Eleanor and Franklin (129 page)

In her analysis of radical political trends, Mrs. Dilling labeled as “red” such figures as Gandhi, Einstein, and Frances Perkins. Of the great scientist she wrote: “Einstein, barred as a Communist from Germany, in January, 1934, was an overnight guest of the President at the White House.” Among the 460 organizations that she described as “Radical-Pacifist controlled or infiltrated” were the Amalgamated Bank, the American Association for Old Age Security, the American Friends Service Committee, the Catholic Association for International Peace, the Federal Council of Churches, the League of Women Voters, the National Consumers League, the NAACP, and Union Theological Seminary. The itemization of suspect associations for Eleanor Roosevelt was substantial:

ROOSEVELT, MRS. FRANKLIN D.:
Socialist sympathizer and associate; pacifist; Non-intervention Citz. Com. 1927; Nat. Wom. Tr. Un. Lg.; Nat. Cons. Lg.; co-worker with many radicals, some of whom have been appointed to Government positions by her husband; speaker, Nov. 24–25, 1933, Prog. Edu. Assn. meeting with radicals Norman Thomas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harry A. Overstreet,
etc. sent telegram expressing hope for success of World Peaceways; vice pres. N.Y. Lg. Women Voters; addressed pacifist Conference on Cause and Cure of War, introduced by Carrie Chapman Catt, who exulted that “for the first time in the history of our country we have a woman in the White House who is one of us”; she predicted unless we change our concept of patriotism “we most certainly will commit suicide”; she revealed that her recent declaration against toy soldiers for children had brought a “violent letter” from a man who dubbed her “preaching pacifism” as “inconsistent if your husband has to call the boys to the colors.”
⁷

Rather than intimidating liberals, the indiscriminate, often cynical efforts to brand as “Communist” all welfare legislation and organizations that were manifestly liberal had the opposite effect in the later thirties of causing liberals to shrug off charges of Communist control even when there was merit in the charges.

In the same letter in which she ridiculed Mrs. Dilling's
The Red Network,
Eleanor gave her assessment of Soviet Russia: “It happens that we in our country will never be content with the rather limited freedom that has come to the Russians, though to the Russians it may seem a great step in advance of what they have had before.”

Eleanor had approved the president's decision to recognize the Soviet Union; she had, in fact, encouraged a change in policy. When, at the close of his fourth-term campaign in 1944, Roosevelt defended recognition of Soviet Russia in 1933 as “something that I am proud of,” he added a “personal” note:

In 1933, a certain lady—who sits at this table in front of me—came back from a trip in which she had attended the opening of a schoolhouse. And she had gone to the history class—history and geography—children eight, nine or ten, and she told me that she had seen a map of the world with a great big white space upon it—no name—no information. And the teacher told her it was blank, with no name, because the school board wouldn't let her say anything about that big blank space. Oh, there were only a hundred and eighty or two hundred million people in it, which was called Soviet Russia. . . . For sixteen years before then, the American people and the Russian people had no practical means of communicating with each other. We re-established those means.
⁸

Eleanor's interest in U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union was pragmatic, not ideological. A piquant glimpse of the attitude to the Bolshevik Revolution in the circles in which Eleanor and Franklin moved at the time it took place is afforded by Caroline Phillips' journals. In early 1918, at a meeting of “the Club” (the name that the Roosevelts and their closest friends in the Wilson administration gave their Sunday gatherings) at the Roosevelts', Caroline and the Adolph Millers performed a song and dance, and because the three of them had been arguing for a negotiated settlement of the war, Adolph sang extemporaneously, “For we are the gay Bolsheviki.” A few months later, when Woodrow Wilson made the decision to intervene in Russia and to dispatch an expeditionary force, Eleanor's only comment was to lament that General William S. Graves and not Theodore Roosevelt's friend General Leonard Wood “goes in command to Siberia.”
⁹

But that was fifteen years earlier. By the time Roosevelt assumed the presidency enlightened U.S. opinion had long accepted the view that nonrecognition served neither the interests of the United States nor that of world peace. A committee that Esther Lape organized in 1932 to study the “Relations of Record” between the United States and the Soviet Union and to press the case for recognition reflected this shift in American opinion. Eleanor was a member of the committee, as were old Russia hands like Colonel Hugh Cooper, who had supervised the building of the Dnieperstroy Dam, and conservative Wall Street figures like Thomas W. Lamont and John W. Davis. “I think this group will be helpful,” Eleanor advised her husband in July, 1933. Evidently he thought so, too, because he kept sending messages to Esther to speed up the report.

Roosevelt, however, was less interested in a scholarly report setting forth the “Relations of Record” between the two countries, Esther discovered, than in what the committee might do to lessen the feeling of American “church people” against recognition. Curious as to whose views Roosevelt listened to regarding U.S. policy toward Russia, Colonel Cooper one day asked the First Lady, “Mrs. Roosevelt, who is it now who really exercises influence with the President?” She exploded into laughter. “There never is one. Franklin plays one against the other. He is much too canny to be under the influence of any one individual.”

If the report had little influence on the president, it was noted that when Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov arrived to carry on the recognition negotiations he had a copy of the committee's study
in his hand, and after the complex talks ended in the exchange of ambassadors, Thomas Lamont wrote Esther that he thought Litvinov should raise an icon to her in Moscow.
¹⁰

One subject touched on in the conversations between president and commissar related not to affairs of state but to the relations between husbands and wives with careers of their own. Mrs. Ivy Litvinov, the commissar's English-born wife, a highly cultivated woman, did not accompany her husband to the United States.

“Mrs. Roosevelt and I regret so much that your wife couldn't accompany you,” the president said to Litvinov.

“Oh, well, you know. Very active woman, career of her own, constantly traveling, making speeches. Impossible to interrupt what she was doing. Came alone because she is individual in politics just as I am.”

“I think I understand,” Roosevelt commented.
¹¹

In 1936 the Soviet government sent a delegation of managers and technicians to study U.S. factories. Two women, Mme. Pauline Z. Molotov and Miss Ludmilla Shaposhnikova, were in the group, and Eleanor invited them to lunch at the White House along with Mrs. Hull, Mrs. Wallace, and Isabella Greenway. The Soviet women were the heads of Russia's soap and cosmetic industry and were studying American methods of manufacture and distribution. More than 50 per cent of the Russian women, even the farm women, were using the better grades of face soap and cosmetics, the Russian ladies boasted. Neither Mrs. Roosevelt nor Mrs. Greenway used cosmetics, and Isabella could not resist pointing this out to the representatives of the new Puritanism, quickly adding, however, “Of course, you must not judge the other women of this country by Mrs. Roosevelt or myself. I feel quite sure that if Mrs. Roosevelt began to do one eyebrow she would go out forgetting to do the other!”
¹²

One source of information about Russia at this time was Sara Gertrude Millin, a South African writer whom Felix Frankfurter encouraged to write to Eleanor about her newly published life of General Jan Christiaan Smuts. She had been to Russia, Mrs. Millin's letter said, and it had turned out to be nothing

like I had imagined from the books I had read and the films I had seen. I had many-sided and extraordinary opportunities to see things—met Madame Litvinoff and her friends, newspapermen, foreign ministers, sincere communists, the simple people. I wish
happiness only results for them, and I think that if Germany doesn't attack them they
may
emerge. But today—just this day—they are the most distressed people I have ever seen—worse off, in my mind, than the natives here.

There's only America for the hope of the world. Thank God for its President to maintain that hope.
¹³

Another source of information on Russia during the thirties was Anna Louise Strong, indefatigable propagandist for Soviet Communism. Eleanor had her come to lunch at the White House when the president was there and evidently both Franklin and Eleanor enjoyed the conversation. How it went and the subjects covered may be surmised from the letter Miss Strong wrote to Eleanor a few days later. Evidently she had gone straight to the Soviet Embassy to discuss some of the questions the Roosevelts had brought up.

