Eleanor and Franklin (131 page)

A
FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE
N
AZI
-S
OVIET
P
ACT AND THE OUTBREAK
of war, Paul Kellogg, the editor of the
Survey,
and his wife Helen Hall, the head of the Henry Street Settlement, congratulated Eleanor Roosevelt on the “gallantry” she had displayed at the Model Congress of Youth, “by that meaning your brave faith in them—for you were certainly taking risks in view of the ugly and twisted attacks upon them. You were in a sense putting yourself in their hands.”
¹

The attacks on the Youth Congress, mixed as the motivations were, had a basis in fact. For several years liberals and Communists had worked together in a mottled array of Popular Front organizations that were united on a program of support for Roosevelt, a strengthened New Deal, and collective security. The alliance had its critics who contended that the real control in the Popular Front organizations rested with the Communists and that the latter, because of their subservience to Moscow, were insincere adherents of the democratic faith and untrustworthy partners in the democratic cause.

The test came after September, 1939. Before then, as the
New Republic
noted, the Communists had pursued the Popular Front policy so ardently “that one can hardly tell them from New Deal Democrats.”
²
For a few grotesque weeks, after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the American Communists, while awaiting clarification from Moscow, made a spectacle of themselves with their successive rationalizations of the alliance. The new directives from Moscow arrived, and the Communists dutifully about-faced. They characterized the war in Europe as “imperialist,” declared that the democracies were as guilty as the fascist nations for its outbreak, accused Roosevelt of plotting to push the United States into it, and called for all-out opposition to Roosevelt's “war-hunger” program. Neither peace nor the immediate interest of the masses, the Communists continued, could any longer be promoted through “the Democratic Party or any faction of it.” The issue no longer was “a third term” but “a third party.”

Eleanor read the statement with distaste and disbelief. She considered it tantamount to a declaration of loyalty to a foreign power. A group of veterans organizations challenged her on her support of the American Youth Congress. What basis did she have for her belief that its leadership was not Communist? The Youth Congress leaders should not be blamed, she replied, for the statements of Gil Green, the head of the Young Communist League, and Earl Browder, claiming credit for the growth and development of the Youth Congress. The Communist leaders, she said, seemed to owe their “first allegiance” to another country, and it would probably be to America's benefit “if we should allow these people to go to that country.”
³

As for her confidence that the Youth Congress leaders were not Communists, she reported that was based on hours of discussion with them, getting to know them as individuals. She had carefully examined their finances. She had attended their national and regional meetings, studied their minutes and resolutions. She had even sent for the FBI reports. Had groups such as the Legion, who criticized her support of the Youth Congress, been as painstaking and conscientious in their scrutiny?

Many of the witnesses before the Dies Committee cited the Youth Congress as an example of Communist deception and control, but the credibility of the Dies Committee and its witnesses was not very high at the White House. Established in 1938 with the encouragement of John Nance Garner and the votes of the southern bloc, in its first year the committee not only attacked Popular Front groups such as the Youth Congress without giving them an opportunity to reply but, using the technique of trial by headline, helped destroy the WPA's Federal Theatre and Writers' Projects. It contributed measurably to the defeat of Frank Murphy for re-election as governor of Michigan. It harassed Frances Perkins for her failure to deport Harry Bridges, the longshoremen's leader who was charged with being a Communist, and made itself a sounding board for attacks upon the CIO by old-line elements in the AFL. “The Dies Committee was from the outset on the track of the New Deal and all its works,” wrote Walter Goodman in his objective study of the committee's history.

It was characteristic of the committee that, having obtained the lists of the Washington chapter of the American League for Peace and Democracy, a Communist-inspired anti-war organization, it made the lists public, including the names of 563 federal employees, a procedure that Roosevelt denounced as “sordid.” By this “act of mass
exposure, the Dies Committee obliterated all distinctions,” Goodman observed.
⁴

Although the White House shared the loathing of the committee and its methods that was felt by liberals and New Dealers, in late November, 1939, when an official of the Youth Congress telephoned Eleanor in New York City to say that the congress had received a telegram to appear at committee hearings the next day, she urged her young friends to be cooperative and not request a postponement. She was returning to Washington that night, she added, and would talk with them at the station before she left on the midnight train.

The young people, including the author of this book, who as head of the American Student Union had also been summoned to appear before the committee, were in a defiant mood when they met her at the train. They wanted to use their appearance to indict the committee, not to clear their organizations of the charges of Communism. Eleanor counseled otherwise. “Volunteer information,” she urged, “try to cooperate with the Committee.” The young people seemed like her children to her. “Don't assume a hostile attitude,” she went on. Even if the committee was unfair, they should be restrained. She would try to get the president's permission to attend the hearings, she said, as she bade them good night.
⁵

At 10:00
A.M.
the youth group arrived in the caucus room. Neither Representative Dies nor J. B. Matthews, who had originally denounced the Youth Congress as a Communist front and was now the committee's chief interrogator, elected to be present. Representative Joe Starnes of Alabama, a fairer man with a sense of humor, was presiding, and he was in no hurry to call the youth group. Other witnesses were being questioned when without advance notice Eleanor, dressed in green, entered the caucus room alone at 11:15. A southern gentleman, Mr. Starnes stopped the questioning: “The chair takes note of the presence of the First Lady of the Land and invites her to come up here and sit with us.” But Eleanor, who a few days earlier had said that she was willing to testify before the committee herself, declined the invitation to sit with the investigators. “Oh, no thank you,” she replied smiling; “I just came to listen,” and sat down with those to be investigated. The caucus room came alive. The press corps poured in and the moving-picture cameras were set up and focused, but the leisurely pace continued and it was not until four in the afternoon that the Youth Congress was called. Eleanor was still there, having—without premeditation, because she was a friendly woman and it seemed the
natural thing to do—“scooped up” the young people, as one newspaper described it, and taken them to lunch at the White House. She now moved up to a press table to hear better.

