Eleanor and Franklin (125 page)

The war was lost. “At this very sad hour,” Señora de los Rios wrote her from New York City, where her husband had accepted appointment to the Graduate Faculty in Exile, “I can only say that your kindness, courtesy and understanding have made much easier, circumstances which at times seemed beyond endurance.”
⁴⁸

In Los Angeles a Catholic group threatened to boycott Eleanor's lecture unless she was introduced by someone other than Senator Robert W. Kenny, who, the Catholics said, was a sponsor of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, “a group who deliberately left this country to engage in a religious war in Spain.” Eleanor rejected the demand. “As he [Franco] had the full support of the Italian and German fascist governments, it was natural that the democratic Loyalist Government had to turn for what help they could get to the communists. That did not, however, mean that they themselves were a communist government.” As for the young Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, they had felt that democracy was threatened in Spain “and therefore I can not feel that any one supporting them is in any way anti-Catholic or pro-Communist.”
⁴⁹

In the final days of the war, Leon Henderson, a militant New Dealer
and Loyalist supporter, was at the White House when Eleanor brought up the subject of Franco's victory. “You and I, Mr. Henderson, will some day learn a lesson from this tragic error over Spain. We were morally right, but too weak.” She turned toward the president as if he were not there. “We should have pushed
him
harder.” The president did not defend his policy.
⁵⁰

 

*
The weakness of the “merchants of death” thesis has been shown since World War II when governments, including the United States, have become the chief purveyors of surplus arms and munitions.

†
Franklin D. Roosevelt, speech, “I Have Seen War . . . I Hate War,” Aug. 14, 1936, in Franklin D. Roosevelt,
The Public Papers and Addresses,
ed. S. I. Rosenman, 13 vols. (New York, 1938–50), V, pp. 285–92.

47.
A SPIRITUAL SHOCK

I
T WAS IN
S
PAIN, WROTE
A
LBERT
C
AMUS, THAT MEN OF HIS GENERATION
“learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.” After Spain came Munich to drive home the lesson that the force of dictators had to be met with force. Yet Eleanor Roosevelt was a reluctant convert.

Since the country had not been prepared to support sanctions, even against Japan, Roosevelt's follow-through on his quarantine speech was to recommend to Congress a vast rearmament program and to revert to the conference approach. In this he was abetted and advised by his newly named undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles.

Both the president and his wife found Welles more congenial than Cordell Hull. Eleanor's relationship with Hull was courteous and cool, as it was with the State Department generally. Hull kept her at arm's length. Letters that she sent to him were answered in State Department officialese. Once, when she was asked to take part in an international peace broadcast, she wrote on Tommy's memorandum, “I do approve but tell him the State Dept. wld have a fit if I said anything.” She considered the department stuffy. When a vice-consul in Latin America asked in verse to be allowed to return home and was answered in verse by a State Department clerk, she commented, tongue in cheek: “Somehow or other I had not given credit to any one in the State Department for so much versatility and humor. It is nice to feel that what of necessity must be such a solemn branch of government may occasionally deal lightly with a situation.”
¹

But it was not the department's stuffiness as much as its conservatism that bothered her. Harry Hopkins told her after his trip abroad in 1934 that American diplomats in Europe did not seem to know anything about the country they were in except what they were told by members of the upper crust, and they were not even interested in finding out from Hopkins what was going on in the United States. It
was only with the president's promotion of Welles to the undersecretaryship that Eleanor began to feel a genuinely sympathetic presence in the department. “Sumner's mother and mine were great friends and he went to school with my brother,” she wrote. “Franklin never knew him as well as I did but appointed him because of his abilities. . . . I think Sumner was very much in sympathy with what Franklin wanted to do.”
²

Welles proposed that the president call the Diplomatic Corps together on Armistice Day and broach the conference idea as part of a dramatic appeal for peace. The president was enthusiastic, but Hull violently opposed such “pyrotechnics.” Roosevelt gave up the Armistice Day appeal but wanted to go ahead with the conference. When Welles saw Roosevelt he found him “harassed and irritated” by Hull's relentless objections. Hull finally agreed on the condition that British Prime Minister Chamberlain would be consulted first.
³

It was about this time that Eleanor spoke to the annual Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, where she pushed the conference idea: “If we are going to have peace in the world we will have to find machinery to draw us together and make us function together and we have got to find a way by which we can actually attack the problems before they reach the point where people will want to go to war about them. . . . I don't think leadership lies along the path of isolation.”
⁴

Chamberlain's reply to the president's soundings, Welles wrote later, was “a douche of cold water.” The British leader protested that such a conference would cut athwart British efforts to appease Germany and Italy. Winston Churchill thought Chamberlain's rebuff of Roosevelt represented “the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war.” A few weeks after Chamberlain's airy dismissal of the “proffered hand,” Hitler moved against Austria. Yet even if Chamberlain had accepted, how far could Roosevelt have committed the United States? As Eleanor wrote at the time:

Of course the trouble is that most people in this country think that we can stay out of wars in other parts of the world. Even if we stay out of it and save our own skins, we cannot escape the conditions which will undoubtedly exist in other parts of the world and which will react against us. That is something which I have preached from coast to coast on deaf ears I fear. We are all of us selfish—note Mr. Hoover's statement on his return from Europe—and if we can save our own skins, the rest of the world can go. The best thing we can
do is to realize nobody can save his own skin alone. We must all hang together.
⁵

