Eleanor and Franklin (137 page)

Congress was debating conscription. The Army and Navy wanted a year's compulsory military service and nothing else. The Burke-Wadsworth bill reflected their recommendations. But Eleanor, who felt that the strengthening of democracy was an indispensable component of defense, favored a universal youth service that would be a force for democratization and national unity. She urged that military training be combined with other types of training. There was considerable talk in the press gallery, May Craig wrote from Washington, that she was “‘bucking the old man' on the conscription bill,” so Miss Craig was glad to see Eleanor's column making it clear she did not oppose the Burke-Wadsworth bill. “I am not bucking the President,” Eleanor replied, “but would like to see a wider service.” She did not want conscription to be exclusively administered by the Army, but felt that it should be geared in with the NYA and CCC. “National defense means more than military training,” she told a news conference. “It means the building up of physique, of character and of a people conscious of what they owe to their country and what it means to them. . . . It took more than a knowledge of the manual of arms to carry the British troops through the retreat from Dunkirk.”

Why should the nation's young men alone be asked to serve in this supreme moment of danger? She favored total mobilization, a national muster in which everyone would be given a job to do, women as well as men, old as well as young, with burdens and sacrifices equally shared, a mobilization that would be at heart a commitment of spirit and of faith in the democratic future. When Dr. Harriet Elliott, the only woman on the National Defense Advisory Commission, went to Val-Kill to discuss what women might do in connection with the defense program, Eleanor was ready for her. The defense program should be used to serve the purpose of community revitalization, and women should be given training that would be useful in peace as well as in war. She suggested that they be taught how to prepare nutritious meals and that this be combined with a hot-school-lunch program; she urged training in the household arts, first aid, home nursing, and hygiene; and she recommended a physical-fitness and recreational program.
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But many of the president's advisers, as well as the president himself, feared that efforts to combine defense with reform might drive a crucial segment of business into the ranks of the isolationists and appeasers. Asked by an alert reporter to comment on Harriet Elliott's assertion that “defense is planes and guns” but also “building the health, the
physical fitness, the social well-being of all our people. . . . Hungry people, undernourished people, ill people, do not make for strong defense,” Roosevelt, instead of endorsing the plea, wisecracked that the issue of whether women should be admitted to the White House correspondents' dinner might also be considered a matter of national defense “but it is not immediate,” no more so than whether his Christmas tree crop would be a success that year. He had to restrict defense assistance in the social field to needs that arose clearly from expansion of defense industry and facilities! “I draw the line. I have to.” It was a sensible point, but still, as
Common Sense
noted, the wisecracks “came strangely from the head of the New Deal.” When Eleanor questioned him about it, the president insisted he had not been referring to Miss Elliott or her report. “I've checked with others and it seems hard to understand how he could have missed the meaning of the question,” Eleanor wrote to Selden Rodman. “I just can't feel that I've got to the bottom of it and yet I can't get the President now to think back.”
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The contrasting fortunes of the conscription bill and a Treasury tax measure to take the profits out of war brought into sharp focus the compromises that Roosevelt was obliged to accept that summer. His tax message had asked for a steeply graduated excess-profits tax “so that a few do not gain from the sacrifices of the many.” But Congress showed little enthusiasm for the Treasury bill, which was modeled on England's excess-profits legislation. “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country,” Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary,

you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won't work, and there are a great many people in Congress who think they can tax business out of all proportion and still have businessmen work diligently and quickly. That is not human nature.
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That was the point of view of the military men, who were primarily concerned with speed in production. On the other side, liberals like Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau, concerned with democratic morale, were indignant over the attitude of business. One week end at the beginning of August, Morgenthau went to Hyde Park to talk with the president about the tax bill, and afterward he visited Eleanor at Val-Kill to bewail the president's retreat. The Treasury's tax bill was out, Roosevelt had told him; the president would take the bill prepared by Congress, Morgenthau reported, which meant it would be drafted
by the lawyers for the chambers of commerce. The manufacturers were on strike and were refusing to negotiate contracts until Congress enacted a tax bill that assured them their profits. “Only $900,000 in contracts have been negotiated and the President is scared.”

