No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  What the Negroes wanted at that moment, Hopkins was told, was the promotion of Colonel Benjamin Davis, grandson of a slave, to brigadier general, and the appointment of William Hastie, dean of Howard Law School, as a civilian aide to Secretary Stimson. Change in the structure of the military would only come, Negroes now believed, if strong black men were placed in positions of leadership.

  Roosevelt heard the cry of his political advisers. Moving quickly to repair the damage that had been done, he announced the promotion of Colonel Benjamin Davis, commander of the 369th National Guard Regiment in New York, to brigadier general, and the appointment of Dean William Hastie to the War Department. Stimson considered both appointments a terrible mistake. In his diary, he decried the fact that “the Negroes are taking advantage of this period just before the election to try to get everything they can in the way of recognition from the army” and blamed the situation on “Mrs. Roosevelt’s intrusive and impulsive folly.” And in a letter to Knox the following day, he noted sarcastically that, when he called on the Navy Department the next time with his colored brigadier general, he “fully expected to be met with a colored Admiral.”

  Stimson’s negative attitude was reflected in the president’s mail. “Are you crazy appointing a nigger as General in the U.S Army?” an angry man from West Virginia wrote. “It is incomprehensible to normal Americans,” an Illinois couple wrote, “for you to appoint a member of the red, yellow or black race to the high rank of Brigadier General.” But the Negro press was pleased, calling the twin appointments a major victory “in the fight for equitable participation of colored people in the national defense program.” Sending a personal word to the president on the eve of the election, Walter White expressed his thanks “for all you did to insure a square deal for Negroes in the defense of our country.”

  The irony of the situation was not lost on Eleanor. Had it not been for the inept way the War Department and the White House press office handled the original statement, the appointments that so delighted the Negro community would probably not have been made. Up until this time, Eleanor had believed that, as long as segregated facilities were provided equally to blacks and whites alike, there was no issue of discrimination. But now she was coming to understand that things were not that simple, that “the basic fact of segregation which warps and twists the lives of our Negro population” was itself discriminatory.

  • • •

  No sooner had the commotion over the president’s meeting with the civil-rights leaders begun to subside than Eleanor became embroiled in a fiery argument with the State Department over its refugee rescue operation. In mid-September, she learned from friends on the President’s Advisory Committee that the visa arrangements entered into with such high hopes in July had completely broken down. After working indefatigably all summer long, sifting the lists, negotiating with various agencies, and examining affidavits, the PAC had submitted 567 carefully selected names, supported by all the necessary documents, to the State Department. The visa procedure was supposed to move forward automatically from that point on. But somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong; more than three months had passed and only fifteen visas had been issued.

  A deliberate policy of obstruction was under way, directed from the top of the State Department, from the man in charge of refugee matters, Breckinridge Long. Working with what one refugee scholar has called “a singleness of purpose and a formidable arsenal of political weapons,” Long had successfully devised a series of obstructive tactics that walled out any applicant the State Department wished to exclude. In a secret memo addressed to State Department officials James Dunn and Adolf Berle, Jr., early in the summer, Long had spelled out his plans: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative advices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”

  On September 28, the day after the president’s meeting with Randolph, White, and Hill, Eleanor penned an indignant note to her husband describing the unhappy situation. “Mr. [James] McDonald [chairman of the PAC] is so wrought up about it, he wants to talk to you for about 15 minutes. He would come to Washington, and I promised to help him. Because he feels that their good faith has been impugned and because he also feels that there is something he ought to tell you which makes him extremely uncomfortable [most likely she is referring here to the perceived anti-Semitism of Breckinridge Long] and about which he does not wish to write, he is asking for an appointment. I am thinking about these poor people who may die at any time and who are asking only to come here on transit visas and I do hope you can get this cleared up quickly.”

  Eleanor’s note stirred Franklin to contact Undersecretary Sumner Welles. “Please tell me about this,” the president wrote. “There does seem to be a mix-up. I think I must see McDonald.” In reply, Welles suggested that the president talk first with Breckinridge Long. A meeting was set for noon, October 3. Long was well armed, carrying fearsome stories purporting to prove that many of the refugees Eleanor and her friends wanted to bring into the country were not refugees at all, but German agents trying to use America’s hospitality for their own dark purposes. By playing on the president’s fears that spies had infiltrated the refugee stream, Long managed to persuade Roosevelt that the State Department’s cautious policy was the only way to go.

  “I found that he [Roosevelt] was 100% in accord with my ideas,” Long recorded triumphantly in his diary. “The President expressed himself as in entire accord with the policy which would exclude persons about whom there was any suspicion that they would be inimical to the welfare of the United States no matter who had vouchsafed for them. I left him with the satisfactory thought that he was wholeheartedly in support of the policy which would resolve in favor of the United States any doubts about admissibility of any individual.”

  When the president met with McDonald the following week, the battle was already lost. Refusing to face the situation head on, Roosevelt spun one diverting story after another until the half-hour was up. When McDonald started condemning and criticizing Long, the president warned him not to “pull any sob stuff.” The meeting ended with nothing accomplished.

