European journal of American studies

12-1 | 2017 Spring 2017: Special Issue - Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest

Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11889 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11889 ISSN : 1991-9336

Éditeur European Association for American Studies

Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 12-1 | 2017, « Spring 2017: Special Issue - Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 07 mars 2017, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11889 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11889

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SOMMAIRE

Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest Anya Luscombe et Dario Fazzi

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Peculiar Pacifism: Activism, Pragmatism, and Political Efficacy in Interwar America Dario Fazzi

First Female Travel Journalist Meets First Lady: Mary Pos and Eleanor Roosevelt Speak on Women’s Roles and Intercultural Understanding Babs Boter

Reframing Eleanor Roosevelt’s Influence in the 1930s Anti-Lynching Movement around a ‘New Philosophy of Government’ Melissa Cooper

Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations: “Diplomacy from Below” and the Search for a New Transatlantic Dialogue Raffaella Baritono

“And with all she lived with casual unawareness of her value to civilization”: Close-reading Eleanor Roosevelt’s Autofabrication Sara Polak

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Radio Broadcasts in France Anya Luscombe

Conclusion: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Transatlantic Quest for Equality and Freedom Dario Fazzi

A Trustworthy Collaboration: Eleanor Roosevelt and Martha Graham’s Pioneering of American Cultural Diplomacy Camelia Lenart

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Eleanor Roosevelt and Diplomacy in the Public Interest

Anya Luscombe and Dario Fazzi

1 Recent scholarly production on transatlantic relations in Europe is greatly interested in the role that social and cultural, not just political and diplomatic encounters, exchanges, and interconnections played in the shaping of the Euro- American relations.i As a consequence, this trend avows the absolute necessity of adopting a broader multidisciplinary approach so as to overcome the ideological dispute between cultural imperialism and cultural transmission in the transatlantic arena.

2 Through such a multidisciplinary approach it is possible to highlight that, being the transatlantic exchanges characterized either by fair interactions or by hegemonic ends, they have nevertheless been participated and molded by a plurality of non-state actors, whose significance can be differently weighed but hardly denied. This begs the question of what has been the role, within this process of cultural exchanges, of those leading individuals who, due to their baggage of personal experience, their intellectual wisdom, and their public prominence, have been able to leave their enduring imprint on the transatlantic relations as a whole. Scholarship tends now to recognize such individuals as actors of cultural diplomacy, or, more generally, as public diplomats. And, if it is true that, as the U.S. Department of State officials argue, cultural diplomacy is “the lynchpin of public diplomacy…[that] reveals the soul of a nation,”Eleanor Roosevelt might rightly deserve a mention apart as someone who greatly contributed to the revelation of that soul.ii

3 In April 1952, U.S. Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, wrote to President Truman expressing his admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt’s contribution to the United States government’s aims and praised her “effectiveness as a negotiator” while on her journey through the Middle East and Southeast Asia: “She was received everywhere with great cordiality except in the Arab states... Although it was undertaken in a purely unofficial capacity, Mrs. Roosevelt's journey has served the public interest exceedingly well.”iii At the time of the visit to which Acheson refers, Mrs. Roosevelt represented the U.S. at the United Nations, she had been actively engaged in a variety of politically and socially

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relevant activities to serve the public interest for more than three decades and would continue to be so for another ten years after. She campaigned for the rights of women, children and minorities. In public utterances she encouraged people to take an active interest in politics, to contribute towards the achievement of peace. Her astute perception of the vital role the media played, enabled her to use various communication methods (columns, books, speeches, radio and television) to educate the general public and aim at creating a shared identity, both in the US and between the US and other countries, most notably transatlantic allies.

4 Her role in promoting the public interest started well before she became First Lady. In the 1920s already she played an instrumental role in formal bodies such as the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trades Union League, the Women’s Division of the Democratic party, but also informally in her teaching at the Todhunter School for girls, the charity work in the tenements of New York City, her visits around the country meeting ordinary folk and her work as a journalist and commentator. As a First Lady, she was outspoken on civil rights, a staunch supporter of the New Deal, urged FDR to appoint women to his cabinet and counseled the American public about the need to oppose fascism. The Roosevelts were a political team that not only helped America through the Great Depression, but also the world through the Second World War. As Winston Churchill said at the Pilgrim’s Dinner in 1948, FDR could not have been the President he was without Eleanor Roosevelt:

5 Many of us know what we hold to our wives in life's varied journey. Mrs. Roosevelt has made her distinctive and personal contribution the generous thought of modern society...tonight we must ascribe to Mrs. Roosevelt the marvelous fact that a crippled man, the victim of a cruel affliction was able for more than ten years to ride the storms of peace and war at the summit of the United States …and the debt we owe to President Roosevelt is also owed to her.iv

6 Following FDR’s death Mrs. Roosevelt came into her ownv when she was appointed a delegate to the newly-formed United Nations and was elected as Chairman of its Human Rights Commission where she was the driving force behind the acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document remains to this day “the touchstone of the global Human Rights movement and a key component of an international system that provides for international scrutiny of the way in which a nation treats its citizens.”vi As a delegate to the UN’s Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs), Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out in support of European refugees who did not want to return to their country of origin. She “possessed not only a passionate commitment to human rights, but a hard-earned knowledge of the political and cultural obstacles to securing them in a divided world.”vii

7 This special edition of the European Journal of American Studies aims to examine the way Eleanor Roosevelt gained knowledge of such obstacles and some of the ways in which she used public diplomacy to secure the freedoms she fervently believed people everywhere in the world were entitled to. Her efforts in this regard fall within the many forms of formal and informal diplomacy that constitute as much a part of transatlantic relations as do military planning, state diplomacy, and economic initiatives.viii Indeed, as the different chapters will show, the former American First

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Lady can be firmly placed amongst the most influential American public diplomats of the twentieth century and will argue that American cultural diplomacy throughout the world benefited from her activities.

8 The first essay in this collection looks at how Eleanor Roosevelt contributed to the shaping of American pacifism in the years between the two world wars. Dario Fazzi argues that Mrs. Roosevelt’s vision of peace was proactive and pragmatic, defending and promoting international peace, but not pacifism at all costs. The type of pacifism she augured for, therefore, was a truly modern one and enabled her to transform her humanitarian activism into a powerful political force within the administration, substantially changing the image and perception of the U.S. first lady at home and abroad. This in turn, Fazzi asserts, boosted Eleanor Roosevelt’s social involvement and made her public attitudes more assertive.

9 As well as auguring for international peace, Eleanor Roosevelt was heavily involved in trying to attain domestic peace between the white and black communities. In particular, in the 1930s she vigorously supported attempts to outlaw lynching. In essay number two, Melissa Cooper turns her attention to this aspect of Eleanor Roosevelt’s diplomacy. Cooper situates FDR’s inaction on supporting the Costigan-Wagner anti- lynching bill within the administration’s so-called ‘war on crime’, meaning he wanted the federal government to take responsibility for tackling lynching, rather than merely a need on his behalf to avoid southern states blocking his New Deal reforms. Eleanor Roosevelt, Cooper asserts, failed to make clear to the NAACP, and its Executive Secretary Walter White in particular, where FDR really stood on the matter and in doing so, falsely gave hope to the NAACP that the administration would support the bill and consequently soured relations between the civil rights movement and the government.

10 The focus of the third essay is women’s rights and intercultural understanding as can be gleaned from the works of Eleanor Roosevelt and Dutch travel journalist, Mary Pos, in the period 1930s-1950s. Pos attended ER press conferences at the White House in 1937 and in the Netherlands in 1950. Babs Boter draws on the diaries, correspondence, and lecture notes of Pos and publications by Eleanor Roosevelt to investigate the similarities and differences in the way the two women negotiated what she calls the transnational and gendered arena of journalism of the time. According to Boter, while both women advocated strongly for better intercultural communication, Pos was not always an admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt’s approach to shaping transatlantic relations ‘from below’.

11 When FDR died in April 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was faced with a choice: retiring quietly, carrying on with a few projects close to her heart or developing a new political career of her own. Despite her concerns about her capabilities, she agreed to Harry Truman's request for her to become an American delegate to the United Nations - a way to continue her husband's legacy. Here at the UN, Eleanor Roosevelt could work internationally on many of the issues like women's rights, social and economic rights and peace that she had augured so hard for in the US during the previous decades. She could also work on promoting the image of America and American values abroad, which included the vital role she felt the arts could play in fostering transatlantic relations.

12 Camelia Lenart considers Eleanor Roosevelt’s involvement in the inception of American cultural diplomacy by focusing on the special collaboration between her and

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the American dance pioneer Martha Graham. Lenart views the patronage of Graham’s performances of modernism and patriotism as a conscientious decision by ER to use the arts in the service of politics and diplomacy. Eleanor Roosevelt used her prestige and connections to help Graham during her tours in Europe in the early 1950s, bringing the American ambassador to France with her when attending the dancer’s first European tour in 1950 and introducing Graham to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands in 1952 in New York. In 1954, Queen Juliana attended a performance during Graham’s second European tour: an unprecedented success for American diplomacy in Europe.

13 Not only was Eleanor Roosevelt at the forefront of American cultural diplomatic efforts, but she also broadened the scope of public diplomacy by speaking on behalf of civil organizations and causes. This as we have seen in Dario Fazzi’s essay was effective in the issue of pacifism in the inter-war years. As Raffaela Baritono contends, this form of public diplomacy, ‘diplomacy from below’, was a trademark of Mrs. Roosevelt’s approach to transnational relations post-second world war. ER’s transatlantic relations were “bi-univocal and open to a whole world context” and enabled her to act as “bridge between political power and civil society”, making her the “conscience of the world”.

14 The final two essays in this collection explore communication techniques used by Eleanor Roosevelt to encourage the public to assume joint responsibility with political leaders to create a better world and foster the ideals of western democracy. Media formed an integral part therefore of her public and cultural diplomacy strategies. Sara Polak explains how Eleanor Roosevelt’s astute use of media also enabled ER to informally and indirectly expand FDR’s influence during his life into the domestic sphere and entertainment sections of mass media during, and maintain it in the public conscience after his death. Moreover, this ability to render FDR’s autofabrication more powerful aided her own autofabrication: that of someone who created a public image of modesty while becoming a household name “with unprecedented authority throughout the Western world”.

15 While Polak concentrates on Eleanor Roosevelt’s writing, in the final essay Anya Luscombe examines the way ER used radio a means of soft power. Mrs. Roosevelt recognized that the intimate medium of radio gave her direct entry into the homes of listeners all over the world. A strong supporter of the Voice of America, Mrs. Roosevelt took part in many of its broadcasts. Addressing audiences in Europe and beyond not only gave her a platform to promote the United Nations and world peace and encourage active citizen participation in achieving those goals, but also allowed her as a Cold War Warrior to both voice and shape the American view of transatlantic relations.

16 Eleanor Roosevelt’s proclivity for humanitarianism and her unmatched global popularity then, make her one of the most outstanding examples of American public diplomats. While her public diplomacy efforts have not necessarily been consistent, they have social, cultural and political legacies and as such the authors here would argue have left their enduring imprint on transatlantic relations as a whole.

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NOTES i. This is what David Armitage defines as Circum-Atlantic history, i.e. the transnational history of the Atlantic world, see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage, Michael Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 15. See also, among the others, Marco Mariano (ed.), Defining the Atlantic Community: Culture, Intellectuals, and Policies in the Mid-Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge 2010), Kiran Klaus Patel, Kenneth Weisbrode (eds.), European Integration and the Atlantic Community in the 1980s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Grzegorz Kosc, Clara Juncker, Sharon Monteith, Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson (eds.), The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). edited by Jeroen van Dongen (ed.), Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), edited by ii. See Report of the Advisory committee on Cultural diplomacy. US Department of State, in http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/54374.pdf, accessed 23 January 2016. iii. Memo Acheson to Truman. President's Secretary's Files. 3563, April 11, 1952. Harry S. Truman Library. GaleNet iv. Pilgrim’s dinner, April 12, 1948 (unaired speech. Paley Center audio, New York, accessed 2 April 2015) v. Allida Black, Casting her own shadow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). vi. Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University, https://www.gwu.edu/ ~erpapers/abouteleanor/erbiography.cfm Accessed 25 March 2016. vii. “Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, FDR Library, http:// www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/library/pdfs/sears.pdf Accessed 25 March 2016. viii. See Joseph Rezek, “What We Need from Transatlantic Studies,” in American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 4 (Winter 2014), 791-803.

