observation” made during the evening was the “total subsidence of the criticism to which she was subjected in her first two years or so because she did not ‘stay home and tend to her knittin.’… One does not hear that any more.”
ER’s birthday was not even dampened by family concerns. She minimized her mother-in-law’s meddlings and seemed now almost sympathetic to her intrusions. ER wrote Anna:
I hope Granny is feeling well and that she can refrain… from trying to plan your lives! She seems to me to be aging fast but she still takes so much interest in us all that she would be glad to direct our actions even in the future!
SDR, at eighty-four, worried about everything. She worried about the grandchildren, their children, and everybody’s future. She particularly worried about Hyde Park. She wanted some assurance that the estate would be retained by the family after her death. ER now felt protective of her mother-in-law and wished “she would not worry about my friends for I think she has reached an age when she should not bother about any one she does not like.”
Publicly, ER praised SDR. She had summered in Campobello, and then gone off to Seattle:
At eighty-four, this seems to me quite an achievement and I only hope that many of us will learn from this older generation how to preserve our interest in life and our desire to participate in the interests of the young. Certainly my husband’s mother is younger in spirit than many people whose years are far fewer than hers.
ER seemed to put petty family annoyances in perspective that October:
Too bad Curt had to tell Sis that he never liked me but after all in the end children have to make up their own minds as to whom they like and dislike.
James, who possibly never forgave her opposition to his White House job or her contribution to the tensions with Betsey, was barely speaking to his mother:
James has not said one word to me about his plans since I left him. He telephoned me once, and wired the day after my birthday and that is all I’ve heard….
But ER was rarely in one place long enough to brood. The day after her birthday she lectured at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she found the students “particularly happy and healthy and ready to absorb all the education available.” She returned that night just long enough to see films from Africa made “by our cousin Leila Roosevelt Dennis and her husband.” ER heartily recommended Dark Rapture; it “is really very beautiful and interesting.” She and Tommy left on the midnight train for the Midwest, for Missouri, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Then they headed south to Alabama, and to Columbia, South Carolina.
At some point on her tour, ER spent a day in Atlanta, drove to “my grandmother’s old home in Roswell,” and inspected the new building going on at Warm Springs, “so I could tell my husband all that was being done.” Also she finally had a chance to see the Eleanor Roosevelt School. After FDR built a new brick school for the white children of Warm Springs, ER helped raise the money to build a modern brick school for the area’s black children. To put some meaning behind “separate but equal” in her husband’s adopted town seemed a little enough thing, but it inflamed white supremacists. Sixty years later some residents still complained about ER’s “interference.” She was proud of her achievement and grateful for FDR’s speech at the school’s dedication, in December 1937. They both understood that her school and his speech contributed to Georgia’s violent racialist campaign in 1938.
On the road, ER wondered when she and Hick would “take our evening together before Xmas? We ought to plan it next time we meet!” ER wondered how they would “manage an occasional glimpse” of each other; but Hick indulged in her old fantasy of touring with ER through the Midwest:
If you only weren’t the President’s wife—with all the fuss and pushing and hauling that goes with it—how I should love to travel with you to those places! But if you weren’t the President’s wife, the chances are you wouldn’t be going…. It would be a lot of fun if some day we could just go off bumming, looking at things, visiting all sorts of funny little towns. But that sort of traveling is expensive, isn’t it, when one is not on a job or a lecture trip. And I don’t think you are so keen about motor trips as you used to be. I’d still rather drive a car than do almost anything else I can think of!
For the first time, ER rejected Hick’s fantasy and discouraged further musings about long trips:
I doubt dear, if I’ll ever have the money to travel except on a money-making basis such as lecturing or writing and I cannot imagine that you would enjoy it even if I were not the President’s wife for one does of necessity so much one does not want to do. We can take short motor trips when I have more time someday and those, when I am no longer recognized wherever I go you will enjoy again.
When ER returned she proposed a week together in Washington, and promised “to have time free part of [each] day and you might not mind it so much now….” Hick agreed, to ER’s surprise: “I’m delighted that you are considering my December invitation. I thought you had put the White House aside forever!”
ER returned to a Washington poised for the midterm elections and faced painful dinner conversations about renewed labor strikes; the resurgence “of the KKK, vigilantes, etc.”
After one weekend in Washington, and another in New York for Christmas shopping, ER left on 2 November alone, for an “entirely personal” visit to Seattle, where she was present at the delivery of Anna’s third child, John Boettiger, Jr. Anna wrote Tommy:
You would have got a tremendous kick out of seeing mother selling my Seattle physician on the idea that she must be allowed to don a nurse’s mask and uniform to watch the actual arrival. This doctor is, unfortunately, a strong and very reactionary Republican, so that sometimes I am sure he would like to punch my nose, and I sure have felt like punching his…. But after all, I’m producing a baby and not a political machine….
Delayed by a blizzard, ER reached Hyde Park just in time “to join the President and his mother at the polls.”
The midterm elections of 1938 were disastrous. Except for the reelections of New York’s Senator Robert Wagner and Governor Herbert Lehman (vigorously challenged by Thomas Dewey), which were of great personal concern to both ER and FDR and were markedly narrow victories, the results nationally were a triumph for anti-New Deal forces. Michigan’s Governor Frank Murphy was defeated by Dies Committee accusations that he was a Red communist anti-industry unionist. In the South, every anti-New Deal candidate FDR opposed in his “purge” campaign was reelected. New conservative leaders appeared, including Senator Robert Taft of Ohio—son of President Howard Taft, and a fervent isolationist.
Republicans in the House doubled, from 88 to 170, and increased in the Senate by eight. Although Democrats nominally controlled Congress, it was now overwhelmingly dominated by Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans who despised labor unions, New Deal liberals, and ER particularly.
Amazingly buoyant, FDR wrote Josephus Daniels in Mexico that he was “wholly reconciled” to the results, which he felt “on the whole helpful.” The election cleaned out “some bad local situations,” and FDR predicted the next Congress would be “less trouble” than the last. At least he had sent a clear message: “I am sufficiently honest to decline to support any conservative Democrat.”
ER admired FDR’s courage in battle and under attack. After all, he often said, “once you’ve spent two years trying to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion!”
But the election results quickly changed the national mood. A month earlier, Hallie Flanagan warned ER about “libelous misinformation” being circulated to destroy the Federal Arts Projects, initiated by Martin Dies’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Flanagan sent ER a report which refuted every charge, so she would not be “inconvenienced.”
ER had replied, casually: “I never worry about the hearings, but I will ask you if I ever want to know a specific thing.” After the elections, the Dies Committee became far more worrisome, and ER condemned its tactics as “Gestapo-like.” But in November 1938, ER was more concerned with Gestapo violence throughout Nazi-controlled countries.
