Eleanor and Franklin (130 page)

She was gravely concerned by

the constant battle going on between those who would have us fear the communists and those who would have us fear the fascists. You are thrown into the arms of one or the other in order to defeat the opposite trend of ideas. . . . You rarely see stressed anywhere the fact that it is difficult to win a negative battle. Why are we in this country not stressing a constructive campaign for democracy? We need not fear any isms if our democracy is achieving the ends for which it was established but we must fight for something.
¹⁷

Occasionally she had held back from supporting a movement because it was too closely identified with the Communists, even though its professed purposes were worthy. By the late 1930s, however, she had become less concerned over being tagged a Communist because of Communist involvement in the organizations which she helped.

This was the period of the Popular Front when, because of the rise and advance of fascism, liberals and Communists joined together in defense of democracy and peace. Although conservative columnists
portrayed this as a movement of liberals toward Communism, precisely the reverse was happening—the Communists were transforming themselves into militant New Dealers. Roosevelt, despite his stunning victory in the 1936 elections, found himself increasingly stalemated in Congress by a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, which kept buried in committee his bills to help the one third of a nation that was still impoverished.

Unable to muster support for his programs through the Democratic party organizations, Roosevelt began to look for allies in the unions and in the organizations that spoke for the ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. The job fell to his wife; he wanted her to do it, and she wanted to do it. Inevitably it meant increased involvement with the left—with such organizations as the American Youth Congress, the League of Women Shoppers, and the National Negro Congress, as well as the NAACP, the trade unions (especially those affiliated with the CIO), the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

Foreign developments also pushed Eleanor toward the left. To the more militant liberals, the enemies of the New Deal in the United States represented the same forces of appeasement that had brought fascism to power in Italy and Germany, were in rebellion against the Spanish republic, and were conniving with fascism in Britain and France.

The president felt similarly. “Over here there is the same element that exists in London,” Roosevelt wrote U.S. Minister John Cudahy in Dublin. “Unfortunately, it is led by so many of your friends and mine. They would really like me to be a Neville Chamberlain—and if I would promise that, the market would go up and they would work positively and actively for the resumption of prosperity.”
¹⁸
Countless committees sprang up, some organized by liberals, some by Communists—to aid Spanish democracy, for Chinese relief, to boycott German goods, to help Jews and intellectuals and other victims of fascism, committees to try to stop war by resisting fascism, not by appeasing it. Democrats of all hues, not only New Dealers, flocked into these groups. The presence of Communists was no deterrent, for during the years preceding the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Communists were considered among the staunchest foes of fascism, as was the Soviet Union, despite the terrible things that were happening inside its sealed frontiers.

The treason trials and purges in Moscow bewildered and horrified
Eleanor, as they did most New Dealers. Anna Louise Strong blandly defended the trials:

You asked me what the reaction of the ordinary people in the USSR was to the trial. My husband has sent me some clippings from the newspapers of letters which poured in from the people. I am inclined to think that Stalin made a bad mistake in ever letting Trotsky out of the Soviet Union. The man is really incredibly dangerous, the more so because he has a very remarkable degree of magnetism which sweeps whole crowds of people off their feet. I know because I once gave him English lessons and I am still ashamed to remember how completely he could sway my convictions if he took the trouble.

Eleanor's reply was a noncommittal thank you. She was equally reticent in her comment on a letter from Marjorie Davis, the wife of Roosevelt's ambassador to Moscow, who had sent her a copy of the verbatim proceedings of the trials issued by the Soviet government with the comment, “At almost any place that you may open the book, there is much to impress the mind that a tremendous plot existed. . . . There seems to be such a predisposition on the part of the outside press to discount the facts of what the Government was up against, that I thought you would be interested in scanning this book.”
¹⁹

Dr. Jerome Davis, an old Russia hand who had been dismissed from Yale because of his activities with the American Federation of Teachers, thought he could find out the truth about the trials. He had been in charge of YMCA work in Russia during the war, had administered the prisoner-of-war camps in Turkestan, and had made several trips to Russia after the revolution. The new batch of trials, he wrote worriedly to Eleanor in March, 1938, would make any kind of understanding between the American people and the Soviet Union more difficult. “It will,” Eleanor wrote next to this observation. Davis thought the United States should have an “unofficial observer” at the trials who could report directly to the president, and he volunteered for the assignment:

I knew all these men from my work as he head of the YMCA during the World War. I have personally autographed pictures of Lenin and Stalin. I could go directly to Stalin and get the inside story of at least what he thinks is true. . . . I must say that all these trials make a bad impression on me as I know they must on the public at large.

“What would you think?” Eleanor queried her husband. The Russians would never consider it, he replied. She conveyed this message to Dr. Davis, adding, “I am afraid the world is not idealistic enough as yet.”
²⁰

She listened to those who defended and apologized for the macabre proceedings in Moscow, and she also read the documents of the other side. Princess Alexandra Kropotkin lent her Vladimir V. Tchernavin's
I Speak for the Silent,
which she read, and Eleanor Levenson, the manager of the Rand School Book Store, a Menshevik stronghold, sent her the “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” which the school had just published.

