No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  The plight of the refugees, particularly the British children, touched such a responsive chord in the American public that within two days the committee was flooded with thousands of offers of homes. All of these offers had to be confirmed and evaluated, a laborious task which Eleanor willingly shouldered. “I think men are worse than women on committees,” Eleanor confided in a letter to her daughter, Anna, “and they do think more of their importance. I hope I’ll never think I am of any importance, it makes one so stuffy!”

  Moreover, as Eleanor quickly recognized, the task of “finding homes into which to put children when they arrive” was delightfully simple compared with “the horrid legal details” involved in having the children admitted to the country in the first place. From the start, Eleanor understood that visitor visas were the only way to get around the low monthly quotas for immigration which had been set by a xenophobic Congress in the late 1920s. In a radio program on CBS, Eleanor argued for an administrative ruling that would permit refugee children to enter the United States as temporary visitors rather than as immigrants. “The children are not immigrants,” she said. “The parents of these children will recall them when the war is over . . . . Therefore [they] should be classified as temporary visitors and not as immigrants . . . . Red tape must not be used to trip up little children on their way to safety.”

  Since visitor visas were not subject to numerical limitations, the change Eleanor advocated promised to open America’s doors to tens of thousands of refugees, and simultaneously to provide an invaluable precedent for saving countless lives in the years ahead. The principal obstacle was the head of the State Department’s visa section, Breckinridge Long. A Southerner who proudly traced his roots to the Breckinridges of Kentucky and the Longs of North Carolina, Long was adamantly opposed to the admission of refugees under any circumstances. In a diary filled with invectives against Jews, Catholics, New Yorkers, liberals, and in fact everybody who was not of his own particular background, Long interpreted the widespread desire to admit the British refugee children as “an enormous psychosis” on the part of the American people. “I attribute it to repressed emotion about the war,” he recorded in his diary, “the chance finally to DO something, however wrongheaded it may be.”

  Long had first met FDR during the Wilson administration, when they were both assistant secretaries, Long at State, Roosevelt at Navy. A successful international lawyer, Long had made a sizable contribution to the Democratic campaign fund in 1932 and was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Italy. There, Mussolini and the fascist regime captured his heart until Mussolini’s foreign adventures and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia changed his mind. Resigning from the ambassadorship, he returned to the United States, where in January 1940 he was made head of a Special War Problems Division in the State Department, which included the visa section.

  Long had come to the unshakable conviction that the admission of refugees would endanger national security, since the Germans were using visitor visas to send spies and foreign agents abroad. Every single one of the now defeated countries, according to Long, had been honeycombed with spies and fifth-column activities. There was some truth to his claims.

  But not even Long, whose skill at carrying the security gambit to an illogical extreme boggled the mind, was able to argue that British children were German spies. Moreover, in the summer of 1940, the tide of support for letting the British children into America was so strong, running through every class in American society, that it promised, for a time, to overwhelm the more general antirefugee sentiment that had been prevalent for so many years.

  Capitalizing on the moment at hand, Eleanor appealed directly to Franklin, patiently explaining why it was necessary to go over Breckinridge Long’s head. For days and weeks, she said, she had been arguing with Long to no avail. The president assured her he would do his utmost, and the next day, in a signal victory for the refugee advocates, Roosevelt ordered Long’s boss, Secretary of State Hull, to simplify the procedure so that the British children could come in. A new ruling was issued the following day whereby visitor visas would be issued to British refugee children “upon a showing of intention they shall return home upon the termination of hostilities.”

  Eleanor was delighted. “I think your mother is really enjoying her work with the refugee committee,” Tommy told Anna. “She looks very well and of course, is always happier when she feels she is doing something constructive.”

  One pressing problem remained: how to get the children here. “The English,” Harold Ickes recorded in his diary, “cannot spare warships to convoy bottoms [unarmed merchant ships] bringing in refugee children and it isn’t safe to send them except under convoy.” Nor was it safe to send American mercy ships into the sub-infested waters. “The very surest way to get America into the war,” Long argued, “would be to send an American ship to England and put 2000 babies on it and then have it sunk by a German torpedo.” Roosevelt shared Long’s fear about sending American ships, but when the pressure to save the British children refused to abate, the Congress took matters into its own hands, passing an amendment to the Neutrality Act which permitted unarmed, unescorted ships to sail to Britain to evacuate British children provided safe conduct was granted by all belligerents.

  • • •

  While Americans fretted over the plight of British children who were not yet in danger, the people who most urgently needed help were the Jewish refugees from Germany who were trapped in Vichy France. One of the provisions in the French armistice agreement required the Vichy government to return on demand all German citizens named by the German government. As American ships crossed the Atlantic to save the British children, Gestapo agents were on their way to France to round up every German Jewish man, woman, and child they could find. But when Congressman William Schulte of Indiana tried to broaden the use of the visitor visas to any European child under sixteen, his bill was killed before it even reached the floor. The crucial difference, in terms of American public opinion, between the British and the German children was that the British boys and girls were mostly Christian, the German children mostly Jewish.

