Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (104 page)

Reporters naturally inquired whether Roosevelt had anything to add. Not on the specific subject of Czechoslovakia, he said. A newsman took his hint. “Mr. President,” he asked, “do you want a revision of the neutrality legislation this session?”

“Put the question a little differently,” Roosevelt prompted. “Do we need legislation on neutrality at this session? The answer is: Yes.” But he did not elaborate.

Roosevelt’s reluctance was politically calculated. In private he was getting “madder and madder,” Harold Ickes observed. The president ordered administrative measures—ones not requiring congressional approval—to punish Germany and prevent its benefiting from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. He imposed new duties on imports from Germany and suspended special trade arrangements with Czechoslovakia lest Germany sneak its own exports into America under Czech labels.

In April Roosevelt took a bolder step than any he had attempted before. He sent simultaneous public messages to Hitler and Mussolini urging them to commit their governments to peaceful resolution of difficulties with other countries. “Hundreds of millions of human beings are living today in constant fear of a new war,” he said. Each week brought a new threat. “If such threats continue, it seems inevitable that much of the world must become involved in common ruin.” Recent events were especially ominous. “Three nations in Europe and one in Africa have seen their independent existence terminated. A vast territory in another independent nation of the Far East has been occupied by a neighboring state…. This situation must end in catastrophe unless a more rational way of guiding events is found.” The governments of Germany and Italy had repeatedly declared that they desired peace. If this was true, Germany and Italy shouldn’t object to making their desires specific. Roosevelt asked for promises that Germany and Italy would not attack other countries; he listed thirty-one by name. He offered to serve as an intermediary with those countries, which would be expected to offer reciprocal pledges of non-aggression. Once the process of guaranteeing got under way, the United States would undertake an additional leadership role in the realms of disarmament and freer trade—the former to ease the crushing burden of defense, the latter to ensure access of all countries to necessary supplies and markets.

Roosevelt explained that the American government offered these proposals “not through selfishness or fear or weakness.” It spoke, rather, from a sincere desire to spare the world new conflict. He hoped the governments of Germany and Italy would respond in kind. “Heads of great governments in this hour are literally responsible for the fate of humanity in the coming years…. History will hold them accountable.”

Roosevelt didn’t really expect a positive response. Words hadn’t halted Hitler and Mussolini before, and words probably wouldn’t halt them now. But he needed to speak out, if only for the record. The president concluded an Easter vacation in Georgia with a grim farewell. “My friends of Warm Springs,” he said, “I have had a fine holiday here with you all. I’ll be back in the fall if we do not have a war.”

Hitler reacted about as Roosevelt anticipated. The German dictator took the president’s message to the Reichstag and used it as a prop in another diatribe against the Versailles system and the iniquitous constraints it placed on German prosperity. “Mr. Roosevelt!” Hitler sneered. “The vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allows you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations.” Germany had neither such luxury nor such pretensions. “In this state there are roughly 140 people to each square kilometer, not 15 as in America. The fertility of our country cannot be compared with that of yours. We lack numerous minerals which nature has placed at your disposal in unlimited quantities.” Hitler rejected as ridiculous Roosevelt’s assertion that the German government owed something to the world. “I cannot feel myself responsible for the fate of the world, as this world took no interest in the pitiful state of my own people. I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery.”

W
HILE
F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT’S
appeal to the fascist conscience of Germany and Italy was failing, Eleanor Roosevelt’s appeal to the democratic conscience of America fared better. During the same week of April 1939 that the president sent his message to Hitler and Mussolini, Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Eleanor Roosevelt was largely responsible.

For all his expressed concern for the downtrodden, Franklin Roosevelt had done little for African Americans as African Americans. To be sure, they enlisted in the CCC and took jobs with the PWA and WPA. And black farmers received benefits from the AAA, although because the crop-support payments went to landowners rather than tenants, and because blacks tended to be tenants, blacks received less from the agriculture agency than their numbers would have indicated. Yet Roosevelt left the most obvious source of black inequality—the Jim Crow system of segregation—untouched. The reason for his hands-off attitude was politically unassailable: southern Democrats would have revolted even more violently against the New Deal had it attacked segregation. Roosevelt judged that civil rights reform must await a more enlightened time and probably another administration.

Eleanor acknowledged fewer political constraints. She made a point of visiting black homes on her tours of the rural South, and she invited African American leaders to the White House to discuss methods of addressing black problems. Walter White, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, became a regular correspondent. White pointed out that NRA codes for the South typically included a lower wage for blacks than whites; Eleanor put White in touch with Donald Richberg, Hugh Johnson’s successor at the NRA. Though the wage differentials didn’t disappear, White and the NAACP discovered they had an ally in the White House.

