Eleanor and Franklin (127 page)

In a last-minute effort to stave off catastrophe, the president proposed to Hitler and Mussolini that in return for a specific pledge of
nonaggression against thirty countries in Europe and the Near East, there would be an international conference in which the United States would participate to deal with access to markets, raw materials, territorial issues, and disarmament. “I am waiting anxiously, like everybody else, for the answer from the German and Italian heads of State to the plea for peace made by the President of the United States,” Eleanor wrote.
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But Hitler and Mussolini, emboldened by the success of their tactics of terror and violence, were not disposed to negotiate, and turned down Roosevelt's plea with scorn and derision. Hitler called a special meeting of the Reichstag to do so, and at the same time denounced Germany's nonaggression treaty with Poland. Roosevelt had not really expected Hitler to respond otherwise, but he hoped this new demonstration of Hitler's hostility to collaboration would soften isolationist opposition to the more flexible neutrality for which he had been pressing Congress since January. But the isolationists drew the opposite conclusion. Every move Roosevelt made to prevent war in Europe confirmed them in their view that he was seeking a way to involve the United States in Europe's quarrels. An amendment of the neutrality laws to give him the power to use methods short of war which might have been a warning to the dictators that an attack upon Poland would range the United States on the side of the democracies remained stalled in committee.

The only positive indication that in a showdown precipitated by Hitler the democracies would stand together was the state visit to the United States in June of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. “I need not assure you that it would give my wife and me the greatest pleasure to see you,” Roosevelt had written the British monarch just as the Munich crisis was coming to a head, “and, frankly, I think it would be an excellent thing for Anglo-American relations if you would visit the United States.” The visit was a great triumph; the United States embraced Their Majesties. Even Father Coughlin carefully referred to them as “lovely personalities” who, however, were being used “to nullify our basic foreign policy of no entanglements.” Roosevelt was the impresario of the occasion. Every item of protocol, ceremony, and program underwent his scrutiny. Yet much of what made the visit distinctive bore his wife's unmistakable stamp.
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Not without some travail. “Oh dear, oh dear, so many people are worried that ‘the dignity of our country will be imperiled' by inviting Royalty to a picnic, particularly a hot dog picnic,” she wrote in her
column two weeks before the royal couple arrived. In the forefront of the worriers was Sara, who forwarded a letter she had received begging her to rein in her daughter-in-law before she disgraced the country. On the back of the letter Sara had written a little message, “Only one of many such.” “Poor darling,” commented Eleanor; she did not know “that I have ‘many such' right here in Washington.”
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Beneath Eleanor's boundless tact and perfect good taste was an irrepressible and occasionally impish democrat. Her critics should relax, she went on. What people remembered of a visit abroad were the differences, not the similarities with the way things were done at home, especially the customs that were a little queer and amusing: “We certainly don't want to make everything so perfectly English that there will be nothing for our guests to smilingly talk about afterwards.” While she deleted this sentence from her column, she refused to be deterred by those who scoffed at what they considered her Yankee parochialism from showing the king and queen aspects of American life that were characteristic of the country and the Roosevelt reforms. And her husband supported her.

At the White House she presided over a lawn party where the king and queen met the heads of such agencies as the NYA, WPA, and Social Security that were distinctively New Deal. Dr. Will Alexander, the Farm Security administrator, was one of those whom she brought over to the king and queen to tell them what he was doing. He recorded later, “It was one of the most amazing performances and was an indication of where the hearts of President and Mrs. Roosevelt were.”

The concert at the State Dinner also reflected Eleanor's special touch. There was Kate Smith, who was typically American, although Ickes grumbled that she was “a type one would expect to hear in a cheap music hall.” Ickes did approve, however, of Marian Anderson, whose participation in this most select and glamorous social event of the Roosevelt years was the artistic high point of the evening as well as an unspoken rebuke to the snobbery and prejudice that had excluded her from the DAR auditorium. Another unorthodox performer in the concert for the royal couple was Alan Lomax, a gifted young collector and singer of folk songs, who seems, as a premature hippie, to have occasioned some shocked whispers since his locks were unshorn, his socks forgotten, and his political associations suspect.
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The semiofficial German News Bureau reported: “On Friday afternoon Mrs. Roosevelt has arranged a tea and a reception at which she hopes to bring the Left Radical members of the Federal
Government into conversations with the royal couple.” The Italian propagandists took another line. “Mrs. Roosevelt did not kneel when introduced to Queen Elizabeth, despite the fact that this is court etiquette. This is the greatest scandal of the present era,” noted
Popolo di Roma
.
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If Berlin and Rome were scandalized, the British ambassador was not wholly serene. He was unhappy that Eleanor presented her press-conference regulars to the king and queen, as Eleanor wrote Kathleen McLaughlin of the
New York Times:

