Eleanor (4 page)

Frances Perkins had confirmed her fears in regard to Hannegan’s reluctance to push women for jobs, and other women who had served the government under Roosevelt wrote nostalgically of the support Mrs. Roosevelt had always given them: “Yes, you
are
missed.”
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“I have no idea whether you agree with me or not,” her letter to President Truman, accompanying the copy of her letter to Hannegan, said, “but all I can do is send you the results of my observations and my conversations with people in the last few days.” A
few days later the president issued a public statement in favor of the FEPC. “President Truman did a courageous and wise thing when he came out in favor of the FEPC Bill,” she wrote in her column. And Truman evidently spoke with Hannegan, as she learned from Doris Byrne, the head of the women’s division of the New York State Democratic party. Although Hannegan was still afraid of Mrs. Roosevelt, Miss Byrne reported, she was the only woman in politics whom he took seriously, and the president thought so highly of her that Hannegan was now trying to mend his ways.
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Mrs. Roosevelt reciprocated the president’s feelings. “I think President Truman is doing extremely well,” she wrote her son James after her visit to Washington. “I also think that Mr. Stettinius brought the San Francisco Conference to a very successful conclusion. I suppose now Jimmy Byrnes will become Secretary of State and Mr. Stettinius will go to London and Heaven knows what will happen to Winant.”
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While she was in Washington (perhaps Truman mentioned the subject to her) she wrote a column about Earl Browder’s demotion by the Communists for “revisionism.” Her column was clearly intended to be read in Moscow. Browder, in the interests of Big Three cooperation, had been helpful to Roosevelt in preserving domestic unity. Eleanor knew of that helpfulness because Browder’s messages to the president had been routed through her. Suddenly, in May, Jacques Duclos, a leader of the French Communists, acting, it was assumed, on directives from Moscow, wrote an article criticizing Browder’s collaborationist policies, calling instead for a Marxist revolutionary program. Within a few weeks the American Communists had repudiated Browder, declared U.S. “imperialism” again to be the enemy, and portrayed Browder’s collaboration with the New Deal as collaboration with capitalism.

The actions of the American Communists, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in a column datelined Washington,

have added fire to the general fear of Communism as an international force. Earl Browder has been reprimanded for an
attitude which many of us believed had represented the attitude of the Soviet government. . . .The American Communists had been cooperative where they could be, but now, as we understand it, they are out to force communism on our democracy. That we will not tolerate. . . .The sooner we clear up authoritatively the whole situation of Communists outside of the Soviet Union, the better chance we will have for peace in the future. The Russian people should know this, and so should the people of the United States.
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In July, Sidney Hillman invited her to head the National Citizens Political Action Committee, the mainstay of which was the CIO. Organized nationally, as it was, it could sway political parties—“and they need to be swayed,” she conceded. But she also knew that NCPAC was infiltrated with left-wingers. “The meeting with NCPAC last night left me torn in my mind. I don’t know how useful I will be to them. I have an aversion to take on responsibility except individually and this is a big one. . . .” A week later she turned Hillman down:

I have decided that if I became chairman instead of being helpful with the Democratic Party it would alienate the Democratic Party and I think it important to keep the Democratic Party close to both the CIO-PAC and the NCPAC.

For the present she intended to confine herself to writing and radio work. Also, she might be doing “a considerable amount of traveling,” which was an added reason, she told Hillman, why she did not want to be tied down by administrative responsibilities.
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The traveling related to the long-hoped-for trip to the Soviet Union. After Franklin’s death, as Big Three unity began to founder, she became more eager than ever to see this vast, mysterious, troublesome country with her own eyes. Ed Flynn brought back word from Russia, which he had visited after Yalta on assignment from Roosevelt, of how much the Russians had hoped she and the
president would visit their country. He felt she should go on her own. He also reported that he had “told His Holiness the Church should change their tactics and stop attacking the Soviets.” George Carlin, the head of United Features Syndicate, suggested that she go as a correspondent. She liked that idea and thought she would go in March, 1946. But Flynn urged her to go immediately as did Harry Hopkins, who had returned from his mission to Moscow for Truman deeply troubled by the growing division between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Russians would let her see “everything you wanted to see everywhere in the country,” Hopkins assured her. She wanted to go “purely as a correspondent” for the syndicate “and not as Franklin’s widow,” she wrote back a little unrealistically, and she “would not want to do a lot of parties, etc. except of course, for calling on Marshal Stalin.” She should go as a correspondent, Harry Hopkins agreed, “although, of course, the Russian Government and the Russian people would receive you as the widow of the President and there is just no way out of that one.”
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She consulted Mr. Truman:

I haven’t spoken to the Syndicate about going at any immediate time because I wanted first to make sure that it would meet with your approval to have me go to Russia, either now or in the spring.

I would not want in any way to complicate anything that you may be doing. . . .
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It is not clear when Truman, who was about to leave for Potsdam, replied to her, but judging by subsequent letters, when he did, he counseled her to postpone her visit until the spring of 1946.

She still was looking for a job to do, groping for the assignment that would bring all her interests into a single focus. She had been deeply conscious during her White House years of how her energies had been scattered among a thousand enterprises. After Franklin’s fourth-term election, Esther Lape had implored her to think over carefully the best ways to make use of the powers and opportunities
that were so peculiarly hers. That involved a “selection and decision,” Esther had cautioned her.
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Now she was determined to do just that, and she was going to do the selecting. When two longtime friends, Maj. Henry S. Hooker and John Golden, the theatrical producer, proposed to appoint themselves a committee to pass on the jobs suitable for her, she interrupted them, Tommy looking aghast, and, scarcely able to suppress her laughter, said, “I love both of you dearly. But you can’t run my life.”
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She agreed, at the request of Mrs. David M. Levy, with whom she had worked closely in the International Student Service, to join the board of the newly formed Citizens Committee for Children. In addition, she spent more time helping the Wiltwyck School for delinquent children. When the Union for Democratic Action, spearheading the campaign for the full employment bill, asked her to write Truman, she did so.
‡
She became the honorary president of committees for Yugoslavian and Greek relief. She continued her work with Walter White and the NAACP. “When I warn my friends,” she wrote on her sixty-first birthday,

that I am going to sit by the fire with a little lace cap on my head and a shawl about my shoulders and knit baby things for the newest generation, they look at me with some incredulity.
The day will come, however, and when it does I think it will be rather pleasant.