“It's like the sit-down strike of capital against Léon Blum,” broke in Elinor Morgenthau.

Couldn't something be done through the National Defense Advisory Commission, Eleanor asked. “You can't expect the businessmen on the Defense Council to go after fellow businessmen,” Morgenthau replied. But disappointed as the secretary was, he cautioned Eleanor to let the president alone—“at least for 24 hours. He's in one of those moods.”
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If she could not speak to the president directly, she had her column. People should not profit from the war financially while the nation's young men were being drafted, she wrote.
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Each side in this debate had its own analysis of why France fell. While liberals spoke of the sit-down strike by French business against Léon Blum, conservatives like Eleanor's long-time friend and lawyer Harry Hooker were equally sure that the collapse of France had been due to the Blum reforms. Wendell Willkie had sounded this theme in his acceptance speech. The New Deal, like the Blum government, Willkie contended, was incapable of mobilizing industry's capacity to produce, and fomented division instead of unity. Eleanor gave a wholly opposite analysis of what had happened in France. Too many Frenchmen had cared more for their money than for France.

Unhappy as Eleanor was over Franklin's inability to give a stronger lead on those issues, Willkie offered no alternative, and the Republican party refused to follow his leadership on the Burke-Wadsworth bill, narrowly conceived as it was. Further, as if to underscore the unwillingness of the privileged to make any sacrifices, Willkie attacked the Russell-Overton amendment to the conscription bill, which would authorize the government to seize plants that refused to cooperate in the defense program. It would “sovietize” industry, Willkie charged: “It is said that if men are to be conscripted, wealth must be conscripted. If this statement is taken literally . . . I cannot understand what we are undertaking to defend.” “Oh, yeah,” Uncle David Gray wrote Eleanor from Dublin, Willkie “will send our boys to be massacred, but money is too sacred.”
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But it was a losing battle. It took Congress all summer to complete action on conscription and taxes. Liberals predicted a “new crop” of
war millionaires. “It was abandoning advanced New Deal ground with a vengeance,” Ickes commented in his diary.
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It was worse than that. Earlier in the year, before France had fallen and he had consented to run again, Roosevelt had spoken of a revived NRA through which corporate enterprise would be subordinated to the public interest, and had talked to Ickes about regulatory and planning mechanisms modeled on the TVA. Now big business was setting the terms of its cooperation with the government, and the influence of the military had begun to grow. These were the dangers that Eleanor had foreseen for her husband if he ran for a third term, but as the campaign progressed and she saw the forces that lined up behind Wendell Willkie, she became increasingly reconciled to her husband's candidacy.
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“I think I'll have to do a little work at headquarters but no campaigning,” she wrote shortly after the Chicago convention. “It is going to be a disagreeable fight! The convention was bad & Jim Farley's feelings & F.D.R.'s feelings made things no easier. They seem quiet now, however.” Quiet they were, but the breach between the president and Farley was unbridgeable. Neither the president nor Eleanor was able to sway Farley from his determination to give up the national chairmanship. Roosevelt turned to Ed Flynn, who took on the job, reluctantly. “If I do anything political,” Eleanor wrote Ruby Black, “I will surely let you know as I feel that the press would be entitled to know. However, I do not expect to do anything out in the open. Eddie Flynn is a very old friend of mine and I think, in some ways, we are even closer than I have ever been with Jim.”

