Confronting the Vital Center

Civil Liberties in War and Peace

excerpted from the book

Casting Her Own Shadow

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism

by Allida M. Black

Columbia University Press, 1996

For most of her life, Eleanor Roosevelt defended civil liberties with the same zeal with which she tackled racial discrimination. Yet, unlike her unceasing public defense of civil rights, her support of civil liberties was sometimes modified and curtailed by her husband's foreign policy. Consequently, her record as a defender of dissent and protector of the suspect is marred by her sporadic and reluctant compliance with FDR's wartime security priorities.

These compromises do not alter ER's fundamental identity as a civil libertarian. Indeed, from her earliest years at Marie Souvestre's Allenswood Academy, she believed that the rights to speak one's mind, to dissent, and to associate with whomever one wanted were inviolate. Her compromises suggest that although she did not share FDR's belief that the emergencies of wartime should override the Bill of Rights, after America entered the war, ER nevertheless conformed to her husband's demands. In short, she did not challenge programs that FDR believed necessary to sustain his foreign policy with the abandon with which she challenged his delaying of domestic reform. The historical record does not fully reveal why ER complied with FDR's wishes. What is clear, however, is that as soon as her husband died, she returned to defending her own civil libertarian principles with fervor.

A review of Eleanor Roosevelt's position on civil liberties from I940 until I962 amply demonstrates three aspects of this phase of her career. First, the curtailment of wartime civil liberties caused ER great pain. Second, she strove whenever possible to defend the liberties of Americans whose actions were questioned by the administration. And third, once the war was over she spoke out forcefully and consistently in defense of civil liberties as if to make up for lost time and missed opportunities. Such strident defense of postwar civil liberties often placed her in the center of the debate over free speech and created yet another reason for both the right and the communist left to criticize her. Consequently, throughout the New Deal and the Second World War, ER increasingly had to defend her positions on free speech and dissent to both her critics and her supporters. Conservative and communist activists assailed her commitment to "moderation"; liberal politicians questioned her political savvy; and intellectuals ridiculed her columns for their simplistic, unanalytical approach. This created a new dilemma for her. ER intended to defend civil liberties the same way she defended civil rights. She planned to show the nation through her own actions that there was nothing to be afraid of but the paralysis unreasonable fear insplred. However, when her activism failed to allay public concern and the assault on political nonconformity intensified, she often assumed an unaccustomed role of lay political philosopher.

By the beginning of the Cold War, when the vast majority of New Deal liberals either followed Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr's lead and denounced popular front alliances or enthusiastically endorsed Henry Wallace's progressive crusade, ER had already carved out a different path. While her observations of FDR's relationship with Stalin led her to view American-Soviet cooperation as unrealistic, she refused to capitulate completely to a policy characterized by "iron curtain" and consensus politics. She would not follow her husband's lead and temporize civil liberties. Although she believed that American communists did not keep their word, allowed the Soviet Union to set their agenda, and promoted a public duplicity she labeled "the philosophy of the lie," she repeatedly refused to endorse the public demand to outlaw membership in the Communist party. Moreover, she insisted that fear must not dominate American domestic and foreign policy and agonized over the rift this issue caused among the liberal rank and file. Such positions placed her outside the vital center and exposed her to criticism from the moderate and liberal left and the conservative right.

Eleanor Roosevelt's dual stature as FDR's widow and as a political leader in her own right made her the major symbol for both protecting FDR's legacy and expanding domestic reform. Her insistent wartime demand for civil rights and widespread social and economic reform underscored her deviance from mainstream American politics. Consequently by I945, many conservatives and most members of the far right believed she represented all that threatened America, all the dangers they associated with liberalism and feared from communism.

To these critics ER's danger lay in her ability to dissuade average Americans from unconditionally accepting what they saw as the heart and soul of the American heritage: repudiation of communism, unbridled patriotism, and the politics of segregation and social conformity. As the right's chief target from the I9305 on, ER, more than any other noted liberal, encountered both its fury and its scorn. Her detractors were so vitriolic that one prominent columnist asserted "never before in American history has a respectable woman been subjected to such reckless and relentless attack."

Indeed, as the editors of the ever-vigilant, anti-communist newsletter Counterattack asserted, the positions ER promoted "aroused more temperature than temperateness." One had only to look briefly at her obsession with reform to recognize that she was the "honorary head of the Communist front." To other correspondents, her speeches were nothing more than "Russian propaganda [designed] to stir up trouble at a time when we can least afford it." They pleaded with J. Edgar Hoover to recognize that she was "a Traitor and no longer worthy to remain a citizen." Not to be outdone by his supporters, the arch segregationist Theodore Bilbo agreed and even proposed his own solution to ER's treachery. She should be deported to Liberia, he told his Senate colleagues, where she could rule over as many American blacks who could be deported along with her.5

As irate as the rabid anti-communists were in their condemnation of Eleanor Roosevelt, their rebukes paled in comparison to the hyperbole of Protestant fundamentalists. The Reverend Dan Gilbert, director of the Christian Press Association, argued that ER's support of Planned Parenthood proved that she was really a communist at heart because she deliberately "invaded the sanctity of the white family." Others saw her as nothing more than "a pro-Stalin politician [and] an alien-minded traitor" who insisted on forcing "Negro rule." Anti-ER sentiment even dominated the debate when an unidentified southern clergyman tried to defend FDR's war policies. When the pastor claimed that the congregation should be patient with FDR because the president "depended upon a higher power for guidance,'' a stalwart member of his congregation jumped up and shouted, "I don't like her either." Consequently, most revivalists would agree with Gerald L. K. Smith's assessment. "The only good thing I can say about Eleanor Roosevelt," he told a I946 Tulsa, Oklahoma, gathering of the Chrlstian Nationalist Crusade, "is that she gave her old gold teeth to the Elk Lodge."