AUTHORS

ANYA LUSCOMBE University College Roosevelt

DARIO FAZZI Roosevelt Study Center

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s Peculiar Pacifism: Activism, Pragmatism, and Political Efficacy in Interwar America

Dario Fazzi

1 The U.S. has a long pacifist tradition, both religious and secular, which has represented one of the most fruitful soils for the development of transnational pacifism as a whole. Anti-militarism, non-violence, disarmament, and democratic internationalism have been the main arguments that the U.S. pacifist organizations have put forward. American women, in particular, have played a major role in shaping both the domestic and international debate on peace, and have managed to spread pacifist ideals by merging them with the promotion of social justice and human rights.

2 Eleanor Roosevelt was not only an integral part of such a pacifist chorus, but she also represented one of its most influential voices, by bringing pacifist ideals to the highest level of the American political landscape and public debate. The main scope of this essay is to provide an account of her contribution to the shaping of American pacifism in the years between the two world wars. In doing so, this overview will survey three peculiar features of Eleanor Roosevelt’s interwar pacifism, as to eventually define it as a truly modern one.

3 Eleanor Roosevelt’s pacifism was the combined result of idealistic activism and political pragmatism. In the 1920s, Mrs. Roosevelt’s attitude toward peace was a proactive one, leading her to join an American peace movement largely shaped by women and deeply involved in the promotion of internationalism and multilateral diplomacy. A decade later, when Eleanor Roosevelt became the U.S. first lady, her natural humanitarian inclination merged with such an activism and inspired what can be seen as her own peculiar New Deal, mostly focused on education and social and racial equality. Internationally, in spite of the war approaching fast, she kept promoting multilateral disarmament and, contrary to the most radical features of American pacifism, she endorsed a democratic intervention to erase the threat of

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totalitarianism worldwide. Purely pragmatist, Eleanor Roosevelt identified utopianism as an untenable position in the light of the international rise of Nazi-fascism and communism. The rejection of utopianism, however, did not imply a disengagement from peace activism. According to the first lady, that activism was still crucial to spread a culture of peace and social justice at home and promote multilateral diplomacy and cooperation abroad.

4 In the early 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had already become a skilled politician on her own, managed to combine pacifist stances with the exigencies of national security. She pressed toward a greater U.S. involvement in European and world’s affairs. In her opinion, isolationism and disengagement, in an era of global interdependence, were not viable options anymore. The ideals of freedom and equality had to be fulfilled in the national and international protection of human dignity. Later on, this became the core of her mission at the U.N. and the centerpiece of her promotion of transnational mutual understanding.

5 Accordingly, it is safe to say that Eleanor Roosevelt had a truly comprehensive view of peace, which she mainly described as a broader socio-political objective to be pursued both at home and abroad. In line with the tenets of classical U.S. liberalism, she praised multilateral diplomacy, international institutions, and cooperation as crucial stability and peace providers. She associated peace with such ideas as social justice, security, equality, and democracy. By doing so, she gave particular prominence to the role of peace education, thus emphasizing what is still considered to be one of the most distinctive traits of contemporary pacifism.

6 This essay will recon with the complex and multifaceted nature of Eleanor Roosevelt's commitment to peace, by reading her interwar participation in several anti-war rallies, meetings and conventions, and her writings on peace related issues and peace groups as part and parcel of her social and humanitarian inclination. In addition, this study will argue that Mrs. Roosevelt’s pacifism was proudly pragmatic, meaning that while she was involved in defending and promoting peace, she did not endorse the principles of absolute pacifism. For instance, she criticized unilateral disarmament and praised multilateral diplomacy as the only method through which nations could settle disputes in a civilized manner. She considered herself as a “realistic” pacifist, because she believed that, under the strains of war, military preparedness was somehow inescapable. Finally, the essay will examine Mrs. Roosevelt’s influential position at the White House, where as first lady she advocated for the promotion of international peace, thus transforming her humanitarian activism into a powerful political force within the administration and substantially changing the public image and perception of the U.S. first lady.

1. Peace Activism in the U.S.

7 In the immediate aftermath of World War I, American pacifist organizations’ most urgent goal was to mobilize people against war; avoiding another immense catastrophe was their number one priority. The number and variety of organizations protesting against war and militarism encompassed both women’s movements and religious and ethical pacifist associations. The American pacifist landscape was composed of movements and campaigns that promoted neutrality, disarmament, internationalism, and non-violence at the same time and in a variety of ways.i

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8 The roots of such a pacifist mobilization originated with the Spanish-American War and the U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines. American late-century interventionism merged the various groupings of American pacifism and eventually gave rise to the emergence of the U.S. Anti-Imperialist League. This was “a national movement with a mass constituency” that counted more than thirty thousand members and later became “the largest anti-war organization in American history.” The League was intended to defend many ideals that were considered part of the traditional American political milieu such as “political unilateralism, military independence and exemplary moral conduct.” In particular, the League depicted American imperialism as an extraneous element that ran counter to the underlying principles of American constitutional republicanism.ii

9 Amidst the preparation for World War I, a new organization emerged: the People’s Council of America. It aimed at unifying the fragmented American peace movement and connecting it with workers, a recognition that the lack of workers’ involvement had been of the main limits of the Anti-Imperialist League. It was a radical organization whose primary purpose was to denounce war as intrinsically unequal, economically dangerous – especially for the lower classes that did not receive adequate wages – and in utter contrast to professed American values, which promoted and protected economic and social justice. These slightly pro-socialist ideals immediately came under the lens of the administration, which countered with funding pro-war propaganda through the American Federation of Labor.

10 During the early 1920s, allegations of socialism and the Red-Scare paranoia marginalized the People’s Council to the edges of the public landscape. Many other peace organizations suffered the same fate. Only religious movements were partly acquitted of this allegation and succeeded in keeping the pacifist spirit of reform alive. This was the case with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization founded in 1917 by members of the Religious Society of Friends. Its members were moved by the religious idea of an “inner light” existing in every human being. This universal spark of God – according to Quaker views – should be enough to “take away the occasion for all wars,” almost by itself. Quakers, along with Mennonites, Amish, and Anabaptists, were the best-known religious pacifist bodies, or peace churches in the U.S., and they were among the most active groups in supporting conscientious objection during the first years of the twentieth century. Established in 1914, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, with its refusal of military conscription on grounds of conscience and moral revulsion, was another example of this trend.iii

11 The first national organization claiming for itself a secular image within the American pacifist landscape was the War Resisters League. Founded in 1921, it defined itself as a pacifist organization with no religious base or values, and campaigned for the promotion of liberal internationalism. War Resisters believed that international cooperation was the key to the abolition of war. They held that international and supra-national institutions should help states settle their disputes, regulate their behaviors, and thus avoid the outbreak of other destructive wars. Accordingly, international treaties, as well as negotiation, arbitration and diplomacy, were all simultaneously among the main American pacifist demands of the early twentieth century.iv

12 The emergence and apparently steady growth of American pacifism in the interwar years, however, would not have been possible without the contribution that women

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and women's organization paid to it. Women were indeed among the most active members of the principal American peace organizations, and it was due to women’s mobilization and activities that the various American peace movements gained political relevance and were efficiently organized. The struggle for peace meant for American women the opportunity to enhance the conditions of their lives, break the boundaries of the private sphere and participate as protagonists in the public arena, by both expressing a concerned motherhood and an aware citizenship. Leaders of the women’s campaign, such as Emily Balch, Lillian Wald, and Jane Addams, promoted liberal ideals, workers’ rights, international disarmament, and global institutions. Carrie Chapman Catt, for instance, played a central role in the organization of the first National Conferences on the Cause and Cure of War, which aimed to educate the larger American public, and especially women, to actively work for peace. Dorothy Detzer coordinated the national and transnational activities of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which stressed the importance of multilateral disarmament and peace. Jeanette Rankin co-founded the National Council for the Prevention of War, which was organized to press for neutrality legislation and multilateral disarmament.

13 Either acting individually as liberal and radical freethinkers or mobilizing collective efforts through a series of organized movements and campaigns, women were on the frontline of peace promotion in interwar America. The nature of their message was intrinsically neutral and democratic; however, their social activism did not go unnoticed and became an easy prey for any sort of anti-socialist or anti- communist agitators. Women activists and pacifists were stigmatized, accused of promoting socialist propaganda, being communists, and generally branded as radicals. They were, however, all but banned from the public sphere and political discourse.v

14 Eleanor Roosevelt was an integral part of this pacifist – and too a large extent feminist too – wave. Her biographers and other historians have recognized this and have written on her social activism during the interwar period extensively.vi Many have also stressed the influence World War I had on her political and intellectual formation.vii The Great War and its consequences, indeed, boosted Eleanor Roosevelt’s social involvement and made her public attitudes way more assertive than before. During an interview for her husband’s 1920 Vice-Presidential campaign, for instance, she stressed the relevance of the League of Nations and the necessity for the U.S. to take part in it. Her criticism of American isolationism and support of social justice and pacifist stances were not particularly advantageous to her husband’s electoral campaign, but they were part of her character.viii As Joseph Lash, later recognized, “the War gave her a reason acceptable to her conscience to free herself of the social duties that she hated, to concentrate less on her household, and to plunge into work that fitted her aptitude.”ix Eventually, the Great War transformed her into a reliable social and political leader, “an accomplished, widely known, and admired public figure in her own right,” one who was able to set her own agenda and to fight for her own social and political priorities.x

15 In the early 1920’s, Eleanor Roosevelt’s increasing political interests found a bold channel of expression in the New York League of Women Voters. The League, as Maurine Beasley has noted, played an important role in her political education, in making her a conscious citizen, and in improving her social skills.xi While working for the League, Eleanor Roosevelt started to give public presentations, discuss social issues,

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and campaign in favor of social legislation and other broad political objectives. While lobbying for women’s right to vote, however, Mrs. Roosevelt was also very active in promoting anti-militarism and internationalism. Without agreeing with the most radical features of the many American pacifist organizations, she nevertheless found the rationale of their arguments fully comprehensible and acceptable. She participated in anti-war rallies, attended pacifist meetings and conventions, and wrote articles and pamphlets on peace issues and about the activities of peace groups. She also endorsed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and hosted a women’s peace movement conference at Hyde Park, with Carrie Chapman Catt as the keynote speaker.xii

16 In 1923 and 1924, Mrs. Roosevelt’s commitment to peace soared. She helped organize the Bok Peace Prize competition, an award that was intended to galvanize and promote the American peace movement as a whole. The $100,000 prize was reserved for “the best practicable plan by which the United States may cooperate with other nations to achieve and preserve the peace of the world.” Esther Lape, a college professor, a publicist with a strong interest in international affairs, an activist of the New York League of Women Voters, and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, was appointed as the contest director. Mrs. Roosevelt worked hard to promote the competition. To this end she wrote a passionate article for the October 1923 “Ladies’ Home Journal.” Although isolationist elites criticized the prize, her experience in this effort confirmed Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to the peace movement’s ideals and illustrated her early involvement in international and multilateral cooperation.xiii In 1924, when questioned whether war could ever be morally justified, she showed her deep conviction to the necessity for world peace once more, and admitted her own inability to see “why there should be any such thing as a righteous war.”xiv

17 Naturally, Eleanor Roosevelt’s ideas developed over the years and changed as external conditions changed too. In the late 1930s, she gradually shifted toward a more assertive position on U.S. military policy, but she succeeded in preserving the quintessential element of her pacifism anyhow, which was mostly represented by her full endorsement of multilateral diplomacy. The negotiated settlement of international disputes remained a centerpiece of American peace activism and a core belief of Eleanor Roosevelt’s pacifism as well.