  Throughout the 1930s, as tens of thousands of Jews fled Nazi Germany, Roosevelt worked behind the scenes to let more people in. Estimates show that, in the years between 1933 and 1940, nearly 105,000 refugees from Nazism reached safety in the United States, a record, though limited, that went beyond that of any other country. Only Palestine, which took in 55,000 during these same years, approached the American figure.

  But those who were granted refuge were pitifully few compared with those who were trying to flee. “The long pathetic list of refugee ships, unable to find harbors open to them,” historian David Wyman argues, “testifies to the fact the world of the late 30s and early 40s was a world without room for the Jews of . . . Europe.” The sad saga of the St. Louis, which set out from Germany for Cuba in May 1939 with 930 Jewish refugees aboard, was a dramatic case in point. On reaching Havana, the passengers were not allowed to disembark and the ship was turned away. For weeks, as the ship hovered close enough to Miami for the refugees to see the lights of the city, negotiators tried without success to get the U.S. government to provide temporary sanctuary. A telegram to FDR from a committee of the passengers received no reply. The St. Louis, memorialized in the movie Voyage of the Damned, was forced to sail back to Europe, where many of its passengers eventually died in concentration camps.

  Roosevelt was not unsympathetic to the plight of the Jewish refugees. Though anti-Semitism had been part and parcel of the cloistered world in which he and Eleanor had grown up—“The Jew party [was] appalling,” Eleanor had written her mother-in-law in 1918 after an evening with Bernard Baruch. “I never wish to hear money, jewels or sables mentioned again”—politics had broadened their attitudes and expanded their sensibilities. During the Roosevelt presidency, though Jews constituted only 3 percent of the U.S. population, they represented nearly 15 percent of Roosevelt’s top appointments. Indeed, so prominent were Jews in
the Roosevelt administration that bigots routinely referred to the New Deal as the Jew Deal and charged that Roosevelt was himself a Jew. “In the dim distant past,” Roosevelt had replied, “[my ancestors] may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.”

  But it was one thing to sympathize with the plight of the Jewish refugees and quite another to pit his presidency against the xenophobic, anti-Semitic mood of his country in the late 1930s and early ’40s. This Roosevelt was unwilling to do. Roper polls confirmed that, though people disapproved of Hitler’s treatment of Jews in Germany, the majority of Americans were manifestly unwilling to assist the Jews in practical ways, especially if it meant allowing more Jewish immigration into the U.S. In answer to a question posed in 1938, “What kinds of people do you object to?,” Jews were mentioned by 35 percent of the respondents; the next-highest category, at 27 percent, were “noisy, cheap, boisterous and loud people,” followed by “uncultured, unrefined, dumb people” at 14 percent and then all other types. The following year, another Roper poll found that 53 percent of the Americans asked believed Jews were different from everyone else and that these differences should lead to restrictions in business and social life.

  The desperate situation of the refugees stranded in Europe was brought to Eleanor’s attention on June 24, when she hosted a small dinner at her village apartment for her friend Joe Lash and two members of the European underground, Karl Frank and Joseph Buttinger. Buttinger had been head of the underground socialist movement in Austria while Frank had been organizing in Germany. The question was whether Mrs. Roosevelt could do anything for the leading people of the various socialist parties—German, Austrian, Spanish, and Polish. All these people had fought Hitler for years and were now in mortal danger. Buttinger’s group had lists of the people who’d been stranded in France and the ones who had moved on to Spain or Portugal. Could she help?

  Agreeing at once that she would do what she could, she rose from the table to put in a call to her husband. But if Eleanor expected public support from her husband at this juncture, she was mistaken. For weeks, ever since the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries, the president had been hearing tales of the great success of the Nazis’ various infiltration schemes. In Norway, it was said, thousands of Nazi agents, camouflaged as lecturers, refugees, newspapermen, and diplomatic attachés, had infiltrated the country in the months before the invasion. Then, six weeks before the actual seizure, Norway was flooded with German “tourists” who remained on the scene to help the German troops. In Holland, fifth columnists were said to have figured prominently in the Germans’ successful parachute landings, signaling to the planes from the ground and then providing the sky troops with Dutch military and police uniforms when they landed.

  Addressing the joint session of Congress on May 16, the president had condemned “the treacherous use of the fifth column by which persons supposed to be peaceful visitors were actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation.” Ten days later, in his fireside chat, he had used even more forceful language to warn that “today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack, the Trojan horse, the fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs and traitors are all the actors in the new strategy. With all that we must and will deal vigorously.”