Between 9 and 15 November, Jewish homes, schools, hospitals, synagogues, businesses, and cemeteries were invaded, plundered, burned. Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, was a week of contempt, abuse, destruction.
If anybody doubted the intent of Hitler’s words, so clearly revealed in his writings, speeches, and previous outrages, those November days in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland shattered any illusion. The violence coincided with Armistice Day, 11 November, when the Allies ended World War I. The defeat of that war was for Hitler to be avenged with new blood, and unlimited terror.
The violence began on 28 October, when Germany expelled thousands of Polish Jews who had lived for decades within the historically changing borders of Germany. Nazis rounded up children and old people on the streets, emptied houses and apartment buildings, allowed people to take nothing with them except 10 marks ($4) and the clothes they wore, shoved them into waiting trucks and trains, and dumped them across the border onto the desolate flats of Poland’s borderlands. More than ten thousand Jews were deported in this manner.
Among the deportees was the family of Zindel Grynszpan, whose seventeen-year-old son, Heschel, had previously fled the family home in Hanover to Paris. When he received a letter from his father recounting his family’s ordeal, Heschel Grynszpan bought a gun and on 7 November walked to the German embassy in Paris to assassinate the ambassador. Ironically, he was detained by a minor official, Ernst vom Rath, who was himself under investigation by the Gestapo for his opposition to the increasing anti-Semitic violence, and shot him. This murder was the immediate excuse used to launch the well-orchestrated burnings, lootings, and round-ups known as Kristallnacht.
Then on 12 November, German Jews were fined a billion marks—$400 million—as penalty for the murder. This “money atonement” was astronomical and rendered it virtually impossible for most Jews to retain sufficient savings to emigrate. Yet another decree ordered the victims to pay for the repair and restoration of their former shops, buildings, and homes—from which they were permanently banished.
These fines had another, more sinister purpose. Hitler had announced: “If there is any country that believes it has not enough Jews, I shall gladly turn over to it all our Jews.” Now, if they left, they left penniless. Moreover, most countries had closed their doors, and those who would accept Jews would not accept paupers.
It was a major challenge for FDR, whose policy was to do nothing to involve the United States in European affairs, but who wanted to respond somehow to the thousands of refugees who stood for hours before the U.S. embassy seeking asylum, only to be routinely turned away.
Within days, Jews were stripped of their remaining human rights. They were no longer permitted to drive cars, travel on public transportation, walk in parks, go to museums, attend theaters, or concerts. Passports and visas were canceled. They were stateless and impoverished. Charged for the violence and fined for the damage, the Jewish community now owed the Reich, collectively, one billion Reichsmarks. For a time, they were not molested in their homes. But there was nothing to do, no work to be had; no place to pray; no recourse from agony. Many committed suicide; most tried to leave.
ER wrote:
This German-Jewish business makes me sick and when FDR called tonight I was glad to know [U.S. Ambassador to Germany Hugh] Wilson was being recalled and we were protesting. How could Lindbergh take that Hitler decoration!
ER’s formerly private protests against bigotry were increasingly for public attribution. Although she had resigned in silence from the Colony Club for its discrimination against Elinor Morgenthau, she now canceled a speaking engagement at a country club in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a statement of distress that it excluded Jews.
While she counseled complete assimilation and urged Jews to “wipe out in their own consciousness any feeling of difference by joining in all that is being done by Americans” for justice and democracy, she also spoke on behalf of support for refugees in Palestine. In 1937 she helped spearhead a drive for a home for immigrant girls in Jerusalem, and was perceived as so supportive that an Eleanor Roosevelt Vocational Training Classroom in the new home was dedicated in her honor.
On 6 December 1938, ER appealed to fifteen hundred people assembled at the Hotel Astor under the auspices of a national committee for refugees chaired by William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, to help promote the Léon Blum colony in Palestine for the settlement of one thousand Jewish refugee families. ER urged all Americans to celebrate the democratic vision of the nation’s founders and by “thought and example” to help restore “kindness, good-will and liberty” to the world.
While ER called for demonstrations of “thought and example,” little was done, or said, by FDR’s administration to indicate official outrage at Hitler’s violence. No message of protest warning of boycott or economic reprisal was sent. Yet history abounds in such protests on behalf of victimized peoples. In 1903 and 1906, Theodore Roosevelt protested against Jewish pogroms in Russia, after Jacob Schiff lobbied for an official U.S. condemnation of the massacre of Jews in Odessa. In 1902, TR ordered his secretary of state, John Hay, to send an official U.S. protest to Romania:
The political disabilities of the Jews in Romania, their exclusion from the public service and the learned professions, the limitations of their civil rights and the imposition upon them of exceptional taxes … [are] repugnant to the moral sense of liberal modern peoples…. This government cannot be a tacit party to such an international wrong. It is constrained to protest against the treatment to which the Jews of Romania are subjected … in the name of humanity.
FDR sent no similar message to Germany.
FDR did respond to the pitiless carnage and massacre in China. In December 1937, Japan destroyed Nanking in a vicious episode of rape, horror, and death. Half the population, an estimated 300,000 people, were tortured and killed. Whether the details were immediately known to FDR, even of Japan’s 12 December sinking of the U.S. gunboat Panay, remains controversial. But on 11 January 1938, FDR sent a memo to Cordell Hull and Admiral Cary T. Grayson, head of the American Red Cross. He called for additional relief funds for the “destitute Chinese civilians” and for medical aid. “I think we could raise $1,000,000 without any trouble at all.” On 17 January, the U.S. Red Cross launched an appeal for aid to the Chinese people, initiated by FDR’s formal request for such a drive.
No similar appeal was made by FDR to the Red Cross on behalf of Europe’s Jews.*
Since he was considered by many the best friend American Jews ever had, FDR’s reactions to the European events of 1938 are unexplainable. He wrote nothing to Mussolini after he issued his summer 1938 decrees expelling Jews who had settled in Italy after 1919 and removing all Jews from schools, universities, businesses, and the professions. On 15 September 1938, however, FDR sent a crass note to William Phillips, the U.S. ambassador to Rome: “What a plight the unfortunate Jews are in. It gives them little comfort to remind them that they have been ‘on the run’ for about four thousand years.”
Subsequently, FDR told Phillips to confer personally with Mussolini on “the Jewish exile question.” According to Ickes:
[FDR wanted to cultivate Mussolini and] drive a wedge between him and Hitler and at the same time use his good offices to prevail upon Hitler to ameliorate the economic condition of the Jews who are being driven into exile. Mussolini agrees that it is not fair to the rest of the world for Germany to strip her Jews bare and then exclude them. They ought at least be allowed to convert enough of their property into money to take them to other lands and establish themselves there.
