Eleanor (21 page)

She was determined to do what she could to press Truman in the other direction. “I used to have to remind the gentlemen of the Party rather frequently,” she had written him in mid-1946,

that we Democrats did not win unless we had the liberals, labor and women largely with us. Among our best workers in all campaigns are the women. They will do the dull detail work and fill the uninteresting speaking engagements which none of the men are willing to undertake. I hope you will impress this fact on those who are now organizing for the Congressional campaigns and in preparation for 1948.
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By the end of 1946 some of her liberal friends were gloomily speaking of a “reversion to type” by the Democratic party now that the strong hand of FDR was removed. “That is the real meaning of the New Deal exodus from Washington. The turnover in administration personnel is fast approaching the proportions that usually accompany a change in parties,” a friend wrote her. He cited the premature, pell-mell abandonment of wartime economic controls, the inept handling of labor crises, the replacement of able and talented men by political hacks, wondering whether it was not time for progressives again to think of going the road of a third party.

“I would still be opposed to a third party,” she advised him, “but in the end you are right & I think we must have a
new
party, not necessarily a 3rd party.” She wrote along similar lines to La Guardia:

It takes so long before a third party wields any power, I can not see much point in trying to build one up at the present time when things need to be done quickly.

She saw a role for independents, she went on, “to make the two major parties uncomfortable when they stand for something which is really wrong.” She was not saying that the Democrats should be supported no matter what sort of candidates they nominated, “but I think it is the party to belong to, and we can try to improve the candidates. If we do not succeed, we do not have to vote for them.”
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She considered Edwin W. Pauley one of the people responsible for the conservative shift of the administration and Democratic party, and politely told him so after she spoke at the California Jackson Day dinner in Los Angeles, which as Democratic National committeeman he organized in June, 1947. Irate over a statement critical of the Truman Doctrine issued by liberal Democrats with James Roosevelt in the lead, Pauley publicly rebuked the liberals, and the press interpreted his censure to include Mrs. Roosevelt, whose questions about the Truman Doctrine were on the public record. He had meant no disrespect, he hastened to assure her, but a Jackson Day dinner was not an appropriate forum for the criticism of the administration’s policies or the president.

He might be right on the issue of propriety and protocol, she replied, but the questions asked about the administration’s policies in the statement of the progressives were being asked everywhere, and the mistake at the dinner was in not having an administration speaker there to answer those questions.

I was not bothered by any suggestion of disrespect. Things like that have never bothered me, but I was troubled by what I thought was stupid politically. 1948 is no walk-over for the Democratic Party or for President Truman, and he needs some really astute and liberal politicians around him.
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When Mrs. Roosevelt heard from Ed Flynn that Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson would replace Robert Hannegan as national chairman, she saw it as confirmation that the party was being turned over to its most conservative elements. “I thought it only fair to tell you,” she wrote Truman,

that I could never support Mr. Anderson. I consider him a conservative and I consider that the only chance the Democratic Party has for election in 1948, [is] to be the liberal party. We cannot be more conservative than the Republicans so we cannot succeed as conservatives. If the country is going conservative, it is not going to vote for any Democratic candidate.
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The real reason for Flynn’s pique, Truman said, was a quarrel over patronage. But her protest against Anderson must have had some effect, for Sen. J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island, a politician oriented toward urban rather than “middle” America, was appointed national chairman.

As 1948 approached, the politicians understood her political importance. There were renewed pressures in New York to have her run for senator. “Dear Mr. Mayor,” she wrote William O’Dwyer:

. . .I want to tell you again that under no circumstances would I run for any office.

I am interested in the United Nations work and feel that even at sixty-three, which I will shortly be, I can do something there, but it is no time at sixty-three to start running for elective office and nothing would induce me to do it.

What she said to O’Dwyer privately, she reiterated publicly in her column to make doubly sure that the party’s leaders knew she meant it.
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Her popularity astonished the politicians and infuriated anti-Roosevelt columnists, especially Westbrook Pegler, who had embarked on a systematic campaign to try to destroy her influence. In a popularity poll conducted by the
Woman’s Home Companion
at the beginning of 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt was placed first among the nation’s ten outstanding personalities, including Truman, Marshall, Dewey, Hoover, Eisenhower, and MacArthur.
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The Gallup poll taken every year on the most admired woman in the United States regularly showed her at the head of the list.

She knew she had political influence. She knew that Truman needed her. He needed her the more because of the Wallace third-party candidacy. Wallace had announced his candidacy for president in December, declaring that a vote for him would be a vote against war with Russia. Her first comment had been a terse, motherly “Oh dear, oh dear.” Then in three columns running she assailed him, her final sally being the flat declaration, “he has never been a good politician, he has never been able to gauge public opinion, and he has never picked his advisers wisely.”
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Yet it was by no means certain at the turn of the year that Wallace’s assessment of the public mood was wrong. She hoped that Truman was “going to make a real fight,” she wrote him after his State of the Union message, “for every one of the social things in your message. . . .The great trouble is that Mr. Wallace will cut in on us because he can say that we have given lip service to these things by having produced very little in the last few years.”

Nettled, Truman replied that he had been making a real fight and if he had not come to Wallace’s support during the confirmation struggle in 1945 when Roosevelt was in Yalta, Wallace never would have been approved as secretary of commerce in the Senate. Truman felt that his problem with Congress was the same one FDR had had—the coalition between the southern Democrats and the Republicans.
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The answer was time-honored and hackneyed. It had never wholly satisfied her when offered by Franklin; it did not satisfy her now. Upset over the administration’s vacillations on Palestine, worried over the increasing influence of the military, she decided she had to express her anxieties more bluntly. “Because this letter is not too pleasant, I have been putting it off,” she wrote Truman. She knew how difficult it was for the people around a president “to tell him that they are troubled and of course, there are many people who tell him only what they think will serve their own interests in what they think he will want to hear.” She detailed her foreign-policy worries and went on:

There is also a fear of the conservative influence that is being exerted on the economic side and I am afraid that this deposition of Mr. Eccles [Marriner S. Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board] which the
New York Times
takes as a triumph of “orthodoxy and conservatism in fiscal policy as represented by John W. Snyder, Secretary of the Treasury” is going to emphasize this feeling considerably.