Such attacks spurred her efforts for tWO reasons. First, she experienced the personal and political damage that unwarranted attacks caused. As she acknowledged in a rare disclosure, by I944 she was "getting a little weary of the criticism heaped on me" when she acted as a foil for other leaders Second, she realized that she, unlike many of the victims of the right's anticommumst propaganda, was in a unique position to combat it. Opinion polls repeatedly proved that whatever issue she tackled, more of the public approved of her conduct than disapproved. With the platform this reservoir of support afforded her, ER throughout her long career strove to educate America about the dangers of labeling anything unconventional "Commumst." Formerly the White House activist, after leaving Washington she assumed the role of the nation's civics instructor. Using both her column and her lecture tours as forums, ER urged her readers to understand three major points: that difference promotes democracy; that it is essential for citizens to honor their civic responsibilities; and that if the first tWO conditions were not met, the nation's future would be in jeopardy.7

As the suspicion of Soviet espionage began to dominate postwar American polltical rhetoric, Eleanor Roosevelt expanded the focus of her writings and speeches to counter the political backlash this anxiety provoked. In a style that often bordered on oversimplification, she strove to educate the average American about the inherent danger of stereotyping difference and of unquestioned acceptance of unsubstantiated accusations Often using "My Day" and magazine articles as a one-woman teach-in, ER never strayed from her commitment to dramatizing complex issues for ordmary readers. Sometimes these portrayals galvanized her readers to take the stand she supported. More often, her readers admired her integrity while they questioned her position. Yet whatever the response her words provoked, her commitment to political speech and freedom of association served as an omnipresent reminder that politics need not be dictated by bullies and demagogues.

This staunch commitment to the democratic ideal did not cloud Eleanor Roosevelt's astute and hard-headed assessment of the political arena. First and foremost a political realist, ER struggled to keep political ideals in front of an apolitical public. Moreover, she recognized the difficulties inherent in this effort. As the Cold War deepened and the public rejected the arguments she presented, she found herself in the unusual position of trying to explain the liberal philosophy to a public more concerned with immediate results than with long-term analysis.

This role was not always comfortable for her. While she always had been an educator, she never claimed to a philosopher. However, she always had believed in study, deliberation, and action. The more she spoke out, the more of a lightening rod she became. Conservatives pounced on her willingness to take the postwar lead on civil liberties and civil rights and depicted her simplistic statements as the quintessential example of liberalism's theoretical weakness. By I954, she began to worry that Americans were so afraid of criticism that many saw any admission of American shortcomings as a declaration of communist sympathy. As she told readers of the New York World Telegram, "I am beginning to think . . . that if you have been a liberal, if you believe that those who are strong must sometimes consider the weak, and that with strength and power goes the responsibility, automatically some people will consider you a Communist." She continually worried that this deep-seated fear of difference would deter the next generation from speaking their minds and advocating new policies. As she acknowledged a few months before she died, it was becoming "increasingly difficult" for a person to appreciate "himself [as] a unique human being." The constant pressure for conformity undermined individual character and demanded vigilant opposition. She urged Americans to resist, to think for themselves. Unless a person "keeps the sharp edges of his personality and the hard core of this integrity intact, he will have lost not only all that makes him valuable to himself but all that makes him of value to anyone or anything else."

When the public preferred unquestioning compliance to her thoughtful dissent, ER refused either to wallow in martyrdom or mount a pedestal.

Instead, she tried to concentrate on the long-range goals she promoted. This was not an easy process. While she often criticized herself for her weaknesses, she nevertheless recognized that public ridicule was part of the price she must pay for a public career. As ER noted often, she took great comfort from the example of Thomas Paine, who endured slander and still kept the faith. Frequently she responded to queries about her perseverance with a favorite quote from Common Sense. "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, like me, must under go [sic] the fatigues of supporting it." In short, she knew that she must lead by example and not just generate liberal rhetoric.

Eleanor Roosevelt tried to pass these hard-won lessons on to the rising generation of activists. When Myles Horton and Rosa Parks came to tea in 1955, one of the first questions she asked was "have you been called a Communist yet, Mrs. Parks?" When Parks replied that much to her surprise she had been, ER then criticized Horton for not preparing the Montgomery woman for the venom she would encounter. Clearly, earlier than other major leaders in America, ER not only understood how demands for social and political change promoted what historian Robert Griffith would later label "the politics of fear" but also strove to support rhose brave enough to risk these attacks.