For all moral and political purposes, Kristallnacht was the terminal event. Civility in the heart of western Europe lay in ruins, surrounded by broken glass, bloodied streets, desecrated temples, burned Torahs, ripped books of prayer to the one shared God. Hitler’s intentions were flagrant, and the whole world was invited to witness. Twenty thousand Jews were removed to concentration camps, which the Anglo-American press named: Dachau near Munich, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen north of Berlin, Buchenwald near Weimar.
These great centers of learning and high culture had been transformed into locations of unspeakable humiliation and agony.
Except for Father Charles E. Coughlin, who hailed the violence against “Jewish-sponsored Communism,” the press was unanimous in its condemnation. Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, British counselor in Berlin, wired Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax: “The Jews of Germany are, indeed, not a national but a world problem, which, if neglected, contains the seeds of a terrible vengeance.”
FDR told his 15 November press conference: “The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the U.S…. I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization.” FDR agreed to allow all German aliens on visitor visas to remain in the United States for six months “and for other like periods so long as necessary.” At the time there were between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand political refugees covered by his order, and “not all Jews, by any means,” the president assured the press. “All shades of liberal political thought and many religions are represented.”
Anti-Semitism in FDR’s State Department increased after Hitler’s November atrocities. Breckenridge Long now dedicated himself to keeping refugees out of America. Curiously, FDR continually promoted Breckenridge Long, who had life-and-death control over visas and passports. Nevertheless, in 1938, for the first time, the United States filled its refugee quota.
ER and her asylum-seeking circle faced the urgent refugee crisis in a lonely political environment. Thousands of the earliest refugees who left in 1933 were still wandering Europe seeking safety and political asylum. After 31 January 1933, over 30 percent of Germany’s 500,000 Jews had become refugees. After the March 1938 Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria, when the Nazis began to expel Austria’s 190,000 Jews, the situation became critical. The flight of Czech Jews compounded the problem, and Kristallnacht ignited refugee panic.
FDR expanded his search for underpopulated and suitable lands upon which to place the world’s unwanted Jews. He ordered Myron Taylor, the U.S. representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees, to return to London for further discussions with George Rublee, director of the committee. But again FDR told his press conference that he had no intention of asking Congress to alter existing immigration quotas. He acknowledged Hitler’s determination to send Jews out of his territories, on luxury ships if necessary, by searching the world’s waste spaces for possible places of sanctuary.
During her own press conference, ER called for temporary emergency measures to do whatever was possible “to deal with the refugee problem, and at home, for renewed devotion to … the American way of life.” Wary of her husband’s strategies, she hesitated to criticize him directly and said: “Of the international issues involved, or existing conditions abroad, [she] would not speak.” But this was “a special situation” which required “special and speedy relief methods … of an emergent and transitory nature. For ourselves, I hope we will do, as individuals, all we can to preserve what is a traditional right in this country—freedom for different races and different religions.”
FDR appealed for special emergency asylum in the United States for temporary residents. He urged Congress not to introduce “new legislation, to force the deportation of the unfortunates who have sought temporary asylum here, any more than it sought to force the deportation of white Russians to face certain death at the hands of the Soviet Union.”
But antirefugee feelings were virulent, and Congress wanted no part of any refugee liberalization schemes. New York Congressman William Sirovich planned to introduce one, and also a resolution to call for the United States to break off diplomatic relations with Germany. Martin Dies said any such proposal would receive fewer than a hundred votes.
FDR cast about for some alternative to carnage. After Kristallnacht, FDR appointed geographer Isaiah Bowman, president of The Johns Hopkins University and formerly territorial adviser to the U.S. delegation at Versailles, to scout the globe for potential areas for settlement. Given the failure of the Evian Conference, FDR was particularly interested in undeveloped lands or weak colonial centers. Bowman’s mandate included a study of resource-rich areas for future investment and development. From 1938 to 1940, Bowman and a State Department team explored possibilities in underpopulated areas of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Central Africa. This amazing investigation revealed FDR’s early interest in British and French colonial territories as well as nominally independent and sovereign nations.
On 21 November 1938, Henry Morgenthau reported his conversation with Dr. Bowman “on colonies” to FDR: The “only country in Central America which offers possibilities for colonization is Costa Rica.” But Morgenthau wanted “to remind” FDR that the president of the United Fruit Company “informed you” that Costa Rica required “$5,000,000 to put them on their feet financially.”
Costa Rica was particularly suited for refugees because of its “excellent” climate and the fact that it was “democratic and sympathetic toward immigration.” Perhaps 100,000 refugees could be accommodated.
Honduras had a sparse population. There were good mining possibilities in gold and silver, but the “attitude of government toward immigration doubtful.”
Nicaragua was “sparsely inhabited but capable of sustaining two or three 10,000 groups by subsistence agriculture….”
Guatemala offered “good prospects in certain areas.” But these areas were already inhabited by “some influential English and American Farm Owners,” and there were many German plantations. “Government likely to favor immigrants, but some foreign [especially German] land owners likely to oppose.”
British Honduras (Belize) was unsuitable, since additional settlers “would strengthen Britain’s hold on the territory.”
Panama was a possibility for “several 10,000 groups.” Salvador was impossible, “due to dense population and intensive development.”
South America varied widely: The underpopulated areas of Venezuela failed from every point of view. Brazil had geographic possibilites but political drawbacks. Paraguay, while not a “paradise,” did have space. But politically the entire region was disastrous.
Bowman cautioned FDR against the whole idea. He objected to the impact of “a large foreign immigrant group” upon these countries, and particularly worried that FDR’s interest in their presence would “seriously” involve the United States in “European quarrels.”
Why not keep the European elements within the framework of the Old World? Even if we do not favor migration to Latin America, but allow it, difficulties will arise….
FDR evidently agreed. In any case, no further steps were taken by the United States—except subsequently for economic investment. Sumner Welles briefed FDR on the resettlement situation worldwide. It was grim.
Australia would admit five thousand a year, but wanted no publicity. South Africa had refused to participate in Evian and was not interested: There was “strong and increasing anti-Semitism in the Union.” Canada would not discuss the subject.*
Welles had one bold idea: Appropriate Lower California (Baja) for a Jewish homeland in partial settlement of the U.S.-Mexican oil controversy over the nationalization of PEMEX. But the State Department thought Mexico would be averse to any further “alienation of its national domain.”
