Eleanor and Franklin (113 page)

Sentiment was running strongly against lynching, and to dramatize and deepen public feeling on the issue the NAACP arranged “An Art Commentary on Lynching.” The exhibition included Reginald Marsh's “This Is Her First Lynching,” a black-and-white drawing which showed a young white girl being held by her mother above the heads of a mob so the child could get a view of the lynching. There was also the famous print by the late George Bellows, “The Law Is Too Slow,” showing a Negro being burned by a mob. A Thomas Benton oil portrayed a Negro being hanged from a telephone pole while lynchers replenished the fire beneath him. A “macabre exhibition,” the
Times
headline said.

White wanted Eleanor to come, but the
Times
account made her uneasy that the publicity attending her visit might endanger the anti-lynching bill:

The more I think about going to the exhibition, the more troubled I am, so this morning I went in to talk to my husband about it and asked him what they really planned to do about the bill because I was afraid that some bright newspaper reporter might write a story which would offend some of the southern members and thereby make it even more difficult to do anything about the bill.

My husband said it was quite all right for me to go, but if some reporter took the occasion to describe some horrible picture, it would cause more southern opposition. They plan to bring the bill out quietly as soon as possible although two southern Senators have said they would filibuster for two weeks. He thinks, however, they can get it through.
¹⁴

Roosevelt's hopes that the South would permit the bill to go to a vote after a
pro forma
filibuster were not realized. This time the president did support a vote making the measure the Senate's order of business after Costigan and Wagner, who were in charge of the bill, expressed in writing their readiness to have the motion temporarily laid aside for action on his “must” program, but he did not feel he could take action against the ensuing filibuster. White demanded that the president condemn the filibuster and publicly endorse the bill. He
sent Eleanor an editorial from the
Des Moines Register
which savagely assailed the president's silence. Eleanor passed it on to Franklin with the comment—“Pretty bitter isn't it? I can't blame them though, it is human.” On May 6 White, in protest, resigned as a member of the Virgin Islands Advisory Council, a post to which he had been appointed with Eleanor's backing.

“I am so sorry about the bill,” Eleanor sought to console White. “Of course, all of us are going on fighting and the only thing we can do is to hope we have better luck next time.”
¹⁵

The president was angry with White and displeased with his wife. He did not say so directly, but a memorandum from Steve Early to Tommy no doubt reflected his views:

August 5, 1935.

Personal and Confidential

MEMORANDUM FOR MRS. SCHEIDER

Dear Malvina:

I have been asked to send you a memorandum containing information for Mrs. Roosevelt concerning Walter White, Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The memorandum is sent at this time because Walter White has been bombarding the President with telegrams and letters demanding passage of the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill before the adjournment of Congress: complaining about the War Department's policy regarding the assignment of negro reserve officers in C.C.C. camps, etc.

Walter White for some time has been writing and telegraphing the President. Frankly, some of his messages to the President have been decidedly insulting. For example, in a letter he wrote the President on May 6th when he resigned as a member of the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands, after expressing great disappointment that the Pres. did not make a public pronouncement by means of a message to the Congress which would openly endorse the Anti-Lynching Bill, he said:

“In justice to the cause I serve I cannot continue to remain even a small part of your official family.”

His file of correspondence is voluminous.

I am advised by those familiar with White's actions at the Capitol that it was he who some time ago went into the restaurant within the Capitol Building and demanded that he be served, apparently
deliberately creating a troublesome scene, compelling his eviction from the restaurant and giving rise to an issue, made much of in the press at the time. The belief in some quarters is that he did this for publicity purposes and to arouse negroes throughout the country through press accounts of his eviction from the Capitol and the refusal of Capitol authorities to permit him to eat in the restaurant there.

Mr. Forster advises that Walter White, before President Roosevelt came to the White House, because of his activities, has been one of the worst and most continuous of troublemakers.

