“A date which will live in infamy.” That’s how Franklin described December 7, 1941, the day Japan launched a devastating air attack on U.S. naval ships and military facilities at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He spoke these words the following day as he asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war. Within an hour of his speech, Congress issued that declaration. Four days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.
For Americans, World War II had officially begun.
Isolationism was now forgotten, and men all over the country went to their local recruitment offices to enlist. In the first years of the war, black men—volunteers and those who were drafted—were usually assigned to service units that helped supply and maintain troops on the front lines. As the war dragged on, the government needed men, black and white, to take the place of fallen infantrymen, pilots, and officers. Still, throughout the war, the problem of segregation remained.
From the first moments of battle, servicemen of color distinguished themselves. The argument that black men in the navy were only capable of being messmen was turned on its head when one of the heroes of Pearl Harbor was a black sailor, Dorie Miller. Miller carried his captain through raging flames to safety, and then without weapons training, picked up a machine gun and began firing at Japanese planes. At first, the navy only wanted to give him a commendation for his actions, but on May 11, 1942, Franklin approved the Navy Cross for Miller, that service’s third-highest award at the time.
World War II brought almost unbelievable stresses for Franklin and Eleanor. On a personal level, there was concern about their four sons serving in the armed forces. Elliott in the Army Air Corps, James in the Marine Corps, and Franklin Jr. and John in the navy. Eleanor said, “I imagine every mother felt as I did when I said goodbye to the children during the war. I had a feeling that I might be saying goodbye for the last time.”
In the fall of 1941, Sara died at age eighty-seven. Franklin keenly felt the loss of the mother who adored him. Eleanor was sympathetic, but her feelings about Sara remained unresolved. “I kept being appalled at myself because I couldn’t feel any real grief,” Eleanor told her daughter, Anna, and that seemed “terrible” after their long relationship.
Just a few weeks later, Eleanor had the emotional task of sitting by the bedside of her dying brother, Hall, who had battled alcoholism for decades. “My idea of hell, if I believed in it, would be to . . . watch someone breathing hard, struggling for words . . . and thinking this was once the little boy I played with and scolded. He could have been so much and this is what he is . . . in spite of everything, I’ve loved Hall . . .”
Meanwhile, the fate of the world was on Franklin’s shoulders. There was no guarantee that the United States and its allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, would win the war.
Instead of the war drawing the president and the First Lady closer together, it pulled them apart. Franklin was, naturally, consumed with war plans. Eleanor didn’t know how to make herself useful in this new situation. Sometimes, she vehemently opposed his decisions.
In February 1942, Franklin signed an executive order that effectively allowed the internment of Americans of Japanese descent. Even though they had done nothing wrong, because they looked the same as America’s enemies, they were considered a danger. More than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans would eventually be moved from their homes, lose their property, and be relocated in camps.
Japanese Americans waiting to be taken to an internment camp in Salinas, California
Eleanor disagreed with internment, wrote against it, and visited a Japanese camp to observe the conditions in 1943. She made a short speech there that noted while she could understand “the bitterness” of those who had lost loved ones to the Japanese enemy, she felt that the issues of Japanese Americans must be looked at “objectively . . . for the honor of our country.” For the First Lady, that meant emptying the camps as soon as possible. Though some camp residents began to leave at the end of that year, the camps were not fully closed until 1946.
There was also disagreement with the president on the subject of refugees. She had been interested since the late 1930s in helping Jewish refugees trying to escape Hitler’s Germany find a home in the United States. But until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, public opinion remained isolationist and unwelcoming of refugees. The United States took in about one hundred thousand refugees from 1933 to 1940. This was a larger number than any other country, but only a small percentage of those trying to flee.
Eleanor focused her efforts on bringing Jewish children to the United States from Europe. Franklin didn’t spend much time on the problem of European Jews specifically, maintaining the best way to save the Jews was to win the war. Nevertheless, by 1943 both Roosevelts knew what much of the public did not: The Jews were not just being taken to labor camps as Nazi propaganda claimed. They were being systematically murdered.
Eleanor was greatly disturbed by Franklin’s tightening of immigration laws, which his administration said reduced the chance of Nazi spies entering the country. Of course, it also reduced the number of frantic refugees. In 1941, Eleanor said to a friend, “One of the things that troubles me is that when people are in trouble, whether it’s the dust bowl or the miners . . . the first people who come forward and try to help are the Jews. Now in these terrible days . . . why they don’t they come [to help the Jewish people]?”
Eleanor saw for herself the destruction that Nazi bombs had caused London when she visited in 1942.