The committee was on the defensive and Representative Starnes at his courtliest in dealing with the Youth Congress witnesses. He good-humoredly countenanced an appeal for funds that Youth Congress president Jack McMichael, who was tall, blond, a divinity student, and a southerner, managed to introduce in the midst of a discussion of Youth Congress finances. Starnes even permitted a congress resolution calling for the abolition of the Dies Committee to be read into the record; some of its statements were slanderous, Starnes noted, but the Youth Congress had a right to believe anything it wanted: “That is your right as American citizens.”

“I can take six of you,” Eleanor had said at lunchtime. Now she invited the same group to come to dinner and spend the night at the White House.

In addition to the six “guttersnipes,” as someone dubbed them, there were at dinner that evening Melvyn Douglas, actor and militant New Dealer; his wife Helen Gahagan; Assistant Attorney General Norman Littell, who wanted to talk to Eleanor about how to pull the liberals together; his wife; Aubrey Williams, who was regarded with almost as much suspicion as the youth leaders by Mr. Dies; Colonel Francis C. Harrington, the head of the WPA; Eleanor; and the president, who was wheeled in after everyone had assembled in the family dining room.

The president, despite his preoccupation with Russia's two-day-old invasion of Finland, wanted to hear about the day's events on Capitol Hill. He punctuated his wife's and the young people's accounts with appreciative laughter. Perhaps he could be slipped into the next day's hearings under a sheet, he suggested roguishly. “You will be welcomed as a Ku Kluxer,” observed Melvyn Douglas.
⁶

“I have two real interests in this situation,” Eleanor wrote in her column for the next day:

One is that as far as is humanly possible, I give to young people whom I know and trust, the feeling that in any situation, particularly a difficult one, they may count on my assistance. My second interest is a desire to observe to what extent the government is not only striving to un-cover un-American activities, but is giving to youth the assurance that their government does not look upon
them with suspicion until they are proved guilty, and is anxious to help them in every way to build up the faith and trust in democracy which should be the heritage of every youngster in the United States.
⁷

She did not lightly dismiss the warnings of some of her friends that she might be lending her prestige to a movement which could prove to be communistic. But she felt that the Youth Congress leadership could be trusted; perhaps even more strongly she felt that in dealing with human beings, trust and love were creative and must in time find an answering response. She had attended their weddings, had lent them money, had given them gifts, and she had helped them raise the Youth Congress budget, and found it inconceivable that young people would repay friendship with personal deception. But Aubrey Williams was worried. He did not share Eleanor's sense of trust and security in the Youth Congress leadership. After dinner, when the president had retired to his study and the youth leaders began a litany of praise for Eleanor's courage and steadfastness in accompanying them to Capitol Hill, Williams fixed the group with a piercing look and said, “Don't let her down; it will break her heart.”

Eleanor's good friend Bernard Baruch was also worried for her. When he had heard the reports of the first day's session he telephoned from Hobcaw offering to come to Washington to supply her with a lawyer and to pay the expenses of the young people. She had not needed a lawyer, she wrote him after the hearings; “my mere presence created an atmosphere of great gentleness and even the young people needed no assistance.” She did want Baruch to help with the Youth Congress budget, but when he saw her a few days later he had read the Youth Congress resolution attacking the Dies Committee and was quite upset by it. He felt the Youth Congress should have limited its criticism of the committee to its own specific grievances. She passed on Baruch's views to the leaders of the Youth Congress, but two days later decided she had leaned over too far in seeming to accept Baruch's appraisal of the work of the Dies Committee, and wrote him so:

I have been feeling ever since our talk that I ought to tell you that I agree with you getting Kuhn and Browder was a valuable contribution. However, on the whole, I think the Dies Committee is doing work which the Federal Bureau of Investigation could do a great deal better. What the Federal Bureau of Investigation discovers has
to be proved in court and they have to have real evidence. They cannot just make statements about people and take any amount of time to prove them. . . .

I have a feeling that if we allow ourselves to be so conditioned that we cannot believe in people whom we see and meet and work with for fear that somewhere in the background there may be a sinister influence, we are never going to be able to do anything again. . . . Undoubtedly there are some people in any group that we would not approve of, but as long as the work done is creditable work, I think we must go ahead and help this group.
⁸

The first real jolt to her confidence in the Youth Congress leadership came during the Washington “pilgrimage” in January, 1940. This project had been authorized, as a demonstration of youth's support of the president and the New Deal, in the halcyon summer days before the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of the war. The emphasis was to be on civic education and persuasion, and it was called a “Citizenship Institute” in order to differentiate it from the militancy and sloganeering of earlier demonstrations.

Now the character of the institute was being transformed, but it was being done so subtly that it took a sophisticated observer to detect that it was not a spontaneous recoil at the outbreak of war but a result of Communist manipulation. The passion went out of the Youth Congress fight to revise the neutrality act to aid Britain and France; instead the emphasis was on keeping America out of war. There was a greater stress on liberties, with the implication that it was the administration's preoccupation with the war crisis that endangered them, as this same preoccupation endangered the continuation of the New Deal. However, such anxieties were not confined to the Communists. Ickes noted in his diary that he had brought up with the president the effort of “fat cats” to use the crisis to move back into positions of control in the government. “Don't think that I am not watching everything with an eagle eye,” the president had sought to reassure him. It was the period of the “phony war” when the war aims of Chamberlain and Daladier were highly suspect and anti-involvement sentiment was running high in New Deal circles.
⁹