Eleanor Page 27

  It was a period when Dulles was speaking of the “art of brinkmanship,” an added reason to change pilots as quickly as possible:

  Mr. Dulles has just frightened most of our allies to death with a statement that there is an art in actually threatening war and coming to the brink but retreating from the brink. He certainly is a strange Secretary of State and I shall feel relieved if we can elect a Democrat in the next election and change the State Department attitude.8

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to Stevenson’s preconvention drive was the fact that she, who continued to be the woman most admired by Americans, favored his candidacy and campaigned for him in the primaries. Although ahead in the polls, Stevenson decided he had to go into the primaries because most of the party’s politicians, including that key figure, Harry S. Truman, were not for him. Minnesota was the first important primary, and she agreed to go out to Minneapolis and the Iron Range. Mrs. Roosevelt was the best campaigner she had seen, Jane (Mrs. Edison) Dick, national cochairman of the Stevenson committee, testified afterward, but except for the two congressional districts in which Mrs. Roosevelt campaigned, Kefauver carried the Minnesota primary. It was a serious setback for the Stevenson forces.9

  “You are often in my thoughts,” she wrote Stevenson on April 2, in an effort to buoy up his spirits, “and I know you are going through the hardest part of your struggle just now. Once the primaries and the Convention are over, the campaign will seem very easy in comparison!” Yet Minnesota showed that “it is going to be hard to get him elected,” and the more she thought of the significance of Stevenson’s defeat there, the more strongly she felt it was not enough to bolster Stevenson’s morale—he had to change his approach. “Dear Adlai,” she wrote him a week later,

  I am really worried about one or two things that I think I should say at the present time. It seems to me that it is unwise to be attacking Mr. kefauver as much as you have been doing. The things that need to be attacked are the issues that need to be made clear to the man in the street in the simplest possible terms. The people need to feel that you have done all the agonizing over how to meet situations, that you are sure of what you would do if you were starting in today. . . .

  The problems of today are serious enough. Nobody knows the answers but the people must feel that the man who is their candidate knows where he is going to begin, that he is not so tortured by his own search that he can’t give them reassurance and security. . . .

  This is not meant to be a discouraging letter but an encouraging one. If I did not think you could win, it would not be worth doing a good job.10

  She admired doers, men of action who carefully considered the options open to them, chose one, and if it did not work, tried another. That had been Franklin’s way, she often said. It was also her own. “I don’t really have more energy than many, many people,” she had once explained to novelist Edna Ferber, “but I never use up any energy in indecision or regret. If I make a speech and know it isn’t very good, I get on the plane and say I’ll do a better job next time. But I am never undecided about anything and never have time for remorse or regret about the decisions I make.”11

  Yet Stevenson’s weaknesses may have added to his attractiveness. She could help him. He needed her. Women stuck to Adlai, Dorothy (Mrs. Samuel I.) Rosenman would later tease her. They either wanted to marry or protect him. Nonsense, Mrs. Roosevelt would reply. Adlai did not interest her as a man. It was the thrust and sparkle of his mind that appealed to her. But her interest in Stevenson was not simply political. It rarely was when she worked as hard for a man as she did for him. There was a personal involvement with Stevenson of the kind there had been with Harry Hopkins before he had moved into the White House and, in Tommy’s words, had “dropped” her. She was his protectress, and if, at times, he seemed to rely too much on her, that, too, was not unflattering. The worst thing was not to be needed.12

  She had reason to be concerned over the Minnesota defeat. The professionals were gloating. William Benton, former senator and publisher of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, had chatted with Truman while in Kansas City and reported to her that the former president thought Stevenson was going downhill and by the time of the convention will be finished as a presidential possibility unless he did well in the California primary. Truman was strongly opposed to Kefauver, but Benton was unable to find out whether his candidate was Harriman or Stuart Symington of Missouri.13

  The next primary was in the District of Columbia on April 30. Few convention votes were at stake, but a delegate slate pledged to Kefauver was entered and a poor showing by Stevenson might be fatal. The Stevenson Club begged Mrs. Roosevelt to come down. Afterward, its head, Nancy Davis, wrote her: “I realize that Saturday was an awful day for you—hectic and exhausting—and I hated to put pressure on you to fly down here. Nevertheless it was necessary and your strong endorsement of Governor Stevenson was the strongest single factor in the area. Senator Kefauver told the press that your appearance turned the tide in Adlai’s favor.” Stevenson, campaigning in Portland, Oregon, sent her his thanks. “Wait till it is over and we can sit down quietly and rejoice,” she replied.14

  The California primary in June proved to be a 2 in 1 triumph for Stevenson. “Thanks for the good wishes on Mother’s Day,” she wrote Al Lowenstein:

  I have been running around so madly speaking for Adlai that I had forgotten that I was a grandmother, and a great-grandmother at that!—but the victory in California is certainly satisfactory and I have more hope than I have had in a long time.