Feeling her presence at home was not helpful to her husband, Eleanor spent time traveling during the war years. She made a three-week goodwill trip to England in 1942, winning friends among the British people.
During a trip to England in 1942, Eleanor met with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Eleanor visited the troops—especially those who were wounded—bringing them comfort and the sincere thanks of the president for their sacrifices.
In 1943 she took a controversial trip to the Pacific theater of war, where the fighting was especially intense. The admirals and generals thought her trip would be a nuisance, but her visits with the service people in the field and those injured in hospitals brought comfort and a bit of home to them—and admiration for her. One soldier who heard her speak said, “We liked this speech . . . it was good to hear a kind lady saying nice things.” Even Admiral William Halsey, one of her most vocal critics, later admitted, “She did more good than any other person or group of civilians, who passed through my area.”
Eleanor flew more than 23,000 miles in the army transport plane to places throughout the South Pacific, from New Zealand to Fiji to Australia.
Yet even with her nonstop travels, the “Negro” question, as it was called then, was never long out of Eleanor’s mind. In the United States, there was continued racial unrest during the war years. There were still lynchings, prejudice in hiring and employment, and segregation throughout American society. Eleanor continued to work alongside African American leaders in their fight for civil rights.
One issue that caught her attention occurred in Detroit, Michigan. The Sojourner Truth housing project was built for blacks working in defense industries, but white workers demanded the housing for themselves. At the request of civil rights leaders, Eleanor lobbied her husband, and eventually—after violent racial encounters—the project was given to its intended residents. Later in 1943, more racial rioting broke out in Detroit, and some put the blame directly on the First Lady, accusing her of trying too hard to mix the races and the “coddling of Negroes.” Used to attacks, Eleanor replied, “I suppose when one is being forced to realize that an unwelcome change is coming, one must blame it on someone or something.”
Letters continued to flood the White House accusing the First Lady of being a troublemaker who stirred the pot of racial division. Most of the criticism came from whites, but African Americans also didn’t like the way she sometimes counseled restraint or patience. One historian later said she could, at times, “sound patronizing.” The president, as usual, was content to let Eleanor take much of the heat on the issue of civil rights so he could continue running the war and the country.
One of the knottiest racial problems concerned the armed services in the South, where transportation and use of base facilities was a big issue for black military personnel. These service people now included African American women. In 1942, Congress approved the creation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. These women served as stenographers, postal clerks, and truck drivers, as well as in other noncombat roles. African American women served in segregated units. Two of the training centers for the WAACs were in the South, one in Georgia, another in Louisiana.
Since buses and trains in the South were segregated, black service people were often at the back of the line when it came to getting tickets. If they didn’t return to their bases on time, they were considered AWOL—away without official leave—and penalized.
In other cases, blacks were at stations where they couldn’t buy food because there were no segregated facilities and they weren’t allowed to eat with whites. In one instance, German prisoners of war were served in a station lunchroom because they were white, while black Americans had to eat in the kitchen! It’s no wonder the soldiers asked themselves what kind of democracy they were fighting for. All this was particularly shocking for African Americans who had been raised in the North and hadn’t had to live under stringent Jim Crow laws.
Eleanor fought hard to make sure the War Department looked at the busing situation. She noted, “These colored boys lie side by side in the hospitals . . . with the white boys and somehow it is hard for me to believe that they should not be treated on an equal basis.”
At last, the War Department agreed with her. On July 8, 1944, they issued a directive stating all transportation owned and operated by the government would be available to all military personnel regardless of race and regardless of local customs. This did not cover private transportation companies, but it was a big first step.
In 1944, further progress was made in desegregating the navy. A new secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, had ambitious plans for integration. Although by now the navy had allowed blacks to serve as more than messmen, these new jobs did not, as a rule, place them on ships. Instead, black sailors were often placed at docks, moving equipment and loading ships.
A tragedy occurred in Port Chicago, California, in July of 1944, as six hundred men, mostly black, were loading ammunition and bombs onto ships. A giant explosion destroyed the pier and killed more than two hundred black sailors and injured hundreds more. This event spurred Secretary of the Navy Forrestal to move even more quickly on with his plans. His directive on “Negro Naval Personnel” stated that no inherent differences existed between blacks and whites and that each member of the navy would be trained according to his abilities and promoted on the basis of his performance.
