The First Lady of Radio (31 page)

May we have the courage to do our part for the sake of future generations. And may God bring consolation to those who suffer both at home and abroad.

37.

“V-E Day Radio Message”

May 8, 1945, 11:25 a.m. (NBC Red Network)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia. Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as commander-in-chief. The Allies were on the verge of victory in Europe; Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker eighteen days later. His successor signed a document of unconditional surrender on May 7 in a French schoolhouse. Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, was celebrated in the United States on May 8, 1942. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to the nation from the NBC studios in New York. ER urged her listeners to stay resolute. There was still a war to win against Japan in the Pacific.

ER: I am very happy to have this opportunity to speak to the people of this country on V-E Day. It is a day on which we can be happy that the European war is at an end.

I know my husband would want me to say to you, the soldiers of this country on all the fields of battle, and to the workers at home and the
civilians who, side by side, have won through to this day with him, that he is grateful to each and every one of you. I think, also, that he would want to say that we must go on with every power we have until the war is fully won. And that after that, we must give all the backing we can to our own president, to the heads of allied nations, and win through to a permanent peace. That was the main objective for which my husband fought. That is the goal which we must never lose sight of.

It will be difficult. And there will be times when it will be hard to understand other nations and their leaders. But the goal is there. And in one way or another, our leaders and our people must fight through to a permanent peace. That is the only way that we, as a nation, can feel compensation for the sacrifice of thousands of young lives in our own country and in other countries.

Today, I think I want to say again, thank you, from my husband and from myself, as a private citizen. Because it is a wonderful thing to be a private citizen, standing side by side with all other citizens of this great country, knowing that our leaders are worthy and that, we, as citizens, will be worthy of them.

38.

“V-J Day Radio Message”

Tuesday, August 14, 1945 (CBS)

On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito of Japan went on the radio to tell his people that Japan was giving up. Because of the difference in time zones, it was a day earlier in the United States. After President Harry S. Truman announced the Japanese surrender at a press conference, Americans swarmed to town and city centers across the country, creating spontaneous parades and rallies. Others marked the victory with prayer services at houses of worship.

The victory came after Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This new and powerful military technology was vaguely understood by the American public. In her broadcast to the nation on V-J Day, Eleanor Roosevelt rightly predicted that the new weapon would challenge the wisdom of humanity. She proposed that atomic science should be collectively developed and controlled.

ER called on the women of the world to help create a constructive and lasting peace. She would play her own influential role in shaping
the postwar world. President Truman appointed her a delegate to the newly created United Nations on March 15, 1946. Until her death in 1962, ER would travel the globe promoting peace and international cooperation.

ER: The day for which the people of the world have prayed is here at last. There is great thankfulness in our hearts. Peace has not come, however, as the result of the kind of power which we have known in the past, but as the result of a new discovery which, as yet, is not fully understood, nor even developed.

There is a certain awe and fear coupled with our rejoicing today. Because we know that there are new forces in the world, partly understood but not, as yet, completely developed and controlled. This new force is a tremendous challenge to the wisdom of men. For that reason, I know that most of us feel that it must be subject to their collective wisdom. Just as it was discovered by the pooling of knowledge from men of many races and religions, so it must be ruled in its development. We should not think only of its destructive power, for this new discovery may hold within it the germs of the greatest good that man has ever known. But that good can only be achieved through man's wisdom in developing and controlling it.

Today we have a mixture of emotions. Joy that our men are freed of constant danger. Hope that those whom we love will soon be home among us. Awe at what man's intelligence can encompass. And a realization that that intelligence, uncontrolled by great spiritual forces, can be man's destruction instead of his salvation.

For the happy wives and mothers of my own country and of the world, my heart rejoices today. But I cannot forget that to many, this moment only adds a poignancy to their grief. All women—wives and mothers, sisters or sweethearts—who have had men involved in this conflict know what it is to live with fear as a constant companion. Some
women will still have to help their men fight the aftermath of war in their own lives. Others have lost forever the men they held dear. Many, many women, however, will be able to rejoice for themselves individually, and for the others whose anxiety for their dear ones and whose separation from them will soon be over.

Many of us are hoping that the very suffering which women of all nationalities have been through will bring about a greater kinship among them than has ever existed before. The power of women for good should be intensified, because they will surely determine to work together in order to ensure that the forces of the world are used for constructive purposes.

Women want to create a world atmosphere in which human beings may develop in peace and loving understanding. Our prayer today is one of gratitude, O Lord, that peace has come to bless the Earth. But above all, we pray for wisdom and for the spirit of love in the hearts of men, for without that spirit, wisdom will avail us little.