I might have been able to do even more than that if one of your colleagues had not been fool enough to tell the British Ambassador that I was thinking of having a press conference when the Queen was there. I understand that the girls in Washington just about killed her!
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She arranged for Harry Hopkins' six-year-old daughter Diana to meet the queen, whom she told beforehand that she thought Diana envisioned queens with crown and scepter. In that case, said the queen, it might be more satisfactory to the child if she saw her dressed for dinner. So that night Eleanor and Diana stood waiting in the hall for Their Majesties to come out of their rooms. When they did, Diana made her little curtsy to the queen who, Eleanor reported, lived up to a child's dream of how a queen should look, for “her spangled tulle dress with her lovely jewels and her tiara in her hair made her seem like someone out of a story book.”
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From Washington the royal visitors went to Hyde Park with a stopover in New York to visit the World's Fair. At the Hyde Park picnic the menu included frankfurters and beer and the entertainment was equally distinctive, although some of the 165 guests found the Indian princess, Te Ata, boring and the voice of the young refugee singer, Charlotte Kraus, unexciting. “Not very good,” recorded Helen Robinson of the entertainment, “but perhaps it was a novelty to the King and Queen—at any rate they were very polite about it, and the King was amusing himself by taking moving pictures.” And throughout it all there was Eleanor “dashing about in a little brown gingham dress, seeing that the lunch was properly served and that everybody was comfortable, just as though it were only a family party.” Afterward the president got into his little hand-operated Ford, with the queen beside him and the king in back, and drove away, “which looked very nice and informal.”
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A dinner for the visiting royalty at the Big House was Sara's moment of glory. The king took her in, and the only toast of the evening was that of the president to the king's mother, a lovely tribute to two very awesome ladies. There were minor mishaps, and Eleanor could not resist the impulse to report them. An overloaded serving table crashed, and Eleanor's stepsister-in-law was heard saying to Sara, “I do hope that it wasn't
my
china that was broken.” And later a tray of ice, water, and ginger ale hurtled to the floor when a butler slipped on his way to the library. “Why mention that?” the president asked when Eleanor checked her column with him. She thought people would like to know that accidents happen to housekeeping, even in the president's house. The president laughed and withdrew his objection. For the remainder of her life Sara would tell her children, “If
my
butler had been used instead of those White House people, none of these things would have happened.”
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As the train carrying the king and queen pulled away from the Hyde Park station, the crowd of Roosevelt's Hyde Park neighbors which had gathered for the departure suddenly began to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” It was a moving moment. “We all knew the King and Queen were returning home to face a war.”

“Now for ‘the visit,'” Eleanor reported to Maude Gray: “Everything went well. . . . Both [the king and queen] interested me & I think he feels things more than she does & knows more. She is perfect as a Queen, gracious, informed, saying the right thing & kind but a little self-consciously regal.”
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The king and queen had made a good impression, Ickes noted in his diary, “although I doubt whether there will be any relaxation of the wariness with respect to possible entanglements in foreign affairs.”
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Public opinion was shifting away from isolationism, especially as signs multiplied that Hitler intended to force Poland to yield Danzig even at the risk of war with Britain and France, but the shift was not sufficiently pronounced to bring about amendment of the neutrality laws. By narrow majorities the House upheld the mandatory arms-embargo provisions of the legislation. “The vote last night was a stimulus to war,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor's old colleague and friend, Representative Caroline O'Day. But her vote with the majority was an indication of the sincerity and depth of conviction that gripped both sides in this historic controversy. Roosevelt turned to the Senate, but it postponed action until January, 1940, after Senator Borah disputed
Hull's warning that there might be war before then. His sources of information were better than the State Department's, Borah said.

The senators were eager to get away from the Washington heat, the president told Eleanor over the phone. She could not bring herself to believe there was nothing to be done to halt the looming conflict, but privately she was pessimistic:

It would be marvelous if one could get all the nations around a table to discuss what they really need and put the money into something other than armaments. Unfortunately, however, my husband found when he sounded out the possibility of such a meeting that there was no cooperation forthcoming from the dictators. We pray daily that there will be no war although I must say our own Senators have made it more difficult to use one's influence to prevent a war.
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“I don't know what might happen now,” she wrote Martha Gellhorn, “but it looks pretty hopeless to me and our hands, as far as prevention goes, are pretty well tied.”
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On August 12 the president left Hyde Park for a few weeks of relaxation on the U.S.S.
Tuscaloosa
. “I think I shall spend most of the first few days sleeping,” he told his wife. He was at Campobello on the fourteenth. “I look at the papers anxiously,” Eleanor wrote him, “but hope you get the whole of your cruise, not just for your sake but for the sake of the poor people in Europe.”

On August 21, Hitler secured himself against a two-front war by conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “It would be a pact with the devil, if Britain signed an agreement with Russia,” Carola had written “Bennett.” The Englishwoman promptly wrote back, after revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact, to ask whether “the devil had suddenly grown angel's wings in the sight of all good Germans!” Carola replied that “of course they were very much surprised but that everyone thought it wonderful!” Carola had been writing to her for months, Eleanor replied, “that only Christ's teachings could save us, and how one can reconcile Mr. Hitler with belief in Christ is more than I can tell.”
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Within hours after the signing of the pact Hitler's demands for the return of Danzig had turned into a full-blown war crisis. The president broke off his cruise.

Again Roosevelt appealed for a peaceful resolution of the crisis—this time addressing himself to Hitler, the king of Italy, and the president
of Poland. Carefully Eleanor commented that “blindly to ask for peace is no help in the present situation, for peace may be bought today at too high a cost in the future. It may be wise to buy it, but you must do so knowing what your objectives are for the future, and accepting the conditions which are a part of the price which is paid.” Part of the price, she was suggesting, if war was to be averted, would be U.S. involvement in a settlement that would be fair as well as secure.
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“Negotiation, mediation or arbitration are just words,” she wrote the next day, “but any one of them if put into practice now by people who really want to keep the peace might mean life instead of death to hundreds of thousands of young men.” She asked Franklin over the telephone when he might be arriving at Hyde Park. Perhaps not for months, he told her, and his tone of voice implied that arrivals and departures were no longer of consequence, that in fact nothing relating to the plans of individuals counted any longer. Her heart sank, for it reminded her of 1914. “What a horrible situation it is,” she wrote her husband that night.

“And still we wait from day to day hoping and praying for peace,” she wrote on August 29. “I feel that every day that bombs do not actually burst and guns go off, we have gained an advantage.” The thought of war desolated her. She looked again at Thomas Mann's tract on force having to be met with force, but the sentence that seemed most meaningful to her, so much so that she sent it on to Franklin, moved in the opposite direction. “War is nothing but a cowardly escape from the problems of peace,” it read.