  Still Eleanor refused to give up, bombarding the president with requests for action, but Franklin, preoccupied with the question of Britain’s survival, was unwilling to listen. “Something does seem wrong,” she insisted in one note. “What does seem wrong?” Franklin replied, manifestly annoyed.

  • • •

  Eleanor’s sole triumph during this period was her successful intervention in behalf of eighty-three Jewish refugees who had sailed to America aboard the Portuguese freighter the S.S. Quanza. Filled to capacity with 317 passengers, the Quanza had steamed into New York Harbor in late August. All those in possession of American visas were allowed to debark. The remaining passengers, refugees who had escaped from occupied France, pleaded with authorities to let them come ashore, too. “Impossible,” said the officials, “no one can step onto America soil without the proper papers.” The Quanza sailed on to Veracruz, hoping to find a more receptive port, but the Mexican authorities ordered the ship to return to Europe. “Complete despair overwhelmed the passengers,” one young woman traveling with her parents recalled: Europe to them was “a German concentration camp.” Preparing for the return trip, the Quanza docked at Norfolk, Virginia, to load up with coal. While the ship remained in the harbor, Jewish organizations appealed to Mrs. Roosevelt for help.

  Eleanor was at Hyde Park when she received word of the situation. Convinced that something should be done, she appealed to her husband directly. He agreed to send Patrick Malin, representing the PAC, to Norfolk to see what he could do to secure visas for children, for aliens holding visas from other countries, and for bona-fide political refugees. Working quickly, Malin certified all the documents
that were presented to him and construed everybody else to be a political refugee so that the entire ship could disembark.

  Long was furious. “I remonstrated violently,” he recorded in his diary, “said that I thought it was a violation of the Law . . . that I would not be party to it, that I would not give my consent, that I would have no responsibility for it.” But Malin refused to back down. “When he [Long] told me that he felt he could not take responsibility for them,” Malin wrote, “I informed him that they were already landing.”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt saved my life,” one passenger affirmed.

  • • •

  But Eleanor’s success was short-lived. Long was soon back in the saddle, cleverer and more treacherous than ever. “The department does not refuse visas,” Freda Kirchwey explained in The Nation. “It merely sets up a line of obstacles stretching from Washington to Lisbon and on around to Shanghai . . . . It is as if we were to examine laboriously the curricula vitae of flood victims clinging to a piece of floating wreckage and finally to decide that, no matter what their virtues, all but a few had better be allowed to drown.” The resulting “record,” she concluded, “is one which must sicken any person of ordinary humane instincts.”

  On November 15, refugee advocate Joseph Buttinger appealed again to Eleanor. Remembering how she had helped in June, he sent her a long memo detailing the various obstacles that were keeping refugees from getting their visas. “It looks again,” he pleaded, “as if only your word could once more help us to overcome the barricades and hindrances in this ghastly situation.”

  Attached to the memo was a chilling two-page letter from a Jewish doctor which detailed a story that would become all too familiar in the years ahead. On Tuesday, October 22, a police officer had appeared at his home in the province of Baden, Germany, and told him he had an hour to pack up whatever could fit in a single suitcase. When the doctor and his family reached the designated assembly point, he learned that “all Jews, not only of the town but of all Baden and the Palatinate had been hit by the same fate.” There was a moment of relief when they learned they were not being taken “to dreaded Poland,” but conditions in the refugee camp in France where they ended up were far worse than anything they had imagined. Thirteen thousand refugees were living “like criminals behind barbed wire in dark, cold, wet, unhealthy barracks without beds, table or chair.” In the first seven weeks, he reported, more than five hundred refugees had died.

  At the end of his letter, which somehow made its way to the White House, the doctor pleaded for help. “For us here there only exists one solution, the quick emigration from Europe. All our appeals in that respect have been in vain so far. If the United States continues to work so slowly the number of dead here is going to increase in a most deplorable manner.”

  When Eleanor sent the material on to her husband, she attached a personal note of her own. “FDR, Can’t something be done?” There is no evidence that Roosevelt ever replied to Eleanor’s note. “The President’s overriding concern was the war,” Eleanor’s friend Justine Polier explained, “and he probably didn’t like to be urged as much as he was in regard to refugees.”

  At one point, as continued reports of Long’s intransigence filtered in, Eleanor flared up angrily at her husband. “Franklin, you know he’s a fascist,” she said over lunch. “I’ve told you, Eleanor, you must not say that,” the president replied, cutting her short with an “unusually cross” tone. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it,” Eleanor countered, “but he is!”

  So the battle to save lives by bringing large numbers of refugees into America was lost during the crucial months of 1940, when Germany was still willing to grant exit permits to the Jews. “True, the Nazis wished to be rid of the Jews,” historian David Wyman has written, “but until 1941 this end was to be accomplished by emigration, not extermination. The shift to extermination came only after the emigration method had failed, a failure in large part due to lack of countries open to refugees.”