  Again her contribution was central: “The local leaders were all in agreement that your stay there was the most helpful thing that happened during the campaign,” Finletter reported.15

  She had been particularly helpful in the Negro precincts, which Stevenson had carried by the surprising margins of 4.5 to 10 to 1 in spite of NAACP opposition. The Negro vote elated Stevenson because Harriman’s bid for the nomination—and he was emerging as Stevenson’s real rival—was based on the argument that only an aggressive champion of New and Fair Deal principles could win in November. This, in his view, ruled out Stevenson, whom he charged with “moderation,” especially on civil rights. Mrs. Roosevelt did not question Harriman’s liberalism, but having known him since he was a little boy, tidings that she always managed to convey in a motherly tone of voice that suggested he was still in pantaloons, she doubted that there was any real difference between Stevenson and Harriman on civil rights. She saw his militancy as a tactical maneuver, the purpose of which was to divide Stevenson’s support in the North or, if he was forced into a more militant position, to lose Stevenson the support of the South.

  He had heard from responsible newspapermen, Stevenson informed her, that the Republican press, having failed to dispose of him in the primaries through Kefauver, would play in with the Harriman strategy. “Your analysis of the Republican attitude is, of course, correct both on what they did for Kefauver and what they will undoubtedly do for Averell,” she replied. The civil rights issue was the key. “They,” the Republicans,

  would like to see the party completely divided and I don’t know that there is any way one can hold it together and live up to one’s convictions, but somehow I think understanding and sympathy for the white people in the South is as important as understanding and sympathy and support for the colored people. We don’t want another war between the states and so the only possible solution is to get the leaders on both sides together and try to work first steps out.

  I have been asked by Mr. [Paul] Butler [Democratic National chairman] to come down to Washington in an effort to get a Civil Rights plank developed for the Convention which will not mean the South will walk out of the Convention. I don’t look forward to it because I have spent endless hours in the UN discussing over the value of words and I think that is what we will have to do in this case.

  It is essential for the Democratic party to keep the colored vote in line, so you can’t take away the feeling that you want to live up
to the Supreme Court decision and go forward, and that this can’t be done in one fell swoop. Desegregation of schools in the South must follow a number of steps. Even in the North we have to desegregate housing before we can desegregate schools. . . .

  You have not in any [way] aggravated my burdens. I chose myself to do this because I felt it was important that we have a nominee in the Democratic party who had not only a chance of winning but a chance of giving us a good administration.16

  During the White House years, Mrs. Roosevelt had always been on guard against the wiles and stratagems that her husband had employed in pushing for his goals lest the objectives be compromised. That had especially been the case in regard to Negro rights. When she saw a thing to be done, she had charged ahead asking, “Why not?” FDR, being the politician, approached his objectives with a circumspection and care that often shaded into deviousness, biding his time, looking for cracks in the wall or ways around it before he went driving into it frontally.17

  But having committed herself to seeing Stevenson elected president, she showed that she, too, could be a fox as well as a lion—to invoke the distinction drawn by James M. Burns in his biography of FDR. In her approach to the civil rights issue, she displayed Franklin’s toughness and maneuverability in balancing the political necessity of not alienating the South against the moral imperatives of the Negro cause.18

  Civil rights groups, especially the NAACP, were beginning to make life hard for Democratic politicians, even the liberals among them. They were demanding that the federal government enforce the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954 on school desegregation even if it meant the withholding of federal funds and the sending in of troops. In Congress, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell had introduced a rider to the school construction bill that would deny federal funds to the states that refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision—at that time, almost the whole South. Rep. Richard Bolling, former head of the American Veterans Committee and a liberal congressman from Kansas City, wrote Mrs. Roosevelt that “despite the fact that I have supported all civil rights measures in the House during my term of service, I have concluded that I must oppose this rider in the interest of enactment into law of the bill itself.” He had heard that she had taken the same position. Was that the case, and could he say so? When the school construction bill had been discussed by the NAACP board in the spring of 1955, she replied,

  Walter Reuther and I asked the Board to allow it to be brought out of committee without an amendment, stating that the Federal aid should only go to school construction in unsegregated areas. We had the promise of Senators Lehman and Hubert Humphrey that as soon as it reached the floor of the Senate they would amend it. They asked that this be done in order that there would be an open debate on the floor so the whole country would know what the argument was about and who the people were who were taking sides. Otherwise it would be killed in the Rules Committee and never reach the floor and no one in the country would know anything about it.

  The NAACP did not agree with our position at that time and therefore insisted that the rider should be attached in the Rules Committee.

  She saw the dangers of a rider, she went on. It would invite a filibuster in the Senate and enable the Republicans to characterize the Congress, which was controlled by the Democrats, as a “do nothing” Congress.

