No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Though Roosevelt did not share Stimson’s unqualified enthusiasm for business, he did agree that the primary task at hand was to convert industries of peace into industries of war, and to this end he was willing to give business what it wanted even if it meant capitulating on the tax bill. “I regret to say,” Ickes recorded in his diary, “the President is willing to take what Congress will give him and Congress will give him only what big business is willing that he should have.”

  During a heated session over the legislation on the president’s back porch at Hyde Park that summer, Morgenthau reported that Roosevelt sat in his rocker and repeated over and over, “I want a tax bill; I want one damned quick; I don’t care what is in it; I don’t want to know . . . . The contracts are being held up and I want a tax bill.” When Eleanor gamely offered to continue the fight, Morgenthau advised her to back off. “Leave the President alone,” he warned. “He is in one of those moods.”

  But Eleanor was constitutionally incapable of leaving the president alone. On a Sunday night in September, with FDR’s economic adviser Charles Taussig as her dinner guest, she renewed her arguments against the tax bill, charging that manufacturers were placing profits before patriotism. The president listened sympathetically, nodding his head in his usual manner, but he remained absolutely firm in his conviction that it was necessary to accept an imperfect law in order to encourage the defense program. Once the legislation went through, he predicted, the mobilization program would get under way. In this prediction Roosevelt was correct, for, when the revenue bill finally passed later that fall, the capital strike came to an end and war contracts began to clear with speed.

  Army historians contend that passage of the amortization law was a major turning point in the mobilization process. The rapid-write-off provision converted high tax rates from “a liability into an asset,” inducing business “to retain its earnings in the form of expanded plant and equipment.” With tax rates at their peak, the historians argue, the success of the amortization privilege “shattered conventional beliefs that high tax rates would inevitably lead to drying up of capital.”

  But liberals were correct in suggesting that small business would be hurt by the way the tax legislation was structured. As the defense program got under way, military-procurement agencies turned more and more to big business. A study released the following summer indicated that in the first year of the mobilization fifty-six large corporations accounted for three-fourths of the dollar value of all prime contracts. “We had to take industrial America as we found it,” War Department Undersecretary Robert Patterson explained. “For steel we went to the established steel mills. For autos we went to Detroit.” Large firms had the facilities and experience to handle large orders. “It would have been folly to have ignored the great productive facilities of these concerns and to have placed our business with companies that could not produce.”

  In the months ahead, as the cries of small businessmen began to be heard on Capitol Hill, new legislation would be enacted to try to increase the relative share of small business in total army procurement. But by then, the basic pattern—the link between big business and the military establishment, a link that would last long into the postwar era and lead a future president to warn against the “military-industrial complex”—was already set. Eager for action—too eager, liberals thought—the president made war production his overriding concern. He could fight only one war at a time. If this priority produced negative consequences for small business, that was a price he was willing to pay.

  The 76th Congress had been a tumultuous gathering. So trying were the conditions, observers noted, that, just after the final House vote on conscription, Speaker William B. Bankhead died of a stroke. (He was replaced by Sam Rayburn of Texas.) But in the end, despite the blunders, divisions, and dillydallying, the Congress had granted the president the legislation he needed to begin the process of mobilization, and with it the revitalization of the American economy after a decade of depression.

  It was the president’s custom each year on the night that Congress was due to adjourn to host a poker game in his study. The game would begin in the early evening, and then whoever was ahead at the moment the Speaker called to say that Congress had officially adjourned would be declared the winner. On this night, Morgenthau was far ahead when the Speaker phoned, but Roosevelt pretended that the call was from someone else and the game continued until midnight, when Roosevelt finally pulled ahead. At this point, Roosevelt whispered to an aide to go into another office and call the study. When the phone rang, he pretended it was the Speaker and declared himself the winner. Everyone was in high spirits until the next morning, when Morgenthau read in the paper that the Congress had officially adjourned at 9 p.m. He was so angry that he handed in his resignation. Only when the president called and convinced him that it was all in good fun did Morgenthau agree to stay. Morgenthau should have realized that Roosevelt was not above a little deception if it helped him win his bets!

  CHAPTER 7

  “I CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT HER”

  When Eleanor accepted A. Philip Randolph’s invitation to speak at the Convention of Sleeping Car Porters on September 16, 1940, she set in motion a chain of events that would carry her into the center of a convulsive battle for racial equality in the armed forces. Although few recognized it at the time, this battle would prove a turning point in American race relations. It would stimulate a new spirit of militancy in the black community, a new willingness to protest. The civilrights movement that would flower in later decades was struggling to be born.