18 American pacifism of the 1920s and 1930s made a strong appeal for world cooperation as the only possible solution to war and the only viable road for international peace and security. For this reason, Eleanor Roosevelt stressed many times that the U.S. had to participate in the League of the Nations. In 1935 for example, when an isolationist inclined U.S. Senate had to vote for the World Court treaty, Eleanor Roosevelt, though she knew that her appeal would very probably not receive the necessary legislative support, delivered a radio address in which she called for the ratification of that treaty. She believed that nations had to find a civilized, rapid way to settle their disputes. This also explains why she decided to contribute a chapter to Carrie Chapman Catt’s book Why Wars Must Cease, and why, in 1938, she wrote This Troubled World, dedicating both of these analyses to the necessity of banning war and promoting world cooperation.xv

19 What Eleanor Roosevelt liked less, however, and what ultimately separated Mrs. Roosevelt’s pragmatic pacifist approach from the utopian stands of American peace organizations, was the promotion of unilateral disarmament. “None of us believe that

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the United States can disarm alone,” she stated in 1931. She was convinced that nations had to come together “not in fear, but in trust” and in that way they would be able to “settle disputes in a more civilized manner.”xvi She sensed the international threats earlier than most Americans and felt the compelling need to qualify her involvement in the peace campaign accordingly. As the clouds of the war gathered, Eleanor Roosevelt remained “passionately committed to peace,” even though she became everything but an absolute pacifist. She preferred to be defined as a “realistic” pacifist, meaning that she understood the necessity for military preparedness and conscription. In the end she was, as Blanche Wiesen Cook reminds us, “a practical idealist; an American internationalist, specifically an internationalist whose values were profoundly American. She was committed to the precepts of America as codified in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.”xvii

20 Thus, the failure of the League of Nations, the neutralization of all of the efforts to reach an international ban on war or to find forms of effective disarmament, and, eventually, the victory of power politics and rearmament, convinced Eleanor Roosevelt to keep her distance from the more idealistic faction of the peace movement. Confronting the rising of Nazism and Fascism, Eleanor Roosevelt came to dislike the calls for unilateral disarmament that permeated many pacifist organizations. She began to consider these claims dangerous and fruitless and, when the war broke out in Europe, she was completely persuaded that the United States would have to fight, “because fascism threatened the future of civilization.”xviii

2.Pragmatism and Politics

21 When Eleanor Roosevelt entered the White House, in March 1933, she was forty-eight years old and she had already become an exceptional figure in her own right. In an era when only one out of four women worked outside the home, she had led many local and national campaigns, organized events, managed businesses, established important social and political relationships, become a respected lobbyist and a skilled politician, raised a family, and finally, acquired great skills in coping with the press. Mrs. Roosevelt brought all of her peculiarities with her to her new office.

22 Historians have amply recognized Mrs. Roosevelt's ability to use her new position instrumentally or, as Allida Black says, “adroitly.” This was one of the most intriguing aspects of Eleanor Roosevelt’s life at the White House.xix Due to her social activism and the breadth of her interests, Mrs. Roosevelt was able to use her new political position “to advocate for both individuals and causes in which she believed.” In doing so, “she emerged as the conscience of the administration, […] she transformed her personal need to be active and useful into a potent political force within [the] administration.” Such a transformation made Eleanor Roosevelt “one of the strongest and most popular voices in Washington, in spite of critics who derided her nontraditional activism and alleged meddling in political matters.”xx

23 Among the many causes the first lady decided to advocate, civil rights was politically the most slippery and perilous one, immediately followed by the discussion of war and peace. Eleanor Roosevelt, however, managed to address both of these themes with equal commitment. As historian Blanche Wiesen Cook argues, “there was nothing simple about her views on international relations during the 1930s.” During her early years at the White House, indeed, Eleanor Roosevelt remained deeply

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involved in defending peace ideals and promoting peace values nationwide. This does not mean that she endorsed the principles of absolute pacifism tout court. Rather, she maintained a pragmatic approach that permitted her to establish new ties and reinforce the old ones within the pacifist network.xxi

24 Mrs. Roosevelt supported peace both as an ideal and as a political objective, and she worked hard to simultaneously preserve peace and achieve it. Her personal beliefs induced her to host an official reception at the White House so as to celebrate the WILPF’s twentieth anniversary, only a few weeks before Jane Addams’ death in May 1935. Moreover, when the National Council for the Prevention of War invited the first lady to broadcast a radio message in support of its campaign, she accepted wholeheartedly and delivered a stirring speech explaining the reasons why she thought women should prefer peace to war. Mrs. Roosevelt reiterated the theme of a concerned motherhood many times after that occasion, as for instance in 1940, when she clearly stated that women did not wish to see their sons go to war again.xxii Given her popularity, she easily became a widely known ambassador for peace. In a 1935 pamphlet titled “Why Wars Must Cease,” for instance, she explained why she believed that war in the modern era was outdated: “an idea is obsolete if, when applied, it does not work. […] There is no further use for war in business, or war between labor and capital or war between the rich and the poor. The time for unbridled competition, or war, is at an end, we must cooperate for our mutual good.”xxiii In “This Troubled World,” she advocated for brotherly love as a way of living instead of a pure doctrine, and in one of the “If You Ask Me” columns, she championed the search for a common understanding in contrast to the rise of individualism.xxiv “The basic thing,” Eleanor Roosevelt stated, “is that individuals should want peace, should care about other human beings all over the world regardless of race, creed, or color, and should be determined that they will not seek for purely personal advantage, but will seek for mutual advantage.”xxv

25 Following her personal inclinations, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to back and support pacifist organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resisters League, even though she kept opposing fiercely the idea of unilateral disarmament that animated some of these groups. She maintained that an adequate defense was necessary “as long as we cannot have simultaneous disarmament.” This position separated her from the most radical elements of the American peace movement. On several occasions, she tried to explain that she could differ with the pacifist organizations but still cooperate with them in a general drive for peace. “[T]he peace drive is a coming together of all organizations interested in peace to promote the spirit in this country. All those who speak and work for peace do not agree exactly as to the way in which peace shall be obtained. I happen to believe that adequate armament for defense is necessary. Others may not; but I can join in any demonstration, at least, which has as its object the will for peace.”

26 Such a moderate attitude was a peculiar element of Eleanor Roosevelt’s approach to peace and she reiterated this stance both privately and publicly. In a letter of 1936, for instance, the first lady confessed to believing that “all armaments cause distrust between nations, but that disarmament must be international so that no one country leaves itself open to attack or invasion from another.” In a speech that the New York Times reported on February 15, 1938, she added, “it is unfortunately true that we still live in a world where force is the only voice that carries conviction and weight with

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certain groups. I wish it was not so. I wish we lived in a world where reason and patience prevailed and that the money could be spent on other things. But now, today, it is undoubtedly necessary for us to have better equipment for self-defense.”xxvi

27 Given these moderate stances, many tried to define Eleanor Roosevelt’s approach to peace issues during the late 1930s as an ambivalent one.Frances Perkins, for instance, described her “as near pacifist as one can be and still be a realist.” A correspondent of hers, Mrs. Oliphant called her “the number one pacifist in the land.” Her friend and biographer, Joseph Lash defined her positions as both pacifist and anti- fascist. However, Eleanor Roosevelt had a precise idea of what her commitment to peace was. In a 1934 letter, she defined herself as a realistic pacifist. She needed to qualify her pacifism because of her fear of fascist expansionism, the rise of international tensions and the urgency to confront dictatorships. She also needed to be at the same time politically cautious and pragmatic because of all of theelectoral campaigns in which FDR was involved. In June 1937, she added that “being a pacifist means that you do not see a fight, that you use every means in your power to prevent a fight […] But if war comes to your own country, then even pacifists, it seems to me, must stand up and fight for their beliefs.”xxvii As soon as external conditions forced her to realize that unilateral disarmament and neutrality legislation, two of the main pacifists’ demands, would not prevent war and could potentially threaten the American interests, she stressed even more the need for a pragmatic approach. When her personal views occasionally “ran contrary to official U.S. policy of neutrality toward conflict in Europe,” she always maintained that her views were merely personal with no relationship to official policy.xxviii Amidst a pivotal political struggle over the Lend- Lease proposal to Britain, she eventually spoke in favor of American actions and said that it was time the U.S. started “thinking about giving something,” explicitly thinking of military assistance.xxix By that time, however, America was already at war.

3. An Effective World Peace

28 “We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it.” With these few words Eleanor Roosevelt counseled Americans in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.xxx It was her voice that announced to the nation that the war had finally come home. Due to FDR’s physical disability, she had to embody the administration’s war efforts throughout the country. Her presence had to inspire Americans and convince them that democracy would triumph over dictatorship. To this end, she gave assistance to the director of the nation’s civilian defense program. On countless occasions, Americans soldiers all over the world had the opportunity to see her as a tangible sign of the White House presence. She paid many visits to hospitals where she copied the names and addresses of the wounded she encountered, so that she could write letters to their relatives once she returned home. The first lady thus became a symbol of national unity and throughout the war her popularity soared.xxxi

29 The war, however, not only gave Mrs. Roosevelt’s personality and evocative rhetoric great prominence, it also accentuated her distinctive pragmatic pacifism. Amidst increasingly belligerent tones and pro-war campaigns, she was able to make the difficult trade-off between her public role and personal beliefs and pacifist stands. As Allida Black argues, Eleanor Roosevelt understood, “the complex relationships between war and peace,” and always tried to explain the rationale behind the necessity of

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fighting dictatorships.xxxii Already in 1939, when the war had just erupted in Europe, she noted that the world situation would inevitably affect U.S. domestic affairs and she warned her fellow citizens about the tensions and the psychological effects that the new conflict would generate at home.xxxiii She pragmatically defended the idea that the main goal for the U.S. in this war was to ensure an independent nation for American children.xxxiv She expressed the desire to continue to live in an independent country based on individual freedom and equal opportunities.xxxv She also advocated women’s active participation in war mobilization, an element that she considered crucial in avoiding further negative consequences.

30 The first lady, indeed, fiercely promoted the deterrent value of preemptive mobilization: “Our only hope of keeping the peace which we so prize, is to prove before there is any involvement in war, that we are a unified nation for defense.”xxxvi She believed that the participation of the whole population in what she defined as a “people’s war” would be the key to defeat Nazism and Fascism. What she was supporting was, in essence, a people’s democratic revolution against tyranny.xxxvii In a radio address in October 1941, she commended even the conscientious objectors for the dogged service they were providing in medical facilities.xxxviii She asked every American to do the most efficient possible job in order to “shorten the horrible period” of war.xxxix She reminded young people and ordinary citizens that the ultimate ends for which they were fighting were freedom and “a different and better future world.”xl Exquisitely realist as well as purely exceptionalist, the core of Eleanor Roosevelt’s message was that the sooner the U.S. faced up to the fact that this war was its own war, the sooner American citizens would do the job which other men and women were doing all over the world.xli That job, according to the first lady, was nothing less than defending democracy.xlii

31 Given her pragmatic pacifism and political realism, Eleanor Roosevelt existed in a quandary in which “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.”xliii Since she did not want to gainsay FDR’s pro-war stance, she decided, on the one hand, to defend practical causes such as conscientious objection and, on the other hand, to promote the general idea of world peace.xliv This last attitude occasionally rendered Eleanor Roosevelt a voice outside the chorus of the overt political realm and the public debate. As she later recalled, it was not enough to talk about peace, since “one must work at it.”xlv During the war, the cause of world peace became so central to Mrs. Roosevelt’s public efforts that many historians, for instance Joan Hoff, use the expression “apparent incongruity” to describe her internal conflict between the necessity of fighting the war and at the same time promoting world peace.xlvi That incongruity epitomized, instead, the search for a delicate equilibrium between Eleanor Roosevelt’s pragmatism and idealism.xlvii In the end, she accepted World War II as a route to the achievement of a stable international peace.

