Eleanor and Franklin (126 page)

But in writing to her Allenswood classmate, Helen Gifford, she was less positive about the rights and wrongs of the Sudeten issue:

I feel with you that things are not definitely settled and I can well imagine that Mlle. Souvestre with her feelings about minorities might be very unhappy. However, I cannot help being glad that the countries involved did not send thousands of young people to be killed over this particular question. Czechoslovakia was set up in an arbitrary way and my whole feeling is that the question should have been discussed in a calm atmosphere and not at the point of a pistol.
¹³

Another Allenswood classmate, “Bennett,” wrote that she was relieved that war had been averted, but confessed that she was baffled by Carola, who had written enthusiastically about her son being in the German army.

and oh what a wonderful thought it was that he might give his life for his country. I may be unpatriotic, but I have not the slightest desire that my own sons should give their lives either for their own or anyone else's country if it can possibly be avoided! Indeed my chief feeling about Chamberlain's achievement is the deepest gratitude that they are not doing it now.

“Of course all you say about Carola is true,” Eleanor replied,

and I cannot say that I want any of my children to go to war and be killed. Hitler has certainly managed to give the Germans a curious psychology, and how Carola can talk about being a Christian and not see the inconsistency of what they are doing is beyond my understanding. I think she realizes this, because I haven't heard from her in a long while, and we are becoming more and more articulate in this country as to our feeling.
¹⁴

She was herself much clearer as to what she thought and less guarded in saying what she felt about neutrality revision and rearmament. A lecture trip in the midwest took her to Wisconsin. “The LaFollettes have been everywhere & are speaking against increased armament,” she wrote the president, “but I had a good audience last night, people standing & no one took exception to my point of view.”
¹⁵

America's isolationism seemed to Eleanor to be nurturing a growing insensitivity to human suffering elsewhere, especially to the plight of the refugee. Her first effort to help refugees was undertaken at the request of the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, who in 1934 had asked
her to talk to the president about a bill to legalize the status of white Russian refugees who still had only temporary visas. Eleanor had spoken with the president, and the bill the Grand Duchess wanted—S. 2692—had been adopted by the Senate and signed by the president.
¹⁶

But there were few such victories for the advocates of easing the immigration laws in order to provide a haven for Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees from Hitler. All such moves foundered on the hard rock of a congressional resistance that was supported by American public opinion. “What has happened to us in this country?” Eleanor asked in her column at the beginning of 1939. “If we study our own history we find that we have always been ready to receive the unfortunates from other countries, and though this may seem a generous gesture on our part, we have profited a thousand fold by what they have brought us.”

When she wrote this she was in the midst of a new effort to open America's doors a little wider. In early November the Nazis had horrified world opinion by
Kristallnacht
(night of the broken glass), when a wave of looting, arson, destruction, and cruelty had been let loose on Germany's hapless Jews in reprisal for the assassination of a German attaché in Paris by a young Polish Jew. Anti-Nazi and Jewish groups in the United States thought that perhaps in the light of events, which made it clear that the fate of Germany's Jews was sealed, U.S. public opinion might be willing to support legislation to ease the quotas for children.

At the end of December, Rabbi Stephen Wise's daughter, the brilliant and eloquent Justine Polier, who was a children's court judge in New York and active in the American Jewish Congress, conferred with Eleanor about a child-refugee bill which would provide for the admission of ten thousand children a year for two years in excess of the German quota. She would take it up with the president, Eleanor told Judge Polier. Franklin gave the bill the green light, and Eleanor outlined the strategy to Mrs. Polier:

My huband says that you had better go to work at once and get two people of opposite parties in the House and Senate and have them jointly get agreement on the legislation which you want for bringing in the children.

The State Department is only afraid of what Congress will say to them, and therefore if you remove that fear the State Department will make no objection.

He advises that you choose your people rather carefully and, if possible, get all the Catholic support you can.
¹⁷

The bill was introduced in early February, 1939, by Robert Wagner in the Senate and by Edith Nourse Rogers, a Massachusetts Republican, in the House. The supporting committee for the legislation included George William Cardinal Mundelein, Canon Anson Phelps Stokes, Herbert Hoover, Alfred Landon, and Frank Knox. Despite this impressive sponsoring group, the legislation immediately ran into objections from the American Legion, the DAR, and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, who contended that “charity begins at home.”

“Are you willing I should talk to Sumner, and say we approve passage of Child Refugee Bill?” Eleanor cabled Franklin, who was on board the U.S.S.
Houston
in the Caribbean. “Mrs. Roosevelt's gentle persuasion did not work,” wrote one critic of what he called Roosevelt's seeming indifference to the fate of the children. It was an unjust accusation, as Eleanor's letter to Judge Polier describing the president's attitude demonstrated. Eleanor had talked with James G. McDonald, the head of the president's Advisory Committee on Refugees, about what the president should do, she wrote Judge Polier,

and he told me he [McDonald] is in favor of the bill personally, but he has been told that pressing the President at the present time may mean that the people in Congress who have bills to cut the quota will present them immediately and that might precipitate a difficult situation which would result in cutting the quota by 90%, and that, of course, would be very serious. Therefore, the committee hestitates to recommend support of the bill when they do not know whether this will be the result or not.

I also talked with Sumner Welles. He says that personally he is in favor of the bill and feels as I do about it, but that it would not be advisable for the President to come out, because if the President did and was defeated it would be very bad. I told him I did not think it was any question of the President's actually coming out, though he was anxious to see the bill go through.

I cabled the President and he said I could come out and I could talk to Mr. Welles and say he would be pleased to have the bill go through but he did not want to say anything publicly at the present time.