She was more realistic when S. J. Woolf, who had interviewed and sketched her regularly since the twenties, came to see her. He recalled that ex-President Theodore Roosevelt had once said to him that many people did not have to worry about him in retirement. “I can always find something to keep me busy.” Mrs. Roosevelt laughed and answered, “I suppose that is true of all the Roosevelts. They can always keep busy.”
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What she really wanted to do was to make some contribution to what had been Franklin’s main wartime objective—the establishment of machinery that would help ensure a lasting peace. As long ago as 1939 she had read Clarence Streit’s
Union Now
and had had the author dine at the White House in order to explain his plan to Franklin. She had kept Franklin informed of the work of Clark Eichelberger’s Commission to Study the Organization of Peace. All through the war she had argued for a “United Nations” rather than an Anglo-American approach to peacekeeping. In July, when the UN Charter was before the Senate, she had pleaded for immediate ratification, saying her husband thought it most important to write the Charter and have it accepted while the exigencies of winning the war still kept the Allies together.
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The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August and the revelation of the awesome force that had been let loose in the world underscored the indispensability of the United Nations. That had been her reaction when, in July, 1943, she had fortuitously learned one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war from a young nuclear physicist working on the project. “He was convincing and rather frightening and we must have peace in the future.”
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Although Mrs. Roosevelt did not question the decision to drop the bomb—indeed, welcomed the news of the first bomb as meaning the war must come to an end more speedily and bring the men in the services home sooner—she immediately lent her
support to the remarkable movement that developed among the atomic scientists to educate the public so they might see that there could be no national monopoly of the bomb and that U.S. security, therefore, would require international control under adequate safeguards. She saw two of their representatives, Harrison Brown and Eugene Wigner, and, according to them, was “very nice” and offered to help them with introductions in Washington. Their visit was reflected in her column. She was disturbed, she wrote, by the talk in the press about keeping the secret of the bomb. The sovereignty the United States would have to renounce to achieve international control would be a small price to pay for the avoidance of a nuclear arms race. In a transatlantic interview with Dr. Lise Meitner, the shy German refugee who had first grasped the significance of nuclear fission, both women said that the bomb posed a challenge to mankind to ensure that this awesome force was used in the future “for the good of all mankind and not for destructive purposes,” and that this would require international control.
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The United Nations, regardless of its imperfections, now seemed more important than ever. Mrs. Roosevelt considered it her husband’s most significant legacy to the world and wanted his name to be associated with it. She enlisted the help of Truman and Hopkins to get the United Nations to consider the possibility of using Hyde Park as the permanent site of the new organization. She even thought that she, too, might be of help in carrying forward her husband’s work.
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Truman yielded to no one in his admiration of Mrs. Roosevelt, whom he still addressed as “First Lady,” just as he still thought of Roosevelt as “
the
President.” There were two people, Truman had told James Byrnes sometime in November, that he had to have on his political team—Henry Wallace, because of his influence with labor, and Mrs. Roosevelt, because of her influence with the Negro voter. He could “take care of Henry” but wanted Byrnes to find an appointment for Mrs. Roosevelt in the field of foreign affairs. “The following week,” Byrnes said, “in recommending a list of delegates for the first meeting of the United Nations Assembly in London, I
placed Mrs. Roosevelt’s name at the top of the list, expressing the belief that because of her husband’s deep interest in the success of the UN she might accept. Truman telephoned to her immediately, while I was still in his office, and she did agree to serve.”

Franklin Jr. was at her Washington Square apartment when the president telephoned her in early December. He heard his mother protest she had no experience in foreign affairs; she did not know parliamentary procedure; she could not possibly do it. Truman refused to be put off, she told Franklin Jr. when she came back to the luncheon table.
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“You have to do it,” her son urged. Tommy agreed, as did her other children and the close friends to whom she mentioned the president’s call. She decided finally that she had a duty to accept. Mr. Truman was wise, she said, in thinking that her presence in London, because of her connection with FDR, would remind delegates of his hopes for the new organization and would help to keep the Assembly’s sights high.

Truman asked Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley to sound out his colleagues for their reaction to the appointment. A few days later, her nomination was approved with only one dissenting vote cast by Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, who noted that he had been severely critical of her statements on the American Negro.

“She has convictions and does not hesitate to fight for them,” wrote Scripps-Howard columnist Thomas L. Stokes. “The New Deal era was richer for her influence in it. That influence was far greater than appeared publicly.” Other women could represent American women, but this was a good appointment because “she, better than perhaps any other person, can represent the little people of this country, indeed of the world.”
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In her own response to the appointment she spoke of it as an honor and responsibility that had come to her “largely because my husband laid the foundations for the organization through which we all hope to build world peace.” The novel note here was the word “largely” with its implication that her own merit and point of view had played a part in her selection.

Some things I can take to the first meeting: A sincere desire to understand the problems of the rest of the world and our relationship to them; a real goodwill for people throughout the world; a hope that I shall be able to build a sense of personal trust and friendship with my co-workers, for without that understanding our work would be doubly difficult.
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