With Austria annexed Hitler began his moves against Czechoslovakia. In September the crisis came to a head. Chamberlain, believing Hitler could be appeased, flew to Berchtesgaden to confer with him. Although earlier in the year Eleanor had seemed to feel the time had come to stand up to the dictators, she recoiled from the prospect of war:

I open the newspapers every day with a feeling of dread and I turn on the radio to listen to the last news broadcast at night, half afraid to hear that the catastrophe of war has again fallen on Europe. It seems to me that the Prime Minister of England did a fine thing when he went to visit the German Chancellor in a last effort to prevent bloodshed. It seems insanity to me to try to settle the difficult problems of today by the unsatisfactory method of going to war. If you kill half the youth of a continent, the problem will be no nearer a solution, but the human race will be that much the poorer.
⁶

The British and French effort to resolve the crisis peacefully in effect reduced itself to an attempt to settle it at the expense of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs stood firm. Hitler threatened to march. “I thought as I looked at the pictures of the French Reservists leaving,” Eleanor wrote, “how terrible it must be for those who remember 1914. How incredibly stupid it was for us to resort to force again!”
⁷

Such pleas for peace played into the hands of the forces personified by Chamberlain who were prepared to sell Czechoslovakia down the river. It needs to be said, however, that responsible American leaders were in no position to urge Britain and France to stand up to Hitler when they knew the United States was not prepared to support the democracies if the result should be war. “The poor Zchecks! [
sic
],” Eleanor wrote her husband from Cousin Susie's, where “the quiet and calm” seemed “like another world. . . . I don't somehow like the role of England & France, do you? We can say nothing however for we wouldn't go to war for someone else.”
⁸

She read Thomas Mann's
The Coming Victory of Democracy
. The great humanist's quietly stated argument that force had to be met with force left her unsettled and confused. “I am sure that he feels as I do that the
World War and the attempts which we made at permanent settlements really left us with the seeds of the present complicated international situation,” she wrote. Little had been done in the years since Versailles to correct its injustices. “Now, too late perhaps, we are conscious of this need when the world is faced again with the alternative of using force and building the same bitterness that we built up before, or else of allowing those nations which believe exclusively in force, to have everything their own way.” Mann felt that “force must be met with force, but that is what we have been doing from generation to generation.” She speculated on whether the world was witness again to another shift in the balance of power, or whether more was at stake. “It is very difficult for me to think this situation through. 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?”
⁹

That was the critical question for her. If there was war, what was the United States? What was she prepared to do?

The British and the French had appealed to Roosevelt to use his influence to bring about a peaceful resolution of the crisis. An Allenswood classmate who moved in Court circles cabled from England:

DEAR ELEANOR ONE WORD FROM AMERICA WILL SAVE
EUROPE.
YOUR SCHOOLFELLOW MARGUERITE FEW ONCE BAXTER

Eleanor replied that she wished she knew “what the one word is which America could say to avert war. We are all deeply concerned but you seem to have a mad man in Europe who does not care how many people are killed.” With the United States not prepared to intervene on the side of the democracies, Roosevelt could scarcely refuse to make the one move that was open to him. He cabled Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier, and BeneÅ¡ urging the parties “not to break off negotiations,” stating that there was “no problem so difficult or so pressing for a solution” that it could not be settled by pacific methods.
¹⁰

Beneš, Chamberlain, and Daladier promptly expressed their agreement with Roosevelt that the issue could be settled peacefully. But Hitler's reply, when it finally arrived, rehearsed Germany's case against Versailles and the League and ended on the chilling note that the
responsibility rested “with the Czechoslovakian Government alone, to decide whether it wants peace or war.” Roosevelt sent another appeal to Hitler. Eleanor was handed a copy, and she underlined the paragraph reading: “Present negotiation still stand open. . . . Should the need for supplementing them become evident, nothing stands in the way of widening their scope into a conference of all the nations directly interested in the present controversy.” Next to the words “the nations directly interested,” she wrote, “Are we?”

The question did not have to be answered because the next day Hitler invited Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini to Munich. “In company with many people through out the world,” Eleanor wrote that day,

I breathe again this afternoon in the hope that this meeting in Munich may bring about peace instead of war. It may be harder to work out problems in a peaceful way, but it certainly seems to me worth the effort, for things which are imposed by force rarely are satisfactory.
¹¹

Her sense of relief was not unmixed:

I can not help wondering, however, whether the patient in this case when he comes to and finds himself minus some arms and legs will not feel rather sad at having had them removed without being allowed a consultation.
¹²

She was having great difficulty sorting out her ideas. The threat of war had lifted, but she disliked intensely the fact that the great powers had forced a small nation to submit, invoking a principle of self-determination they were unwilling to apply to themselves.

Here the British, together with some others, have decided that the Sudeten Germans should have the deciding voice as to what country they wish to belong, and lo and behold, Palestine has a revolt. Perhaps they want to vote, and the Irish seem to have caught the fever and shall we be hearing from a few other peoples soon, I wonder? A complicated world, isn't it.