Stephen Early

Eleanor, who was in Campobello, immediately wrote Early in defense of White:

I realize perfectly that he has an obsession on the lynching question and I do not doubt that he has been a great nuisance with his telegrams and letters, both now and in previous administrations. However, reading the papers in the last few weeks, does not give you the feeling that the filibuster on the lynching bill did any good to the situation and if I were colored, I think I should have about the same obsession that he has.

I do not think he means to be rude or insulting. It is the same complex which a great many people belonging to minority groups have, particularly martyrs. The type of thing which would make him get himself arrested in the Senate Restaurant is probably an inferiority complex which he tries to combat and which makes him far more aggressive than if he felt equality. It is worse with Walter White because he is almost white. If you ever talked to him, and knew him, I think you would feel as I do. He really is a very fine person with the sorrows of his people close to his heart.

E. R.
¹⁶

She realized that her racial beliefs upset Early and McIntyre. “They were afraid,” she later wrote, “that I would hurt my husband politically and socially. . . . There was no use in my trying to explain, because our basic values were very different, and since I was fond of them, I thought it better to preserve the amenities in our daily contacts.”
¹⁷
By and large it was true that Roosevelt did not attempt to rein her in and that the activities she carried on in the field of welfare and race were
with his knowledge and agreement. But there were times when her persistence annoyed him, and this, to judge by Early's memorandum, was one of them.

Early's hostility toward Negroes and Roosevelt's concern to protect his southern political flank were demonstrated again in September when Eleanor had Tommy submit a request from a Negro reporter to be allowed to attend her press conferences. She should not answer it, Early advised Tommy: “I have taken care of the Negro requests for the President's press conferences and if Mrs. Roosevelt opens hers it just makes the President more vulnerable. I think it is far the best thing to ignore the letter.” Eleanor complied. Inside the White House she prodded, argued, and appealed to Franklin's better nature, but when he laid down the law, she generally let the matter rest there.
¹⁸

Not always. If the purpose of the Early memorandum was to reduce White's access to the White House, she declined to understand it as such. But she was circumspect. She knew her activities were being exploited in the South by the extremists and demagogues. As early as August, 1934, Barry Bingham, whose father was president-publisher of the
Courier-Journal
in Louisville and Roosevelt's ambassador to Great Britain, wrote to McIntyre of one of the rumors that was afloat about the First Lady.

The old propaganda story is being passed around in Louisville to the effect that Mrs. Roosevelt has made herself offensive to Southerners by a too great affection for Negroes. The tale is that she was visiting in South Carolina recently, and was scheduled to make a speech in one of the larger towns. She is said to have ridden to the auditorium, through the streets of the town, in an open car in which she sat next to a Negro woman, with whom she conversed sociably all the way.

Bingham thought the story was a fake, and it would give him “a good deal of satisfaction to know if I am right in saying that not only did such an incident not occur, but that Mrs. Roosevelt has not visited South Carolina in recent months.” McIntyre passed the letter on to Eleanor. It was a hoax, she informed him; she had been to North, not South, Carolina in July, had made no speeches, and had driven into town in her own car accompanied only by Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook and out the same way. “I am very much interested in the Negroes and in their betterment,” her letter to Bingham said,

but the tale that I was scheduled to speak somewhere and drove through the streets of a town with a negro woman beside me, happens to be untrue but I would, however, not have a single objection to doing so if I found myself in a position where it had to be done, but I probably would not do it in North Carolina.
¹⁹

What had been a false rumor in 1934 took photographic form in 1935. Molly Dewson brought Eleanor a copy of the
Georgia Woman's World,
a racist sheet whose back page was given over to a photograph of Eleanor offering a flower to a tiny Negro child. The caption under the photograph quoted New York Representative Joseph A. Gavagan, House sponsor of the anti-lynching bill: “It has been increasingly evident that President Roosevelt, unlike his predecessor, as well as Mrs. Roosevelt, have drawn no color line at the White House.”