Britain admitted refugees from Germany at the rate of seventy-five a day, but wanted “to avoid any publicity concerning it.” Britain also planned to settle two hundred refugees in Tanganyika and considered settlements in other African territories. Regarding Palestine, Britain’s policies became more restrictive. Jewish immigration into Palestine from 1933 to 1936 varied from 30,327 in 1933 to 61,854 in 1935. But in 1937, Britain restricted immigration to 10,536, although emergency provisions were made after Kristallnacht.
No other government represented on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees created at Evian indicated a willingness to consider colonization. France rejected a community in Madagascar or French New Caledonia, and neither Belgium nor the Netherlands would discuss the subject. Most countries in Latin America agreed to accept refugees, although some introduced greater restrictions after Evian.
ER was staggered by the contempt for human suffering expressed at Evian and revealed in the Welles and Bowman reports. In the bitter time before the burning time there was hope for rescue country by country. But there was no official objection to Hitler’s intention to remove Jews from Germany and all his new territories. ER increasingly bypassed State Department restrictions; she worked, often covertly, with private groups and individuals. She campaigned for a less restrictive refugee policy, pursued visas for individuals, and answered and passed on to government officials every appeal sent to her.
Revolted by world events, ER called for entirely new levels of action. Her speeches became more pointed and vigorous, and she spent more time in the company of radical activists, especially members of the American Youth Congress whose ardent views now coincided most completely with her own.
For ER, AYC leaders represented hope for the best of liberal America. Christian theology students, Jewish children of immigrants, black and white activists from the rural South and urban North imagined a nation united for progressive antifascist action.
A week after Kristallnacht, ER contemplated her future and her new allies. On 18 November, she defended the AYC at the annual luncheon of New York’s branch of the American Association of University Women and spoke of the need for courage and fearlessness in perilous times.
Helen Rogers Reid, vice president of the New York Herald Tribune, introduced ER as a woman who had “the qualities of mind of the great scholars—‘flexibility and complete free-mindedness.’ ‘’ ER’s speech was bold: She rejected the current Red Scare tactics which branded the AYC communist and her a dupe or fool: Such name-calling had destroyed democracy in Europe, and she wanted democracy to survive here.
“People whose opinions I respect” had warned her not to attend the AYC convention.
[But] I didn’t think that those youngsters could turn me into a Communist, so I went just the same….
I listened to speeches which you and I could easily have torn to shreds. The Chinese listened while the Japanese spoke; the boy from India spoke with the British delegates…. Nobody hissed or left the room. I have been in lots of gatherings of adults who did not show that kind of respect….
She spoke with many delegates, asked what they thought of the Soviet Union; she left convinced that there was interest in communism, but not domination by communists: “We who have training, and have minds that we know how to use must not be swept away” by fear and propaganda. The urgent problems before the United States and the world required scrutiny, debate, honest disagreement, democratic participation, not a wild and fearful flight from controversy.
After the luncheon, anticipating future events with her new young friends and co-conspirators, ER went on a shopping spree and decided to change her public image. She had already altered her hairstyle to a more free-fashioned “modified upswing coiffure,” and she now refurbished her wardrobe. According to the press, ER selected unusually glamorous and dramatic styles for both day and evening wear. Among her eight new costumes was a floor-length “evening gown of glacier satin in an ashes-of-roses shade”; a dinner gown “of Bagheera velvet in Lanvin red”; a “black crepe gown cut with V-neck, back and front, worn with a gold cloth jacket.” For daytime, ER selected “a grape-wine ensemble with tuxedo reveres of skunk, and a teal-blue frock adorned with fourteen strands of pearls….”
On 22 November 1938, ER embarked on a dangerous mission when she keynoted the radical biracial Southern Conference on Human Welfare, in Birmingham, Alabama. For the first time since the Civil War, Southern liberals were determined to face the race issue embedded within the region’s struggling economy. Since 1890 there had been talk of a “New South,” but always before, racial cruelties at the heart of peonage and poverty had been ignored in the interest of white supremacy. For decades, New South proponents echoed Henry Grady’s insistence on Negro degradation “because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts.”
Race defined the limits of change for all programs ER cared about, including Arthurdale and the efforts to build decent housing to replace Washington’s alley slums. Until race issues could be addressed frankly, nothing would really change.
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, there was a new level of commitment and urgency at the Birmingham meeting. Regional race and antiunion violence was behind the call for the SCHW, first conceived as a civil liberties conference by Joseph Gelders and Lucy Randolph Mason. According to Virginia Durr, they wanted to deal with the “terrible things happening” to CIO organizers in Mississippi. Many people were beaten; crosses were burned; the Wagner Labor Relations Act was held in contempt. In Tupelo, Ida Sledge, kin to the Bankheads of Alabama, sent by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was run out of town. John Rankin represented Tupelo in Congress, and “he was anti-Semitic and anti-black and very much against unions.” He called everyone in the CIO a communist, and it was time for a meeting.
The entire venture was fortified by FDR’s National Emergency Council’s study of the South, by Lowell Mellet, Arthur Raper, Lucy Randolph Mason, Frank Graham (president of the University of North Carolina), and Clark Foreman, with input from leading Southerners for the New Deal, including Virginia and Clifford Durr, Lister Hill, Senator John Sparkman, Tex Goldschmidt, and Abe Fortas. The Council’s Report on Economic Conditions of the South announced that the South was America’s economic problem number one.
While the South “led the world” in cotton, tobacco, paper, and other products, it was a disaster area. The average per capita income was half the nation’s; the poll tax limited voting rights to 12 percent of the population in eight Southern states, including Virginia; the region’s children were being undereducated. The South was hampered by backward and colonial customs; and its entrenched leaders wanted no changes.
The Southern Conference on Human Welfare determined to change the South and challenge segregation. Fifteen hundred delegates, black and white, sat anywhere they wanted Sunday night, 21 November 1938, in the city auditorium of downtown Birmingham. According to Virginia Durr: “Oh, it was a love feast…. Southern meetings always include a lot of preaching and praying and hymn singing…. The whole meeting was just full of love and hope. It was thrilling.” Frank Graham was elected chair, set a beautiful tone, “and we all went away … that night just full of love and gratitude. The whole South was coming together to make a new day.”
Somebody reported the integrated seating at the opening-night gala, and the next morning the auditorium was surrounded by black Marias. Every police van in the city and county was there. Policemen were everywhere, inside and out. And there was Eugene “Bull” Connor “saying anybody who broke the segregation law of Alabama would be arrested.” Tensions escalated; violence was in the air. The delegates complied and arranged themselves into separate sections.