Flynn, she felt, understood the New Deal much better than Farley, and, indeed, the Bronx leader was keenly aware of Eleanor's strength and popularity with the New Deal segments of the Roosevelt coalition. He accepted her views on the organization of the women's work. She immediately implored Molly Dewson, who had written in July saying that she was “nearly reconciled to his running again,” to leave her Maine refuge “to do some of the work with the men.” Flynn asked Eleanor to serve as his link with Norris and LaGuardia, who were to head up an Independent Committee for Roosevelt and Wallace. But primarily Flynn wanted her nearby as an additional channel to the president. He knew how stubborn and remote Roosevelt could become, inaccessible even to his closest advisers.
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What was the strategy of the campaign, she was asked early in August. Before she could reply a friend observed, “The strategy eludes
me except that the President is to continue being President and Mrs. Roosevelt First Lady.” Flynn's advice to the president had been to confine himself to running the country and, as commander-in-chief, preparing for the dangers that beset it, and to leave partisan attacks to Flynn. There would be no campaign trips, Franklin informed Eleanor, but with the president silent, the pressure on her to campaign was stronger than in 1932 and 1936. She was sorry, she wrote a Roosevelt supporter,

but I have never campaigned for my husband, and could not. The Democratic National Committee does not wish it either. The President must stand on his own record.

If he is defeated we must believe it is for the best interest of the country.
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By the end of September she was no longer sure that the president's above-the-battle posture was right. She sent him a letter from a woman deploring the president's aloofness in the face of the GOP barrage of charges and claims. “FDR—I rather think she expresses the feelings of many,” she wrote on the margin.

Flynn dispatched Franklin Jr., who was heading up youth work in the campaign, to plead with his father to make some political speeches. “What brings you to Washington?” Roosevelt teased his son as they dined alone in the oval study. “What is this ‘urgent' business you had to see me about?” he went on as if he did not know.

“Everybody's worried at headquarters.”

The president was amused. “Are they out ringing the doorbells?”

“Yeah, they're working their pants off.”

“Good, good,” the president beamed, “then they're not relying upon me.”

Young Franklin protested: it was not enough; he had to get into it; Flynn had to know when he intended to start campaigning. “I'll let him know,” the president said amiably.
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On October 11, Roosevelt went to Dayton, Ohio, but only to make a nonpolitical speech on hemispheric defense, and the short talks he made along the way were equally nonpolitical. Eleanor now felt that the president owed it to the public to discuss the issues that were being raised by Willkie: “I hope you will make a few more speeches. It seems to me pretty essential that you make them now as political speeches
& the people have a right to hear your say in opposition to Willkie between now & election day.”
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The anti-Roosevelt underground campaign in 1940 was venomous, and Flynn accused the Republicans of conducting “the most vicious, most shameful campaign since the time of Lincoln.” Much of the abuse centered on Eleanor and the Roosevelt family. Publicly she brushed it off as routine “mudslinging” but privately, as she confided in a long letter to Maude Gray reporting on her children, it caused offense and anguish:

The campaign is as bad in personal bitterness as any I have ever been in. Scurrilous letters & publications pour in about Elliott, about the money we have all made & the way we have made it with innuendoes of all kinds so I'll be glad when it is all over. Of course from a personal standpoint I'd give anything to leave Washington & if Franklin is elected I sometimes wonder if the amount he can do will be worth the sacrifice that all of us have to make, but the choice is not ours to make.
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She feared what another four years of the presidential spotlight might do to her children. Franklin Jr., handsome, full of life, quick at jovial repartee with hecklers, was proving to be a great success as a campaigner; from all over the country politicians reported on how he captivated his audiences. His success pleased his mother, but his other traits worried her. In a stern letter reminiscent of the one Sara had written her son in 1906, Eleanor wrote her husband:

Something has to be done to make F. jr. realize it is dishonest not to pay bills. I suggest you ask him to list
all
he owes. Pay it yourself & then take out of his allowance $100 a quarter. Tell him he
has
to live on his income, no going to “21” etc. until he earns his own money in toto & has no bills. Forbid Granny to give him anything except his Xmas & birthday presents beyond his allowance & that to be cut in proportion as his earnings make it possible. . . . Thank God for Anna & Johnnie who don't want to get rich quick & are willing to work & pay their way as they go.
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