  Eleanor’s failure to force her husband to admit more refugees remained, her son Jimmy later said, “her deepest regret at the end of her life.”

  • • •

  Through the months of September and October, while Willkie was conducting a vigorous campaign in thirty states, traveling by train for 17,300 miles, the president insisted on limiting his trips to war plants and shipyards. In his acceptance speech, he had contended that, with the war raging in Europe, he would have neither the time nor the inclination to campaign for re-election. Yet one look at the crowded schedule the president kept that autumn suggests that under the guise of nonpolitical inspection trips the old politician was alive and well.

  On the last day of September, Roosevelt telescoped three “inspections” into six hours. He began his tour at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where all guns and their carriages were fully proofed before being issued to troops and all powders, shells, and bombs were tested to check quality and performance. During the previous fifteen months, employment at the proving ground had nearly tripled, and a six-day work week was now in force. Facilities of this nature, designed for use in the actual operation of the army, were known as command facilities. To carry out their expansion—including airfields, army posts, artillery ranges, camps, forts, hospitals, research labs, and a new Pentagon building—the War Department had to acquire unprecedented quantities of land. (Over the next five years, the U.S. government would purchase more than five million acres of land for these command facilities, an area larger than the commonwealth of Massachusetts.)

  Seated in an open touring car, the president saw at close range the new types of ordnance, including the new Garand automatic rifle and a new railway howitzer. He witnessed an impressive display of mobile artillery, ranging from eight-inch guns to the antitank cannon, and saw a completely mechanized company exercise over a field with steep hillocks and quagmires. Though the army would continue to experiment with new weapons, he told reporters traveling with him, the point had been reached where the current models could be standardized and carried into mass production.

  Driving southward to the Glenn Martin plant in Baltimore, Maryland, where the B-26 twin-engine bomber, “said to be the fastest bomber in the world,” was being built, the president saw construction under way for a new building that would eventually accommodate forty thousand workers. The Glenn Martin Company, America’s oldest builder of bomber planes, had come close to bankruptcy only a few years earlier, but now, with $400 million worth of orders, it was flourishing. Construction was also under way at Fort Meade, Maryland, which Roosevelt visited after a picnic lunch. Then housing two thousand men, Fort Meade was being enlarged, by an $11-million building program, to serve as a gathering center for twenty-five thousand men at a time.

  Everywhere Roosevelt looked, there were signs of a rapidly improving economy. With new army camps and defense plants appearing all across the country, with textile mills running double shifts to fill orders for uniforms and blankets, with shipyards working round the clock, the unemployment rolls were swiftly shrinking—by four hundred thousand in August, by five hundred thousand in September. The eleven-year depression was, at last, coming to an end.

  Returning to the White House in an ebullient mood, Roosevelt penned a letter to his son-in-law, John Boettiger. “The main point of these trips which has never yet appeared in print is that the places visited by me—arsenals, Navy yards, private plants, etc.—get a real enthusiasm and speed up production during the days following my visit. It does seem to help.”

  The following week, the president journeyed to the Midwest to inspect steel plants in Pittsburgh and Youngstown, a government housing project for defense workers at Terrace Valley, and the Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, where he saw new types of planes, “one knifing through the air and another moving so unbelievably slowly that it seemed to be hung on a wire.” Everywhere he went, he was greeted with all the fervor and trappings of an old-fashioned campaign. Schools were dismissed, and more than a quarter-million people lined
his route. Still, he refused to acknowledge that he was campaigning. “I have come here today very informally,” he said, “on what is essentially a trip to educate myself, to learn about what is happening for national defense.”

  While the president reveled in the cheering crowds, Eleanor headed to the West Coast to visit her oldest son, Jimmy, who had just been ordered to active duty at Marine headquarters in San Diego, California. Tall, thin, and prematurely balding, Jimmy had married Boston debutante Betsey Cushing soon after his graduation from Harvard. In 1937, after working in the insurance business for seven years, he had joined the White House staff as his father’s secretary. He was generally credited with excellent work, but after two years, the stress of the position, coupled with charges in the press that he had used his public office for private gain, proved too much. He suffered a perforated ulcer, had two-thirds of his stomach removed, and was forced to resign. That fall, he moved to Los Angeles to become a film executive with Samuel Goldwyn Productions. The move coincided with the breakup of his marriage and the start of a new romance with Romelle Schneider, the nurse who had cared for him when he was in the hospital.

  Twenty-six-year-old FDR, Jr., an officer in the navy reserve, was also affected by the standing order to report to duty. Considered the “golden boy” of the family, with his father’s good looks and outgoing personality, FDR, Jr., had distinguished himself in both academics and athletics at Harvard. His marriage to heiress Ethel du Pont was labeled the wedding of the decade. After Harvard, on the advice of his father, he had chosen law in preparation for a career in politics, but now, like so many thousands of young Americans, he had his plans interrupted by the war.