  A. Philip Randolph, the man who would lead the movement in the 1940s, was a commanding figure with a handsome face and a voice so resonant that he once considered a career in acting. When he was still in his twenties and living in Harlem, he had founded an independent journal, The Messenger, which became an influential voice for radical action among Negroes in America. In 1925, he was asked to organize the overworked Pullman porters, who had been trying without success to form a union since 1900. The odds against the union were great; it took a leader of Randolph’s intelligence and ability to counter the Pullman Company’s propaganda, threats, and spies. When Randolph succeeded in creating the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he became, almost overnight, the most important Negro leader in America.

  Eleanor was joined at the dais by Negro leaders Mary McCleod Bethune and Walter White.

  The daughter of an illiterate South Carolina sharecropper, the youngest of seventeen children, Bethune was the only one in her family to receive an education. At fifteen, after taking every subject taught at the little missionary school near her home, she was given a scholarship to attend Scotia Seminary in North Carolina. There she became inspired with the vision of founding a school to help other Negroes. Her purpose was realized when she founded a Negro primary school in Florida and then built it into Bethune-Cookman College.

  Walter White, by contrast, was born into a middle-class family, the son of a postman in Atlanta. Slender in build with fair skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, White was only one-sixty-fourth Negro. But when his father died from an injury which his son believed was brought about “by his being a colored man,” White became a leader of the Negro cause. After graduating from Atlanta University, he wrote for the Negro publication The Crisis, conducted investigations of race riots and lynchings, and assumed a permanent position with the NAACP.

  Eleanor’s presence that evening was a testament to the long journey she had taken from the insulated days of her childhood when she listened to her Southern relatives reminisce about the slaves they had owned on their plantation in Georgia. “I quite understand the southern point of view,” she later wrote, “because my grandmother [Martha Bulloch] was a Southerner . . . and her sister had a great deal to do with bringing us up when we were small children . . . .” When Eleanor first moved to the segregated city of Washington, D.C., with her young husband, her primary contact was with black household staff members, whom she persisted th
en in calling darkies and pickaninnies. Her sympathetic comprehension of the Negro situation in America had been a gradual awakening, a product of her exhaustive travels around the country and her developing friendships with Negro leaders, which, one black historian has written, “began to resemble a crash course on the struggle of blacks against oppression.”

  Though the New Deal never succeeded in giving full justice to the economic needs of black Americans, Eleanor was largely responsible for the steady increase over the years in the numbers of Negroes on public relief and in the funds they earned. When she first began inspecting New Deal programs in the South, she was stunned to find that Negroes were being systematically discriminated against at every turn. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), Negro tenant farmers were the first to be cast off in the wake of the crop-reduction program. Under the National Recovery Act (NRA), Negroes either had to accept less money for the same work performed by whites or risk replacement. Even Eleanor’s favorite program, the WPA, was guilty of discrimination. “Is it true,” Eleanor queried Harry Hopkins, “that wages for Negroes in regions 3 and 4 (the southern regions) under work relief are lower than those established for white people? It is all wrong to discriminate between white and black men!”

  Largely because of Eleanor Roosevelt, black complaints against New Deal programs received a hearing at the White House, and in 1935 the president agreed to sign an executive order barring discrimination in the administration of WPA projects. From that point on, the Negro’s share in the New Deal expanded. By the end of the thirties, the WPA was providing basic earnings for one million black families; three hundred thousand black youths were involved in NYA training programs, and another quarter-million were serving in the CCC. Though the Negro’s proportionate share in state activity was never as large as it should have been, the cumulative effect of the New Deal programs provided an economic floor for the entire black community. “For the first time,” commented a delegation of Negro social workers visiting Hyde Park in the summer of 1939, “Negro men and women have reason to believe that their government does care.”

  During the thirties, Eleanor’s public identification with black causes encouraged the hopes of the black community. In 1938, when confronted with a segregation ordinance in Birmingham, Alabama, that required her to sit in the white section of an auditorium, apart from Mrs. Bethune and her other black friends, she had captured public attention by placing her chair in the center aisle between the two sections. In 1939, she had resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) after it barred the Negro singer Marian Anderson from its auditorium. Over the years, she invited hundreds of Negroes to the White House, had her picture taken with them, and held fund-raising events for Negro schools and organizations. Although these actions may seem purely symbolic now, they must be evaluated in the context of their times. “Blacks in the thirties found them impressive,” historian Nancy Weiss has written, “because there had been nothing like them in anyone’s memory.”