Mr. Welles feels very strongly that pressing the bill at the present time might do exactly what Mr. McDonald says, because his desk is flooded with protests accusing the State Department at conniving in
allowing a great many more Jewish people than the quota permits to enter the country under various pretenses.
¹⁸

House and Senate immigration committees held hearings in April and May, and, as the State Department had feared, restrictionist groups led by the patriotic societies turned out en masse to denounce the legislation as “part of a drive to break down the whole quota system.” At the beginning of June New York Representative Caroline O'Day asked the White House for an expression of the president's attitude. “File No Action,” Roosevelt stoically scrawled on this query. A few weeks later Wagner withdrew his bill, which the Immigration Committee had modified so that the 20,000 children would come in—not in addition to but against the regular German quota.

“We used to be more sensitive to human need,” Eleanor had remarked sadly to the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War at the beginning of the year. The defeat of the Child Refugee bill painfully underlined that judgment.
¹⁹

An increase in anti-Semitism was another facet of the country's intensifying isolationism. “As to my husband's being a Jew,” Eleanor replied to a woman who had passed this on as her friends' explanation of the Roosevelt administration's alleged partiality toward the Jews,

there is one name, a great many generations back, which might have been a Jewish name and, as a joke, in my uncle Theodore Roosevelt's family it used to be said that some of the intelligence came from the ancestress. I feel, however, that if she was a Jew—and none of us know whether she was or not—the blood has been so much diluted that there is very little left in my husband's generation.
²⁰

Her own feeling about Jews, as about all ethnic, racial, and religious groups, had changed dramatically from her insecurity, dislike, and sense of strangeness with members of minority groups when she had been in Washington during the Wilson administration. Prejudice, she had come to understand, was worse for the person who felt it than for those against whom it was directed. “When a person holds deep prejudice, he gets to dislike the object of his prejudice. He uses it as an excuse for the fact that there is something unworthy in himself.” And when you blame someone for your own undesirable qualities, “it becomes hard to be honest with yourself.”
²¹
The Nazi persecution of the Jews reflected envy and insecurity: “It is
the secret fear that the Jewish people are stronger or more able than those who still wielded superior physical power over them, which brings about oppression.”
²²

People were good and bad, sensitive and calloused, greedy and generous—but not because they were Jews or Italians or Negroes or Anglo-Saxons.
²³
And if a minority had certain disagreeable mannerisms or traits—the Jews, she felt, tended toward clannishness—that was because of what the dominant society had done to them. The gentile world had “pushed the Jewish race into Zionism and Palestine, and into their nationalistic attitude.”
²⁴
When a Jewish doctor inquired what Jews might do to stop “the ever-increasing tide of anti-Semitism,” her answer essentially was assimilationist:

I think it is important in this country that the Jews as Jews remain unaggressive and stress the fact that they are Americans first and above everything else; that they give help, together with the other citizens of this country, to the people who are being oppressed because of their race and religion; and, as far as possible, wipe out in their own consciousness any feeling of difference by joining in all that is being done by Americans.
²⁵

But basically she felt that the Jews were powerless and that their fate rested with the non-Jewish world.

It depends almost entirely on the course of the Gentiles what the future holds. It can be cooperative, mutual assistance, gradual slow assimilation with justice and fair-mindedness towards all the racial groups living together in different countries, or it can be injustice, hatred and death. It looks to me as though the future of the Jews were tied up as it always has been with the future of all the races of the world. If they perish, we perish sooner or later.

Zionism and nationalism needed no apology, a Jewish editor protested; assimilation had not saved the Jews of Germany and Italy. “Mrs. Roosevelt read your editorial,” Tommy wrote him, “and thinks you may well be right.”
²⁶

An isolationist storm blew up at the end of January when, with a French observer on board, the latest model U.S. bomber crashed and it was disclosed that Roosevelt had authorized the sale of military planes to France. Eleanor defended the president's decision.

Do our sympathies lie with the other democracies or do they lie with the totalitarian states? Germany is geared to produce a thousand planes a month; France to produce one hundred planes a month. It seems quite evident why France would be interested in buying from us. It is also quite evident that Germany would naturally start a hue and cry that the U. S. was favoring France. . . .

I want to see all the nations of the world reduce their armaments. Mr. Chamberlain has suggested it, but I have seen no acquiescence on the part of Mr. Hitler. Have you? Who is taking a belligerent attitude in the world today?
²⁷

The isolationist leaders thought it prudent not to reply to the First Lady, but the Nazi press did. The
Lokal Anzeiger
advised her to

leave politics alone. . . . One should ask her to keep her pen away from things of which she is ignorant. There are many other better fields of work for a militant writer; for instance, social questions concerning the 12,000,000 unemployed, lynching, child labor and public morals. It is not good for a nation if not only the husband but also the wife enters the political china shop.

Her press conference asked Eleanor what she thought of that. “I thought their whole attitude was that women didn't count,” she replied. She was a “bad influence” on her husband, wrote
Popolo di Roma
, and “too many” of his decisions were swayed by her anti-totalitarian ideas.
²⁸

On March 17 Hitler moved again, occupying Prague and partitioning Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain, pushed by British public opinion and outraged by Hitler's failure to keep his word, pledged military assistance to Poland in the event of an attack by Hitler. Eleanor applauded:

The gentleman with the umbrella, finding that “appeasement” does not work where ethics do not exist, has gone the whole way in the opposite direction. It takes courage to do that, if you are in politics, and it cannot be done, except in a democracy. A dictator must always be “right.” He can never be a human being, for his hold upon the people lies in the illusion that he is a superman.
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