Eleanor (38 page)

Words are no substitute for deeds. What is required is cooperative effort on the part of individual citizens as well as action by local, state and Federal governments. . . .In this spirit, the Democratic party stands firmly in support of the Supreme Court decisions regarding desegregation in the public schools and in other public facilities, including transportation, as we stand firmly in support of all Supreme Court decisions.

Stevenson sent her a copy of this draft, asking her to notice how it spoke of “support” rather than “approval” of the court’s decision, although he cautioned her that in talking to an interviewer, he had said that “the platform should express unequivocal approval of the Court’s decision. . . .”
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It was not the finest hour of either of these normally staunch supporters of civil rights.

The convention was at hand, and Mrs. Roosevelt performed one final service for Stevenson. “We raised $75,000 at the Stevenson dinner last Wednesday night with 135 people present.” She did not say, although the Stevenson people did, that her speech was the high point of the evening. They wished they had a recording to play for the undecided delegates. She gave the credit to Kefauver’s announcement releasing his delegates. “It sparked the optimism everyone felt.” She sent her thanks to Kefauver!

I am sure that your move will strengthen the Democratic Party, and bring the nomination to a quicker conclusion, and make it possible for a unified Party to win in November.
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Having done what she could for Stevenson in the primaries and in the drafting of a civil rights plank that she felt would hold the party together, she informed Butler that although she had agreed to speak at the convention on the sixteenth, she was bowing out. “I don’t think it the least important and it would make it very difficult to make my overseas flight on the afternoon of the 17th.” She was going to Europe with two of her grandsons and David’s daughter, young Grania Gurewitsch, and did not want to start out tired.

If I can go to Chicago at all, I would do so on August 13th to 15th in the hope that I might be able to do something for Mr. Stevenson. However I am not sure I will go unless they feel there is something really helpful that I can do.
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Anna Rosenberg, Mary Lasker, and Tom Finletter, with whom she had been working closely, blanched when they heard the news. They had been equally nonplused a few days earlier when they discovered that she had booked herself solid for the fall with lectures for the AAUN and Colston Leigh. She could not see why people were so agitated, Mrs. Roosevelt said a little wearily. She would not be of much help. Younger people should be taking over. All the world, it seemed to her, including her sons, remonstrated with her. Stevenson begged her to make at least an appearance at the convention and to keep every possible date open in the fall. “Let me know,” he wrote her, “but I should like to have you available
all
the time.”
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She yielded to Stevenson. Whatever he asked, she would try to do. She canceled all her speaking dates except those for which contracts had actually been signed, and with Stevenson, Jane (Mrs. Edison) Dick, Elliott, and the Finletters, she flew out to Chicago for the convention.

By all accounts, her appearance there, although brief, was largely responsible for stopping dead in its tracks Harry Truman’s blitz for Harriman. He had come to Chicago determined to destroy the Stevenson candidacy, and the day before she arrived he let loose his blockbuster, saying that the party needed a “fighting” candidate, which Stevenson was not, nor was the Illinois governor well enough prepared to take over the presidency.

Instead of taking her to her hotel from the airport, Stevenson’s managers drove her about Chicago while they filled her in on what Truman had said. Then they escorted her directly to a press conference at which she would answer the former president. She entered the room and faced “more reporters and more cameramen than I had ever seen before.”

Graciously, in her best patrician style, Mrs. Roosevelt in forty-five minutes disposed of Mr. Truman. She could not take seriously
his preference for a “fighting” candidate, she said, noting that while Stevenson fought it out in the primaries “there was a conspicuous lack of that kind of fighting” by Harriman. Was Stevenson any less prepared to take over the presidency than Truman was on April 12, 1945? She wanted to know. She thought Stevenson was perhaps “better equipped” in the field of foreign affairs than Truman had been. She then answered the attacks upon Stevenson’s “moderation.” Being a moderate did not mean you believed in standing still. FDR’s policies were those of moderation, she asserted; he did the new things that had to be done, but did not destroy what his background and beliefs told him were valuable in the old.

To the Negro leaders and the ADA, who were pressing for a stronger civil rights plank, she said:

You can’t move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, but it means that yo do the things that need to be done according to priority.

If the Negro leaders “knew Mr. Stevenson at all,” she argued, “they must know that he believes you have to uphold the law of the land.” The civil rights plank did not say everything she would like it to say but she felt southern members of the platform committee had come a long way.
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Columnists wrote that it was doubtful any other northern Democratic leader could say the things she did and survive politically. Resolved on getting the nomination for Stevenson, she demonstrated she could be a politician of “a formidable toughness.” Her most deadly thrusts against Truman were her gentle reminders that they were both old—they were seventy-two—and that it was time to permit a younger generation of leaders to take hold of the party reins. She did not think Mr. Truman would change many votes, she told the reporters. People were fond of him, but he belonged “to the old tradition when the professional politicians had more influence than they should have.”

“It was an adroit and ruthless performance,” commented Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., one of Stevenson’s top aides at Chicago. After her press conference, she and Truman lunched together. There was only one reference to the convention.

“I hope you will understand that whatever action I take is because I think I am doing the right thing,” Truman said.

“Of course,” she replied. “I know you will act as you believe is right and I know you will realize that I must do the same.”

Truman nodded and grinned. “What I want to do is make this convention do some real thinking about issues.”
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Although this was Truman’s wish, it was Mrs. Roosevelt who forced the intellectual pace at the convention with her powerful speech to the convention sounding the theme that it was a time for new beginnings. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death, his memory and the historic work he had accomplished had no more loyal a custodian than Mrs. Roosevelt. The politicians and leaders with whom she had dealt in the postwar years were admirable men with forceful qualities, but FDR by contrast seemed to tower over them. She jealously defended her husband’s place in history, but she was also the one to insist that history had not come to an end with the New Deal. Her convention speech now took the form of a moving and powerful plea that the Democrats go beyond the New Deal and the Fair Deal and launch a campaign to end poverty in America.