  So I think if I were a member of Congress, I would feel obliged to vote for the bill and prevent the amendment from being introduced if possible. I am, however, not a member of Congress nor a candidate for office. I have, therefore, an obligation, I think, to live up to the principles in which I believe. I believe that it is essential to our leadership in the world and to the development of true democracy in our country to have no discrimination in our country whatsoever. This is most important in the schools of our country. Therefore I feel personally that I could not ask to have this bill passed without an amendment since unless the situation becomes so bad that the people are worried about all education, I fear nothing will be done in the area of discrimination.19

  This answer was not wholly satisfactory. Although she was not a candidate for office, she was a principal backer of the Stevenson candidacy. He had to take a position on the Supreme Court decision and the Powell rider. What should it be, and, if he did not satisfy the Negro leaders, where should she stand? Would she still refuse to accommodate principle to political realities? The problem soon confronted her. Stevenson, campaigning on the West Coast in early February, emphasized conciliation and gradualism. He did not believe that deeply rooted racial attitudes could be changed by “a stroke of a pen,” and he opposed “punitive (or coercive) action by the Federal Government.”20

  Roy Wilkins, who had succeeded Walter White as chief executive of the NAACP and top strategist of the civil rights movement, was outraged by Stevenson’s emphasis on “moderation.” “To Negro Americans ‘gradual’ means either no progress at all, or progress so slow as to be barely perceptible,” he wrote Stevenson, sending a copy of his letter to Mrs. Roosevelt.21

  She did not like his statement as reported in the press, she wrote Wilkins. She had had a long talk with Stevenson, had made a careful study of his record in the Navy and as governor of Illinois, and had satisfied herself that “his stand on civil rights is the correct one in every way. . . .We will need great wisdom and patience in the next few months, not hotheaded bursting into print.” To Walter White’s widow, who protested that liberal Democrats like Stevenson might be expected to express views as strong, at least, as those of the Republicans, Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “Yes, but Stevenson is our best friend and we should not run him down.”

  Ralph Bunche was the Negro leader in whom she had the greatest confidence. “I had a long talk with Ralph Bunche yesterday,” she wrote a protesting Pauli Murray, whose youthful militance she had treated so understandingly in the thirties and who was now a successful lawyer and writer,

  and I don’t think that fundamentally there is any cleavage between my point of view and that of Mr. Stevenson and that of the really wise Negro leaders. I did not like Roy Wilkins’ hot-headed statement which I thought poorly thought out, nor did I like the garbled reporting of what Mr. Stevenson said in Los Angeles. Unwittingly Mr. Stevenson used the word “gradual” and this means one thing to the Negroes but to him it was entirely different. However, Mr. Stevenson’s record remains remarkably good and he certainly was courageous in the statements he made in the last campaign. I think so far he has made no really deeply felt statement on the situation but I don’t think that is because of any political reaction that might come. I simply think that he is waiting for the time when he thinks it will be of most value. However, the more he seems to be under attack by the Negroes, the less possible it is for him to make such a speech because he will be accused of doing so in order to get the Negro vote.

  The only thing on which Stevenson and I differ with some of the Negro leaders is in support of the Powell amendment. His feeling is that aid should not be withheld from the states that need education most in order to improve. . . .

  I think it is a mistake for the Negro leaders to be tearing down Stevenson who is after all the only real hope they have, the President having told Mr. [Adam Clayton] Powell that he would make no statement on whether the Executive would refrain from allocating funds where schools were segregated. Yet the papers and the Negro leaders have not attacked the President. Why this discrimination?22

  Her differences with Wilkins came to a head in April when, in a speech under NAACP auspices in Chicago, he suggested that Negroes were not wedded to the Democratic party. “Up here we can strike a blow in defense of our brothers in the South, if necessary by swapping the known devil for the suspected witch.” Some Negro papers interpreted this as a call to Negroes to desert the Democratic party if that was the only way to get around Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi, who, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, kept all civil rights legislation effectively bottled up in committee.

  “I think you are bei
ng most unwise,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Wilkins.

  You are losing the people who have done the most for you in the past few years. I agree that the teaming up of the reactionary Democrats with the reactionary Republicans is a very bad thing but if the Republicans win it is not going to change that and you will certainly have as much inaction with either President Eisenhower or Nixon or any other Republican candidate as you have had in the past four years.

  She did not see how having Sen. William E. Jenner, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, become chairman would improve the prospect for civil rights legislation. She was angry. “I am unable to come to many meetings or spend the time to be an [NAACP] Board member,” her letter ended, “and so I am herewith tendering my resignation. I am telling you this because I am forwarding my resignation to Dr. Tobias.” Channing H. Tobias, a Negro leader with a long view, implored her not to resign, at least not before she had talked with Wilkins, who was out of town. “I am a registered Democrat and have voted for the party candidate consistently beginning with Alfred E. Smith,” Wilkins wrote her in a letter that was a model of dignity and firmness. But his concern was “first and last for civil rights. . . .My view is that the political parties have not hesitated to use the civil rights issue advantageously for themselves, and I see nothing wrong with our trying to use political developments in either party advantageously for our cause.” He asked her to reconsider her resignation. “I would consider it as a great personal loss, as well as an official one, if you should insist upon resigning.”23

  She had her talk with Wilkins and was satisfied that in the future he would not make statements that seemed to be anti-Democratic and anti-Stevenson in their thrust. “He assures me that he will remember to make very clear his meaning in what he says and writes,” Mrs. Roosevelt notified Dr. Tobias, withdrawing her resignation.