When the Nazis came to power in Germany, some Jews began to look for a way out, despite their long ties to the country. In fact, Nazi policy was focused on trying to rid Germany of Jews. The problem was finding a place for Jews to go. In the United States, strict immigration quotas severely limited the number of Jews that were allowed into the country. Moreover, a powerful lobby of isolationists and Antisemites inside and outside the State Department made sure that even those quotas were often not met. While sympathetic to the plight of refugees, Eleanor found herself caught between fighting for her views and avoiding open criticism of her husband’s policies. Behind the scenes, Eleanor worked with advocates on creating legislation aimed at extending the stay of refugees and providing visas to others.
Writing in her My Day column in January 1939, Eleanor tried to change the way people thought about the refugee crisis:
What a curious thing it is when a great musician like Mischa Elman146 offers the proceeds from a concert trip throughout the country to the fund for refugees, that he has to be guarded on the way to and from his first concert. What has happened to us in this country? If we study our own history we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.
It may be that some of these very refugees may make discoveries which will bring us increased employment. Many of them represent the best brains of the countries from which they come. They are not all of one race or religion, and the wherewithal to keep them alive and get them started is being provided by such generous spirits as Mischa Elman. Must his wife and children tremble for his safety because of this gesture? He is giving concerts for the Committee for Non-Sectarian Refugee Aid. Wherever he goes, I hope he will be enthusiastically supported, not only because people enjoy his music, but because they admire the extraordinary generosity which he is showing.147
After the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, war broke out across Europe. Even more refugees began to seek relief in the United States. In May of 1939, the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 refugees who had been denied permission to land in Cuba despite having visas, sailed north to the east coast of the United States. The State Department refused to make an exception for the passengers, who were sent back across the Atlantic to Europe. The story of the St. Louis so troubled Eleanor that during the summer of 1940, when another ship filled with refugees, the SS Quanza, sailed along the coast, Eleanor directly intervened, allowing the passengers to disembark. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long was furious. In a memorandum issued to State Department employees that same year, Long stated his intentions to keep immigrants out of the United States by bureaucratic means.148
As the war continued, mobile death squads targeted some Jewish civilians, others were transported to ghettos and starved to death, and still others were sent to a growing system of concentration and death camps in eastern Europe. In her August 13, 1943, My Day column, responding to reports asserting that Germany had already killed over a million Jewish women, children, and men, Eleanor urged the public to shed their prejudice.
Some people think of the Jewish people as a race. Others think of them purely as a religious group. But in Europe the hardships and persecution which they have had to endure for the past few years, have tended to bring them together in a group which identifies itself with every similar group, regardless [of] whether the tie is religious or racial. . . .
[T]hey have suffered in Europe as has no other group. The percentage killed among them in the past few years far exceeds the losses among any of the United Nations [Allies] in the battles which have been fought throughout the war.
Many of them, for generations, considered Germany, Poland, Romania, and France, their country and permanent home. This same thing might happen to any other group, if enough people ganged up against it and decided on persecution. It seems to me that it is the part of common sense for the world as a whole to protest in its own interest against wholesale persecution, because none of us by ourselves would be strong enough to stand against a big enough group which decided to treat us in the same way….
It means the right of survival of human beings, and their right to grow and improve. . . .
I do not know what we can do to save the Jews in Europe, and to find them homes, but I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.149
1 Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4.
2 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 18.
3 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2006), 651–52.
5 Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (column), August 8, 1945. The full text of Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Day columns can be found at the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project website, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/.
7 See, for example, the letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to Harry S. Truman, August 12, 1959, Post-Presidential Files, Harry S. Truman Papers, in the Truman Library, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/eleanor/eleanordoctemplate.php?documentid=hst19590812&pagenumber=1 (accessed December 29, 2008); Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 145.
8 Memorandum of press conference held by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt (January 3, 1946); Allida M. Black, ed., The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers (New York: Thomson Gale, 2007), 184; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: Norton, 1972), 29.
9 Allida M. Black, private communication (August 11, 2009). Her work there introduced her to the language of international treaties and law, as well as to the ideas of many peace activists and scholars. The prize itself, $50,000 (one million dollars or more today), was enormous and generated wide publicity. Isolationists in the House, however, were livid and petitioned successfully for a Senate investigation into the “un-American” activities and “communistic internationalism” of Eleanor, Bok, and their allies. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1: 1884–1933 (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 342–45.
10 Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 3.
14 Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Seven People Who Shaped My Life,” Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/q-and-a/q13-seven-influences.cfm (accessed August 13, 2009), originally published in Look 15 (1951), 54–56, 48. We thank Allida M. Black for this and many other valuable references.
15 The Roosevelts were made up of two principal clans: the Oyster Bay line, primarily affiliated with the Republican Party (Eleanor’s father belonged to that line), and the Hyde Park line, affiliated with the Democratic Party (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor’s future husband, was born into that line). Eleanor Roosevelt’s father, Elliott, for example, was the youngest brother of Theodore Roosevelt, who served as president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. On Eleanor’s mother’s side, the Hall family, she was a descendent of Robert R. Livingston, who administered the oath of office to President George Washington.