"We do not move forward by curtailing people's liberty."
Conscientious Objectors and Japanese Americans during World War II

Unlike his wife, FDR did not accept criticism graciously. Less than fifteen months into his administration he instructed the FBI and military intelligence to investigate "the subversive activities" of American communists and fascists. When opposition to his policies increased, the president ordered his staff to monitor the actions of the nativist, fascist, and fundamentalist organizations leading the right's attack on the New Deal. Labeling these zealots "Trojan Horses" who undermined the national security, FDR prodded the FBI to take up the slack when Attorney General Francis Biddle failed to act quickly enough to satisfy him. As the attorney general later reminisced, FDR was "not much interested . . . in the constitutional right to criticize the government in wartime.''

Eleanor Roosevelt took a different approach. Throughout the forties and fifues, she insisted that the "real value" of any democratic relationship is that people's differences are respected. While her husband hid behind the vaguely worded rhetoric of freedom of thought, ER challenged her audiences to understand exactly what freedom meant. Repeatedly, she asserted that the nation would reach its full potential only when it was not afraid of dissent. She warned: "when fear enters the hearts of people, they are apt to be moved to hasty action" and accept self-destructive policies. Thus, to succumb to suspicion was not only poor government but imprudent politics as well. As she told readers of The Nation in I940, "We do not move forward by curtailing people's liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say. We move forward by assuring to all people protection in the basic iberties under a democratic form of government, and then making sure that our government serves the real needs of the people.''

As the fear of fascism swept America in the thirties and early forties, ER continued to insist that democracy demands that the individual's right to self-expression be upheld. "The tendency that you find today in our country only to think that these are rights for the people who think as we think" distressed her a great deal. While ER recognized that consensus was essential for political stability, she also argued that the majority should not determine the scope of the discussion. As she told a I940 gathering of the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, "I believe that you must apply to all groups the right to all forms of thought, to all forms of expression.''

In direct opposition to her husband, who professed allegiance to free speech while he monitored his antagonists, Eleanor Roosevelt argued that one's critics must have the same rights as one's supporters. As first lady, she continued to defend her belief that the United States must "be willing to listen or to allow people to state any point of view they may have, to say anything they may believe." To do otherwise is to believe that people are not capable of choosing "for themselves what is wise and what is right." The nation confronted a challenge: "to decide whether we believe in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution of the United States, or whether we are going to modify it because of the fears that we may have at the moment." She knew that this choice would not always be an easy decision or popular position. Nevertheless, she argued that it was crucial to the nation's survival. "That is the only way we are going to keep this country a law-abiding country, where law is looked upon with respect and where it is not considered necessary to take the law in your own hands.''

As the war with Germany neared, Eleanor Roosevelt struggled to reconcile her own anti-war sympathies with the information FDR presented on German conduct. She detested Franco and Hitler, but she had a longstanding commitment to anti-war activism. Throughout the twenties, she campaigned tirelessly for America's entry into the League of Nations and the World Court, strongly endorsed the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF), co-chaired the Edward Bok Peace Prize Committee, lobbied in support of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty, and circulated memoranda discussing economic reform as a deterrent to war to all her New York State Democratic Women colleagues. In the I9305, she had supported the efforts of the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, helped finance the Quaker-run Emergency Peace Committee, joined the advisory board of the American Friends Service Committee, keynoted the I937 No-Foreign War Crusade, and praised those Loyalists who resisted Franco. She so admired Carrie Chapman Catt's work for WILPF that she told FDR that Catt was the greatest woman she would ever know. In I938 she published This Troubled World, in which she argued that negotiation and economic boycott, rather than military conflict, were the best ways to curtail aggression and that the nation could "profit" from a careful review of the mistakes made by the League of Nations.

But, as Blanche Wiesen Cook demonstrates, this passionate commitment to peace did not mean an unswerving allegiance to fascism or isolatiomsm. Indeed, as fascist aggression increased, ER became more outspoken in her opposition to isolationist policies. She described her stance to Lewis Chamberlain in I934 as that of a "very realistic pacifist." When he objected to her support of the president's plan to increase naval appropriations, she replied that while she wanted peace, military preparedness was both expedient and necessary. "We can only disarm with other nations; we cannot disarm alone." In I936, she seconded recommendations made by a senatorial investigation of the munitions industry chaired by George P. Nye that characterized the relationship between weapons manufacturers and the military as "shameless profiteering." The government, she declared, either should nationalize or tightly control the munitions industry. By I938, she used "My Day" to denounce the Japanese attack on China and announce support for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade's fight against Franco. When pacifists questioned these positions, she replied, "I have never believed that war settled anything satisfactorily, but I am not entirely sure that some times there are certain situations in the world such as we have in actuality when a country is worse off when it does not go to war for its principles than if it went to war."

When FDR phoned her at 5 A.M September I, I939, to tell her that Germany had invaded Poland, ER knew that the United States would eventually enter the war and began to assess the role she would have to play. "I . . . could not help feeling that it was the New Deal social objectives that had fostered the spirit that would make it possible of us to fight this war," she later admitted. Well aware of the role she played in fostering these obJectives, ER could not easily avoid recognizing that she would have a major part in defining the domestic conduct of the administration's war effort. She recognized that "to win the war" America would "have to fight with our minds, for this is as much a war for the control of ideas as for control of matenal resources." Her challenge was to highlight the ideas she thought essential to winning both the international war against fascism and the domestic war against intolerance and prejudice.

