Eleanor (24 page)

“Have you forgotten, Prince of Rome,” wrote Archibald MacLeish in a poem that he entitled, quoting the cardinal, “I SHALL NOT AGAIN PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGE YOU”:

Have you forgotten, Prince of Rome
,

Delighted with your Roman title,

Have you forgotten that at home

We have no princes?. . .

Prince of the church, when you pretend

By rank to silence criticism

It is your country you offend,

Here man’s the faith and rank’s the schism
.

A devil’s brew of discord and division was boiling up, one result of which might be to defeat the Democrats that fall. One of the most courageous condemnations of the cardinal’s letter came from Lehman. He was, at the time, vacationing in the Adirondacks. It
took courage because he still planned to run that fall against Dulles for the Senate seat vacated by Wagner. “I’m going to speak out,” he told his wife, “but we may as well kiss the Senatorship good-by.”

The issue, said Lehman, “is not whether one agrees or disagrees with Mrs. Roosevelt on this or any other public question. The issue is whether Americans are entitled freely to express their views on public questions without being vilified or accused of religious bias.” Coming on top of his protest against the banning of the
Nation
, there was every prospect that the church would use its influence to defeat him if he ran. Mayor O’Dwyer, himself a candidate for re-election in New York, was aghast upon returning to the city. The controversy “will divide our people into two camps,” he warned. Privately he told Mrs. Roosevelt that “it must have been the weather,” that had led the cardinal to pen such a letter. Publicly he pooh-poohed charges that her stand on federal aid might have been actuated by prejudice. He would do what he could, he announced, to bring about a reconciliation.
¹²

“Do not be misled or trapped by overtures re a reconciliation,” Bill Hassett begged her. “Personally, you’re better off without it. The initiative must come from the Cardinal himself. He should approach you hat in hand, make public apology and beg forgiveness. . . .He knows already that Catholic opinion is divided in a controversy for which he is solely responsible.” But she was not averse to a reconciliation. She thought it was very bad to have the country split “on an emotional religious issue.”
¹³

She told President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson that if her renomination to the United Nations would be divisive, they should not feel “the slightest embarrassment” in not naming her a member of the delegation to the 1949 General Assembly:

I realize that the attitude of Cardinal Spellman which has developed towards Governor Lehman and towards me, makes appointing me an embarrassing and difficult situation, and I would regret adding to your difficulties. I want you to feel entirely free to do what you deem best for the work of the United Nations and our government situation.
¹⁴

He wanted her back at the General Assembly, Truman replied immediately. She was needed at the United Nations more than ever. She was right and the cardinal wrong in the controversy over federal aid to education. He wasn’t backing down, the president remarked to Hassett.
¹⁵

It was Ed Flynn in the end who wearily moved into the situation to repair the damage and bring about a truce. Tracking her down at a radio station, he asked her to have lunch with him. “I am sick of politics,” he told her. He was having enough trouble with O’Dwyer over the mayoralty, but much worse was the religious division that was setting in because of the cardinal’s letter. He had worked against that sort of thing all his life. He had talked with the cardinal, he went on. He had a rough draft of a clarifying statement the cardinal would like to issue but which His Eminence would first like to read to her to see if she approved.
†

Would Mrs. Roosevelt be willing to talk with the cardinal if he called her? “Why, Ed,” replied Mrs. Roosevelt, “I’m not the one who said I would have nothing to do with the Cardinal.” She would be back at Hyde Park by six that evening, if the cardinal wanted to reach her. As Flynn said good-by, he added a final word smilingly. She should not yield on Spain, if she talked with the cardinal. “Tell him the Basque priests fought and still are fighting Franco.”
¹⁶

Promptly at 6:30
p.m
. the cardinal called. He was gracious and friendly, as if they had always been on the best of terms. He had reworked the statement and would send an aide up the next morning with the revised draft, if Mrs. Roosevelt was willing.