At Mary Lasker’s country place in Amenia, just before the convention, Mary had showed Mrs. Roosevelt a book she (Mary) had compiled documenting the extent of poverty in the United States. It was a popularization of the data turned up in the hearings on low-income families held by the Joint Congressional Committee on the Economic Report. Mrs. Roosevelt borrowed the book, and, taking it with her to Chicago, made it the heart of a speech that Edward R. Murrow called “the greatest convention speech I ever heard.”

She believed in a Democratic victory, she started out, but she did not believe “that victory in itself is enough.”

I want victory, and I believe we will have it in November, but I want even more that each and every one of you, as you
go back to your communities, take the message of what you want that victory to mean.

The party had had great leaders, “but we could not have had great leaders unless they had had a great people to follow. You cannot be a great leader unless the people are great,” she said, commenting on the movie depicting the history of the Democratic party that had been shown.

The world was again looking to the United States for leadership, for

the meaning of democracy and we must think of that very seriously. There are new problems. They must be met in new ways. . . .It is a foolish thing to say that you pledge yourself to live up to the traditions of the New Deal and the Fair Deal—of course, you are proud of those traditions; of course, you are proud to have the advice of the elders in our party, but our party is young and vigorous. Our party may be the oldest democratic party, but our party must live as a young party, and it must have young leadership. It must have young people, and they must be allowed to lead. They must not lean on their tradition. They must be proud of it. They must take into account the advice of the elders, but they must have the courage to look ahead, to face new problems with new solutions.

The party needed a “vision,” and she wanted to suggest a thought:

You will remember that my husband said in one of his speeches that our job was not finished, because we still had a third of our people who were ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed.

We have lessened that group in our country that are ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed, but we still have a job to do.

Twenty per cent today is the figure they give us.

Could we have the vision of doing away in this great country with poverty? It would be a marvelous achievement, and I think it might be done if you and I, each one of us, as individuals, would really pledge ourselves and our party to think imaginatively, of what can be done at home, what can make us not only the nation that has some of the richest people in the world, but the nation where there are no people that have to live at a substandard level. That would be one of the very best arguments against Communism that we could possibly have.

It was absolutely imperative that the Democrats come back to power, she had said earlier in her speech, “but they must come back with the right leaders.” Party custom forbade her mentioning her candidate, she stated smiling broadly. She did not need to name the man whom she thought could again lead the party to greatness. On her dress was pinned a large ADLAI button.
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Mrs. Roosevelt stayed in Chicago’s steaming environs less than two days, but while she was there, wherever there was a cluster of delegates, like as not, at the center would be this tall, smiling lady in a gay flowered hat, boosting the virtues of her candidate. Before she left for New York, there was one final matter she had to face. Eugenie Anderson of Minnesota, former ambassador to Denmark, sent her a copy of a lengthy letter that she had addressed to Stevenson, arguing the advantages of selecting Humphrey as his running mate. Mrs. Roosevelt’s friend, Abba Schwartz, and his law partner, James M. Landis, pleaded the case for Sen. John F. Kennedy. “Thanks,” she had noted on the margin of the Landis letter. “I am troubled about Sen. K’s evasive attitude on McCarthy.” A session with the young senator at the convention did not change her mind. She declined to help him, and in the end Stevenson left the designation up to the free choice of the convention and Kefauver emerged from the balloting as the winner.
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She arrived in New York in time to dine with the Nottingham Roosevelt scholars—recipients of scholarships established by the town of Nottingham in honor of FDR—but she spent a good part
of the evening taking calls from Chicago, which was in the midst of the fight over the civil rights plank. The minority report, representing the viewpoint of the Civil Rights Coalition, was defeated. “I may have been very wrong in my stand on the platform,” she confided to a friend. Her position was opportunistic and unmilitant. A few months later she herself would describe President Eisenhower’s stand on civil rights as being “about as aggressive as a meek little rabbit,” and in the Little Rock crisis, when Arkansas governor, Orval E. Faubus, defied a federal court integration order, she would say that President Eisenhower should have gone down and personally led the nine Negro children into the school. But that was in the future. At the 1956 convention, she was instrumental in defeating the minority plank. There was no southern bolt; and Stevenson was nominated. He would have preferred a “specific endorsement” of the court’s decision, he told the press afterward.

She took off for Europe knowing she had done a first-rate job, for her press conference and speech continued to reverberate politically. An old Washington hand, the talented writer Helen Hill Miller, sounded a note that many felt strongly. “It isn’t very often that a person who has been at the very center of one period in the life of a political party has the forward-lookingness and the resilience to note the transition to a new time, much less to bring it forcefully to the attention of the current members of the party. That’s exactly what you did.” In New York David E. Lilienthal made an entry in his
Journals
: “Up last night until long after midnight for the happy business of seeing Stevenson nominated overwhelmingly. . . .Mrs. Roosevelt said so well, with such authority, the very thing I was trying to say to Stevenson, in December, 1955. I felt good that I had tried to give Stevenson the feeling, thus early, that there were those who wanted him to strike out into new ground, not try to live on the glories of the New Deal past, great as they were.” “I doubt whether any leadership was more potent than yours in advancing Adlai’s nomination at the convention in Chicago last week,” William Benton, Connecticut’s ex-senator, congratulated her.
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Although busy in Europe at a task she loved—introducing young
people to her favorite museums, sights, and restaurants—for once she was bored. Her thoughts were with Stevenson: