Eleanor and Franklin (122 page)

The peace lobby was effective. Even though Roosevelt told his Senate leaders he did not want action on the World Court at that session, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was persuaded to hold a hearing on adherence. Would she attend, Esther asked Eleanor. “After all, the objective is simply a definite plank in 1932 Democratic Platform which we all support 100%.” She was “terribly sorry,” Eleanor
replied the next day, “but Franklin thinks I had better not go to any hearings. I never go either to any of the code hearings or to any of the others at the Capitol. I hope to goodness that you have the votes to bring it out and that all will go well.” She invited Esther to stay at the White House during the hearings, but Esther declined; it might be interpreted as committing the president “to a more aggressive line on court action than he wants to show at the moment.” The hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were successful beyond Esther's hopes. The isolationists who thought they had buried adherence to the court along with the League of Nations were taken by surprise. Senators Hiram Johnson and William E. Borah acknowledged that the court supporters had marshaled enough strength to force a favorable report by the committee at that session of Congress.

But Franklin's political antennae still signaled danger. She had heard, Eleanor wrote, “what a very good hearing it was and [I] think it will do great good, but they are all convinced that the World Court shall not come up until after the next election as they feel that it would just give Mr. Hearst another thing to pin his attack on. So I am afraid there is not much chance.” But Esther, remembering Roosevelt's previous vacillations on the issue, wondered if he would move in 1935. In October she transmitted to Eleanor a report of an evasive reply made by Senator David I. Walsh, the Massachusetts Democrat, when asked his position on the court: “I am a supporter of the President and when he recommends our joining it I shall vote in favor of doing so.” In fact, Franklin's mind was made up, although he had not yet indicated so publicly. When the State Department had sent emissaries to Hyde Park in September to suggest that an adherence resolution be presented to the next session of Congress, they were pleasantly surprised that “Mr. Roosevelt readily agreed.”
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The effort to win U.S. adherence came to a head in January, 1935. “We are banking everything on the Court getting through this week,” Esther wired Eleanor on January 15, 1935. “We think only chance is to get it out of the way before legislative program gets complicated.” The Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported the bill out on January 9, but Key Pittman, its chairman, refused to handle it on the floor because he was not in sympathy with the resolution and predicted a bitter fight. The bill was entrusted to Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who had polled the Democrats, as Senator Charles McNary had the Republicans, and estimated that the two-thirds majority for the resolution was easily there. The president
evidently was dubious about the count for he asked for Esther's, and when she replied that even if one included the twelve doubtful votes in the opposition, there were not enough votes to defeat the resolution, Eleanor replied, “Please send me the names of any one on the doubtful list immediately.”
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The Senate debate took place against a somber international background. Germany was rearming in disregard of treaties. Japan was preparing to push on from Manchuria into North China. Italy's campaign of threat and pressure against Ethiopia had begun. “At this period in international relationships,” Roosevelt's message to the Senate read, “when every act is of moment to the future of world peace, the United States has an opportunity once more to throw its weight into the scales in favor of peace.” But Senator Hiram Johnson, veteran of the battle against the League of Nations, looked at the same set of events and drew an opposite conclusion for American policy. The staccato sentences poured out: “All Europe sits over a volcano. No one knows when the explosion will come. But when the day comes Europe will drag us into the war as they did in 1917, and will hate us afterwards.”
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Franklin had begun to work on the list of doubtful senators, Eleanor informed Esther, but the opposition also was mobilized. “Father Coughlin is down here now and I have been told that he got one Senator away from us. The President thinks he has a two-thirds vote but he wants to get his big appropriations bill through first. . . . He agrees with you about the record vote and wants it just as soon as the other bill is out of the way.” As the record vote approached, isolationist pressure mounted. Every day, the Hearst press in front-page editorials called on its readers to write to their senators. The most deadly attack was leveled by Father Coughlin the Sunday before the vote. He denounced the court, which he said was favored by the “international plutocrats” who again would push the United States down the road to war, and entreated his vast listening audience to telegraph, today—“tomorrow may be too late”; a torrent of telegrams descended upon Capitol Hill.
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Esther and her friends frantically sought someone to go on the radio to try to offset the Hearst-Coughlin onslaught. Eleanor agreed to do so if they couldn't get someone more effective. “Sporting of you to do it,” Esther wired after the speech, adding, “men are worms.” Esther thought the president was not doing enough and that the Senate pro-court leadership was incompetent. Eleanor appealed to the women of her generation “who remember the World War and who desire to take any action they can to safeguard the youth of the future.” In
language simple and moving, she reviewed the arguments on behalf of this effort “to have questions settled by law and not by war. . . . We cannot escape being a part of the world. Therefore, let us make this gesture for peace, and remember there was no World Court in 1914 when the Great War began.”

The telegrams from the women poured in, but in the Senate the speech boomeranged. It was the “only counterblow” to the Hearst campaign against the court, Arthur Krock commented in the
Times,
but it “has not had wholly favorable effect, to judge from the comment in the cloakrooms today.” When the vote came adherence fell seven short of the required two thirds.
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A heartsick Esther went directly back to Philadelphia instead of going to the White House to say good-by. She hoped the president would resubmit the resolution promptly because “otherwise our whole international policy will be shortstopped.”

Eleanor understood why, feeling as low as she did, Esther had not wished to spend the night at the White House.

It is discouraging that Mr. Hearst and Father Coughlin can influence the country in the way that they do but that is that.

Franklin says that he could not possibly resubmit the resolution. . . . Time may change the point of view of this country and the settling of American debts would make a tremendous difference. That is about all we can hope for.
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While some of the peace groups thought the president should have been more outspoken, Eleanor demurred.