ER, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Aubrey Williams arrived late that day, out of breath. ER “was ushered in with great applause,” looked at the segregated audience—and took her seat on the black side. One of Bull Connor’s police officers tapped ER on the shoulder and told her to move. ER noted in her memoirs: “At once the police appeared to remind us of the rules and regulations on segregation.”
As if to announce fascism would not triumph here, ER refused to “give in” and placed her chair between the white and black sections. Pauli Murray recalled that ER’s demonstration of defiance and courage meant everything to the young people of the South, who now knew they were not alone. Although the national press did not report ER’s brave action, the weekly Afro-American editorialized: “If the people of the South do not grasp this gesture, we must. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.”
ER was given a little folding chair and sat in the middle of whatever meeting hall or church she attended for the rest of the four-day meeting. She said she refused to be segregated, and carried the folding chair with her wherever she went. According to Durr: “Policemen followed us everywhere to make sure the segregation laws were observed, but they didn’t arrest Mrs. Roosevelt.”
ER’s address to the SCHW stirred the packed auditorium:
We are the leading democracy of the world and as such must prove to the world that democracy is possible and capable of living up to the principles upon which it was founded. The eyes of the world are upon us, and often we find they are not too friendly eyes.
ER emphasized “universal education” in which “every one of our citizens, regardless of nationality, or race,” might be allowed to flourish.
The next day, she participated in a workshop on youth problems, which organized a SCHW youth council to work directly with NYA and CCC. The workshop included former theology student turned radical Arkansas activist Howard Lee, Birmingham attorney Helen Fuller, and Myles Horton. ER was particularly impressed by Lee, who became chair of the new Council of Young Southerners—which ER personally supported—and then executive secretary of the SCHW.
A dramatic moment occurred when Aubrey Williams joked about revolution. He was “a very jolly, funny fellow, always cracking jokes.” It was a throw-away line about the usefulness of “class warfare,” but it received endless radio coverage. The press milked it for days: Marxist WPA leader shows New Deal’s true content. FDR called Aubrey: “What are you and my wife doing down there? What do you mean by … saying you are for the revolution?”
Aubrey, “heartsick,” went to ER and offered to resign. But she said, “You will do no such thing,” and immediately called her husband. FDR did not want Aubrey’s resignation; he wanted him “to quit making speeches.”
Williams’s career was not over, but FDR refused to appoint him head of WPA to replace Hopkins, the job he actually did for two years, throughout Hopkins’s long illness and convalescence. ER felt personally betrayed when FDR instead appointed conservative Army engineer Colonel F. C. Harrington. Nevertheless, NYA was given significant authority and made a permanent agency, and ER felt fortified and encouraged by the burgeoning grassroots movements represented by the AYC and the SCHW. She believed that their determined activity would move the New Deal forward.
The 1938 SCHW adopted thirty-six resolutions, all of which involved the plight of African-Americans, and eight of which directly concerned racial issues, including freedom for the four Scottsboro boys who remained in prison; availability of medical services by African-American physicians in all public health facilities; more funding for public housing and recreation facilities for African-Americans; equal funding for graduate education in state-supported colleges; and—inspired by ER’s demonstration—a resolution to support fully integrated SCHW meetings.
Perceived as “one of the gravest sins that a white southerner could commit,” that direct assault against tradition created a furor. The antisegregation resolution divided the delegates, some of whom withdrew, and was branded communist, subversive, and un-American. On the other hand, it transformed national assumptions about the unspeakable: White supremacy, and its primary bulwark segregation, were forevermore on the nation’s agenda—put there by an integrated conference, led by Southern New Dealers.
Traditional “race etiquette” was also challenged when Louise Charlton called on Mary McLeod Bethune to speak. According to Virginia Durr:
She said, “Mary, do you wish to come to the platform?” Mrs. Bethune rose. She looked like an African queen…. “My name is Mrs. Bethune.” So Louise had to say, “Mrs. Bethune, will you come to the platform?” That sounds like a small thing now, but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, was called Mrs. at a public meeting….
Virginia Durr, wife of Clifford Durr, the assistant general counsel of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and sister-in-law of Justice Hugo Black, addressed the meeting to denounce the South’s refusal to educate its people and the prevailing ignorance so general throughout the country. The reasons for an uninformed public, she declared, were propaganda and a controlled press dominated by Wall Street. She accused the National Manufacturers Association of being a “huge propaganda machine” intent on the “liquidation of organized labor.”
From ER to Aubrey Williams to Virginia Durr, the sentiments expressed at the SCHW represented the outer borders of the New Deal. The SCHW was viciously attacked by conservatives, the KKK, and white citizens’ groups. SCHW delegates were accused of eating together, partying together, all the same “old dirt … it was disgusting….” But Virginia Durr and others were surprised by the attacks from their putative allies on the liberal left.
ER and Durr knew that there were communists in attendance, and in every radical movement for decency and social change. Although not particularly interested in communists, ER insisted on her right to work with every ally for change she could find. Like ER, Durr wanted to see an alliance of all Southern radicals opposed to fascism, and she dismissed as ideological imprisonment “the intricate distinctions” between various communists, socialists, anarchists, and Trotskyites:
All the different groups and isms used to bore me to death. I always felt it was exactly like the distinctions in religions—are you going to get to heaven by dipping or sprinkling or total immersion….
In November 1938, FDR evidently felt the same way, and in his supportive message to the liberal leaders of the South he noted:
It is heartening to see the strength of Southern social leadership mustered to face these human problems, not locally or individually, but in a United Front from Fort Raleigh to the Alamo.
The SCHW represented an assemblage of the South’s best talents, dedicated to the hardest long-range issues.* The last night of the conference was like “a revival meeting. All of a sudden you felt that you were not by yourself,” lonely Southerners for change. Rather, ER and Justice Hugo Black, CIO leader John L. Lewis, Negro leaders from Mary McLeod Bethune to John Davis were prominent. It was “marvelous.”
“It was the New Deal come south…. We had the feeling of having the power of the government on our side.” Bull Connor had the police but he wouldn’t arrest ER, and he wouldn’t arrest Hugo Black. And at the end, the auditorium packed to the roof, ER and all the leaders, white and black, stood “at the center of the stage” and sang for tomorrow. After four days in downtown Birmingham, everything seemed possible.
Tommy had feared for ER’s life, but the New York Times failed to notice ER’s movable chair protest against segregation, and emphasized the economic changes called for. The SCHW had set new goals for the nation: a Federal Rural Housing Authority empowered to build one million Southern homes for $500 each, at one-tenth the cost of the new national defense program; more federal credit for farmers; federal aid for education; repeal of poll-tax laws; and a Wagner antilynching law in every state.
ER left Birmingham filled with energy and plans for the future. With Tommy, she went to Georgia to join FDR for Thanksgiving. Hick, in New York, wondered: “How did you finally get away with the trip to Birmingham? Have they torn you limb from limb yet?”
ER was unscathed, and rather excited. She wrote Hick: In addition to her speech, followed by questions for over an hour, she had long talks with Aubrey Williams and Lucy Randolph Mason, held a press conference, and presented her views in a panel on youth and another on women’s labor conditions. At one lunch she “argued at length with Gov Bibb Graves [about] the poll tax and the right of the Negro to vote.”
But, she confided:
Tommy doesn’t feel well on this trip. I think she was worried all day yesterday for fear I would get myself in trouble!
We are going to get our hair washed and combed and our nails done before we drive down to Warm Springs this morning.
As she toured the South, between Atlanta and Birmingham, ER had an idea that would reunite Hick to politics and bring her closer into ER’s own newly expanded orbit. Without preparation or discussion, ER asked Hick to consider taking over Molly Dewson’s job as head of the Women’s Democratic Committee. Surprised, Hick thought about ER’s offer overnight, and replied the next morning with unqualified enthusiasm:
I’ve been thinking about that Democratic National committee business. If you want to ask Jim [Farley] about me, I think it might be a good idea. I’m not particularly anxious to leave the Fair at this time, but … if I should do it, I’d like to do a good, thorough job, and it might not be a bad idea to start even earlier than January, 1940…. I think I ought to make a swing around the country to contact my women’s editors, etc., and I might work them in together some way. It would be fun, wouldn’t it?
Fun, and supremely important. FDR had lost many liberal battles since his overwhelming 1936 victory. Every New Deal agency was under attack, threatened with cuts, denounced as communist and dangerous. FDR promised to fight the reactionaries, and he rejected those advisers—including Farley—who urged him to move with his party to the right.
ER talked with FDR about her plan:
He’s much interested but doubts if Jim [Farley] wants a liberal Democratic party. I’ll talk to Jim soon and let you know how things develop. I’d rather see you in [the newspaper] business and yet this cries to be done and is most interesting….
I don’t suppose I can reach you on Thanksgiving … so here is my love dear and may you have much to be thankful for.
Hick agreed that Jim Farley was not much interested in a liberal party.
But let’s hope he has the political acumen to keep it more liberal than the Republican party….
Yes, my dear, I have much to be Thankful for—a great deal of that “much” being YOU.
While ER was at Warm Springs, the Nazi press announced that Germany had embarked upon “the final and unalterably uncompromising solution” to the Jewish question. In the Gestapo’s official paper, Das Schwarze Korps, on 24 November, the front-page feature announced that it should have been done immediately, brutally, and completely in 1933. But “it had to remain theory” for lack of the “military power we possess today.”
Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world’s screeching and because, after all, no power on earth can hinder us, we will now bring the Jewish question to its totalitarian solution.
Two weeks after Kristallnacht, accepted without notable “screeching” from any government, Hitler felt sufficiently unrestrained to publish his intentions for all Jews caught in his widening web. First would come pauperization, isolation, ghettoization. They would all be marked for positive identification. Nobody would escape. Then, the starving, bedraggled remnant would become a scrounging, begging scourge. They would be forced to crime, would be an “underworld” of “politico-criminal subhumans,” breeders of Bolshevism. At that stage “we should therefore face the hard necessity of exterminating the Jewish underworld…. The result will be the actual and definite end of Jewry … and its complete extermination.”
While the announcement was made two years and eight months before it was actually implemented, the time to protest and resist was at hand. After it was reprinted in the U.S. and European press, many understood the implications of such crude words given the reality of the cruelties under way in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Since Kristallnacht, race hatred had triumphed completely and Jews had been removed from all German institutions, doomed to a pariah existence in complete segregation. Jews could no longer dine with Gentiles—not in restaurants, not anywhere; nor could they buy food in the same stores. Nazis established separate stores where Jews were restricted in the purchase of life’s staples—milk, bread.
Such laws cast a torchlight on American traditions. ER made the connections: brown shirts, white sheets; the twisted cross, the burning cross. Yet the internal affairs of a nation were deemed sacrosanct, nobody else’s business. ER and other citizens no longer agreed with that diplomatic principle.
Citizens of conscience petitioned FDR. Thirty-six prominent writers sent an urgent telegram, including Pearl Buck, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, John Gunther, Lillian Hellman, George S. Kaufman, Clifford Odets, Van Wyck Brooks, Dorothy Thompson, and Thornton Wilder:
We feel we no longer have any right to remain silent, we feel that the American people and the American government have no right to remain silent. Thirty-five years ago a horrified America rose to its feet to protest against the Kishinev pogroms in Tsarist Russia. God help us if we have grown so indifferent to human suffering that we cannot rise now in protest against pogroms in Nazi Germany. We feel that it is deeply immoral for the American people to continue having economic relations with a country that avowedly uses mass murder to solve its economic problems.
FDR remained virtually silent about human rights abuses, and did not end trade with Germany, but he began a vigorous rearmament program, emphasizing military planes and naval construction. Immediately after Kristallnacht, on 14 November, he reported to Josephus Daniels, his Wilson-era boss, that he was working on “national defense—especially mass production of planes.” By December, he ordered the navy yards to run full-time, “two shifts or even three” wherever possible. It “is time to get action.”
While ER approved of all defense programs, she also called for a worldwide educational crusade to address prejudice. In November, at Warm Springs after the SCHW meetings, ER wrote her first articles specifically about Jews and race hatred. One, initially called “Tolerance,” was for the Virginia Quarterly and attacked the kind of anticommunist hysteria that had resulted in fascist triumph and appeasement throughout so much of Europe. The other, which addressed the mounting hatred against Jews, was dated 25 November 1938.
She sent them both to Hick, who considered the article on tolerance “the best thing you’ve done in ages. It satisfies me completely. I gather that the President okayed it. What did he say about it?” Evidently FDR “read it” with no particular reaction, and “just said it was OK with him to send it.”
FDR also read her article on Jews, which she wrote for Liberty magazine, without comment: “FDR read it and it is the way I feel so I hope no one whom I care about will have their feelings hurt.”
Untitled, ER’s “Jewish article” called for a campaign of understanding to confront “the present catastrophe for Jew and Gentile alike…. In books … schools, newspapers, plays, assemblies we want incessant truth telling about these old legends that divide and antagonize and waste us.”
As she struggled to understand “the kind of racial and religious intolerance which is sweeping the world today,” ER rejected her former emphasis on assimilation. On 19 November 1938, ER replied to a correspondent who had written asking how to end “the ever-increasing tide of anti-Semitism”: “I think it is important in this country that the Jews as Jews remain unaggressive and stress the fact that they are Americans first and above everything else.”