  The president was far more cautious than his wife. While Eleanor thought in terms of what should be done, Franklin thought in terms of what could be done. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told Walter White in the mid-thirties, explaining his refusal to endorse a federal antilynching campaign. “Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. The southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”

  Yet, without a federal law, the U.S. government was powerless to intervene against lynchings in individual states. Eleanor refused to give up. Much to the dismay of the president’s Southern-born secretaries, Steve Early and Marvin McIntyre, she continued to speak out in favor of an antilynching law. “They were afraid,” Eleanor later explained, “that I would hurt my husband politically and socially, and I imagine they thought I was doing many things without Franklin’s knowledge and agreement. On occasion they blew up to him and to other people.” During the antilynching campaign, Early complained in writing that Eleanor’s friend Walter White had been bombarding the president with telegrams and, “Frankly, some of his messages to the President have been decidedly insulting.” Mrs. Roosevelt must understand, Early went on, that, even before President Roosevelt came to the White House, Walter White was “one of the worst and most continuous troublemakers.” Undeterred, Eleanor penned a personal note to Early: “If I were colored,” she stated, “I think I should have about the same obsession that he [White] has . . . . If you ever talked to him, and knew him, I think you would feel as I do. He really is a very fine person with the sorrows of his people close to his heart.”

  Across the country, Eleanor’s activism in behalf of blacks engendered scathing comments. “If you have any influence with the President,” a New Jersey woman wrote Missy LeHand, “will you please urge him to muzzle Eleanor Roosevelt and it might not be a bad idea to chain her up—she talks too damn much.” Throughout the South, she became a symbol of everything wrong with the attitudes of white Northerners toward Southern society. “The South is sick and tired of being treated as a conquered province,” Georgia Representative George Cox warned his fellow Democrats, “and if the party which it has cradled and nurtured and supported all these years permits itself to be used as an instrument for its complete undoing then you may depend upon its people finding some other means of protection.”

  Never once, however, did the president move to curb his wife’s activities in behalf of the Negroes. Do you mind if I say what I think, she once asked her husband. “No, certainly not,” he replied. “You can say anything you want. I can always say, ‘Well, that is my wife; I can’t do anything about her.’”

  In part, Franklin tolerated Eleanor because she represented the more generous, idealistic side of his own nature, the humanitarian values he himself held but felt unable to act upon in the context of the Southern-dominated Congress. But it was also good politics. While he kept the party intact in the South, Eleanor was building new allies in the North among tens of thousands of migrating blacks who were gaining access to the ballot in urban areas such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit. In the Northern precincts, the same photographs of Eleanor entertaining various black figures that had been circulated throughout the South as proof of White House treachery contributed to a historic shift in the political allegiance of Negroes. Before the Roosevelts came into power, Negroes, still loyal to the party of Lincoln, had consistently voted the Republican ticket. In 1936, blacks swung decisively into the Roosevelt coalition. “I’m not for the Democrats,” explained one black who had voted Democratic for the first time in 1936, “but I am for the man.” Though the president had taken no specific initiatives in behalf of the Negroes, and had failed to support the antilynching campaign, he had managed, with Eleanor’s substantial help, to convey to blacks that the administration was on their side. “When you start from a position of zero,” civil-rights leader Clarence Mitchell, Jr., later observed, “even if you move up to the point of two on a scale of 12, it looks like a big improvement.”

  • • •

  By the time of the porters’ convention, however, a new and explosive issue—the elimination of discrimination and segregation in the armed forces—had replaced lynching as the dominant concern among Negro Americans.

  When the U.S. began to rearm in the summer of 1940, Negro citizens had flocked to recruiting stations by the thousands, only to be met by a series of obstacles. In the regular army of close to a half-million men, there were only forty-seven hundred Negroes, two Negro officers, and three Negro chaplains. There were only four Negro units, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry regiments, and only one was receiving combat training. There was not a single Negro in the Marine Corps, the Tank Cor
ps, the Signal Corps, or the Army Air Corps.

  As stories of discrimination began surfacing in different parts of the country, the Pittsburgh Courier provided front-page coverage and launched a national drive for equal participation in the armed forces. The NAACP followed suit, resolving at its national convention to devote its full energies to the elimination of Jim Crow in the military. Discrimination in the military became for many blacks a symbol of the entire order of racial separation in the South. The struggle for “the right to fight,” as it came to be called, mobilized thousands of Negroes who had not been previously involved in civil rights, expanding the ranks of the NAACP and the circulation of the Negro press.

  The new mood contrasted sharply with the “close-ranks” strategy articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois during World War I, which had called on Negroes to “forget our special grievances and close ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow-citizens.” This time, feeling it was the psychological moment to strike out for their rightful place in American society, Negro leaders were taking an openly aggressive stance.

  Through her talks with civil-rights leaders and her correspondence with Negro citizens, Eleanor had achieved a vague understanding of the new mood in the Negro community. In early September, she had received a disturbing letter from a Negro doctor, Henry Davis. “At a time when everyone is excited about increasing the size of the army,” he told her, he had been refused an active commission simply because of his dark skin. “I am greatly disappointed and am very much depressed,” he admitted, “gradually losing faith, ambition and confidence in myself.”