As for Stalin,—after leaving you I saw Troyanovsky, who is an old friend of my husband's. I asked him if he agreed with the picture of Stalin I gave you. He said: “I well remember Stalin from earliest days,—an unobtrusive youth sitting in conferences, saying little, listening much. Towards the end he would venture a mild suggestion and we began increasingly to see that we always took it. He summed up best the way to our joint purposes.”

Stalin's authority, Miss Strong went on, arose from his ability to analyze events:

He has refused several chances to make himself the personal “god” of the people. . . . So the President asks whether people in these conferences don't feel that they “have to” agree with Stalin, the answer is both yes and no. Personal wire-pulling is not, I think, his characteristic, but the painstaking search for the adjustment of each bit of human material into a place where it can function, is. I have even been told by people in a position to know, that it was Stalin who tried to the last to “save Trotsky” against the rising ire of the Central Committee. I don't repeat this in America, not wishing to lose my reputation for sanity, but I can quite believe it myself.
¹⁴

In addition to wanting to know how Stalin wielded power, Roosevelt pressed Miss Strong on how the Soviets raised money for
their budget. Money did not seem to be an issue in the Soviet Union, she replied. The Soviet problem was time—“to get schools, factories, tractors—quickly rather than cheaply.” She indicated that Roosevelt's problem was how “to get money from unwilling owners,” but in the USSR the

money problem becomes: which industries shall we run at a loss in order to establish them or to cut costs of basic necessities? Which shall we compel to pay for their plants out of three or four years income? On which shall we profiteer shamelessly in order to use the surplus for health, education and losses of needed industries?

Priorities were assigned.

Eleanor was politely skeptical. She did not understand how the Russian leaders managed to get diverse social groups—peasants, workers, managers, consumers—to act jointly if not by coercion. Moreover, she had the feeling that it was simpler to manage Russia's primitive economy than America's sophisticated and highly developed productive machine. “Their problem is simpler,” Miss Strong replied, “because they have no fundamental clashes over ownership, but only clashes over which district or industry shall be developed first.”

“But I see your tragedy,” Miss Strong went on with the presumptuousness of someone who was sure that history was on her side. “The people trust you to use power for their benefit. And you want to do it. But you haven't power to use. Power resides in ownership of the means of production; the financiers have it, not you. But the people think you have it, and so, in spite of their great faith and your own sincerity, they will grow disillusioned.” She was pessimistic about the future: “The financiers will force you steadily to the right and if you do not go, they will be ready, either through the ballot or by subsidizing veterans, to put in someone who will.” Roosevelt would end up in the same plight as Ramsay MacDonald and the German Social-Democrats, she predicted. Having thus delivered herself of the party line on the future of the Roosevelts and the New Deal, she signed herself a little lugubriously, “with great admiration for you personally and utmost sympathy for the difficulties of your position.”

Eleanor thanked her for her letter, adding, “However, we are much more hopeful than you are.”
¹⁵

Eleanor listened to Anna Louise Strong, and she also listened to the Quaker relief worker Alice Davis and her friends among the Russian
émigrés
. She and Lorena Hickok visited Miss Davis, who had moved to Dumbarton, Virginia, while Alexandra Tolstoy, a foe of Soviet Communism, was there. “Mrs. Roosevelt understands everything,” Tolstoy's daughter said afterward. Miss Davis then added, “When you were here—I remember you questioned whether we would have to go through the same awful bloodshed that the countries abroad are having. I think that the reason we shan't have to is that you and the President do ‘understand everything' or at least a very great deal about all sorts of people.”
¹⁶

Both the president and the First Lady had great confidence in themselves and in the redemptive power of American democracy, and were not afraid to talk with Communists. Eleanor felt that loyalty oaths were a reflection of fear, and any action motivated by fear seemed to her almost always to end up being unwise action. “Fear is not a constructive force,” she told the
New York Herald Tribune
Forum in 1938. When the women cheered Representative Martin Dies, whose House Committee on Un-American Activities had just begun its probes of Communism, she wrote
Herald Tribune
publisher Helen Reid, “I was just grieved that a group of women so intelligent and outstanding could be carried away with and approve so spontaneously Mr. Dies.”