Eleanor (13 page)

Her disenchantment with Wallace began when he seemed willing to associate himself with American Communists in his attacks upon U.S. policy and his speeches fell silent about Soviet responsibility for international tensions.

She had to deal with the Russians at the United Nations. That made for realism. Her hopes that personal friendliness might pave the way for frank exchanges were proving illusory. Russian representatives, she found, despite diligent effort, were “hard to get to know as human beings” even though “more frankness between individuals would bring their governments closer together.”
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Wallace had criticized the Baruch Plan for the international control of atomic energy. It only told the Russians, his July 23 letter said, that if “they are ‘good boys,’ we may eventually turn over [to them] our knowledge of atomic energy. . . .” Baruch was deeply upset. He telephoned Mrs. Roosevelt and left a message for her, saying Wallace’s statement simply was not based on fact and that his effort to get Wallace to come in and talk with him so far had not succeeded. “Send Wallace a wire saying I hope he will talk to Mr. Baruch,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote on this. The two men, seconded by their advisers, eventually did talk, and Wallace, according to Baruch, agreed that Baruch’s idea on “stages” was sound, and even agreed to the necessity of suspension of the veto in an international control agency. But in the end Wallace, again according to Baruch, “reneged” on issuing a statement amending his earlier criticism.

That disturbed Mrs. Roosevelt. Soviet delaying tactics in the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission seemed to her to show that it was Moscow, not Washington, that was keeping the world from moving toward disarmament. Nor did she like Molotov’s attack on Baruch as “a warmonger”:

On Tuesday the Russian Foreign Minister, V. M. Molotov, had impugned our motives in our plan for atomic control and development and attacked Bernard Baruch personally, and,
therefore, I felt that his speech lost much of its value. People are rarely convinced by exaggerated and violent statement. So I was particularly pleased at the restraint shown by Senator [Warren] Austin.
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Not even Elliott’s espousal of an attitude toward Russia very similar to Wallace’s checked her maturing conviction that Soviet Russia was primarily responsible for the breakup of Allied unity. Elliott’s book,
As He Saw It,
appeared in the autumn of 1946 and caused a world-wide sensation. It detailed Roosevelt’s differences with Churchill over colonial policy and the second front. It described FDR’s careful moves to make it clear to Stalin that the United States and Great Britain were not allied in a common bloc against the USSR. It gave examples of the late president’s distrust of the State Department, because, among other things, he thought it too much under the influence of the British point of view.

Mrs. Roosevelt had heard her husband say many of the same things reported by Elliott, but her own experience with the Russians, the knowledge she had acquired in the thirties of how Communists exploited unwary liberals, kept her from endorsing the conclusions that Elliott drew from his father’s wartime table talk—that the peace Franklin had sought to build was being lost because of the maneuvers of British imperialism and American militarism against a Soviet Russia that was portrayed in Elliott’s book as largely guiltless. “Naturally every human being reports the things which he sees and hears and lives through from his own point of view,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in the carefully phrased Foreword. “I am quite sure that many of the people who heard many of the conversations recorded herein, interpreted them differently, according to their own thoughts and beliefs. The record written by all these individuals is invaluable.”
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She was grateful to Elliott and Faye. By settling at Hyde Park they had made it possible for her to continue to live there. He was currently the favorite whipping boy among the Roosevelt children of the Roosevelt-haters, and that only endeared him the more to her. She loyally defended him and his book against his detractors
and critics, taking indignant issue, in particular, with a column by Joseph and Stewart Alsop in which they pointed up the contrast between Elliott’s attitude toward Russia and that of his mother and his brothers James and Franklin Jr. She was upset that Franklin Jr. had supplied information to the Alsops. “I assure you that I can corroborate the actual things which he said in his book, and so can a good many other people because they were told many times. He may have misinterpreted but that is a matter of opinion.”
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The differences in her own household made her acutely miserable. She knew that this author and his wife as well as Franklin Jr. felt that Elliott was being used by the Communist propaganda apparatus, and the only way that Christmas to preserve peace at Val-Kill was to stay off difficult subjects.

Despite her support of Elliott and defense of his book, her own point of view was being made clear, as the Alsops noted, by her involvement in the plans for a meeting in Washington on January 4, 1947, of American non-Communist progressive leaders to “hammer out an American non-Communist Left program with emphasis on the ‘non-Communist.’”
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She had spent the whole day “from 9:30 in the morning till after five in the afternoon with a group of people, many of whom I have known before, who were trying to set up a liberal and progressive organization.” So she wrote about the founding meeting of the Americans for Democratic Action in Washington on January 4, 1947. Looking in on the group, columnist Drew Pearson quipped, “New Deal in Exile.” James Loeb, Jr., and Prof. Reinhold Niebuhr, leaders of the Americans for Democratic Action, were the moving spirits in the convening of the conference; but it was Mrs. Roosevelt’s presence and, to a lesser degree, that of Franklin Jr. that immediately gave it a power of attraction for FDR’s New Deal associates as strongly magnetic as Henry Wallace and the Progressive Citizens of America.

“If we fail to meet our problems here, no one else in the world will do so,” Mrs. Roosevelt keynoted the meeting. “If we fail, the heart goes out of progressives throughout the world.” The United States, she said, had to pursue a course between fascist and
Communist totalitarianism. She gave her blessing to the projected new liberal organization, and at the end of the day-long meeting, down-to-earth and organization-minded, she asked for the floor again. Ideas were very fine, she said, but how were they going to be put into action? She answered for herself by giving the ADA’s first contribution—$100—and pledging to raise $500 more within a week. “That’s all she said,” recalled Loeb, “but there followed the most rapid and spontaneous and most successful fund raising in ADA’s history.”
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Wallace, who had approved the establishment of the Progressive Citizens of America, sought to minimize the break with Mrs. Roosevelt: “I am not a member or officer of the P.C.A. and Mrs. Roosevelt, to the best of my knowledge, is not a member or officer of the A.D.A. I spoke to one organization urging unity in the progressive ranks. Mrs. Roosevelt spoke to the other.”