Before closing, I want to say just one word about my husband. I know that many people have thought of him very constantly, ever since the war came to an end. I am deeply grateful. He always felt that we could and would fight this war to ultimate victory. And he had complete assurance that the victory, once won, the people of the United States would turn their full strength and power into making peace a reality and a benefit to mankind.

Notes

Introduction

1
. Eleanor Roosevelt,
This I Remember
(New York: Harper Brothers, 1949), 232.

2
. Radio script, “The Pan-American Coffee Bureau,” December 7, 1941, Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park NY (hereafter ER Papers), box 1411.

3
. ER quoted in Blanche Wiesen Cook,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One 1884–1933
(New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 425.

4
. Blanche Wiesen Cook,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume Two 1933–1938
(New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 67.

5
. Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine,
The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 23–24.

6
. “Eleanor Everywhere,”
Time
, November 20, 1933.

7
. Rita S. Halle, “That First Lady of Ours,”
Good Housekeeping
, December 1933.

8
. Cook,
Volume Two
, 3.

9
. Maurine H. Beasley,
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1987), 3.

10
. Cook,
Volume Two
, 339.

11
. Quoted in
Heinl Radio Business Letter
, May 29, 1934. Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

12
. Maurine Beasley,
Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 85.

13
. Virginia Pasley, “First Lady to the Common Man,”
American Mercury
, March 1944.

14
. Blanche Wiesen Cook, in preface to
What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt,
ed. Alida Black (Brooklyn, New York: Carlson Publishing, 1995), xiii.

15
. Letter to ER, January 19, 1933. ER Papers, box 12.

16
. Letter to ER, April 30, 1940. ER Papers, Radio Listener Mail (small collections), box 4.

17
. Letter to ER, February 24, 1942. ER Papers, Radio Listener Mail (small collections), box 6.

18
. Quoted in
Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression
, ed. Robert Cohen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 182.

19
. Postcard to ER, January 23, 1933, ER Papers, box 12.

20
. Letter to ER, January 12, 1933, ER Papers, box 12.

21
. Letters to ER, January 14 and January 31, 1933, ER Papers, box 12.

22
. “Liberal Mrs. Roosevelt,”
Radio Guide
, December 11, 1932.

23
. “A Matter of Propriety,”
The Hartford Courant
, December 20, 1932.

24
. John T. Flynn,
Country Squire in the White House
(New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1940), 107–12.

25
. Westbrook Pegler syndicated column in the
Ogden
[Utah]
Standard Examiner
, August 13, 1945.

26
. Cook,
Volume Two
, 484.

27
. J.E. Doyle, “Hearst Radio Editors' Annual Poll,”
Radio Stars
, April 1938.

28
. Eleanor Roosevelt,
This I Remember
, 73.

29
. Jason Loviglio,
Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xix.

30
. Anne McCormick, “Radio: A Great Unknown Force,”
The New York Times
, March 27, 1932.

31
. Anne McCormick, “Radio's Audience: Huge, Unprecedented,”
The New York Times
, April 3, 1932.

32
. Susan Douglas,
Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 20.

33
. John B. Kennedy, “Ladies of the Air Waves,”
Collier's
, July 9, 1932.

34
. Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport,
The Psychology of Radio
(Salem, NH: Ayer Publishing Company, 1935), 208.

35
. John K. Hutchens, “The Secret of a Good Radio Voice,”
The New York Times
, December 6, 1942.

36
. “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt,”
Variety
, December 13, 1932.

37
. R. Calvert Haws, “Air Secrets of the President's Wife,”
Radio Guide
, November 16, 1935.

38
. James F. Bender, “Their Voices Soft and Low,”
The New York Times
, September 9, 1945.

39
. Samuel I. Rosenman,
Working with Roosevelt
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 11.

40
. Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia Levine,
The Fireside Conversations: America Responds to FDR During the Great Depression
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 13.

41
. Roosevelt,
This I Remember
, 162.

42
. “Six Figures,”
The New Yorker
, February 29, 1936.

43
. Arthur Krock, “My Day Anticipates and Echoes Press Conferences,”
The New York Times
, August 10, 1939.

44
. Cook,
Volume Two
, 37.

45
. Rosenman,
Working with Roosevelt
, 346.

46
. Doris Kearnes Goodwin,
No Ordinary Time
—
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
(New York: Touchstone 1994), 629.

47
. Allida M. Black,
Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.

48
. Letter to ER, July 28, 1940. ER Papers, Radio Listener Mail (small collections), box 1.

49
. Letters to ER, September 13, 1934, ER papers, box 449.

1. “The Girl of Today”

1
. Maurine H. Beasley, Holly C. Shulman, and Henry R. Beasley, eds.,
The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 423.

2
. Joseph P. Lash,
Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers
, (New York: Norton 1971), 356.

3
. Letter to ER, December 20, 1932. ER Papers, box 12.