Her letters to close friends throughout I939 and I940 are filled with references to reconciling this conflict. She pleaded with Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein, an Allenswood classmate who now lived in Berlin, to explain why Germans supported Hitler's policies. She repeatedly turned to Pearl Buck for advice on Asian politics and began to question FDR's policies restricting Japanese importation of American products. When students with whom she worked in the American Youth Congress passed a resolution declaring that they would not participate in any war, she angrily challenged them to help her solve her own dilemma. "What if you are pushed into war? . . . What if you are pushed into a fight you do not seek but which you are obliged to accept?''

When friends could not help answer her questions satisfactorily, she turned to literature for advice. But, the works of Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, Pearl Buck, Lillian Hellman, Adolph Hitler, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Leo Tolstoy produced more questions than answers. "It is very difficult for me to think this situation through," she confessed in September I938. "If we decide again that force must be met with force, then is it the moral right for any group of people who believe that certain ideas must triumph to hold back from the conflict?" Consequently, when Harry Hopkins returned from a secret visit with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in I940, he faced a barrage of questions from her about England's ability to meet those domestic crises, such as food and housing shortages and acerbic political criticism, which were exacerbated by the incessant bombing of London.

Furthermore, having watched the Wilson administration promote the First Red Scare and knowing very well how intransigent FDR could be toward his critics, ER immediately intuited that he would make anti-fascist and rabid pro-Allied propaganda a major part of the American war effort. Although she ruefully concluded that America must fight, ER worried that the war against fascism could easily inspire an ever-escalating domestic propaganda campaign to promote unquestioning compliance with American policy. She recoiled at the arguments made by America Firsters. And while she conceded that propaganda was essential to keeping American hearts and minds behind the war effort-and indeed made her own contribution by making the first Radio Free Europe broadcast-she feared the damage that another Creel Committee (the World War I Committee on Public Information, which promoted American support for the Allies by attacking anything German) would inflict.

ER's ability to see the complex relationships between war and peace, propaganda and education, and consensus and dissent placed her in an uncomfortable position politically and personally. The peace movement wanted her to be its voice within the administration and the administration expected her to defend its position with its anti-war critics. But rather than let these expectations confine her, ER worked to find a position she could advocate with conviction.

Just as she refused to believe that the emergencies of wartime justified postponing domestic reform, ER also refused to believe that the war warranted total suspension of political criticism. Consequently, she worked to restrain the zeal with which the administration reprimanded its critics. She knew her position would not be popular with either her husband or the public. Perhaps better than anyone else, she recognized that her husband would not tolerate critics of American war policy. Yet rather than downplaying the president's vindictiveness, ER tried to counteract FDR's obsession with silencing his opposition. Thus, despite the contempt in which she held their beliefs, ER defended the rights of the German American Bund, the America First Committee, Westbrook Pegler, and Father Charles E. Coughlin to state their opinion of American war policy. Moreover, she repeatedly refused to moderate her staunch opposition to censorship of any sort. For example, not only did ER refuse to rebuke Pegler, the quintessential FDR-hater, for disparaging her children, she also attacked those within the administration who argued that the novels of Howard Fast and Lillian Smith were too controversial, and therefore obscene, to be handled by the post office.

Still, the lists of those she defended had important and significant gaps. In fact, there were times when her silence was so notable that she could reasonably be accused of turning her back on her principles. She did not speak out when eight alleged Nazi spies were tried in a military rather than a civilian court. Furthermore, when Walter White asked her aid in promoting a I944 civil rights campaign that linked the racist treatment of the Japanese Americans to the segregationist policies of Jim Crow, ER, after consulting with FDR, balked and advised White to abandon this strategy. Focus more on individual cases, she pleaded, rather than across-the-board indictments.

World War II not only tested the limits of Eleanor Roosevelt's power within the administration, but also presented her with a more personal crisis of her own. She had already strained her relationship with FDR and his advisers by publicly rebuking his decision to put the New Deal "away in lavender." When the administration's energies increasingly focused on war planning, FDR's staff increasingly resented her interruptions on issues they considered extraneous. In the face of such mounting opposition, ER prioritized her causes.

Despite her suspicion that some Americans would experience sudden religious conversions to avoid military service, Eleanor Roosevelt supported Americans who, out of a genuine commitment to a "higher calling," refused to take up arms but who agreed to serve their nation as noncombatants. Indeed, from early I940 until V-J Day, she admonished those who attacked conscientious objectors. In a nationally broadcast radio address on October I4, I94I, ER not only praised the service the objectors were providing in medical facilities, but also reproached her audience for condoning those who impugned the objectors' convictions and harassed their families. Make no mistake about it, she insisted, "the test of democracy and civilization is to treat with fairness the individual's right to self-expression, even when you can neither understand nor approve of it."

ER did not qualify her support once the American fleet at Pearl Harbor had been attacked. In fact, her commitment to this issue proved so unwavering that she refused to drop the subject when the German and Japanese press interpreted her activism as a reflection of FDR's weak leadership. Nor did ER limit her support of conscientious objectors to public pleas for tolerance. She actively campaigned within the White House and on Capitol Hill for a new program that would provide these men with "college-level training" for special noncombatant positions in "foreign relief work." However, much to ER's dismay and to the Selective Service and War Department's delight, Congress killed the four-month-old program when the American Legion protested. And when she learned that the Civilian Public Service camps, the noncombatant details to which the objectors who agreed to serve were assigned, often abused their workers, she sided with the objectors against their supervisors.