Now ER assessed the historic hatred of Jews, their isolation, and forced ghettoization in the Middle Ages, and the ongoing contempt for Jews: Even where restrictive laws had been eased, assimilation had been “a slow process, particularly where a proud people is concerned and today we are seeing … a return to the attitude of the Middle Ages.”
ER now pointed out that even when Jews attempted to assimilate they were condemned for “being too ostentatiously patriotic and of pushing themselves forward as nationals,” as in Austria and Germany.
ER was also sensitive to the difficulties assimilated Jews faced among their coreligionists, who resented those who strayed from tradition. Never quite accepted into the majority culture, they were everywhere marginalized. She asked: How had these difficult and emotional problems been so quickly transformed into a raging epidemic of bigotry and official policies of persecution that now threatened doom.
Opposition to Jews as a race and a religion was complicated, and began with Christianity. The “blame it seems to me can not be entirely shrugged off the shoulders of the Gentiles.” ER rejected ghettoization and deplored signs that appeared in many American neighborhoods that read “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”
She reviewed the cavils against Jews, their “mannerisms or traits of character which rub us the wrong way,” but none of that was enough to explain this hateful, bewildering moment. There were other stereotypes used for “other nationals and we have no desire to wipe out any of them.” Nobody suggested “we go forth and slay the foreign citizens” from France, Spain, Germany, Italy, or countries in Asia.
ER believed that the missing element was fear:
It is the secret fear that the Jewish people are stronger or more able than those who still wield superior physical power over them, which brings about oppression. I believe that those nations which do not persecute are saved only by confidence in themselves and a feeling that they can still defend themselves and their own place in the world. Therefore, I am forced to the conclusion that the Jewish people though they may be in part responsible for the present situation are not as responsible as the other races who need to examine themselves and grapple with their own fears.
I think we, and by we I mean the people of Europe as well as the people of the U.S., have pushed the Jewish races into Zionism and Palestine, and into their nationalistic attitude. Having that great responsibility upon us, I think it lies with us to free ourselves of our fears….
Written from within the veil of her own stereotypes, ER concluded that the future was not up to the Jews.
The Jew is almost powerless today. It depends almost entirely on the course of the Gentiles what the future holds. It can be cooperative, mutual assistance, gradual slow assimilation with justice and fair-mindedness towards all racial groups living together in different countries or it can be injustice, hatred and death.
It looks to me as though the future of the Jews were tied up as it has always been with the future of all the races of the world. If they perish, we perish sooner or later….
ER’s first article on Jew-hatred assumed Jews were the other. It was written in language that reflected stereotypes of the 1930s. She now intended to combat those attitudes; Hick also confronted her feelings:
I like it very much. Of course my feeling personally is that Gentiles are more afraid of the everlasting energy of the Jews than of their ability. I suspect that energy, the energy of a people who have always had to go twice as far to get anywhere as people of other races, is what gives them the traits that some of us gentiles dislike so much. That’s probably why they push and shove in crowds, elbow their way in ahead of you at ticket windows, and try to “put things over” on you in business deals. Thousands of years of conditioning in an unfriendly world that doesn’t want them has made them that way. The result is that, given a Jew and a gentile, with equal ability, the Jew will nearly always outdistance the Gentile! Am I right or wrong?
If ER winced at her friend’s words, she knew that anti-Jewish feelings were as pervasive throughout Anglo-American society as they were within the Reich. In self-protection, many prominent Jews clung to a steadfast silence, which ER regretted. Her November article on tolerance, subsequently published as Keepers of Democracy, was among her most forthright.
If you are in the South someone tells you solemnly that all the members of the Committee of Industrial Organization (CIO) are Communists, or that the Negroes are all Communists…. In another part of the country someone tells you solemnly that the schools … are menaced because they are all under the influence of Jewish teachers and that the Jews, forsooth, are all Communists. And so it goes, until finally you realize that people have reached a point where anything which will save them from Communism is a godsend; and if Fascism or Nazism promises more security than our own democracy we may even turn to them.
She recalled that as a child her uncle Theodore Roosevelt once said “that when you are afraid to do a thing, that was the time to go and do it. Every time we shirk making up our minds or standing up for a cause in which we believe, we weaken our character and our ability to be fearless.”
To fight intolerance, we must fight fear. Fascism depended on fear and intolerance; on lies and twisted words; on force and violence. ER rejected easy solutions, and defended especially the new movements the AYC and the SCHW represented.
ER was also conviced that this moment presented a particular challenge to women “to foster democracy” and reignite their movement.
Only our young people still seem to have some strength and hope, and apparently we are afraid to give them a helping hand….
I think we need a rude awakening, to make us exert all the strength we have to face facts as they exist in our country and in the world, and to make us willing to sacrifice all that we have from the material standpoint in order that freedom and democracy may not perish from this earth.
ER challenged Americans to think and act politically, to engage in activist citizenship, to become their best selves. A sense of personal unimportance was encouraged by dictators. Democracy depended on “freedom from prejudice, and public awareness.” It required education, economic security, and personal devotion, “a real devotion to freedom…. Freedom is something to guard jealously,” but it can never be “freedom for me and not for you.”
The bolder ER became, the tougher and more adamant her statements, the higher her public approval rating soared. On 16 January 1939, the New York Times published a poll taken by George Gallup regarding America’s feelings about ER during 1938. The results were astounding. Two voters in every three voted in her favor (67 percent approved of her conduct, 33 percent disapproved). The poll was accompanied by such comments as “She lives a useful life and keeps busy.” “She sets a good example by encouraging worthwhile things.”
According to the poll she had a greater approval rating than FDR. Over 30 million favored ER, while the president polled 27.5 million. Also unlike FDR, ER had the approval of a majority of voters even in the upper income group: upper income, 54 percent; middle income, 65 percent; lower income, 76 percent.
Given the nature of the controversies ER engaged in and her challenge to work for the transformation of customs and traditions that subjected so many to poverty and powerlessness, America’s response indicated a commitment to the very democracy she spoke about so earnestly. ER touched a nerve center in America, and the country would never be the same.
On 20 December, ER and Hick shared their annual pre-Christmas party. Free of the tensions that had soured their friendship on occasion, the evening was warm, tender, perfect. Hick wrote:
Dearest, I did have a grand time last night. I can’t really find words to tell you about it. It isn’t the things you give people … but the thought and care that you put into it all that means so much. All the little details, like the artichokes for supper, the candles and Christmas tree, the warmth and coziness of it all, the expression on your face when one is opening the presents and is pleased—oh, darling, you are swell! It’s a kind of generosity of the soul that you have….