32 The first lady envisioned a better world after the war, a world centered on the role of people. This bottom-up approach slowly became her preferred perspective from which to imagine and design the post-war order. She defended citizens’ right to hope and asserted that the future belonged to “those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”xlviii Against the rise of arrogance and egotism, she proposed, and backed, an “enlightened self-interest” through which people of the world could understand that wars are detrimental to the whole of civilization.xlix According to her opinions, there

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would be no victory without removing the “armed camps” in people’s minds – those cultural barriers that kept individuals from mutual understanding.l She believed that the establishment of a universal language, as part of a universal understanding, would be a preliminary step and a “prelude to world peace.”li Replying to a boy who was looking forward “to the time when the conflict will cease and the real problems of the world can be met by thought and brains,” Mrs. Roosevelt remarked that American citizens had to keep themselves from hate, “and act with cool heads but warms hearts, both with our allies and with our enemies at the close of the war.”lii Finally, she placed great emphasis on the role of education, saying that it was one of the most vigorous boosters for peace.liii

33 With the same passionate rhetoric she used to promote world peace, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed one of the most problematic foreign policy issues of the early 1940s – the problem of the post-war cooperation. According to the first lady, the U.S. had to realize that it was “no longer an isolated nation, but part of a family of nations” that needed to be restored to normal life.liv On a number of occasions, she praised the importance of winning peace. In March 1943, for example, she attended a meeting in Philadelphia and listened to Governor of Minnesota Harold Stassen’s speech with great interest. Stassen strongly advocated a “definite United Nations government” and a worldwide vision of winning what he called an enduring peoples’ peace.lv Although Mrs. Roosevelt confessed to having no particular formula for the way international cooperation should function after the war, she endorsed the idea of establishing a working United Nations Organizations, which would be a “solid foundation for world peace.”lvi Such an idea, far from being purely idealistic, took into account the differences that persisted among the nations, and particularly those differences affecting the relations between the U.S. and Soviet Russia. She clearly stated that any plan for the future world order would have to include Russia, China and all those nations that wanted to wholeheartedly subscribe to the notion of cooperation. When New York congressman Arthur Klein introduced a plan that included the establishment of “closer cooperation between all nations” as an “extension of the good neighbor policy to all the world” along with measures for “social and economic improvement,” she immediately endorsed it.lvii She used both her political channels and her connections with social movements to promote international cooperation. As a member of the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee, Eleanor Roosevelt asked her party to join the efforts of the League of Women Voters and those of several churches to discuss and formulate a proposal on world peace before the San Francisco conference.lviii The very day before the convening of that conference, she stressed the significance of setting up an organization that would be a forum for discussion, and a place where future generations would have the opportunity to build a peaceful world.lix

34 As first and most important result, Eleanor Roosevelt’s pacifism, idealism, realism and humanitarianism all converged in the shape of her ideas for what the U.N. should be. She considered “food, or relief, or even aviation” as matters that had direct bearing on the establishment of a lasting peace.lx To preserve peace, the new organization had to encompass a vast range of subjects, including rehabilitation, world labor problems, and world educational problems.lxi Mrs. Roosevelt counted the FAO, the UNESCO, the U.N. health and labor organizations, and the Economic and Social Forum as the most important means to foster international cooperation. Her main interest was to build an organization that would be as efficient as possible. “[W]hen questions reach the

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Security Council, we must have an organization to enforce its decisions,” the first lady liked to say.lxii

35 Hence, the roots of her internationalism were not entirely idealistic. The centerpiece of her foreign policy vision was instead a mutual recognition of interests. Eleanor Roosevelt believed that the mutuality of interests, especially in practical fields, favored international agreements. She expressed this idea in a heartfelt speech against the word tolerance, which, according to first lady’s views, could hide fear and restrain people and nations from cooperating.lxiii As regards the WHO and UNESCO, she said it was useless to support them if they were not intended to produce mutual advantages such as increasing the health standards in all nations or by improving the global educational level.lxiv

36 Accordingly, international defense of human rights had to become the principal way to achieve mutual gains. That was why the cause to which she was most committed was the issue of human rights. It was her attitude toward the promotion and the safeguard of human rights that helped President Truman solve one of his first dilemmas. In 1945, he confided to Secretary of State James Byrnes that he needed the support of two important liberals for the purpose of improving the public image of his administration, specifically Henry Wallace and Eleanor Roosevelt. The area of international affairs seemed a natural destination for such an outstanding and trustworthy figure as Eleanor Roosevelt. That was why Byrnes placed her name at the top of the list of delegates to the upcoming London conference of the United Nations.lxv In December 1945, Truman appointed her as one of the U.S. representatives to the first session of the General Assembly, which was scheduled for Westminster Central Hall the following January. She decided to write of her gratitude in the pages of her My Day column where she confirmed her desire to learn, understand and work on the problems of the world in order to build a lasting peace. Mrs. Roosevelt felt a great responsibility in being the only woman delegate from the U.S. and promised to keep in mind the enormous sacrifices of the youth who had fought in war. After all, she was going to London fully convinced that the world had become, as Wendell Willkie said, “one world” and that only by recognizing this interdependence would it be possible to secure future generations from war.lxvi

37 Eleanor Roosevelt easily won large internal support in the U.S. for the U.N. and its mission to protect human rights. This was particularly true in the case of the varied American peace movements, which immediately praised her appointment. A quick survey of Eleanor Roosevelt’s incoming correspondence in the aftermath of her nomination shows the contentment that many of the American peace movement activists found in her holding that position. Representatives of the American Association for the United Nations, labor movement spokespersons, and women’s and religious organizations sent Eleanor Roosevelt letters of congratulations, suggestions, and memoranda.lxvii One admirer called her “The Queen of Peace - Champion of the Common People - The First Lady of America.” The press defined her nomination a “splendid choice” because of her ability to both represent common people and to understand the urgency of building a lasting peace.lxviii In his comment, Washington Post columnist, Thomas L. Stokes, said that the people had gained a real spokesman, and that Eleanor Roosevelt would be more than a mere representative of the women of America. Although she would fulfill that role excellently, Stokes felt that she represented, “better than perhaps any other person, […] the little people of this

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country and, indeed, of the world.” She knew the common people’s yearning for peace and security. She had promoted peace even when she had realized it was necessary to fight. Accordingly, she understood perfectly why it was of the utmost importance to prevent another war.lxix Sitting at the U.N. in 1946, she was, quintessentially, the right woman in the right place.

4. Conclusion

38 Eleanor Roosevelt's approach to peace in the interwar year was a complex, at times ambivalent one. Although being fully engaged in sustaining her husband's brilliant political ascension and therefore necessarily influenced by political pragmatism and convenience, she was nevertheless able to set up a political agenda on her own, by giving particular prominence to such controversial and politically slippery causes as international cooperation and peace.

39 Eleanor Roosevelt's peace activism, perhaps more importantly, was constantly intertwined with her unceasing quest for social justice. It was during the interwar years, indeed, that she started developing the idea that peace –as a cogent political objective rather than as a mere aspiration – could only stem from and be achieved through equal opportunities. To her, peace was strongly and ultimately related to people’s living conditions. That was the reason why caring about people’s basic needs, as a way to reach a more equal and therefore peaceful society, progressively became the linchpin of Mrs. Roosevelt’s interests and activities both as U.S. first lady and as a prominent member of the Democratic Party.

40 Mrs. Roosevelt's noticeable pacifism, combined with her unremitting social activism and her unmatched ability to cope with the mass media of her era, eventually transformed her into a reliable leader, and made her, at the same time, the perfect intercessor between the political elites and American pacifists.lxx The combined result was the popularization of such a pragmatic approach to peace. Her stances, indeed, came to sound attractive not only to the most moderate exponents of the Popular Front, but also to those liberals in search for rational arguments against both the rampant hyper-nationalism of the right and the radical tenets of absolute pacifism of the extreme left. Accordingly, Eleanor Roosevelt made American pacifism perhaps less pacifist but politically more effective.

NOTES

i. The literature on American interwar pacifism is ample and varied. A classic is still Robert H. Ferrell's Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). Robert David Johnson, in The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) explains how a few influential progressive senators helped realigning U.S. foreign policy with a longstanding antimilitarist and anti-imperialist tradition. Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat collected a series of essays, in a volume titled

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Challenge to Mars: Pacifism from 1918 to 1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), which provide numerous analyses on many of the interwar pacifism's most important features, from Christian pacifism to conscientious objection to women's activism. Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999) byCecelia Lynch focuses on the transatlantic bonds of American interwar pacifist groups. Leilah C. Danielson, in "'In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi:' American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941," in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, Volume 72, Issue 2, and Marian Mollin, in Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) turn their attention to the most radical facets of the American interwar pacifism. Radical connections between pacifists and socialists are also the main object of interests of Michael Kazin's recent American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Vintage, 2011). ii. See Charles De Benedetti, The Peace Reform in American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 3. On the ways in which American anti-imperialist perceived the idea of empire as opposed to the foundational ideal of freedom see Michael Cullinane, Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898-1909 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). iii. Many Protestant denominations, such as Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Universalists and Unitarians, as well as many other secular organizations, influenced American Christian pacifism during the early twentieth century. See Michael True, “Christian Pacifism in the United States: A History and Development since the 17th Century”, and Id., “The American Tradition of Nonviolence” in Les Mouvements Pacifistes Américains et Francais, Hier et Aujourd’hui: Actes du Colloque des 5, 6 et 7 Avril 2007 à l’Université de Savoie (Chambéry: Université de Savoie, Laboratoire langages, littératures, sociétés, 2007); Id., An Energy Field More Intense Than War: The Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995); and Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance (Providence: Blackstone, 2003). iv. See Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003). v. See William Pencak, For God & Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989) and Dean J. Kotlowski, Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). vi. In the first volume of her seminal biography, Blanche Wiesen Cook dates Eleanor Roosevelt's reformism back to her school years, see Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933 (New York: Penguin, 1992). It was the experience of the Great War, however, that undoubtedly played a major role in fostering her commitment to peace. vii. In the interwar period, Eleanor Roosevelt gradually became “a consummate practitioner of politics,” see Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 3. viii. See Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 2. ix. See William H. Chafe, “Biographical Sketch,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 6. See also the classic Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers (New York: Norton, 1971), 320-328. x. “By 1928, Eleanor Roosevelt had clearly become a political leader in her own right. Once just a “political wife,” she gradually extended that role and used it as a vehicle for asserting her own personality and agenda,” see William H. Chafe, “Biographical Sketch,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 8. See also Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Training for Public Life: ER and Women’s Political Networks in the 1920s,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 44.

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xi. See Maurine Hoffman Beasley, Holly Cowan Shulman, Henry R. Beasley (eds.), The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 313. xii. See Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 170. xiii. Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 32-33 and Maurine Hoffman Beasley, Holly Cowan Shulman, Henry R. Beasley (eds.), The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, 67. xiv. See Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 4. xv. See William H. Chafe, “Biographical Sketch,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 7. “Eleanor expressed her changing views on pacifism in ‘This Trouble World,’ a forty-seven-page book that she published in 1938. It addressed issues of war and peace in a simple style easily understood by readers. A call for people to band together and work for peace, the slender volume broadened the discussion of pacifism to include international efforts by nations to settle disputes among countries through united actions such as the imposition of economic boycotts and, if necessary, military forces against aggressor.” However and questionably enough, according to Maurine Beasley, this attitude was more “a repudiation of isolationism” than an “endorsement of American intervention,” see Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 171 and 179. xvi. See Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 4. xvii. As Blanche Wiesen Cook argues in “Turn Toward Peace: ER and Foreign Affairs,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 108-109. xviii. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Turn Toward Peace: ER and Foreign Affairs,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 114. xix. See Allida M. Black (ed.), Courage in a Dangerous World. The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Columbia university Press, 1999), 31. As many historians tend to recognize, Eleanor Roosevelt was a sort of extension of the presidency. She moved in directions where it was politically or practically inconvenient for the President to operate. Thus, she became an advisor, an assistant and sometimes a completely autonomous actor supporting and implementing New Deal policies. In this regard, see Mildred W. Abramowitz, Eleanor Roosevelt and Federal Responsibility and Responsiveness to Youth, the Negro, and Others in Time of Depression (New York: New York University, Ph.D. dissertation, 1970) 183. xx. See Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 80 and 163. xxi. See Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow, 138. xxii. My Day, August 29, 1940. This article came under FBI investigation because the newspaper that had published it, The Guild Reporter, was alleged of Communism and accused to foment “subversive movement,” see Roosevelt Study Center, (RSC), Presidential Collections and Administrations, FBI-Files on Eleanor Roosevelt, 1934-1965, Report, File No. 100/70332, 10-23-1945: 7. Eleanor Roosevelt explained her ideas on the relationships between women and peace also in 1947, in an interview with Eleanor Roberts for the Boston Sunday, see Allida M. Black (ed.), The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Vol. 1. The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948 (Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale, 2007), 658-662. That theme was so persistent in her rhetoric that she used it again amidst the 1952 electoral campaign, when she tried to secure women’s vote for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, see Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, October 22, 1952, in http:// www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. xxiii. See Eleanor J. Bilsborrow, The Philosophy of Social Reform in the Speeches of Eleanor Roosevelt (Denver: University of Denver, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1957), 44. xxiv. See Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 171 and 179 as quoted in note 17. xxv. See Eleanor Roosevelt, If You Ask Me (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938), quoted in Eleanor J. Bilsborrow, The Philosophy of Social Reform in the Speeches of Eleanor Roosevelt, 43.