Agnes E. Meyer, author and journalist and wife of the publisher of the
Washington Post,
was a doughty scrapper for federal aid to the public schools, whose improvement was a ruling passion in her life.
She had clashed frequently with the representatives of the church and knew their arguments and stratagems well. She hastily wrote Mrs. Roosevelt that if she could not avoid the interview with the cardinal, it would be a gain for aid to education if in return for her willingness to support the principle that the parochial school child is entitled to community services “such as health, welfare and even transportation since the Supreme Court agreed to it,” the cardinal would declare “categorically that the demands of the Church would never go beyond the constitutional limits.”
¹⁷

The day after the cardinal telephoned her, a monsignor appeared at Val-Kill at 9:30
a.m.
, “a very comfortable looking Monseigneur whose name I never did discover,” she reported to Mrs. Meyer. They worked on two statements—one the cardinal’s, the other Mrs. Roosevelt’s—that would clarify their views and which would be issued by the chancery office. The monsignor told her as they worked away that he considered “the Quebec school system one of the best in the world. If you know the province of Quebec you may feel as I do that education there is deplorable.”
¹⁸

The two texts were agreed upon. Cardinal Spellman made it clear that his proposed use of public funds for parochial schools be only for “auxiliary services,” among which, however, he included textbooks. With reference to the constitutional point, the cardinal said: “We are not asking for general public support of religious schools. . . .Under the Constitution, we do not ask, nor can we expect, public funds to pay for their construction, or repair of parochial school buildings, or for the support of teachers, or for other maintenance costs.” His letter made no direct reference to Mrs. Roosevelt, but he noted “the great confusion and regrettable misunderstandings” that had arisen on the subject of federal aid and reaffirmed “the American right of free speech which not only permits but encourages differences of opinion.”
¹⁹

The cardinal’s statement was “clarifying and fair,” Mrs. Roosevelt said in her letter. She noted the cardinal’s acceptance of the view that general public support of religious schools was prohibited by the Constitution. His statement on “auxiliary services,” she felt, made it clear that the claim for federal support of such services was
not intended to breach the fundamental prohibition against public support of religious schools.

But this was more a hope than a statement of fact. “I am more convinced than ever that they will never help us to get federal aid for education unless they think they are going to get it too for parochial schools,” she wrote Agnes Meyer. The Barden bill, which would have provided federal aid, but only to the public schools, died in committee. She predicted to Cyril Clemens, editor of the
Mark Twain Quarterly,
that the church would work to get as many states and as many Supreme Court decisions as possible upholding the constitutionality of state funds for parochial schools, “and in the long run they are sure if it is constitutional for states, it may be declared constitutional for federal funds to be used not only for auxiliary services but for all services equally. Once that is done they control the schools, or at least a great part of them.”
²⁰

At the Castel Gandolfo, Pope Pius XII put his stamp of approval on the exchange of statements between the cardinal and Mrs. Roosevelt, telling five visiting American newspapermen that the dispute had been resolved satisfactorily. In doing so, commented
Newsweek
, “the pontiff wrote finis to one of the bitterest and potentially most explosive public controversies in years.” A few days later, Mrs. Roosevelt disclosed in her column, almost laconically, that the cardinal had dropped in at Hyde Park and stayed for tea.

The other afternoon as I was signing mail, with side glances out of my window, and I am afraid my thoughts centered on how quickly I could get out for a swim, Miss Thompson came to my desk, looking somewhat breathless and said: “Mrs. Roosevelt, Cardinal Spellman is on the porch and he wants to see you!”