ER understood that congressional retaliation against conscientious objectors echoed the sentiments of many enlisted personnel. She knew firsthand how intense reaction could be when people believed their lives and patriotism threatened. When she published her response to an outraged mother who asked her why ER could defend those who stayed at home while her son faced death daily, Americans responded by the hundreds, incensed that she could be so faint-hearted in her support of American military personnel.

Beleaguered, but unrepentant, ER continued to urge that both sides, if they could not respect one another, should at least agree to acknowledge each other's sacrifices. "I can not help feeling very sorry for honest conscientious objectors," ER wrote in a June I944 "My Day" column completely devoted to this issue, "for I am quite sure many a young man must find it bitter to let other young men of his own age die and fight and give up time ...." Yet soldiers had a right to bitterness too. "It is only because of these young men, however, who are willing to fight that anyone can indulge himself in a personal viewpoint."

Ultimately ER sided with those who decided to serve in non-military capacities rather than with those who refused to support the war in any way. While praising the ethics of those men who chose prison over compromising rheir conscience, she nevertheless conceded that she could not in good conscience follow their lead. "Some men go to prison and will not do anything during the period of war." That not only is their choice but also "is the price of doing what [they] believe in." She tried to understand their point of view-that "when the day arrives when war is no more, these men may feel they have hastened it"-but could not. She was more concerned with the Immediate crisis. The Axis powers must be stopped because the threatened world civilization. While these young men of conscience had the right to dissent, she hoped that they would recognize that "they might not be alive or they might be slaves to other more warlike people if their brothers were not willing to defend them against other warlike peoples ''

Her contact with war had modified her views. She still valued pacifism but she detested fascism more. Although she worked to state her positions clearly, continued to meet with peace groups, and supported the rights of those who refused to serve for reasons of conscience, the peace movement felt betrayed. But ER had no regrets.

Eleanor Roosevelt was not as true to her convictions when the civil liberties of Japanese Americans were at stake. Indeed, her actions on this issue reflect how conflicted she felt when her husband authorized policies that treated all members of the same race as potential enemy aliens. At first, she responded in her usual fashion-press conferences, speeches, and photo opportunities. Yet, after such an immediate endorsement of the loyalty of the Japanese American population, a strange silence overtook her. In glaring contrast to the numerous other controversial issues that she attacked during the war, there is no clear paper trail to follow to reconstruct ER's changing actions on internment. In fact the dearth of evidence indicates the extent to which she felt constrained. Perhaps ER and FDR never found common ground, and frustrated by his decision to defer reform, she resented the restrictions his war policies placed on her actions.

What is clear is that at the beginning of the war, ER and FDR held opposite views of the rights of Japanese Americans. Less than a week after Pearl Harbor was bombed, ER toured the West Coast; praised a plea for racial tolerance by Mayor Harry Cain of Tacoma, Washington; posed with Japanese Americans for photographs that would be distributed over the Associated Press wire service; and editorialized against retribution Respecting the rights of Japanese Americans, she told readers of "My Day'; December I6, "is perhaps the greatest test this country has ever met." "Ifwe cannot meet the challenge of fairness to our citizens of ever,v nationality," America will "have removed from the world the real hope for the future." FDR, on the other hand, determined to capitalize on the procedures he had utilized to monitor his critics throughout the I930s, immediately summoned aides to discuss the wholesale detention of Japanese and German Americans.

Eleanor Roosevelt never considered internment anything but "absurd" and "vicious" policy. She thought the treatment Japanese Americans received in I94I "pathetic" and the attack on Pearl Harbor did not change her mind. These people "are good Americans," she told FDR. "and have the right to live as anyone else." Moreover, the policy would be countereffective. "Being bitter against an American, because of the acuons of the country of his predecessors, does not make for unity and the winning of the war." Thus, when Yaemitsu Sugimachi offered a less dramatic proposal "for dealing with alien Japanese in wartime," she forwarded his plan to Attorney General Francis Biddle; and when Sam Hohri, press agent for the Japanese American Citizens League, told her that the San Francisco chapter of the Red Cross refused offers of aid from Japanese Americans "on the grounds that we might poison the medicines or bandages, treat knitted goods to injure the wearer, and deliberately sabotage its work," she appealed to the organization's national president to overturn the chapter's policy.

ER wanted to prevent the evacuation. She worked closely with the attorney general to ensure, first, that she understood how the Constitution applied to internment and, second, that the Justice Department presented a strong case against the policy to FDR. Furthermore, since ER was a faithful supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as a close friend of Roger Baldwin, she probably participated in at least a few off-the-record conversations with him on the issue the ACLU called "the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history."