Eleanor was pleased with the forward motion, but there was one branch of the service that had her personal attention: the first unit of black combat pilots, the Ninety-Ninth Pursuit Squadron. Trained in Tuskegee, Alabama, near the Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington, they were also known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
The program had been initiated in 1941 after a black pilot who had been denied a place in the Army Air Corps won a legal battle, and a combat-training program for blacks was court ordered. Though obligated to train black pilots, there was nothing that said the Army Air Corps had to use them. So by 1942, not one of the thousand pilots that had been trained had seen active service.
The First Lady was well aware of this situation—demoralizing to the men involved, and wasteful when it came to helping the war effort. She wrote several times to the secretary of war, but still the airmen sat idle. Eleanor wanted to show her concern personally and struck up correspondences with both faculty and random airmen. She was particularly taken with one of the young fliers, Cecil Peterson, and asked him to keep her informed about how things were going. They wrote back and forth for three years. Cecil told her, “Your letters and gifts are inspiring and have prompted me to be a better soldier.” He also asked her to tell the president, “there’s a private down here rooting for him.”
As a more public display of support, Eleanor went flying with Charles A. Anderson, a Tuskegee Airman, in Alabama and insisted a photograph be taken. The news got national coverage, and the First Lady used the picture and reporting to convince the president to activate the Tuskegee Airmen’s unit.
Finally, in 1943, the Tuskegee Airmen were sent overseas to fight in both North Africa and Europe. They performed brilliantly. In over fifteen hundred missions, they shot down more than two hundred enemy aircraft without losing any of their own planes to enemy fire. As a group, the Tuskegee Airmen won over one hundred Distinguished Flying Cross medals.
A turning point in World War II came on June 6, 1944. The Allied forces, one hundred fifty thousand strong, landed on the beaches of Normandy, France, and went on to liberate Europe.
If running for a third term was unprecedented, running for a fourth presidential term was almost unthinkable. Franklin, however, was determined to see the war to a successful conclusion as president. On November 7, with Harry S. Truman as his running mate, he won once more.
But Franklin was ailing. Polio—and its long-term effects on his body—was just one of his medical issues. He suffered from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and congestive heart failure, all exacerbated by his chain-smoking and his stress. Just a few months after his inauguration, he died at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. He did not live to see the Allies’ victory over Germany only a month later in May 1945. In August, victory over Japan was achieved after the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Though Franklin had been suffering with many ailments, all of which contributed to his worsening health, he died from a cerebral hemorrhage while having his portrait painted. Eleanor was at a speaking engagement when she was told to return to the White House immediately. “I did not even ask why,” she later remembered. “In my heart I knew . . .” Anna and her husband, John Boettiger, along with presidential aide Steve Early gave her the news. As for the four Roosevelt sons, they were all on active duty in war zones. She cabled them with the news. “He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you all, and all our love.”
Eleanor, along with Steve Early and the president’s personal physician, flew to Warm Springs to escort the body home by train. As Franklin’s coffin left Warm Springs, the president’s friend Graham Jackson, an African American musician, took out his accordion and played the mournful spiritual “Goin’ Home.”
As the train rolled along the tracks back to Washington, Eleanor looked out the window and was gratified to see people, black and white, waving and holding signs of sympathy. The comfort of those signs was marred by the news offered by one gossipy Roosevelt cousin who had been present when the president died. Franklin had not been alone, she informed Eleanor. At his side was his old love, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.
This information blindsided Eleanor. Franklin’s long-ago promise to her, that he would never again see Lucy, had been broken. Now she was learning this news at a moment of intense grief. She was further upset to find out her daughter, Anna, had facilitated a number of visits between him and Lucy at the White House over the years at her father’s request.
Eleanor didn’t have too much time to dwell on this betrayal, though she did confront Anna when she returned with the president’s body to the White House. Her daughter tried to make her understand that she had been caught between two parents, but Anna worried her strong bond with Eleanor was now severely strained.
The next days were hectic. Eleanor had to plan the funeral and move out of the White House so the new president and his family could move in. When now-president Truman asked Eleanor if there was anything he could do for her, she replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”
Franklin’s funeral, with two hundred friends and relatives in attendance, took place in the East Room of the White House. His body, accompanied by Eleanor, was then taken by train to be buried in the garden of his beloved Hyde Park estate. Along the route, just as on the journey from Georgia to Washington, Americans of all colors, religions, and creeds stood alongside the tracks, crying and holding American flags. At his burial, Eleanor asked that the last words he had written in a speech that he never gave be included: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
On April 20, 1945, Eleanor left the White House. Now a widow, no longer the First Lady, when she arrived at her apartment in New York City, she was startled to see a group of reporters at her door.
Eleanor shooed them away. “The story is over.”