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xxvi. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Turn Toward Peace: ER and Foreign Affairs,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 109 and 113. See also Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 12-13. xxvii. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, June 19, 1937, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/, and Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 14. xxviii. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Turn Toward Peace: ER and Foreign Affairs,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 115. xxix. See Mildred W. Abramowitz, Eleanor Roosevelt and Federal Responsibility and Responsiveness to Youth, the Negro, and Others in Time of Depression, 190. xxx. See Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 186. xxxi. See Harvey J. Kaye, The Fight For the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014) xxxii. See Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow, 138. xxxiii. Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, September 13, 1939, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. xxxiv. Eleanor Roosevelt stated: “We have always been a proud and independent people. As a woman, I pray for peace not only now, but in the future. But I think we must look a little beyond next week if we expect to ensure an independent U.S.A. to our children. There is such a thing, too, as the moral values of a situation, and I do not think we are a nation that has given up considerations for right and wrong as we see it,” see My Day, June 28, 1941, in http:// www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. xxxv. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, July 3, 1940 and My Day, June 28, 1941, in http:// www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. xxxvi. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, July 18, 1940, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. xxxvii. See Eleanor Roosevelt My Day, April 18, 1941, in n http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. xxxviii. A few years later, Eleanor Roosevelt stated that the conscientious objectors were doing “heroic deeds” and were “fine people”, see Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow, 141. See also Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, June 21, 1944, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. “In political terms, Eleanor’s years at the White House showed how she put her own sense of morality into action,” see Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, 241. xxxix. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, January 28, 1942, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. xl. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, January 28, 1942, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. ,Eleanor Roosevelt also stressed many times the importance of renewing the democracy at home in order to make the fight for democracy abroad worthwhile. She strove to give the war positive meaning, which was to preserve the freedoms of democracy abroad as well as to make democracy work at home, see Doris K. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 30. These political demands are among the most peculiar elements of Eleanor Roosevelt’s war and post-war liberalism. xli. Eleanor Rooseveltwas part of the American exceptionalist rhetoric to the utmost level. She believed that the U.S. had to pursue its destiny to bring freedom to the world: “Being a strong nation and having the greatest physical, mental and spiritual strength today gives us a tremendous responsibility. We can not use our strength to coerce, but if we are big enough, I think we can lead, but it will require great vision and understanding of our part,” see Eleanor Roosevelt’s letter to Harry Truman, November 20, 1945, cited in Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 48 and in Steve Neal (ed.), Eleanor and Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (New York: Lisa Drew Book, 2002), 45.

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xlii. See William H. Chafe, “Biographical Sketch,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 23. See also Eleanor Roosevelt, “Keepers of Democracy,” in The Virginia Quarterly Review, No. 4 (1939), in Courage in a Dangerous World, ed. Allida M. Black, 117-120. Eleanor Roosevelt’s tireless commitment to democracy made 67% of Americans, according to a Gallup poll taken in spring 1940, well disposed toward First Lady’s activities, see Doris K. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 19. xliii. See Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow, 139-140. xliv. As regards conscientious objection, see also Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters to President Truman, dated December 2, 1946 and May 13, 1948 and the subsequent Truman’s replies on December 6, 1946 and May 17, 1948, in Eleanor and Harry, ed. Steve Neal, 84 and 143. On FDR’s policy on war, peace, and foreign affairs in general, see David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball, David Reynolds (eds.), FDR’s World: War, Peace, and Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). xlv. See the November 11, 1951 radio broadcast on the work of the U.N. that Eleanor Roosevelt delivered from the program “Voice of America,” in Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Turn Toward Peace: ER and Foreign Affairs,” in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff- Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 210. See also Anya Luscombe, “Eleanor Roosevelt as ‘Ordinary’ Citizen and ‘Expert’ on Radio in the Early 1950s, Sage Open, September 2014, http:// sgo.sagepub.com/content/4/3/2158244014551712. xlvi. See William H. Chafe, “Biographical Sketch”, in Without Precedent. The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, eds. Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, 23. xlvii. See Maurine Hoffman Beasley, Holly Cowan Shulman, Henry R. Beasley (eds.), The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, 195. Talking about women’s participation in pacifist organizations, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “They are still talking of world peace and what we can do to bring about peace in this world, in the hope that it can be accomplished at the present time and in the same way that peace groups have worked for many years. This is discouraging to me, for I feel that our situation in the world is so completely changed that old methods and old approaches must be changed in order to meet it,” see Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, July 12, 1940, in http:// www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. xlviii. See Leonard C. Schlup and Donald W. Whisenhunt (eds.), It Seems to Me: Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 2. xlix. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, December 13, 1943, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. l. See Eleanor Roosevelt, “Must We Hate to Fight?,” in The Saturday Review, July 4, 1942, in Courage in a Dangerous World, ed. Allida M. Black, 136. li. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, November 18, 1940, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. lii. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, June 4, 1943, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. liii. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, May 23, 1944, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. liv. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, January 1, 1943, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. lv. See Harold E. Stassen, “A Proposal of a Definite United Nations Government,” speech delivered at a joint session of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Branches of the Foreign Policy Association, January 7, 1943, in Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. IX, No. 10 (1943), 318-320. lvi. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, March 13, 1943, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. lvii. See Eleanor Roosevelt My Day, October 21, 1943, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. lviii. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, February 22 1945, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. lix. See Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 45, and Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, April 25, 1945, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. lx. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, May 23, 1944, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/.

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lxi. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, April 25, 1945, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. In the same occasion, Eleanor Roosevelt asserted: “For a long time we have been building points of contact where the United Nations could work on some specific thing in unison. The organization of food for the world, the organization of rehabilitation and relief, world labor problems, world educational problems—all these have been stepping stones.” See also Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, December 18, 1945, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. lxii. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, September 20, 1946, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. lxiii. See Eleanor Roosevelt, “Tolerance is an Ugly Word,” in Coronet, July 19, 1945, in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Vol. 1. The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948, ed. Allida M. Black, 56. lxiv. Eleanor Roosevelt clearly stated: “There would be no real reason for supporting the World Health Organization unless that support was going to increase the health standards of all nations. And there would be no real reason for all nations to take part in UNESCO unless each one was going to benefit eventually from the experience of the others in all the fields covered by UNESCO,” see Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, November 22, 1946, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. lxv. See Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 48-49 and Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: Norton, 1972), 36. The decision to appoint Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the U.S. delegates to the U.N. General Assembly shows that the administration took into serious consideration her influence on public opinion, her reliability and her ability to shape electoral preferences. See also “Eleanor Roosevelt Accepts Appointment to the United Nations,” in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Vol. 1. The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948, ed.Allida M. Black, 158. lxvi. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, December 22, 1945, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/ myday/. lxvii. See a letter from Clark M. Eichelberger, representing the American Association for the United Nations (formerly known as the League of Nations Associations) – Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 28, 1945, in RSC, Presidential Collection and Administrations, The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, part 1, United Nations Correspondence and Publications (hereby after ER Papers, 1945-1962, part 1) Reel 1, 001, November-December 1945. See also a telegram from Dorothy Bellanca to Eleanor Roosevelt, dated December 21, 1945. The writer says: “Your nomination to General Assembly United Nations Organization is guarantee that American delegation will fight hard for principles of universal peace and amity among nations. It will go far to eliminate mutual suspicions which keep nations apart,” in RSC, ER Papers, 1945-1962, part 1, Reel 1, 001, November-December 1945, where it is also possible to find a letter from The Church Peace Union central committee to Eleanor Roosevelt, dated December 27, 1945. See a letter from William Dick Sporborg of the General Federation of Women’s Club, sent on December 28, 1945, where the author writes that he is “very glad on behalf of over two and a half million members to comply with your expressed desire to have the people of our nation let you, as one of the representative of the U.S. delegation to the General Assembly, know what the organized public opinion of our group, already articulated in its recorded stand for international cooperation through the U.N.O., hope may come out of the first meeting of the General Assembly in London,” in RSC, ER Papers, 1945-1962, part 1, Reel 1, 001, November-December 1945. lxviii. See Clarence Gray to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 29, 1945, in RSC, ER Papers, 1945-1962, part 1, Reel 1, 001, November-December 1945; here, Eleanor Roosevelt is defined “The Queen of Peace – Champion of the Common People – The First Lady of America.” Thomas L. Stokes also wrote in the Atlanta Sunday on December 23, 1945 that Eleanor Roosevelt was “a splendid choice” for the administration and concluded: “she, better than perhaps any other person, can represent the little people of this country and, indeed, of the world. She has been their champion. She has

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spoken for them when it took courage. Better than most, she has a felling for them and their problems, despite the different strata from which she comes. She has their confidence. She knows of their need and longing for peace and security in their lives and homes, and knows what happens to them in depressions and wars, which it is the purpose of the UNO to eliminate. […] She loved peace and was active in promoting it.” See RSC, ER Papers, 1945-1962, part 1, Reel 1, 001, November-December 1945. lxix. The article is in RSC, ER Papers, 1945-1962, part 1, Reel 1, 0923, L, January 1946. Here is a newspaper clipping, probably coming from the Washington Post and reporting an article by columnist Thomas L. Stokes, who states that, with Eleanor Roosevelt’s appointment at the United Nations, “The People Gain a Real Spokesman.” lxx. See Dario Fazzi, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Anti-Nuclear Movement: The Voice of Conscience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

ABSTRACTS

In the interwar years, American women have played a major role in shaping both the domestic and the international debate on peace, by spreading pacifist tenets and merging them with the promotion of social justice and human rights. Leading figures of the women’s peace campaign such as Emily Balch, Lillian Wald, and Jane Addams have lived their personal struggle for peace as an opportunity to enhance the universal condition of women’s lives and at the same time promote workers’ rights, international disarmament, and the empowerment of the international institutions. Eleanor Roosevelt was not only an integral part of this interwar pacifist chorus, but she also represented one of its most influential voices. Although her biographers have stressed the impact of this period on her political and intellectual formation, a systematic account of her contribution to the shaping of the American interwar pacifism is still missing and this is precisely the broad scope of my article. I will therefore define Eleanor Roosevelt’s peculiar pacifism as one mostly characterized by a prominent inclination toward activism, a pragmatic attitude, and a compelling political efficacy.

INDEX

Keywords: Activism, and Jane Addams, Arthur Klein, Carrie Chapman-Catt, Dorothy Detzer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Balch, Esther Lape, Harold Stassen, Interwar America, Jeanette Rankin, Lillian Wald, Pacifism, Pragmatism

AUTHOR

DARIO FAZZI Roosevelt Study Center

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First Female Travel Journalist Meets First Lady: Mary Pos and Eleanor Roosevelt Speak on Women’s Roles and Intercultural Understanding

Babs Boter

1. Introduction

1 Between 1947 and 1948 three opinion polls were conducted in the Netherlands to reveal those individuals for whom the Dutch held the highest esteem. The nominees could not be deceased, or be members of the royal Dutch family. The overall winners were Winston Churchill and the Dutch Prime Minister, Willem Drees, followed by a series of well-known international figures such as Pope Pius XII, Stalin and Truman. None of the resulting three lists included names of women. The male reporter of one Dutch newspaper therefore mockingly stated that the categorical exclusion of women would certainly arouse anxiety among “our male and female feminists.” He then concluded that, evidently, the Dutch people only moderately admired Mrs. Roosevelt, who at numerous conferences “plays the first violin”—a Dutch expression for being dominant —and added that the average Dutch citizen ostensibly failed to admire “the fascist and communist quarrelers among women of world importance,” such as Mary Poes-Pas- Pos. The latter’s name is actually Mary Pos, “Poes-Pas” having been added to ridicule the journalist’s work as mumbo-jumbo. In addition, although Pos is well-known among the Dutch at home and abroad, she was no woman “of world importance.”i

2 Noteworthy here is that the newspaper article, while providing the names of two women who would have been possible candidates for the popularity elections, simultaneously mocks and perhaps implicitly disqualifies them (“first violin,” “world importance,” “Poes-Pas”). Remarkable as well is the fact that the two figures that the newspaper mentions in one breath, at first sight have very little in common. It surely seems to be a bit far-fetched to link the globally operating and world-famous former

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First Lady, in 1948 saluted by the international media as “First Lady of the United Nations”ii with a travel journalist from the small Dutch town of Zaandam. However, in the 1940s the two women were similarly engaged in activities that confirm as well as challenge existing gender expectations and versions of institutionalized femininity in the patriarchal models of early to mid- 20th century U.S. and the Netherlands. Each worked within, but also stretched, the gender boundaries of their own maneuvering space, one as former First Lady and chairwoman of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and one as female journalist. In addition, Mary Pos attended two of Roosevelt’s press conferences, in 1937 and 1950 respectively; her recording of these meetings suggests that the two women share more features and interests than their contemporaries were probably able to perceive, or that the reporter of Het Dagblad who singled out their exclusion from the popularity poll was possibly aware of.