You will gather, Mrs. Doaks (Joseph V., of Oelwein, Iowa) that I had a thoroughly good time last night and this morning….
ER returned to Washington on the 23rd, where she was greeted by a “house full of people and so far all is well! FDR has a slight cold but not bad.” She reported: “I’ve worked all day on mail and Xmas things and done nothing official but have Lady Lindsay bring some English ladies to tea….”
But her private fears were revealed in her reply to Hick’s lost Christmas greeting. Although she wanted Hick close by, and more routinely in Washington, as her new job as Molly Dewson’s replacement would assure, she did not want Hick to entertain illusions about long and exclusive times together:
Your day letter came today and I wish you a quiet heart and a sense of serenity.—Few of us know what our heart’s desire is dear and if we had what we fancied was our desire it would probably turn to dust and ashes so serenity and peace are safer wishes dear!…
On 28 December, all thoughts of gloom were suspended entirely for a night of carefree festivity to honor ER’s niece Eleanor Roosevelt II, Hall’s daughter. It was the first debutante dance in the White House since William Howard Taft’s 1910 party for his daughter Helen. ER hosted a splendid affair and looked dazzling in “bright red chiffon sparkling with rhinestones and jeweled embroidery.” ER II was radiant in an “all white ruffled frock of French organdy,” and led the dancing with her father in a Virginia reel. The First Lady and her brother waltzed through the night, surrounded by friends and family, mostly cousins, including TR’s family, and SDR was regal in “black satin and old lace.” The evening was highlighted by Mayris (Tiny) Chaney’s new dance, the Eleanor Glide.
As 1938 drew to a close, ER emphasized action, a politics of example. She had joined the fray with her first April 1934 speech to black educators, when she said that we all “go ahead together, or we go down together.” In a 1937 address in Harlem, to “an enthusiastic, cheering crowd of 2500” at the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church, she called for “equal rights” for all Americans:
In this country we should all have, certainly, equal rights, and minorities should certainly have those exactly as majorities have them.
On 10 February 1938, ER commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by asserting that while Abraham Lincoln took the “first step toward the abolition of slavery … we still do tolerate slavery in several ways.” Her words, addressed to nine thousand people at a meeting sponsored by the National Negro Congress, were electrifying:
There are still slaves of many different kinds, and today we are facing another era in which we have to make certain things become facts rather than beliefs.
As Europe fell to fascism, ER and her new network of youth and race radicals heralded the greatest changes in America since the betrayal of Reconstruction.
In her 8 December 1938 column, ER criticized liberals, smug partisans, and patriots for celebrating incomplete victories. The speeches given the night before at a dinner for the Léon Blum colony for European refugees in Palestine had annoyed her profoundly. She supported the refugee sanctuary founded to honor France’s first socialist and Jewish prime minister. His popular front government collapsed after the left withdrew because he failed to support democratic Spain, and the right campaigned with the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” In the bitter context of that meeting, ER was dismayed by the unwarranted pride and complacency of the speakers:
“As I listened … I could not help thinking how much all human beings like to fool themselves…. [They] made us feel that … we were more virtuous and fortunate than any other people in the world. Of course, I concede this, and I feel for me it is true, for I have been free and fortunate all my life. While I listened, however, I could not help thinking of some of the letters which pass through my hands.
“Are you free if you cannot vote, if you cannot be sure that the same justice will be meted out to you as to your neighbor,… if you are barred from certain places and from certain opportunities?…
“Are you free when you can’t earn enough, no matter how hard you work, to feed and clothe and house your children properly? Are you free when your employer can turn you out of a company house and deny you work because you belong to a union?”
Her thoughts turned to refugees in this country, “of the little girl who wrote me not long ago: ‘Why do other children call me names and laugh at my talk? I just don’t live in this country very long yet.’ ‘’ ER concluded:
“There are lots and lots of things which make me wonder whether we ever look ourselves straight in the face and really mean what we say when we are busy patting ourselves on the back….”
With grit, determination, and a very high heart, ER helped launch America’s crusade for freedom in the fascist era. She was fortified every day by her new allies, her abiding partnership with FDR, love for the people in her life, and love of the world.
*Nicolson lunched with Litvinov on 22 August and asked for his views on the looming crisis. Litvinov replied that the “old pan-Slav feeling is dead, Russia has no sympathy for the semi-fascist systems established in the Balkans, and… is profoundly disillusioned with the western democracies.” If Britain and France defended the Czechs, “then Russia would help. But if the western powers abandon Czechoslovakia, then Russia will become isolationist.”
*The savage hurricane of 1938 blasted into the east coast without warning on 21 September in the middle of the afternoon. The New York Times headlined Czechoslovakia’s demise, and gave the forecast for the Northeast as overcast, a chance of rain, a mild September day. By three o’clock winds exceeded 100 miles per hour and the ocean rushed five miles from the shore in mighty waves on the East End of Long Island. Just east of Hick’s Little House, towns from Westhampton to Montauk were rendered rubble. In Westhampton, where 179 houses stood, 153 completely vanished. In Rhode Island, 380 people were dead. Up and down the coast 63,000 people were rendered homeless; 275 million trees were uprooted, including half of New Hampshire’s white pines and most of Vermont’s maples.
* During the 1940s, the International Red Cross deflected complaints about its neglect of Jewish needs, given the magnitude of the mounting tragedy, with the explanation that the Red Cross “could not interfere in the internal affairs of a belligerent nation.”
*Between 1933 and 1945, Canada admitted only five thousand refugees. Early in 1945 a senior Canadian official was asked during a press conference how many Jews would be admitted after the war. “None,” he answered, “is too many.”
* In addition to the conveners, Louise Charlton, the Durrs, Joe Gelder, and Lucy Randolph Mason, there were journalists and scholars; administration representatives, including Aubrey Williams and Mary McLeod Bethune; industrialists, lawyers, clergymen; socialists and communists, including Jane and Dolly Speed, who ran a Communist Party bookstore in Birmingham, and Rob Hall, party secretary for Alabama; AYC activist James Jackson, there as Gunnar Myrdal’s assistant; politicians, including Governor Bibb Graves and Florida senator Claude Pepper; historians C. Vann Woodward, Horace Mann Bond, and Arthur Raper; sociologist Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University; Tuskegee University president F. D. Patterson; representatives of the National Urban League and the NAACP; John Davis of the National Negro Congress; Myles Horton and James Dombrowski, who ran the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, which ER supported and which trained union organizers; H. L. Mitchell and representatives of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union; mine workers, steelworkers, and grassroots activists.