Believe me, Sir, it is going to be impossible to elect a Democrat if it is done by appealing to the conservatives. The Republicans are better conservatives than we are. If the people are going to vote conservative, it is going to be Taft or Dewey and we might just as well make up our minds to it.
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Another portent of the inroads Wallace was making into Truman’s strength came like a thunderclap out of the Bronx. In a special congressional election in mid-February, the Wallace candidate handed Ed Flynn’s nominee a stunning defeat, almost reversing the landslide percentages by which the Democrats traditionally held the district.

What did she think of her Ed Flynn now, the president inquired with some trenchancy, knowing the great confidence she had placed in Flynn’s political judgment. She thought the Bronx vote had proved the point Flynn had been trying to make to the president:

I was not very much surprised by the results of the vote because in the big, urban centers, even those who are Democrats, just do not come out to vote because they are still radical enough to be unhappy about what they feel are certain tendencies they observe in our Administration.

Ed Flynn has told you this, I think, on a number of occasions. It is important because if the Democrats are going to win in a State like New York, they have to carry by a great majority, the big urban centers. I am sure you are well aware of this, but I feel it my duty to re-enforce what already has been said, disagreeable as it is. . . .

. . .the two things bothering the average man most at
present are inflation and the fear of another war. Congress is doing all it can to help us, I think, because certainly they are showing a complete disregard for the high cost of living as it affects the average human being, but you never know how many people realize this.

I know that in order to obtain what we need in the way of military strength for defense, it would seem almost essential to whip up fear of communism and to do certain things which hurt us with the very element which we need in the election. How can we be firm and strong and yet friendly in our attitude toward Russia, and obtain from Congress what we need to keep us strong, is one of our most difficult problems. I have often thought if you could explain the whole situation over the radio in a series of talks to the people of our country, it might clear up some of our difficulties, because I find great confusion in the minds of the average citizen.
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Truman disputed her analysis. There was always a let-down after a war, he felt. The postwar reaction against the Democrats that had manifested itself in the 1946 elections was still at work. The leaders of the Democratic party were tired, having led the country through the Depression and war. He had to do things in his own way. Truman was right when he said that the leadership of the party was tired, Mrs. Roosevelt replied. “Perhaps the people are too. Unfortunately, this is a bad time to be tired.”
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It was not only the Wallace candidacy and the southern revolt that threatened Truman. A spreading “draft Eisenhower” movement was enlisting the support of such trade-union leaders as Walter Reuther and David Dubinsky, ADA liberals, and even northern machine politicians like Jake Arvey. Three of Mrs. Roosevelt’s sons, James in California and Elliott and Franklin Jr. in New York, were part of it. They reflected the widespread feeling among Democrats that to go into the presidential campaign with Truman would result in catastrophe.

The White House made frantic efforts to stop Franklin Jr. from keynoting the “draft Eisenhower” drive. Handsome, bursting with
vitality, the very image of his father, in the eyes of many he was the party’s golden hope. When the White House heard that Franklin Jr. was about to urge an Eisenhower candidacy, General Marshall was called and asked to help. He made an unsuccessful effort to dissuade the young man, putting it on the basis that the move would weaken the president’s hand abroad just on the eve of the Italian elections and play into the hands of the Communists. Then General Eisenhower, who had previously announced he was not a candidate, authorized Defense Secretary Forrestal to tell Franklin Jr. he would be greatly distressed by any such move. And finally Eisenhower himself called. He was primarily concerned with the dangers in Europe, Eisenhower told Roosevelt, and he did “not want to be the cause of any feeling arising in Europe that the United States was not united in helping free peoples.” Roosevelt held his ground. He, General Eisenhower, was the only man capable of uniting the Democrats and the country. He alone could persuade the Russians that the aim of American foreign policy was to secure a lasting peace and at the same time lead the nation and western Europe in the preparations needed to prevent further aggression.
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Franklin Jr. called his mother and read her the statement he proposed to make. As a delegate to the United Nations she herself was going to stay out of preconvention politics, she told him. But she asked him several questions in order to be sure he had faced up to them. Where did General Eisenhower stand on domestic things? Suppose he reaffirmed his refusal to run? Was he prepared to be cold-shouldered by the president and his friends? Had he consulted people like Bernard Baruch and Ed Flynn?

Franklin Jr. called Baruch.

“You feel this very deeply?” his mother’s old-time friend and counselor asked.

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“It’s the first time I have known you to feel deeply,” Baruch went on and ended the telephone call, “You remind me of your father. When he felt this way, there was only one thing to do, to let him have his head and go.”

Ed Flynn was also reminded of Franklin’s father. Unable to reach
Flynn before he made his announcement, Franklin Jr. caught up with him the following day. He approved of Franklin’s attack on Truman’s policies, Flynn told him. He himself was going down to Washington to tell the president the score. But it was a mistake to come out for Eisenhower because he did not think the general would run. Moreover, the Democratic leaders resented Franklin Jr.’s trying to be a kingmaker. That was their job. They would accept him more readily if he did not try to grab the ball. “You’re exactly like your Father. Louis [Howe] and I had to hold your Father back. Sit still now and let it simmer.”
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