3 This essay will examine how Pos’ narratives of her encounters with Eleanor Roosevelt expose the professional and psychological forces at work in the (gendered) field of journalism in the late 1930s and early 1950s. It will especially look at the way in which both women positioned themselves during Roosevelt’s press conferences. Secondly, it will investigate the extent to which ideas on women’s rights and intercultural understanding as put forward in their work were similar.

4 The main primary sources of this essay consist of Pos’ correspondence, diary entries, personal and lecture notes, and reviews of lectures that make up part of the Mary Pos papers housed by the Historical Documentation Centre for Dutch Protestantism (1800 to the present day), affiliated with the Free University in Amsterdam. In addition, I will draw on Pos’ published accounts of her 1937 visit to the White House, newspaper reports of Roosevelt’s 1950 press conference in the Netherlands, published transcripts of the press conferences for women reporters held by Eleanor Roosevelt, the latter’s column “My Day” and other (auto)biographical publications.

2. Travel journalist Mary Pos

5 Mary Pos (1904-1987) grew up listening to stories told by her uncle, a missionary in the Dutch East Indies. Her father made plans to follow his brother’s footsteps, but due to his wife’s health conditions, the orthodox Protestant family stayed on in the northern part of the Netherlands, where father Pos became an evangelist visiting poor farmers on his bicycle. Inspired by the stories, between the early 1930s and the late 1960s Pos ventured out on numerous journeys to visit the diasporic Dutch in oversees missionary settlements and immigrant communities. In addition, the self-proclaimed “first female travel journalist” explored countries and cultures that she considered to be worthwhile sources to study and to explain to those staying at home. Publishing her travel narratives in more than 2000 articles and 20 books, and offering hundreds of lectures all over the Netherlands and abroad, Pos presented herself as a cultural ambassador making crucial connections between peoples and countries. Her experiences not only shaped her own development, but also seem to have influenced ideas of national and gender identity among her audience.

6 From the 1930s through the 1950s, Pos was a very popular speaker and author. Her novels and travel writing were relished by her many female readers, and reached numerous enthusiastic male readers and listeners also. Her followers apparently

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appreciated Pos’ Protestant-Christian and somewhat moralizing tone, her frequently melodramatic style, and the way in which she as narrator seemed to take her audience with her on her travels. Part of Pos’ fame was also attributable to the enormous professional and personal network she had constructed of notables, diplomats, and businessmen, relatives and acquaintances at home and abroad, and sponsors and admirers who would financially or otherwise support her self-presentation as a well- known, well-read, and well-travelled professional. Pos’ travelling was sponsored by organizations as diverse as KLM, Heineken beer, Wybertjes cough drops and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Nevertheless, many reviewers labelled her writing and lectures as shallow, ill-informed and anecdotal ramblings, or as outmoded and sermonizing products.iii She could be an extremely demanding person and oftentimes came across as headstrong, uncompromising, and self-important. Her rather complicated character is evident in her correspondence. Such letters also show how she appeared to struggle with feelings of insecurity both in the professional and personal spheres, which caused severe mental depressions.

7 One of the many factors that played a role here was Pos’ necessary negotiation with various discourses of femininity available to her at the time. Schippers defines femininity as a web of symbolic meanings, “produced, contested and transformed through discursive processes.”iv It may contain idealized characteristics such as delicacy, compliance, physical vulnerability, sweetness and softness, but could also include less “emphasized” forms of femininity. Referring to women’s subordination in patriarchy, Raewyn Connell explains that:

8 One form [of femininity] is defined around compliance with this subordination and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men. I will call this ‘emphasized femininity’. Others are defined centrally by strategies of resistance or forms of non-compliance. Others again are defined by complex strategic combinations of compliance, resistance and co-operation.v

9 Trying to establish for herself a place in the male-dominated profession of journalism and travelling on her own across national and cultural borders, Mary Pos needed to position herself using various existing gender discourses, as will be pointed out below. Her accounts of her journeys as well as encounters with well-known Americans and others provide a window on her project of gendered self-(re)formation which was oftentimes a struggle.vi

10 However, Pos was determined and felt that her mission was to travel and meet, write and lecture, and thus build connections. Of course, as a single woman she also needed to earn a living. In all these respects her seven journeys to the U.S. were successful. Staying in hotels, the YWCA, and with friends and acquaintances she explored the country and its people. She also presented lectures about Europe and the Netherlands at women’s clubs, churches, the YWCA, and other organizations. Upon her return to the Netherlands she would then publish, among other titles, Ik zag Amerika [I saw America] (1940), which was based on her journey to the U.S. in the Fall and Winter of 1937, Ik zag Amerika en bezocht het opnieuw [I saw America and visited again] (1952), and Californië: Dwars door Amerika op zoek naar Nederlanders [California: Across America in search of the Dutch] (1955).

11 In the first two titles she relates of visits to American families of various ethnic and class backgrounds and reports on making friends with young people in Harlem. Her interest in poor urban areas dated back to 1926, when as a secretary for an

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advertisement firm she traveled to a commercial conference in London where, she would later claim, she prefered to explore the local slums to being at the posh conference venues. In addition, she organized meetings with Americans that her Dutch audience back home in the Netherlands would later enjoy reading and hearing about, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, industrialist Henry Ford, CIO- President John L. Lewis, the warden of the Sing-Sing prison, Lewis Edward Lawes, and deafblind author and activist Helen Keller.

12 Pos prepared herself for these meetings in various ways. We know that before she visited Eleanor Roosevelt, she had read the “My Day” columns which the President’s wife started to write in 1936. We do not know whether Pos was aware of the contacts, interests and experiences that she shared with the U.S. First Lady: Eleanor Roosevelt had toured slum areas as well and as a young woman she had been involved in settlement house work in the New York City slums.vii The two also shared some of the same contacts: Roosevelt, like Pos, admired and corresponded with Helen Keller and both attended and enjoyed meals organized by the National Women’s Press Club. Both women were at times criticized for being naïve and for talking in platitudes and generalizing statements.viii In addition, both Roosevelt and Pos enjoyed horseback- riding, occasionally smoked cigarettes, and delighted in airplane trips.ix Furthermore, they were similarly engaged in writing, broadcasts and lecturing, and both took voice lessons to improve their speech.xThe two women were, each in her own way, engaged in the construction of their public persona—only one effect of which was the Dutch naming a rose after Eleanor Roosevelt, and a tulip after Mary Pos.xi

13 Most important, perhaps, is the fact that both women moved beyond the gender boundaries of their times and were involved in building bridges between people and cultures. These are exactly the two features that Pos stressed most in her published accounts of her meetings with Eleanor Roosevelt. However, Pos’ personal accounts show that the two women, who themselves were strong advocates of better intercultural communication and understanding, had difficulty connecting during the two press conferences under study. This may have been one of the reasons why Pos changed her assessment of “Mrs. Roosevelt” from a sympathetic and “natural” First Lady engaged with her female reporters in a motherly manner, as will be explained later on, to “an unsympathetic business woman” when on tour in Europe in 1950. Below I will first sketch Pos’ accounts of her personal encounters with American Presidents, after which I will focus on her report of Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conference.

3. A first press conference at the White House

14 On January 11, 1952, attending a press conference held by President Truman, Mary Pos carried in her purse a silver tea spoon decorated with a Dutch Windmill. She intended to present the spoon to the President, but ended up handing it to the President’s wife. Four years later she admitted to the chief editor of De Spiegel, a journal in which she regularly published as a freelance journalist, that she had originally wished to present it to the President to show her admiration for the tactful and humorous way in which he had always handled delicate questions from journalists.xii Fifteen years earlier, meeting with the Roosevelts in Washington, she had likewise been greatly impressed with the skillful way in which the two managed interviews and press conferences. It

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spoke to her personal and professional interest in issues of self-presentation, and her fascination for matters such as interpersonal negotiations and communication.

15 The first meeting between Mary Pos and Eleanor Roosevelt is preceded and framed by Pos’ encounter with the President on December 21, 1937 at a White House press conference. She relates of that visit in published work, in lectures held in the Netherlands, and in typed-up, personal notes. In the latter we mostly read of her journey to Washington. She stresses the somber weather, the grey and black industrial surroundings at Newark airport, and the rudeness and indecency of the people she encounters: an airlines “clerk,” two taxi drivers, and a fellow passenger. Flying into Washington, however, did give her pleasure: “white and in the full sun [I noticed] Washington. Again the zeppelin was flying high and gleaming in the early morning above the city. The white column, the white buildings, the Lincoln monument, the river below us, the smooth grounds of the airport.”xiii Pos’ technique of zooming in is something she would also apply when reporting on her visit to Eleanor Roosevelt the next day, as we will see below.

16 From her personal notes we also learn that Pos subsequently traveled by foot from her hotel, the Evangeline Home for Girls owned by Washington’s Salvation Army, to the White House. She was accompanied by Michael J. McDermott, Chief of the Division of Current Information of the State Department, who instructed her not to take notes which, she wrote later, does not make sense as all reporters present are taking notes. When they entered the hall, Pos found it filled with a multitude of reporters, only three of which were women, whom she describes as “unattractive and dressed in bad taste.” Like the male journalists, the three seemed to call out to the President in loud voices.xiv

17 At odds with her expectations, Pos explains in her personal notes, she was not allowed to enter the “special door” for the foreign press but had to find her way to the press room with all the other reporters. It also seems that she was not able to come up closely to the President’s desk, as she notes that “up front” two women, “both unattractive creatures,” were thrusting themselves forward. In her published account, however, she has altered this awkward situation and states that upon arrival of the President, when all reporters rushed to the door that would open to the President’s study, she and McDermott were fortunately allowed to enter another door: “[…] otherwise I would never have been able to see even a glimpse of President Roosevelt, as the others were crowding into the President’s desk. Now I was offered a seat on the first row.”xv This privileged position gave her ample opportunity to study the President’s body language and allowed her to conclude that “a sign that this man did not take life as lightly as his cheerful answers would suspect were the nervous twitches between his eyes and the tired fluttering of the eyelids.”xvi Assuming Pos’ personal notes are correct, her fabricated and published version may have been a way for Pos to create a public persona that occupied a special place during presidential press conferences.

18 But in her personal account as well she acknowledges how “exceptionally interesting” it is, and how “delighted” she is about being present. Among the group of reporters in attendance she noted a Dutch foreign correspondent, a certain Scheltema who was a correspondent of a Rotterdam-based newspaper, who had finally, after nine years, been allowed to meet with Roosevelt..xvii This prompts her to conclude that she should be contented with what she has already achieved.

19 Setting herself off against the Dutch foreign correspondent, Pos does the same with the few female reporters who were present. Her irritation with the two women

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reporters who thrusted themselves up front to ask questions. is Pos’ second reference to female colleagues whom she may have considered rivals. Pos’ irritation may have been partially triggered by the conditions in which the President received Pos and her colleagues: the room, according to Pos, was cramped and stiflingly warm. That Pos describes the atmosphere of the meeting as extraordinarily pleasant, casual, and informal seems largely to be the result of the President’s appearance and attitude: he looked “enormously natural,” very kind and healthy, “much kinder than I have ever seen him portrayed,” with a “fine mouth” that laughs continuously.xviii He answered the reporters’ questions skillfully, in a quick, frank and witty manner.xix

20 At the end of the meetingPos was granted some time alone with the President for reasons she does not explicate. Sitting down next to him, it seems that she had already adopted the jolly discourse of the male-dominated press conference. First of all, presenting herself as a collector of signed photo portraits and requesting one of the President, she informed him that she would like a “genuine” signature, not one copied by one of his officers. This teasing remark, Pos reports in her book, is followed by the President’s hearty laugh.xxSecondly, when Roosevelt “proudly” informed Pos that his ancestors were from Zeeland and that at heart he still felt like a Dutchman although his last visit was in 1910, Pos jovially proposed a little vacation without his yacht but with the big steamer New Amsterdam, which would take him to old Amsterdam. The otherwise level-headed Dutch would instantly transform into exuberant characters and welcome him with open arms. Encouraged by Roosevelt’s smiling face, Pos then added a third joke: she mischievously inquired whether the two could perhaps already set a date so that she could forewarn her countrymen and –women to prepare for the visit.xxi

21 Noteworthy here is that Pos bonded with Roosevelt in several ways. First of all, they shared a history and national heritage, and talked about “all that is Dutch in the country, about the great and impressive achievements of the Dutch.”xxii Secondly, both of them were involved in the exchange of objects and thus materially connecting two worlds, even on a micro-level: the President informed Pos of the 1664 Dutch family Bible he had inherited and which had been used when he declared the presidential oath; Pos collected photos of FDR and other distinguished Americans which she took home to exhibit. Thirdly, the two connected in terms of the (gendered) professional discourse they shared, as Pos shows she was capable of adapting to the talk of her colleagues and the President.