She had no wish to feud with Henry Wallace, whose integrity she believed in and whose ability she admired, “but that does not mean that you have to agree on the way in which you wish to work for your objectives.” She intended “to be helpful” to the ADA, she went on, and then pointed out what basically distinguished the ADA from the PCA:

I would like to see all progressive groups work together. But since some of us prefer to have our staffs and policy-making groups completely free of any American Communist infiltration if we can possibly prevent it, while others have not quite as strong a feeling on this subject, it is natural that there should be two set-ups.
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Former New York mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia, expostulated with her:

The technique and even the nomenclature of selfish, conservative, money-minded groups seem to have been adopted recently by your group. The brand of Communism is hurled indiscriminately. Do you think that is fair? What is the test
of excluding any one from a progressive group? How is a sympathizer or fellow traveler of Fascists or Communists to be identified?. . .It has gotten so now that any one who has a difference of opinion or is not in agreement is charged with being a Communist or a friend of a Communist. My dear Mrs. Roosevelt, where will all this end?

She had been through all this before at the end of the thirties, when the Popular Front disintegrated and the efforts of liberals to distinguish their objectives from those of the Communists and to free their organization from Communist control were met with the cry of “red-baiter.”

Of course, I do not believe in having everyone who is a liberal called a communist, or everyone who is a conservative called fascist, but I think it is possible to determine whether one is one or the other and it does not take too long to do so.

She wanted to see all liberals work together,

and if PCA could remove from its leadership the communist element, I do not see any reason why ADA and PCA should not work together.
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She wrote even more sharply to Max Lerner (at the time, the editorial director of
PM
), who had criticized the ADA for being anti-Communist rather than non-Communist.

The American Communists seem to have succeeded very well in jeopardizing whatever the liberals work for. Therefore, to keep them out of policy-making and staff positions seems to be very essential even at the price of being called red-baiters, which I hope no member of this new group will really be.
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Wallace showed a further lack of sound political judgment in Mrs. Roosevelt’s eyes when he undertook to barnstorm western
Europe, making speeches critical of American foreign policy. Calvin B. Baldwin, the director of the PCA and a close associate of Wallace, asked her to cosign a cable to French political leaders that said, “We the undersigned Americans wish to convey our wholehearted support for the sentiments for peace expressed by Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace’s trip to Europe is a continuation of his vigilance and constant fight for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s concept of one world.” She refused:

I do not believe that it is wise for Mr. Wallace to be making the kind of speeches he is making at the present time in foreign countries.

Naturally I have no idea what my husband’s attitude would be if he were alive today, and though I am convinced he would have wanted to strengthen the UN, I doubt if he would want to do it in just the way that Mr. Wallace has found necessary. I have such complete confidence in Mr. Wallace’s integrity, I am sure he has taken this course because he felt he had to, but with all my heart I wish for his own sake that he had not done so.
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What sent Wallace abroad was President Truman’s enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, a proposal to take over from Britain responsibility for giving economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey as part of a new policy of supporting “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Wallace charged, in a series of speeches in Europe, that the Truman Doctrine meant shoring up reactionary governments. It would require the United States to “police Russia’s every border.” It committed the country to a policy of “ruthless imperialism” and in the end would bring the United States to war with the Soviet Union.

Although Mrs. Roosevelt was shocked that Wallace should make this kind of an attack abroad, she, too, had serious reservations about the doctrine. She demanded further information. “For instance, why must this country accept Great Britain’s military responsibilities?” She doubted that a government

could be completely stable, and representative of 85 per cent of the will of the people, and still require military bolstering from the outside.

I do not question the absolute need to help both Greece and Turkey with relief and rehabilitation. They certainly are unable to cope with their economic problems alone. Without help, chaos would ensue. I think the part of the President’s speech which states that Communism follows economic chaos is entirely correct. The economy of Communism is an economy which grows in an atmosphere of misery and want.

Feeling as I do that our hope for peace lies in the United Nations, I naturally grieve to see this country do anything which harms the strength of the UN. If we could have given help for relief and rehabilitation on a purely non-political basis, and then have insisted that the UN join us in deciding what should be done on any political or policing basis to keep Greece and Turkey free from all outside interference, and to allow her to settle her own difficulties in the way the majority of her people desired to have them settled, I would have felt far happier than I do now. . . .

I realize that the lack of a military set-up within the United Nations makes it very difficult to use the UN in a situation requiring force.

But if force was deemed necessary, “it might better be brought in from the individual nations at the behest of the UN until we have collective force to use.”
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Her criticism was read with anxiety at the State Department. Dean Acheson, the acting secretary of state, promptly dispatched a top aide to New York City to explain the policy to her. She was not won over. She was troubled by the go-it-alone implications of the Truman Doctrine. What if the Russians were to follow U.S. precedent and say, “since you have acted alone without consulting the United Nations, we are free to do the same,” and send their army into Greece? Russia could “go into Greece, claiming she is doing exactly what we are doing and we have given her an
excuse.” She was indignant over the failure of the administration to give advance notification to the United Nations and to the U.S. delegates at the UN.

I hope never again that this type of action will be taken without at least consulting with the Secretary-General and with our permanent member on the Security Council beforehand. It all seems to me a most unfortunate way to do things.
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