“I wish that in some way we could get across to the people,” Eleanor wrote her friend Mrs. William B. Meloney, organizer of the
New York Herald Tribune
Forums and editor of
This Week
, “that the thing we really fear and are horrified by in Russia is not the real communist theory which any peaceable people may decide to live under, but the same kind of dictatorship which takes toll of its people through force in the same way as does fascism.” Theoretically Socialism and Communism could be achieved democratically; it was the departure from democracy, the corrupt reach for power of small groups and certain leaders “no matter what explanation they give, which brings about the horrors that we have watched in Russia and in other countries.”
²¹

The Communists in the Popular Front organizations insisted that to look at the Soviet Union and Stalin objectively, not to mention critically, was a disservice to the anti-fascist cause. Eleanor rejected this view and was pleased when the American Youth Congress resolution condemning dictatorships specifically mentioned the Communist as well as the fascist variety. On the other hand, she refused to allow the events in the Soviet Union and the Communist apologies for them to keep her away from organizations in which Communists were active.

The Workers Alliance held a “Right to Work” congress in Washington in June, 1939, to protest the congressional slashes in relief appropriations. Eleanor accepted honorary membership in the alliance even though she had been told it was a radical group. “There may be some things you believe in that I don't believe in,” she said, “but I certainly am in sympathy with the meeting of any group of people who come together to consider their problems.” Arthur Krock praised her, saying that she spoke “the enlightened truth, as she does so often, when she told the Workers Alliance that there are two ways in which to calculate the New Deal's public relief bill which posterity must pay or repudiate. She said in effect it was better for future national health to pass on a purely fiscal burden than one measured in terms of
congenital, physical, moral and spiritual disease.” But some columnists, like Frank R. Kent, preferred to ignore the issue of joblessness and concentrate on Communism: “It is almost incredible,” Kent wrote, “that this Communist-saturated organization, whose object is to browbeat Congress and push the government to greater and greater expenditures for relief, should find its staunchest friends not only among the government officials who administer relief but in the White House itself.”
²²

“I hope you will forgive me if I disagree with you in your feeling that I should not speak to the Workers' Alliance,” she replied to the inevitable flood of critical letters:

I believe that the people who turn to Communism do so because they feel that it might possibly answer some of their difficulties, and they are usually people who have difficulties.

The Workers' Alliance is composed of WPA workers, many of them not even able to get on WPA. From long experience I have discovered that when people are unhappy, it is better to give them an opportunity to come into contact, even to ask questions, of someone whom they feel is responsible than to let them feel that they are shoved aside without any consideration. Going to speak to them doesn't foster Communism. They know exactly where I stand, but they also have a feeling that someone at least near to the seat of government is willing to listen to their troubles.
²³

Then the news came that Germany and the Soviet Union intended to sign a nonaggression pact. The pact was sealed on August 24; Hitler was free to launch his attack on Poland which he did on September 1.

“Some of the statements made in the last few days by various members of the Communist Party in this country seem rather odd,” Eleanor wrote in a letter to Mrs. Strong dated August 28:

I have always felt that, in theory, Communism was closer to Democracy than Nazism. In spite of the realization that Stalin was a dictator and that Russia was going through somewhat of the same kind of thing that all revolutions seems to have to go through, still one had the hope that in the future the theory of Communism would make a world in which Democracy and Communism might live together.

This treaty does not seem to me to be in the interest of peace. It simply says to Hitler, “We will not attack you, so you are sure of having one less enemy. We need your machinery and you need our
raw materials, and we are quite willing for our mutual benefit, to have a trade agreement with you. As far as we are concerned, you can go ahead and take possession of any of the other countries that you choose without our help.”

England and France will be in a much more difficult position. Of course, it seems quite possible that there may be in addition to this some secret agreement by which Russia will take her share of any particular country she is interested in controlling.

In a letter of September 5, Miss Strong was still enthusiastic about President Roosevelt, as she had not as yet realized the new orders from Moscow would mean a break with the Roosevelt administration. Her husband, she said—“supposedly a regular Bolshevik—goes wild with delighted excitement over the President's speeches, and declares that ‘Just two countries, America and the Soviet Union, are the hope of the world.'” It was the first time, she went on, that she had ever heard him enthusiastic over anything “outside socialism and the USSR.” It reminded her of Earl Browder's views that Roosevelt's actions, in Miss Strong's words,

had caused a fundamental revision of the beliefs of the Communists; it had made them for the first time concede that real gains could be made for the working class under a “bourgeois democratic government,” and that if the real democracy of the New Deal could be established, it should be possible to proceed from this, step by step, without violent overturn, to socialism.

Eleanor found this less impressive than Browder's readiness to accept Moscow's orders. That was as repugnant as Soviet policy itself: “The thing which is doing Russia the most harm in this country, no matter how much we all of us dislike the Dies Committee,” she wrote, “is the fact that Earl Browder and various other American communists, are discovered not to have been acting as free agents but as directed ones.”
²⁴

She was now perfectly clear in her own mind that cooperation with the Communists was impossible. In a few months she would reach the same conclusion about Popular Front organizations in which Communists not only were participants but, as it turned out, the controlling force.

49.
FDR ADMINISTERS A SPANKING