In regard to the World Court vote—I doubt if any public word by the President would have helped matters much. He sent for every Democratic and Independent Senator and talked to him personally, besides sending his message. I am afraid that the pressure must come from the people themselves, and, until it does, we will never be become a member of the World Court.
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“I have been surprised all along that the President should make this such an issue as he has made it,” Ickes commented in his diary. When he telephoned his friend Senator Hiram Johnson to congratulate him, Johnson told him that “a great many” senators “were bitter in their criticism of Mrs. Roosevelt for mixing up in this fight.” Ickes did not
understand how the president, able politician that he was, “allowed himself to become entangled as deeply as he was on this issue. He might have let the Senate pass on it without showing his own hand.”
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Would the president have made the fight for the court if its adherents had not been able to focus their pressure on him through Esther and Eleanor? He was a convinced internationalist, searching for ways to indicate U.S. concern and interests in events in Europe and Asia. But would he have judged the political risks worth taking? In 1932 he had disappointed the Wilsonians when in pursuit of the presidential nomination he had capitulated to Hearst, renounced the League of Nations, and fallen silent about the court. Have faith in me, he had pleaded then. Perhaps the memory of a wife who on that occasion had refused to talk to him influenced him to make the court fight in 1935 despite adverse political signals. “When you disapprove of something you sit so straight your backbone has no bend,” Franklin had once reproved her. And while the reproof had taught her a lesson and she had subsequently learned to treat political opportunism with tolerance and amused resignation, there still were occasions when she went cold and remote with anger, a prospect from which Franklin shrank. So if Roosevelt's involvement in the World Court was, as Ickes wrote, “a major political blunder,” some of the responsibility was Eleanor's. But it was not really a blunder. He would make many efforts before war broke out to turn the country away from isolationism. All would fail, but the fight had to be made.

The Senate rebuffed international cooperation nine months before Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. It was a bad moment in which to weaken the authority, even if it was fragile and compromised, of the institutions that had been set up for the peaceful resolution of disputes. Yet even so committed an internationalist as Eleanor avoided advocacy of American support for the League of Nations. “I think I had better not speak for you,” she wrote the League of Nations Association:

I do hope to work for the World Court and I find that the feeling of Congress is so opposed to the League of Nations that those of us who are interested in trying to change the feeling on the World Court had better not be associated any more than is absolutely necessary with organizations for the League.
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The isolationist tide that ran against the League also engulfed the court. It was, as Franklin realized, a dead issue. The peace movement
split, with many of the peace organizations turning from collaborative efforts to prevent the war that seemed to be coming to an attempt to insulate America from that war. The rationale for this shift was provided by the Nye Committee, which had been established to investigate the international traffic in munitions. Eleanor sympathized with the move to curb the “merchants of death,” as the arms salesmen were characterized in the thirties. “Perhaps the first and most practical step that the nations of the world could take would be to buy out the munitions makers and make their business of war supplies a government business only,” she said.
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But the Nye Committee did not limit itself to the arms trade. It developed the thesis that the United States had been drawn into the Great War by bankers and munitions makers and that the threat to America's remaining at peace in the thirties arose not from the growing dangers in Europe and Asia but from the sale of munitions and loans to belligerents. The way to keep America out of another war, the Nye Committee argued, was to take the profits out of war through embargos on arms and limitations on loans, trade, and travel applied impartially against all belligerents. “In the Executive Branch it was evident that no one could withstand the isolationist cyclone,” wrote Hull. Two months before the outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, the Senate approved a mandatory arms embargo and denied the president any discretion in its application to aggressor and victim.
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There was some confusion in Eleanor's attitude toward the neutrality bill. The resolution was an “achievement” of the peace groups, she wrote John Haynes Holmes, a noted pacifist minister, “but the passage of that resolution does not prevent individual congressmen and senators from coming to the President to try to have a particular product of their district kept off any list which is considered ‘munitions of war.'” That sounded as if she wanted even stronger legislation. Yet she also voiced the hope that when Congress reassembled women would impress upon their representatives that they did not want “any goods whatsoever sold to an aggressor nation which may even remotely contribute to continuance of war.” But what if an aggressor's design could not be blocked without continuance, perhaps even expansion,
of war? She had not faced the choice yet. Although some peace groups recoiled from League sanctions because they felt sanctions created a risk of enlarging the war, Eleanor favored economic sanctions against Italy because she thought they would stop the war and compel Italy to seek redress for its grievances through peaceful means.
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So she wrote her old German schoolfellow Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein, who had criticized League sanctions against Italy as “against all laws of God and nature.” The World War had ended the correspondence between Carola and Eleanor, but in April, 1933, when Roosevelt had come to power in the United States and Hitler in Germany, Carola again got in touch with “Dear Totty,” explaining that she had not written in the intervening years because she had been ashamed of Germany's dishonorable role. But now with the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, Germany had been delivered from meanness and corruption and men with decent points of view had come to leadership. “Can you imagine what happiness it is for us to have our dear black-white-red flag again?”

Eleanor was astonished that Carola, a deeply religious woman, should have so high an opinion of the Nazi leaders, but, fond of Carola and curious as always to find out as much as she could about other countries and peoples, especially when they held views different from hers, she had replied and kept the correspondence going, limiting herself to chitchat about the family and her own busy life. But now she decided she had better let Carola know exactly how she felt about countries that resorted to war to satisfy what they considered to be their grievances. Carola had asked what right England had to think herself better than other nations and sit in judgment on them, and were not sanctions in fact another form of war?