22 It is difficult to overstate the personal impact of her rendezvous with Roosevelt. When on Friday April 13, 1945, she received the news of Roosevelt’s death, she wrote in her diary, in some state of shock and in a peculiar logical twist, “But you must keep calm, Mary, just be reminded of how calm Roosevelt himself would cope with such a message and would not let this knock him over. […] So I behaved calmly and told my family and others.”xxiii Mary Pos honored FDR in the lectures she presented in the following years. One newspaper report of such a lecture quoted Pos as pointing out the greatness of Roosevelt’s character, his brilliance, his idealism and altruism, and his unwavering Christian faith.xxiv She also emphasized the benefits of transatlantic connections, and the significance of connecting “the virtues of the American people” to “the virtues of the Dutch.”xxv It is regrettable, according to Pos, that firstly “global tensions” and then “the war” made it impossible for the President to follow up on his wish to visit the Netherlands, and thus substantiate the transatlantic link once more. “We” should stop just living for ourselves and forget about our own “I,” proclaimed

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Mary Pos.xxvi This declaration fits well with Pos’ many platitudes and naïve sermons, but also makes plain once again her ambitions of becoming an appreciated cultural ambassador and her belief in the building of intercultural connections, which her father and uncle, both misisonaries, had ingrained in her. In that sense Pos resembled Elenor Roosevelt who from very early on expressed her commitment to intercultural understanding, as in her My Day columns and during her press conferences.xxvii

4. Women-only press meetings

23 It is noteworthy that Pos, in her report of FDR’s press conference, singles out the three female correspondents and particularly comments on their appearance. Reporting on her attendance of one of the women-only weekly press conferences organized by Eleanor Roosevelt and her staff on the next day, December 22, 1937, she refers not only to the way in which the First Lady is dressed, but also – and not less than three times – to the looks of the other female reporters. Eleanor Roosevelt, Maurine Beasley asserts, believed that “[w]omen needed to be ornamental. She saw nothing degrading in using a mild form of sex appeal to promote a meritorious cause.” Beasley points out that Roosevelt’s column is brimming with comments on her own looks.xxviii In her column of December 22, 1937, she assesses Mary Pos as an “attractive young wom[an].”xxix We do not know for certain what Pos wore, but it seems very plausible that she was dressed in the new outfit that on the previous day she described in a letter to her Swiss lover, Walter. She discussed the purchase of a very nice, dark brown coat, which she thought made her very young, as well as a matching little velvet hat or turban, “sehr schön mit einen dunkelbraunen voile.”xxx Read in combination with her negative portrayal of the looks of her fellow reporters, Pos’ private display of femininity seems to set her off against the others, who were considered as possible rivals.xxxi

24 Pos and Roosevelt’s references to appearance do not automatically mean that the press conferences held by the First Lady were shallow and merely social gatherings to dress up for and where form was more important than contents. Indeed, various scholars have pointed out that whereas the contemporary press, dominated by men, labelled the women’s conferences as trivial events, they were in fact focused on political issues relating to both women and legislation, as well as social issues and personal life at the White House.xxxii The emphasis on appearance referred to above, however, may have been related to another issue: at a time when female reporters were largely underrepresented and oftentimes belittled in the world of journalism, many women reporters of the 1930s and 1940s may have felt the need and/or delight to ingeniously combine their professionalism and femininity.xxxiiiAccording to Linda Lumsden, “Contradicting gender messages forced women reporters to become somewhat schizophrenic […]” as they studied journalism texts books that “nurtured the alleged dichotomy between femininity and journalistic skills.”xxxiv Referring to women war correspondents, Maurine Beasley claims that a number of these women “took pleasure in maintaining their feminine identity while at the same time they displayed their professional competence.” She offers as example Margaret Bourke- White, photojournalist for Life magazine, who seemed to have been “highly particular about combining her professionalism with her femininity and meticulous in the attention she paid to her appearance.”xxxv

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25 Eleanor Roosevelt herself was very much aware of the weak position of women in the professional field of journalism. In fact, it was part of her reason for organizing the women-only press conferences starting immediately after the election of her husband in March 1933. Indeed, Beasley lists the advancement of the position of American women—women in general and female reporters particularly—as one of the reasons for holding the conferences. The other two were helping establish Eleanor Roosevelt’s status as First Lady, and supporting her husband’s New Deal.xxxvi Roosevelt saw a major role for female newspaper reporters, who could “lead […] the women in the country to form a general attitude of mind and thought.” They had to be “interpreters to the women of the country as to what goes on politically in the legislative national life, and also what the social and personal life is at the White House.”xxxvii Offered this new task, the female reporters attending the conferences gained confidence and recognition.xxxviii

26 Between March 1933 and April 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt held 348 women’s only press conferences. At the time when Pos attended, in the 1930s, an average number of 20 to 30 regular reporters were present.xxxix Apart from these regulars, Roosevelt invited women writers (Mary Pos among them), notables, performers and artists to the conferences, as well as “woman leaders” such as Mary Anderson, head of the Children’s Bureau, Madame Chiang Kaishek, and Dutch Queen Wilhelmina.xl Beasley, who has extensively studied the women’s press conferences, concludes that “In retrospect, the significance of the press conferences lies more, perhaps, in what they conveyed in general regarding women’s position in society than in their specific content.”xli In addition, I would say, they also reflected some of the social complexities of women reporters’ work. Although Roosevelt never let her reporters scoop each other, Black refers to “in-house rivalry between reporters assigned to cover hard news and those assigned to the women’s pages.”xlii For the period 1920-1940 Linda Lumsden has shown that women journalists emphasized “succeeding on individual merit,” and were involved in an “ardent individualism that carried women to reporting’s top echelons.”xliii This attitude may have played a role during Roosevelt’s press conferences, although Beasley also points out the reporters’ camaraderie. Roosevelt herself, reflecting on the press conferences in her autobiography This I Remember, refers to the reporters’ “trick questions” and concludes that “Every press conference was a battle of wits, and at times it was not easy for me, or for them, I imagine.”xliv Mary Pos also refers to the cunning questions posed by the press women convening at the White House.

5. Zooming in on the First Lady

27 Pos’ coverage of her visit to Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conference on December 22, 1937, in Ik zag Amerika (1940), is almost cinematic. She first zooms in on the White House’s surrounding area and the lovely weather, and then on the building itself, glistening in the morning sun: “White as snow it lays in the midst of green grass plots and old black trees.”xlv With the other women of the press she first traversed the terrace with its stately columns, and then entered the great hall, where she seems to have been overwhelmed by the way in which the faces of the “negro servants” contrasted with the whiteness and lighting of the hall. Then, passing time in the waiting room, she considered the number of colleagues present, and felt relieved to see a smaller number of reporters than at FDR’s press conference. Still, the women reporters crowded by the door in order to be able to “conquer” a good spot. Pos decided this was not

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“sympathetic,” as the women blocked the way for those coming in late. Guards needed to solve the situation.xlvi

28 Later on, all women rushed upstairs, through the opened cast-iron gates; at that point, Pos strained with them, but was finally unable to keep up, and decided that “this performance under the eyes of the servants [was] foolish.”xlvii Whereas previously the black servants had stood out in the brightness of the hall, here not color but an improper gendered behavior seemed to be conspicuous. Occupying a marginal position in that grand governmental space, the Dutch journalist may not have been able to identify with the servants, but she felt at least ashamed on their behalf. Her feelings of triumph over the American press women resound when she proudly states that a reserved seat was available for her on the first row, near the door through which Eleanor Roosevelt would enter: “she would sit right across from me, on the low sofa.”xlviii Pos spent her time waiting by studying paintings of sailing ships, and a portrait of the President, as well as a piano, book case, and open fire.xlix Pos’ detailed portrayal of the room must have had the effect of suspension on at least some of her Dutch readers. With her, they are awaiting Pos’ encounter with the American First Lady.

29 Then, without warning, Pos—and implicitly her readers—were caught unawares when, “Suddenly, swift as the wind,” Mrs. Roosevelt entered the room. She was in horse-riding costume, and a white silken band held her “grey wavy hair” together.l This is echoed in the photograph that accompanies Pos’ article in the Dutch national newspaper De Telegraaf, published a few months after her return to the Netherlands.li The picture, taken from a position much higher than Roosevelt and her horse, appears to have been shot by Pos herself, as if from a window in the waiting area. Pos portrays Roosevelt as tall, slender, and flexible, and with a sportive and natural look. Her naturalness is partially a result of a lack of make-up (in contrast to all reporters present), and partially enhanced by “the smell of the park” which she has brought along from her early horse-riding. Pos concludes by stating that Roosevelt is not attractive, but has a friendly and lively face.lii

30 Mary Pos admired Roosevelt and her performance instantly and was surprised by the informal dynamics of the conference. She noted the attention the President’s wife offered each individual reporter: upon entering the room, she “moves freely, and not in a forced way at all, between reporters and chairs to make sure she had shaken hands with everyone.”liii During the session, Pos also perceived Roosevelt’s personal and “almost jaunty” style: she talked freely, made jokes, laughed out loud, and came across as “natural” and cheerful. Pos immediately made a link with Dutch women: “This woman is the mother of six children, and she is even a grandmother. She is not at all like Dutch grandmothers.”liv Her feelings of surprise and awe also speak from yet another comparison with Holland: Dutch reporters, Pos knows, would never submit a First Lady to such personal questions. Discussing the American boycott of Japanese goods, they posed a “cunning” follow-up question that actually combined the political and personal, namely whether Roosevelt was planning to buy new silk stockings soon. Mrs. Roosevelt, however, was quick-witted to understand the question straightaway, laughed out loud, and stated that she did not need to buy them as she had all she needed.lv

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5.1. Women at work and women in the world

31 The combination of the political and the personal also stands out from one of the three questions Mary Pos posed during the press conference, i.e. whether married women should be allowed to work. Pos must have been aware of Roosevelt’s adamant stance vis-à-vis married women working. The latter even used her news conferences as a channel to declare wives’ rights to work.lvi On a personal level it seems quite expected that Pos selected the above question about married women’s right to work. She had been engaged to a Dutch high-school teacher since 1929, but the two had so far been unable to get married, as Dutch social norms of the time required the husband to be capable of earning a living for the upcoming new family. The issue was eventually one of the reasons why the engagement came to an end after 10 years.lvii

32 Pos’ unpublished notes typed up after the interview state that Roosevelt did not fully understand her question “about the ways in which she could lecture so much and accomplish so much work.”lviii Remarkably, her published account does not mention this at all. But Pos repeated the question during an exclusivesession following the press conference, to which a Finnish correspondent and Pos were invited. This special session enabled her to make notes that testify to the degree of diplomacy and accuracy Roosevelt used with European reporters: “About married women who work, yes, [Roosevelt] gave much money to the poor, was able to do this because husband earned money, many marriages would be impossible if woman would not earn money, as Mother [of young children, Roosevelt had] given herself entirely to mothering.”lix

33 In her book Ik zag Amerika Pos eventually pieces together Roosevelt’s answer by referring to the economic conditions that make married women’s entrance into the labor market necessary, and to the unnatural conditions and relations that would arise when a young wife is not allowed to keep her paid position in order to help earn a living for the family. She concludes her discussion of the issue by stating that personally Roosevelt felt delighted with the possibilities to lecture and publish, and financially assisted others with the money earned. Although “Mrs. Roosevelt” originated from a rich family, she had always been interested in the less fortunate, Pos explains, and she had often been distressed by the unjustifiable differences between immense richness and deep poverty. We see here that the personal question stated above has led to a somewhat moralizing lecture in which we can no longer differentiate between Roosevelt’s and Pos’ ideas. It therefore suggests Pos’ partial identification with the First Lady.