The Cardinal had dropped in on his way to dedicate a chapel in Peekskill. We had a pleasant chat and I hope the country proved as much of a tonic for him as it always is for me.
²¹

One result of that friendly forty-five-minute talk was Mrs. Roosevelt’s agreement that a good argument could be made for federal aid to transport children in all free schools, a modification in her position that pained some of the more militant defenders of the First Amendment. They disagreed, however, over aid for nonreligious textbooks. Before they finished, Mrs. Roosevelt brought up another subject:

“Sir, before you go, let me say something. There are rumors that you are opposed to Governor Lehman. My feeling is that if the figures show that the Catholic vote has gone appreciably against Lehman, it will make it impossible for any Catholic to get elected in this state for many years to come. Because a lot of liberals, Jews, and Protestants will be very resentful.” “Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt,” the cardinal assured her, “I’m not opposed to Governor Lehman! I’ll get in touch with Ed Flynn as soon as he returns to town.”
²²

Lehman stopped in at Val-Kill on his way down from the Adirondacks. Although earlier in the summer Democratic leaders who were Catholics had been urging him to run for the Senate, they now were saying that if he
wanted
the nomination they would support him. Mrs. Roosevelt said she would find out how they really felt and make it clear that if they opposed him she would not be able to support the Democratic ticket.
²³

He was given the nomination but Mrs. Roosevelt continued to worry whether the party leadership was giving him all-out support. She spotted an Associated Press story from upstate New York in which a Jesuit priest was quoted as urging Catholics to vote for candidates who would not discriminate against Catholic children. She clipped it and sent it to Flynn. “This sort of story is going to do great harm in this campaign. Can’t it be prevented?”
²⁴

In October she wrote President Truman that she feared a Catholic defection might defeat Lehman, and she asked for his help:

I feel a little responsible for the situation here because undoubtedly Governor Lehman’s statement against the Cardinal’s letter to me is one of the things influencing the Catholic hierarchy
and there are always some Catholics who can be influenced by a word passed down to the priests. . . .
²⁵

The administration did give Lehman all-out support, and Lehman defeated Dulles by some 200,000 votes.

But the episode left its scars. “I don’t think the Cardinal ever forgave Herbert for supporting Mrs. Roosevelt,” commented Mrs. Lehman. As for Mrs. Roosevelt, distrust of the church as a temporal institution was one of the reasons for her strenuous opposition later to John F. Kennedy’s bid for the presidential nomination. She came away from her encounter with the cardinal, she wrote a young friend,

with a horrible feeling of insincerity. In his visit he never once mentioned the fact that he had written me that letter and you would think I was one of his most cherished friends. That does not give me any explanation of the letter nor much sense of security in his sincerity. I think the Barden Bill was something through which they hoped to hurt my influence which has been exerted on the UN delegation against returning Ambassadors to Spain. That is the real crux of the attack.
²⁷
‡

As for the cardinal, when he was questioned by Irwin Ross eight years later as to why he had called on Mrs. Roosevelt, he told him: “I don’t like to have any hard feelings. I want to be charitable with everybody.” And in 1966 when he traveled to Hyde Park for the dedication of a Franklin D. Roosevelt postage stamp, he said a few words over Roosevelt’s grave in the rose garden and was then observed to move over to Mrs. Roosevelt’s grave and fold his hands in prayer.

*
Macherras
is “an ugly word which means a woman who tries to play the part of a man,” a UN official who sent her the clipping translated.

†
According to Warren Moscow, Flynn made a secret flight to Rome and laid the facts of the quarrel before Pope Pius XII. “Equally secretly, Cardinal Spellman was ordered to make a public gesture of friendship to Mrs. Roosevelt. . .” (
The Last of the Big Time Bosses: The Life and Times of Carmine De Sapio and the Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall
[New York, 1971], p. 122).

‡
By the beginning of 1950 she was persuaded by officials in the State Department and by Gen. T. McInerny, a lobbyist for the Spanish government who had been introduced to her by her uncle, David Gray, whose military attaché he had been in Ireland, that the UN decision to withdraw ambassadors from Spain had been a mistake and might even have strengthened Franco’s position at home. “I can, of course, see that it might be wise and helpful to the Spanish people if we resumed ordinary diplomatic and economic intercourse,” she wrote on February 12, 1950. And when at the end of the month, the United States decided to resume relations with Generalissimo Franco and moved to rescind the UN resolution on the withdrawal of ambassadors, she did not oppose the decision.