“Who do you suppose is financing it?” Molly wanted to know. Eleanor thought it was Governor Talmadge. “I am afraid there is nothing much we can do,” she noted. A later issue of the same paper had a two-column photograph of Eleanor being escorted to her car by a Negro in uniform. The photographs showing her in the company of Negroes, Eleanor calmly told her press conference, were taken with her permission, the last during a visit to Howard University, and the one with the Negro child at a slum-clearance project in Detroit. She did not object to their distribution. He was moved to tell her, Felix Frankfurter wrote from Cambridge, of the pride that he felt as a citizen

that the First Lady of the nation should deal with such a prickly problem in such a simple, straightforward, humane way as you did. I know it's the very law of your being so to act—and that makes it all the more a source of pride for the Nation. “They know not what they do,” these racebaiters and exploiters of unreason. And you render deep service to the enduring values of civilization by serving the nation as a historic example of simple humanity and true human brotherhood in the highest places.
²⁰

Eleanor never wanted to offend anyone, even prejudiced whites, but she thought it more important to give Negroes the feeling that they were not alone. What did she want her to do, she wrote a woman who had protested her feeding a Negro girl at a Hyde Park picnic. “Surely you would not have refused to let her eat with the other representatives? . . . I believe it never hurts to be kind. Eating with someone does
not mean you believe in intermarriage.” She refused to be cowed by the bigots.
²¹

What she did as a matter of heart and moral courage turned out to be astute politics, although that had not been her motivation. Republican hopes to split the South by exploiting the racial issue went unfulfilled. It again voted solidly Democratic despite efforts to portray the Roosevelts as “nigger lovers.” And in the northern Negro precincts the same photographs that had been circulated in the South as anti-Roosevelt propaganda contributed to an historic shift in Negro voting allegiance from the party of Lincoln to the party of the Roosevelts.

But gratitude was matched by growing expectations. More perhaps than anyone else in the administration, Eleanor was cognizant of the explosive stuff that lay beneath the surface of Negro patience and bland affability.

New Dealers who had solutions for almost every social problem shied away from the color issue because they were themselves infected with prejudice. Henry Wallace was typical. Though he was the author of a splendidly forward-looking book,
Whose Constitution?,
the racial issue left him ill at ease. Will Alexander, whom Wallace had chosen to run the Farm Security Administration, found him “terribly afraid” of it—he “just wouldn't stand up to it,” and “he was always afraid of Mrs. Roosevelt.” Eleanor, on her side, felt that Wallace lacked sympathy and understanding of the problems of the American Negro, and she knew that he resented efforts to prod the Department of Agriculture to take a more positive approach to the Negro farmers' needs.
²²

Of all the members of the cabinet, Ickes, who had been president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, was the most stalwart on the Negro issue. In the early days of the New Deal, Will Alexander and Edwin Embree had persuaded the White House to agree that someone be appointed to see that Negroes were treated fairly. Ickes had named Clark Foreman, one of Dr. Alexander's aides whom Alexander described as a young man “of very great charm” but “very impetuous,” as adviser to the secretary on the economic status of Negroes, his salary to be paid by the Rosenwald Fund. Foreman's assistant was Robert Weaver, the first Negro to obtain a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. While Ickes was at times as distrustful of Eleanor's judgment as Wallace, on the racial issue they were allies. Unlike Early, Ickes did not resent it when Negroes like White militantly forced an issue such as eating in the Capitol restaurant. He “took the hides off people who
turned away Negroes from the Interior restaurant,” Alexander said. “You didn't dare take a Negro to lunch at Agriculture.”
²³

Unless men like White had forced the issue, most of official Washington would have shut its eyes to discrimination hoping it would not rise up to confront them in a way that compelled a choice between conscience and expediency. They justified their noninvolvement by focusing on the substantial gains Negroes had made under the New Deal rather than on the injustice and degradation that still remained.