But not the one they really wanted. A priority for African American leaders during the 1930s—as for decades—was a federal anti-lynching law. Eleanor arranged for White to discuss the measure with the president, and she prepared him by relating objections her husband had raised when she had brought up the bill over dinner. By the time White entered the president’s office, he was ready. “Joe Robinson tells me the bill is unconstitutional,” Roosevelt said. White adduced evidence suggesting that the Senate majority leader was wrong. Roosevelt offered another objection; White countered again. After a couple more thrusts and parries, the president grew annoyed. “Somebody’s been priming you,” he said. “Was it my wife?” White, not wishing to implicate Eleanor, kept still.

Roosevelt granted that justice might favor the anti-lynching law. But politics didn’t. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he said. Southerners, by virtue of their seniority in Congress, controlled the most important committees in the House and Senate. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass…. I just can’t take the risk.”

Because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, the anti-lynching bill failed. “I’m sorry about the bill,” Eleanor wrote White. “Of course, all of us are going on fighting, and the only thing we can do is hope we have better luck next time.”

Roosevelt often tolerated his wife’s political causes with indifference or even resigned humor, but he was genuinely irritated at the encouragement she had given White to press an issue that threatened real harm to the New Deal coalition. “Walter White for some time has been writing and telegraphing the President,” press secretary Steve Early wrote in a memo intended for Eleanor’s eyes. “Frankly, some of his messages to the President have been decidedly insulting.”

Eleanor fired back. She conceded that White perhaps had an obsession with lynching. But he had reason. “If I were colored,” she said, “I think I should have about the same obsession that he has.”

Roosevelt let the White matter drop—and Eleanor opened a new front in the civil rights campaign. She brought African American contralto Marian Anderson to the White House for a recital. The evening went splendidly; Anderson’s voice was in top form, and few persons thought twice about the politics of the matter.

But when Howard University tried to arrange a performance by Anderson at Constitution Hall, the reaction was decidedly different. Washington in the 1930s suffered from a lack of facilities for any large indoor event. The deficiency had become drenchingly obvious at Roosevelt’s second inauguration, prompting Harold Ickes to propose the construction of an auditorium to render such presidential heroics—or theatrics—unnecessary. “I pointed out that it was absurd that the capital of the richest country in the world should be the only one in any of the leading countries that lacked a proper public auditorium,” Ickes recalled. But no action had been taken, and Constitution Hall remained the largest venue. Yet it wasn’t a public space, being controlled by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Daughters refused permission for the Anderson performance, despite regularly granting permission for white speakers and singers to use the hall.

The ban provoked complaints from groups and individuals more attuned to equal rights than the Daughters. Eleanor Roosevelt, a formerly proud Daughter, resigned in public protest. “The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization?” she wrote in her column. In other cases of disagreement, she had often chosen to work from within. But now she couldn’t. The affront to equality was too great. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”

She didn’t leave it at that. She encouraged Walter White and Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, to approach Harold Ickes about a concert on government property. Ickes responded enthusiastically and took the matter to Roosevelt, who told him to go ahead. The concert was held on Easter Sunday afternoon. A special stage was constructed at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, on the side facing the Washington Monument. The crowd was estimated at seventy-five thousand, with blacks and whites represented about equally. They stretched far down either side of the reflecting pool, and loudspeakers projected Anderson’s voice for all to hear. The major radio networks broadcast the performance across the country.

Ickes introduced Anderson, giving the DAR the back of his hand. “There are those, even in this great capital of our democratic republic, who are either too timid or too indifferent to lift up the light that Jefferson and Lincoln carried aloft,” the interior secretary said. “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, and the sun, the moon, and the stars, He made no distinction of race, creed, or color.”

Anderson commenced with “America,” in her own oblique riposte to the Daughters. She segued to a love aria from
La Favorita
and then “Ave Maria” by Schubert. “She sang with her eyes closed, effortlessly and without gestures, as enchantment settled on the notables up front and on the multitude out beyond,” the music critic of the
Washington Post
observed. Anderson concluded with four spirituals, culminating in “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” At the end of the performance the audience erupted into applause lasting several minutes and crowded toward Anderson with such excitement that she had to be hustled up into the memorial proper, to take shelter beside the Emancipator himself.

Eleanor stayed away, lest her presence further provoke the bigots and detract from the moment. But Walter White acknowledged her role. “Thanks in large measure to you,” the NAACP director declared, “the Marian Anderson concert on Sunday was one of the most thrilling experiences of our time.”

37.

U
NDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES,
R
OOSEVELT WAS HAPPY FOR THE DISTRACTION.
He was pressing for repeal of the neutrality law but wasn’t making much headway. Key Pittman, the Nevada Democrat who headed the Senate foreign relations committee, had introduced another revision of the law, eliminating the mandatory arms embargo and putting all foreign trade on a cash-and-carry footing. Roosevelt liked the former provision but not the latter. “While the cash-and-carry plan works all right in the Atlantic,” he said, “it works all wrong in the Pacific.” Britain and France had the money and ships to purchase and fetch American supplies, but China was short of both.