However, once FDR signed Executive Order 9066 and internment began, ER fell silent. Although neither ER nor the president left any record of their conversations on internment, it is safe to assume that FDR presented the same case supporting internment to his wife that he presented to her ally, the attorney general. Convinced that internment was a military necessity, which superseded constitutional protections, FDR made it painstakingly clear to Biddle and other Justice Department of ficials that he would tolerate no opposition to this policy. Uncomfortable with the policy,

ER nevertheless refused to continue to challenge it. She replaced the righteous indignation that characterized earlier "My Day" discussions of internment with oblique references to Japanese American patience and patriotism. By late March, she ruefully conceded that "unfortunately in a time of war many innocent people must suffer hardships to safeguard the nation." The president won the first round.

Yet, once the relocation of Japanese Americans began, ER tried to ease her conscience in many quiet ways. She told the Washington Star, "the biggest obligation we have today is to prove that in a time of stress we can still live up to our beliefs and maintain the civil liberties we have established as the rights of human beings everywhere." Her refusal to White still fresh in her mind, ER increasingly linked the civil rights of black Americans to Asian Americans in her speeches and columns. She contributed to Japanese American cultural associations and patriotic organizations and praised their contributors in "My Day." And she corresponded with Japanese American soldiers and an interned "pen pal." Unable to remain aloof, she decided to act behind the scenes by monitoring evacuation procedures, intervening to keep families together, helping to secure early releases, and interceding with War Relocation Authority (WRA) personnel on behalf of those few noninterned Japanese Americans who protested the treatment their relatives were receiving in the camps. When she learned that the former assistant director of the Oriental Section of the Library of Congress Dr. Shio Sakanishi, had been detained without having charges brought against her, ER asked the attorney general "to tell her whether the Naval Intelligence had anything on" the librarian. When internees of the Harmony Camp center wrote her decrying their accommodations, she pushed the WRA to investigate its housing. And when a young Californian suggested that consumer cooperatives be established within the resettlement areas, an intrigued ER encouraged WRA official Milton Eisenhower to give the proposal serious consideration.

The WRA was not the only department to encounter ER's pressure. She prodded the Justice Department to oppose efforts to disenfranchise Japanese Americans living in California and to investigate claims of employment dlscrimination and retributive violence against Japanese American fishermen. When interned women who had cleared FBI background checks wrote asking her assistance in enlisting in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, ER quickly wrote Colonel Oveta Hobby, interceding on their behalf. Moreover, when Hungwai Ching told her during a White House meeting of the attack against Japanese American soldiers stationed in Shelly, Mississippi, ER not only pushed FDR to act, but also encouraged General George Marshall to investigate the assault, transfer the soldiers to a safer base, and to send her "a report on this situation."

ER waited until late I943 to address internment publicly. By then the vast majority of the Japanese American population had been removed from the West Coast and those interned in the Poston, Arizona, and Manzanar, California, camps had either struck or rioted in protest of their incarceration. A concerned Ickes wrote FDR that the situation demanded attention and argued that the president must no longer "disregard the unnecessary creation of a hostile group right in our own territory."Although ER had wanted to visit the camps in the fall of I942, it was not until FDR-worried that his interior secretary might be right-asked her to visit the Gila River camp on her way home from her Phoenix vacation that she actually agreed to make the journey. She announced that she would inspect the camps and report her findings to the nation.

Yet instead of discussing the psychological and political climate of the camps, she wrote glowing accounts of the internees' attempts to beautify their small plots of land. She also avoided discussing the concerns about racism and resettlement the internees raised during her meeting with them. She tempered her discussion of the efforts the internees made to "take part in the war effort" with the reassurance that their "loyalty" must be authenticated by both the FBI and the War Relocation Authority before they could begin work. Given her previous statements, this deliberate evasion of racial and civil liberties stands out as a glaring omission.

Despite this momentary lapse into public acquiescence, a decidedly anguished tone resonates through her other depictions of internment life. The night she left the camp, she confided to a friend that she had "just asked FDR if I could take in an American-Japanese family" only to have him evade her request by rationalizing that "the Secret Service wouldn't allow it." This evasiveness hurt and haunted her. No matter how loyal she tried to be in her defense of the administration's internment policy, no matter how many times she stated that "the whole job of handling our Japanese has, on the whole, been done well," she could not temper her belief that security was not the sole motivation. Suspicion of Japanese in America increased because one region "feared [them] as competitors" while the rest of the nation "knew so little and cared so little about them that they did not even think about the principle that we in the country believe in: that of equal rights for all human beings."

Moreover, when ER tried to present the administration's case that loyal Japanese Americans were interned for their own protection, as hard as she tried she could not completely suppress her own doubts about this argument. For example, when she tried to justify the administration's demands for immediate relocation and the "unexpected [economic] problems" this caused Japanese property owners by arguing that "an effort was made to deal with [their financial holdings] fairly," she introduced as many arguments questioning this statement as she did endorsing it. Finally, she lambasted those West Coast xenophobes who believed that "a Japanese is always a Japanese" by declaring that such "unreasonable" bigotry "leads nowhere and solves nothing." Consequently, despite her endorsement of the policy, she could never completely convince herself that internment was either morally or strategically justifiable. As she confessed to a wounded Japanese American soldier who asked her to help expedite his parents' request for citizenship, "war makes far too much bitterness for people to be reasonable.,'

Why ER acquiesced in FDR's probable demand that she be silent on such issues as internment of the Japanese Americans will never be known. Perhaps she kept quiet in public so that she could be more effective in modifying the policy within the administration. Or maybe she knew that this was one time in which FDR would not tolerate any deviance from his position. Or possibly she temporarily convinced herself that the suspension of Japanese American civil liberties actually protected them from zealous xenophobic violence. Or maybe she combined the best aspects of each of the above reasons to rationalize her behavior. Or perhaps she chose to give other critical domestic issues-racial violence, labor unrest, and postwar economic planning-higher priority.