  Thus, while Eleanor and other refugee advocates were fighting to liberalize immigration, Roosevelt was moving in the opposite direction. Preoccupied with the question of subversion, he put the State Department to work on tightening restrictions to prevent infiltration of Nazi agents into the United States. Though it was absurd to believe that Jewish refugees, Hitler’s principal victims, would somehow become his principal weapons against the United States, the widespread paranoia about foreigners combined with anti-Semitism to cast a net so wide that everyone except the British children was caught in it.

  Eleanor reached Franklin in his study, where he was relaxing with Hopkins at the end of a long workday. “He was somewhat impatient and irritated,” Lash recorded in his diary, “that it wasn’t taken for granted he was already doing all that was possible. He kept bringing up the difficulties while Mrs. Roosevelt tenaciously kept pointing out the possibilities. ‘Congress wouldn’t let them in. Quotas are filled. We have tried to get Cuba and other Latin American countries to admit them but so far without success . . . . Can’t locate people in France. Spain won’t admit even American refugees.’ Mrs. Roosevelt interrupted to remind FDR he had always said we could bribe the Spanish and Portuguese governments.” There the conversation came to an unsatisfactory end.

  When she hung up the phone, Eleanor voiced her inability to understand what had happened to America—the traditional land of asylum, unwilling to admit political refugees. But she said she would take the lists herself and send them to her friend Sumner Welles in the State Department. The European underground should understand it now had a friend at court. In her letter to the State Department the next day, Eleanor said she hoped “the list could be put into the hands of our people in Europe with the request that they do everything they can to protect these refugees. I do not know what Congress will be willing to do, but they might be allowed to come here and be sent to a camp while we are waiting for legislation.”

  Eleanor’s protracted conversation with her husband that evening established the basic pattern their relationship would follow in the years to come. Whereas in the 1930s they had worked side by side in common pursuit of the same goals, now, more and more, she would find herself in the role of the agitator while he remained the politician. On a variety of fronts, she would put pressure on the president when he was tired and would have preferred not to have pressure put upon him. But, as Eleanor’s friend Trude Pratt Lash observed, “she had this sense of having to do whatever was humanly possible to do in a difficult time,” and nothing, not even her husband, could stop her from trying.

  In response to the persistent urgings of Eleanor’s committee and other refugee groups, the State Department finally agreed to establish a special procedure to expedite the issuance of visitor visas to political, intellectual, and other refugees in special peril in Spain, Portugal, and southern France. Under this procedure, the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (PAC) would take the first crack at evaluating the lists of names, satisfying themselves as to the purpose for which the refugees sought entry and the manner of their departure from the U.S. at the conclusion of the emergency period. Once the list was approved by the PAC, the consuls abroad were supposed to issue the visas automatically.

  It was a summer of high hopes. As long as America and other countries were willing to open their doors to the Jews, the Nazis, at this juncture, were still willing to let them go. Liberal use of visitor visas seemed the ideal solution. “I know it is due to your interest,” Karl Frank wrote Eleanor the day after the emergency procedure had been put into operation. Already “many hundreds of people have been granted visitors visas.”

  “We all know,” a grateful Joseph Buttinger told Eleanor, “how decisive your protective word was at a time when it looked as if the rescue action would come to a standstill.”

  Though still without a sure sense of the shape or direction of her new role in a world torn by war, Eleanor was on her way, beginning once more to believe she still had important tasks to accomplish and that her work would still be acknowledged by others. The depression of that spring was, in fact, part of a healing process, a mourning for the loss of her old relationship with her husband, and the birth pangs of a difficult and ultimately more influential partnership.

  CHAPTER 5

  “NO ORDINARY TIME”

  The president’s second term was coming to an end. Ever since George Washington refused a third term, no man had even tried to achieve the office of the Presidency more than twice.

  All spring long, Eleanor had tried to push Franklin to make a definite effo
rt to prepare a successor. “Franklin always smiled and said he thought people had to prepare themselves, that all he could do was to give them opportunities and see how they worked out. I felt that he, without intending to do so, dominated the people around him and that so long as he was in the picture, it was very hard for anyone to rise to a position of prominence.”

  Roosevelt “really meant to develop somebody” who would be a natural successor, Frances Perkins believed, but never quite got around to it. At one point, before Hopkins’ health deteriorated, the president did seem to be grooming him for the presidency. Then there was South Carolina Senator Jimmy Byrnes, whom the president liked immensely, but who, Roosevelt felt, would be forever scarred politically by his conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism so that he could marry a wealthy Southern girl. At various times, the president emboldened the hopes of sixty-nine-year-old Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Attorney General Robert Jackson, Federal Security Agency Chief Paul McNutt, and Postmaster General James Farley, the big bald-headed chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had more friends in more places across the country than any other person in public life. But in the end, he committed himself to no one.