16 Eleanor loved and admired her father. She imagined that his return would provide her with the steady and reassuring presence she needed to shed her awkwardness. But Anna’s death destroyed what little willpower Elliott possessed.
17 Roosevelt, “The Seven People Who Shaped My Life.”
18 Allida M. Black, “Eleanor Roosevelt: A Lifetime of Activism,” in Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United States Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, 2008), http://www.usmission.ch/graphics/2008/ERooseveltBook.pdf (accessed September 9, 2009).
19 Roosevelt, Autobiography, 24.
20 Roosevelt, “The Seven People Who Shaped My Life.”
21 Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 47. We strongly disagree with Smith’s assessment that Eleanor was a political liability to President Roosevelt and was a secondary figure among the women in his life.
22 Roosevelt, Autobiography, 12. Theodore Roosevelt was the father of Theodore Roosevelt the president.
23 Roosevelt, Autobiography, 41.
28 Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 500.
29 Black, “Lifetime of Activism,” 23. See also “The League of Nations,” Eleanor Roosevelt Historic Site website, http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/league-of-nations.htm (accessed July 13, 2009).
30 “World Court,” Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site website, http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/world-court.htm (accessed August 17, 2009).
31 Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 98.
32 Allida M. Black, private communication (August 11, 2009); Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 283–285.
33 Allida M. Black, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: Biographical Essay, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/abouteleanor/erbiography.cfm#yr1933 (accessed September 1, 2009).
34 Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 267–68.
35 Joseph Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964), 141.
36 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 304.
38 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, vol. 1, 338.
39 Michelle Mart, “Eleanor Roosevelt, Liberalism, and Israel,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24 (2006): 61. We thank Daniel Cohen for this and many other references.
40 Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 11.
41 Red Book Magazine 50 (April 1928): 78–79, 141–42.
45 Smith, FDR, 236. Eleanor made an average of $25,000 during this period (over $300,000 in today’s terms), which roughly equals the governor’s salary FDR received.
46 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 277.
47 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 372.
49 Black, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: Biographical Essay.
50 Lorena A. Hickok, Reluctant First Lady: An Intimate Story of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Early Public Life (New York: Dodd-Mead, 1962), 55, available on the Internet Archive website, http://www.archive.org/stream/reluctantfirstla012830mbp/reluctantfirstla012830mbp_djvu.txt (accessed September 23, 2009).
52 Eleanor Roosevelt, “I Want You to Write to Me,” Woman’s Home Companion, August 1933, 4, cited in Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters to Eleanor Roosevelt through Depression and War, ed. Cathy D. Knepper (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), xiv.
53 Eleanor’s spirited response appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on August 14, 1935. It can be found on the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project website, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/articles/indefenseofcuriosity.cfm (accessed August 19, 2009).
54 Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project website.
56 Black, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: Biographical Essay.
58 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 382.
59 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 4.
60 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 382.
61 Allida M. Black, ed., What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1995), 7.
62 Hickok, like several other friends of the Roosevelts, actually lived in the White House. When her relationship with Eleanor grew closer, Hickok resigned from her job, fearing that her reports would lose credibility.
63 Lorena Alice Hickok, introduction to My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936–1962, ed. David Emblidge (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), xiv.
64 Eleanor Roosevelt: Close to Home, DVD, directed and distributed by Anne Makepeace (Hyde Park, 2005).
65 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 130–31.
66 Ibid. Cook’s references to original documents can be found in these pages.
67 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 382.
68 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Subsistence Farmstead” (1934), in What I Hope to Leave Behind, 361–62.
69 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 133.
70 Wesley Stout, “The New Homesteaders,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 4, 1934. In 1934, Wesley Stout of The Saturday Evening Post described the failures of Arthurdale and called the experiment a “direct venture in planned economy.” Phrases such as “planned economy” and “social engineering” were derogatory terms routinely used by conservatives to attack New Deal polices.
71 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Helping Them to Help Themselves,” in What I Hope to Leave Behind, 370.
72 Roosevelt, “Helping Them to Help Themselves,” 370.
73 Second Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 20, 1937, The Avalon Project, Yale University Law School website, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos2.asp (accessed November 2, 2009).
75 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 390.
76 Ibid. Cf. Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, vol. 2, 351.
77 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 152.
78 T. H. Watkins, The Great Depression (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1995), 223–24.
80 Watkins, The Great Depression, 223.
83 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 523.
84 “Eleanor Roosevelt and Civil Rights,” Eleanor Roosevelt National Historical Site website, http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/teach-er-vk/lesson-plans/notes-er-and-civil-rights.htm (accessed February 4, 2009).
85 “Bethune, Mary McLeod,” in The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, eds. Maurine H. Beasley et al. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 47.
86 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 160; “Bethune, Mary McLeod,” Roosevelt Encyclopedia, 50.
87 Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 99.
89 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 525.