Unquestionably, Eleanor Roosevelt equivocated on the civil rights and civil liberties of Japanese Americans during the war. But it is also very apparent that she could not completely abandon her conscience and deny her convictions. Stark images reflecting her guilt occasionally surfaced in her public and private writings. She confessed to the nation that she could "not bear to think of children behind barbed wire looking out at the free world," and she confided to her friend Flora Rose that "this is just one more reason for hating war-innocent people suffer for the few guilty ones." Tormented by the policy, she conceded that "we must build up their loyalty, not tear it down." Thus, she promoted dissent and criticism as diligently as she dared. For example, when Secretary of War Stimson refused quick response to a November I943 request by Dillon Meyer, director of the War Relocation Authority, to relax enlistment standards against interned Isseis, ER joined ranks with Meyer and Ickes to advocate closing the camps and proposed "a massive public education campaign to reiterate American commitment to democracy." Refusing to change course, FDR rejected her plan summarily, saying simply "it would be a mistake to do anything so drastic." Yet by this time, ER no longer deferred to his priorities. She corresponded with her "dear" friend Judge William Dennan of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding his dissents in the Hirahayashi and Korematsu cases and carefully read the briefs he sent her, noting in the margins, "thanks. I get it."

What is striking about ER's decision to support those whom the administration considered suspect patriots is, first, that in assuming such a position she deliberately contradicted her husband during the most crisis-ridden period of his administration and, second, that she refused to discount the hypocrisy inherent in her complicity with FDR's racist restrictions. ER chastised herself when she chided Americans who divorced the rights of the Japanese from their own rights and liberties. Reminding readers that a principle was only as effective as it was practiced, she subtly asked her fellow Americans to recognize that their rights would be protected only when they defended the rights of others. "We retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please, but we can only do so if we wish to grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves." Many interned Japanese Americans intuited the anxiety ER felt and continued, like their black American compatriots, to keep faith with the first lady, even though she had not completely kept her pledge to them. Nowhere is this respect more clearly demonstrated than when Togo Tanaka, the organizer of the protest which rocked the Manzanar Camp, named his first born child after ER.

Clearly ER did not speak out as forcefully and as continuously in behalf of wartime civil rights and civil liberties for all races and nationalities as she would in the postwar era. But it is also clear that her decision to challenge FDR during the war set the precedent for the more outspoken defense of civil rights and civil liberties stances she took during the Cold War. In an early draft of an article FDR eventually overruled, she blatantly conceded that "to undo our mistakes is always harder than not to create them originally-but we seldom have the foresight and therefore we have no choice but to correct our past mistakes."

"There is no such thing as a bystander on these questions."
The House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

During the late I9405 Eleanor Roosevelt continued to reiterate this theme, insisting repeatedly that "we must preserve the individual's right to be dif- } ferent." In a I948 lecture tour, she urged her listeners to insist that the country "very carefully guard against" laws that would punish those who held beliefs to which the majority objected. If these rights were not guaranteed, the American citizen would be "as much an obedient servant as any individual living under a totalitarian form of government."

The onset of the Cold War did not cause ER to moderate her position. She continued to proclaim that communism would succeed only in areas where democracy failed. When the vocal majority of the country increasingly began to detect communism in all aspects of American social and political life, her frustration finally overcame her usual restraint. "My Day" columns reflected this anger. In I949, she minced no words in attacking those citizens who saw the red menace in any activity that differed from their own practices. "One thing I deplore in this country is the fact that we occasionally find people here and there who allow themselves to be carried away by hysteria and fear." Such constant and easy acquiescence was a pervasive threat to civil liberties. Whether people agree or not was not the point. "We must not reach a state of fear and hysteria which will make us all cowards! Either we are strong enough to live as a free people or we will become a police state. There is no such thing as a bystander on these questions."

ER did not adopt this position solely in response to Cold War rhetoric. Rather, she had a long history of defending the civil liberties of liberals accused of communist sympathies and of communists themselves prior to the formation of the Popular Front in I935 and the birth of the Cold War. In I934, when the FBI tried to deport the anarchist Emma Goldman for a second time, ER interceded on Goldman's behalf. Moreover, she engaged in spirited debate with journalist Anna Louise Strong throughout the thirties and early forties as well as reading communist publications sent to her by Eleanor Levenson, manager of the Rand School Bookstore.43

As early as I939, the year before Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, later known as the Smith Act, to restrict communist activism, she confronted Representative Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Chairman Dies summoned leaders of the American Youth Congress and American Student Union before his committee in November I939 to investigate allegations that the AYC was nothing more than a front for young communists, ER lent immediate public and political support to the student leaders. She met their train at Union Station, helped them prepare their testimony, and invited them to dine at the White House.44

The action that attracted the most attention, however, was also the act that most clearly revealed her opinion of HUAC investigative techniques. When the press treated her support of the activists as major news, the committee's two chief accusers, Representative Dies and committee member J. B. Matthews, decided not to attend the hearing and left Joseph Starnes, a junior member, to chair. An hour into the hearings, ER entered the caucus room. Her sudden appearance at the committee was especially dramatic because only a week before the committee had rejected her offer to testify about her own AYC involvement.

Trying to defuse the situation, Representative Starnes stopped the questioning and recognized "the first lady of the Land and invite[d] her to come up here and sit with us." ER understood the implications of this offer and refused to sit with those investigating her young associates. Deftly, she thanked the chair for his offer, responding instead that "I just came to listen." Yet when Starnes's questioning of Joseph Lash became more of an inquisition than an examination, ER moved from her seat in the visitor's section and took a seat at the press table and began to take notes. Immediately, Starnes adopted a less combative tone and the tenor of the hearings changed. Clearly, the first lady had outflanked HUAC. While she fervently believed that free association may be a constitutional right, she also astutely recognized that it was good politics.

Although she had previously questioned the validity of HUAC investigations, with such a public defense of young political activists ER now became a major symbol of anti-HUAC action. Once again, her actions inflamed her critics and worried some of her close advisers. Even Barnard Baruch, one of her most intimate confidants, tried to convince her to moderate her position. For once, she did not take his advice. The FBI should be doing HUAC'S job, she retorted. The charges made by the bureau must "be proved in court and they have to have real evidence. They cannot just make statements about people and take any amount of time tO prove them." She thought that "if we allow ourselves to be so conditioned that we cannot believe in people whom we see and meet and work with for fear that somewhere in the background there may be a sinister influence," those who worked for reform "are never going to be able to do anything again." True liberals had no choice. " [A] s long as the work done is credible work, I think we must go ahead and help."

This did not mean that ER, who knew from firsthand experience how zealous its director could be in persuing false allegations, thought the FBI should investigate all the allegations HUAC could present to it. Hoover's distrust of ER bordered on obsessive hatred. To Hoover, ER was nothing but an "old hoot owl" whose conduct approached treachery. He even presented FDR with tape recorded "evidence" proving that ER and Joseph Lash were lovers. Yet Hoover, in his rush to prove her disloyalty to FDR, apparently failed to detect the difference between ER's high-pitched, unmodulated voice and Trude Lash's throaty German accent. FDR, outraged at this intrusive assumption, ordered Hoover to disband the team that gathered this information. Yet the presidential rebuke only increased the director's determination to undermine ER's credibility. He not only refused invitations to appear on her radio program, but also aided efforts to prove that her political conduct was undermining America. For example, when the FBI received one of the several hundred letters asking for proof that ER either was or was not a communist sympathizer, the director instructed the Bureau to respond with a classic "non-denial denial" statement which said in effect that the bureau had no evidence on her only because they had not investigated her. Moreover, he reviewed all FB} memos discussing her "suspicious conduct," frequently making sarcastic references in the margin. "I often wonder whether she is so naive as she professes or whether she is just blind to lull the unsuspecting," the director noted beside a memo he had received on her activities. He even refused to believe her when she praised the agency. Indeed by the mid-fifties, his extreme animosity toward ER took on an even more perverse character. When rumors of W. C. Fields's extensive pornography collection reached Hoover, who was notoriously self-righteous, the director requested a meeting. The comedian feared arrest. Nothing could have been further from Hoover's intent. Rather than confiscate the collection, the director wanted to know, first, if Fields had a copy of an obscene caricature of ER and then, after enjoying the grotesque parody immensely, if Fields would copy it for him. Relieved, Fields immediately complied with Hoover's request.

Yet ER again proved that she could play hardball as well as Hoover could, slyly reporting in later columns that FBI agents questioned her "about the loyalty and competence of John Foster Dulles." An enraged and embarrassed Hoover responded by instructing his staff that "this character is never again to be contacted by FBI unless I personally authorize it."

Such conduct made ER extremely wary of J. Edgar Hoover's biases and his ardent desire to suppress criticism and dissent. Although ER endorsed the legal guidelines to which the agency was supposed to adhere, she did not approve of Hoover's leadership or of the agency's actual practices. While she acknowledged that treason was possible and that the government should guard against it, she nevertheless believed that bureau investigations, like any other legal exercises, should be based on constitutional principles rather than political rivalries.50

ER accelerated her criticism in I948 when HUAC announced that communists had infiltrated American industry and government. In a voice resounding with frustration and outrage, ER proclaimed that she could not object strongly enough to such blatant "Gestapo tactics." Continually, she argued that the key concern should not be whether an individual was a communist, but whether there was incontrovertible evidence, achieved through constitutional procedures, that an individual advocated violent overthrow of the government.

"I have never liked the idea of an Un-American Activities Committee," ER wrote in late I947. "I have always thought a strong democracy should stand by its fundamental beliefs and that a U.S. citizen should be considered innocent until he is proven guilty." That the committee did not behave in such a fashion alarmed her. "[L]ittle people have become frightened and we find ourselves living in the atmosphere of a police state, where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion." Americans must learn to hear both bad and good opinions about their actions. Since the fear generated by the committee continued to dominate political discussion, ER concluded "the Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the U.S.A."

Casting Her Own Shadow

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