90 “Eleanor Roosevelt Resigns from the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Eleanor Roosevelt’s letter of resignation, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum website, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/tmirhfee.html (accessed September 24, 2009).
92 “Mrs. Roosevelt Indicates She Has Resigned From D.A.R. Over Refusal of Hall to Negro,” New York Times, February 27, 1939.
93 Alex Ross, “Voice of the Century: Celebrating Marian Anderson,” New Yorker, April 13, 2009, 78, 79.
94 Roosevelt, Autobiography, 193.
96 Allida M. Black, “Introduction,” What I Hope to Leave Behind, xxi.
97 Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Moral Basis of Democracy,” What I Hope to Leave Behind, 80.
99 Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 117.
100 Facing History and Ourselves, Holocaust and Human Behavior (Brookline: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 1994), 259.
101 Facing History and Ourselves, Holocaust and Human Behavior, 259.
102 Though Jews represented 3 percent of the American population, 15 percent of those who worked in the Roosevelt administration were Jewish. This remarkable number attests to the president’s openness. But even as Jews like Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., entered the highest ranks, they were not allowed into the “old lines” of government such as the Department of State. This had devastating consequences.
103 Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 102.
104 Ibid., and Allida M. Black, personal communication, August 11, 2009.
105 Mart, “Eleanor Roosevelt, Liberalism, and Israel.”
106 Later in life, when both were single, Baruch proposed marriage to Eleanor. See “Jews,” Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, 282.
107 Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 570.
108 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Keepers of Democracy,” originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review 15 (Jan. 1939): 1–5, available at Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, http://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/articles/keepersofdemocracy.cfm (accessed September 8, 2009).
109 Eleanor bluntly stated that
[i]f you are in the South, someone tells you solemnly that all the members of the Committee of Industrial Organization are Communists, or that the Negroes are all Communists. This last statement derives from the fact that, being for the most part unskilled labor, Negroes are more apt to be organized by the Committee for Industrial Organization. In another part of the country someone tells you solemnly that the schools of the country 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. (Eleanor Roosevelt, “Keepers of Democracy.”)
110 Mischa Elman was a legendary Jewish violinist who immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine, and became a citizen in 1923.
111 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 575.
113 “My Dear Justine, My Dear Eleanor,” American Jewish Historical Society website, http://www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=295 (accessed September 9, 2009).
115 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 636.
117 David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). In this pioneering work, Wyman charted American failure to respond to the refugee crisis in Europe between 1938 and 1941. He attributed it to deep-seated anti-immigrant and antisemitic attitudes in the country in general, and in the State Department in particular.
118 Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 175–76.
119 Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1985), 584.
120 Memo from Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to State Department officials dated June 26, 1940, PBS, American Experience website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/filmmore/reference/primary/barmemo.html (accessed January 22, 2009).
121 Eleanor’s quote and the information in this paragraph were taken from a movie script on the Sharps, date of release yet to be determined. We thank Artemis Joukowsky, III, for sharing the script with us.
123 Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 174.
124 “Establishment of the War Refugee Board,” PBS website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX102.html (accessed September 9, 2009).
125 Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 176.
128 My Day, December 16, 1941.
129 Eleanor Roosevelt, “A Challenge to American Sportsmanship” (October 16, 1943), in Courage in a Dangerous World: The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt, ed. Allida M. Black (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 141–42.
130 “Japanese American Internment,” Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, 279, originally cited in Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975), 113.
133 Eleanor Roosevelt, “To Undo a Mistake is Always Harder Than Not to Create One Originally,” in J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord, and R. Lord, “Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites,” Anthropology 74 (2000), available at the National Park Service website, http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/anthropology74/index.htm (accessed September 23, 2009).
134 The term “Four Hundred” loosely described the most powerful people in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. They belonged to a selective circle defined by aristocratic aspirations and etiquette, by wealth, and by genealogy (many of them were distantly related to the first settlers who arrived in America in the seventeenth century).
135 Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Seven People Who Shaped My Life”; The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project website.
136 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 390.
137 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do,” Red Book Magazine 50 (April 1928): 78–79, 141–42, available at Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/articles/womenmustlearn.cfm (accessed October 8, 2009).
138 Eleanor Roosevelt, “The National Conference on the Education of Negroes” (address delivered at the National Conference on Fundamental Problems in the Education of Negroes, Washington, DC, May 11, 1934), reprinted in What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt, 142.
139 Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Minorities Question,” as quoted in What I Hope to Leave Behind, 167–69.
140 Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 525.
141 “Eleanor Roosevelt Resigns from the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum website.
142 “Marian Anderson,” New York Times, March 1, 1939.
143 Allan Keiler, Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 188–89, 202.
144 New York Times, March 19, 1939.
145 “Throng Honors Marian Anderson in Concert at Lincoln Memorial,” New York Times, April 10, 1939.
146 Mischa Elman was a legendary Ukraine-born Jewish violinist who immigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1923.
148 For information about the memo from Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to State Department officials, dated June 26, 1940, see PBS, American Experience website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/filmmore/reference/primary/barmemo.html.