34 Mary Pos also seems to equate Roosevelt with the American woman in general. In one of her many lectures for the Dutch in the late 1940s, she introduced American women as embodiments of modernity. She noted that the hundreds of thousands of married American women, who had since the beginning of the “horrid depression” been forced to work outside of the home, were no drudges or victims. Pos depicted them as admirable and vital: they were very active and industrious, informed and intelligent, they knew how to tackle problems and how to adapt, and were broad- minded and very interested in life in general and in the lives of others. The American woman’s “position in life is completely equal to that of a man,” concluded Pos.lx In both meetings and conversations men attentively listened to women, and valued their contributions. Pos added she was impressed with the institution of the American women’s club, as it enabled and stimulated American women to study, reflect on and

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discuss political, economic and social issues. Many women in these clubs, Pos explicated, were politically active, and in unity they were strong.lxi Pos then turned to the roles for Dutch women, who are “economically far better off” than American women and whose family life is much more “comfortable and peaceful,” and “less restless and hurried” than that of Americans. The “great mission of every woman, and especially the privileged Dutch women [is to] acknowledge the responsibility to help out others who are needy.”lxii

35 This “mission” is also the focus of a second question that Mary Pos was allowed to ask at the December 1937 press conference: could European women possibly contribute to peace in Europe? Pos reiterates this question in Ik zag Amerika, following which we read that the women in Europe have great geographical advantages, as they only need to “find” and “understand” other women across borders and reach out to them. The more they will learn about each other’s history, culture and national character, the more they will be able to understand each other’s problems. In addition, they also have to pray for each other and for peace. Noteworthy here is that it is impossible to ascertain whether this recommendation comes from Pos or the First Lady. No quotation marks are used.

36 In other reports of the press conference it is likewise difficult to distinguish between Roosevelt’s and Pos’ voice because Pos is inconsistent in her use of quotation marks, as is shown in the quotes below.

37 Naturally there were many things in America that those in Europe did not understand, but one should not attempt to look through European spectacles. Emil Ludwig had done exactly that! His book on the President [Roosevelt: Studie über Glück und Macht, 1938] had been written by someone who had been transfixed in the European tradition.

38 “Whoever wishes to understand America should not limit themselves to New-York [sic] and Washington, but should also venture into the Mid-West and Far West and certainly also into the South, where the results of slavery are still noticeable in the problem of the colored population, fully affecting southern life, pushing down the living standard.”lxiii

39 The use of the exclamation mark, and the “should not” and “should,” suggests that this is not merely a response provided at a press conference, but an instruction in itself. Both Pos and Roosevelt appeared to teach their audience while communicating with their audiences. Indeed, Maurine Beasley claims in her book on Roosevelt’s press conferences that Roosevelt performed as an instructor who informed the journalists on teaching other women how to read the newspaper” (June 15, 1933) and use a salutary new product, dried skim milk (May 7, 1935).lxiv Beasley further points out that Roosevelt “used the conferences to lecture on women’s duties as citizens.”lxv In her biography, Allida Black even refers to Eleanor Roosevelt as conducting classes and “deliver[ing] a tutorial.”lxvi

40 Roosevelt’s instructions on newspaper reading closely relate to her belief that women’s role in politics is based on knowing how to gather information, as the following quote from a press meeting in 1933 shows:

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41 […] this is a time when women have a special task in watching national and international news. Every woman should have a knowledge of what is going on in economic conferences. It does affect the future amicable relations between the nations of the world. […] Very few women know how to read newspapers and they miss what could give a new point of view. […] One’s own prejudices and own ideas go into interpretation of public events. Women should train themselves to see both sides, then decide what they really think.lxvii

42 Will married women who work outside of the home and who know how to read the newspaper eventually rule the world? That concern was, more or less, the focus of Pos’ third question, posed during the personal session with Roosevelt following the press conference.

43 Ik zag Amerika offers a discussion of the issue, which apparently followed Pos’ query during the women’s rendezvous. Women all over the world are steadily becoming more knowledgeable and entering new fields: “Women in the East are waking up more and more and in countries such as Russia and America, worlds in themselves, women are increasingly taking hold of high-ranking positions, positions which fifty years earlier no one would have dreamt they would occupy.”lxviii There are no quotation marks in the text, so for the reader it is unclear whether this is Pos’ introduction of the topic to her readers or to the First Lady, or Roosevelt’s response. The exposé seems to be co- authored by Roosevelt and Pos, two women who are exactly representing the women referred to here. In that sense it is possible that Pos’ contemporaries read the exposé as a pep talk. But the latter is cut short when Pos paraphrases Roosevelt as saying that she does not believe

44 that women will ever overrule men. It is true that in some continents women are making immense progress; but the strengthening of one gender does not necessarily mean the weakening of the other. Both will have to work together in harmony and the understanding between the two must grow stronger.lxix

45 The question is also mentioned in Pos’ personal notes, where she points out that Roosevelt “extensively” answered her “question about strong women.” Here, however, the emphasis is more on strength than “harmony” and “understanding.” Roosevelt did not believe that we […] would enter an age of Amazons. Women were still making progress, albeit slowly, and were growing stronger, but that one sex became stronger did not necessitate the other to diminish in power. Both needed to become ever stronger. Something like this.lxx

46 The last sentence suggests that Pos attempts to translate Roosevelt’s monologue, but feels unsure about the argument. Roosevelt herself indicated that Pos had some trouble understanding her: in her column “My Day” she writes that the two foreign correspondents (who based on Pos’ reports must have been a Finnish journalist and herself) wished to depict the United States in a truthful way, but felt confused: “I think it must be a tremendously difficult thing to find yourself trying to grasp political and social situations at the present time with a somewhat limited knowledge of the country.”lxxiRoosevelt here expresses her empathy with the position of the foreign

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journalists. She does not mention any language barriers, but we know from personal sources that Pos felt insecure about her fluency in English.

47 Approximately ten years later, in a postwar lecture Pos held for her Dutch audience, she almost literally reiterated Roosevelt’s earlier recommendation that women and men work together in harmony and understanding resurfaces. Pos yet again seemed to mix her own text with that of the interviewee as she, reporting on her conversation with Roosevelt, offered a “passionate plea” for a “shoulder-to-shoulder and conjoint battle by both men and women,” to triumph over the injustices of the times and help the tens of thousands of victims struggling with the results of the war.lxxii Pos apparently employed Roosevelt’s words as a vehicle to both generate feelings of national solidarity and trigger the emancipation of Dutch women whose status, stated Pos, had been weakened and whose assistance was not employed effectively in the postwar reconstruction of the country: Dutch women had been systematically excluded from boards and committees, and had therefore not been able to help make decisions in the best interests of women. In conclusion, although we have no verbatim account of what Roosevelt communicated to Pos in December 1937, the Dutch journalist certainly drew on that meeting to convey to her Dutch postwar audience a strong message regarding the need for national cohesion and a strong position for women.

5.2 Rivalry

48 Pos’ personal notes typed up after Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conference reveal feelings of frustration and anxiety that do not speak from her published accounts. We surmise from the incomplete notes that during the plenary discussion on women’s emancipation Pos brought up Dutch women’s early procurement of the right to vote, because she was “unpleasantly surprised” by the voice of a Finnish reporter who made an objection and accused Pos of not telling the truth: Finnish women, the reporter claimed, were the first to obtain voting rights.lxxiii Pos felt intensely bothered by this journalist, who “thoroughly spoilt everything” for her. Wishing to exchange some ideas with Roosevelt during the press conference she ended up “not having Roosevelt for her alone.”lxxiv In addition, when Pos and the Finn stayed behind after the conference, “it was she who was asking all the questions.”lxxv

49 Pos portrays the woman as elegantly dressed in a typical red, with the same color for her nails. But she is also “skinny and not tall, very skinny her face.”lxxvi This description of the woman’s stylish looks is followed by the following assertion, in the original text in a mixture of Dutch and English,

50 It was a gorgeous and balmy day, and the warmth also made me dead-tired but how others do that I do not know, because she [the Finnish reporter] had a lunch appointment and after that a car ride and after that a cocktailappointent [sic] and after that dinner and after that dancing, real dancing etc.lxxvii

51 Complaining about her own condition of fatigue, Mary Pos here compares herself to the modern, energetic and socially successful Finnish woman, whose full schedule of upcoming social engagements even resembles the list of appointments which Roosevelt would typically go over at the beginning of a press conference. Still, Pos states in her

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notes that she does not consider her colleague to be a competitor, although “she was an enormous showoff who dared a lot and was very cunning.” She asked questions about labor, capital, and government that “a woman like Mrs. Roosevelt could impossibly answer. Impossibly.” Pos indicates having been impressed with the way in which Roosevelt took to answer, time and again, the Finnish reporter’s “daring questions.” However, the First Lady did not come up with anything “shockingly new” and she actually offered what anyone who is only a little informed about the American conditions already knew. This seems an implicit attempt on the part of Pos to weaken the Finnish reporter’s success as well as Roosevelt’s tendency to speak in platitudes.

52 Pos further attempted to intervene, introducing to Roosevelt the state of the Dutch labor unions, and asking her whether she thought that laborers should be organized. But Roosevelt only seemed to have briefly confirmed that, and Pos’ notes end with referring to the Finnish reporter once again, who after the session confided in Pos that Roosevelt “could not be caught articulating an irresponsible statement.” Pos appropriated this conclusion and states in her published account that Roosevelt never hesitated when giving her answers, but that no answer was careless.lxxviiiYears later, in the Summer of 1950, when Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Netherlands as one of the European countries that received Marshall Aid, Pos again appeared to feel frustrated with rival female reporters. Her report of the press conference held at the exclusive Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam is integrated in a one-page diary entry dated July 5, 1950, which refers to Roosevelt as “that unsympathetic business woman Roosevelt.”lxxix It is unclear exactly why Pos described Roosevelt in such strong terms, and what caused her change of heart, as she had formerly partially identified with her and her ideas. From the remainder of the diary entry we may infer at least that feelings of depression, and the way she is dealt with by her colleagues following the press conference, effected this labelling of the former First Lady. In addition, her negative judgment of Roosevelt may also be related to the latter’s unwillingness to respond to Pos’ demand for help to the Moluccan island of Ambon. The island had proclaimed its independent Republic of the South Moluccas a few months earlier, on April 25, 1950, and had thus rejected the 1945 proclamation of the centralized Republic of Indonesia.lxxx On 17 August 1950 the central state of Indonesia repressed the Moluccan rebellion, and reinstated its power on Ambon and other islands.

53 Mary Pos had visited the Dutch East Indies since the 1930s, and had published a couple of travel books based on those travels. She had also built a rather large network of friends and acquaintances in Indonesia. None of her published or non-published work, however, clarifies her stand on the Moluccan issue, nor her insistence in posing the question. Neither do we know whether she was aware of, and how she assessed, America’s role in the history of Indonesian independence. Nevertheless, Pos writes that during the press conference in Amsterdam she “dared” to ask Roosevelt whether she could possibly use her influence to generate support from the International Red Cross for Ambon. Pos’ action, she states in her diary, was not tolerated by her colleagues from the “Red and papal gang,” partially due to feelings of jealousy. She had therefore suffered “from folks I had never seen before” and also from the “papal Marijke Vetter,” a journalist of the Volkskrant, whom Pos describes as “small, fat, arrogant, and jealous.” Pos does not explicate what she means by “suffer from,” but we may perhaps infer that this included verbal abuse, gossip or giving dirty looks.lxxxi

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54 Her intervention at the press conference, she conveys, furthermore engendered an “unfair piece” in the Dutch weekly paper Vrij Nederland, fitting with the “lowest way” in which “bright red” had “oftentimes attacked her.” Here Pos probably refers to her affair with Het Parool, a formerly clandestine resistance newspaper, which after a study of Pos’ published reports on her trip to the Ostmark in the Summer of 1945 had inaccurately accused Pos of journalistic collaboration with the Nazis. The Parool issue, which motivated the Military Authority to forbid her to write, would affect her professional standing and seriously damage her career. Still, Pos was rehabilitated that same year, and in addition she was invited to travel to Switzerland to present lectures on the Dutch resistance movement. It was perhaps a jealous colleague who upon her return from her trip sent her an anonymous and hateful letter labeling her “the incorrect missionary.”lxxxii The “unfair piece” in Vrij Nederland referred to by Pos is one section in a front-page editorial called “In het vizier” [In sight].lxxxiii It declares the failure of both the reception held in honor of Mrs. Roosevelt, and the succeeding press conference. The ambiance had been somewhat cold, snobbish, and chaotic, and Roosevelt was “charming,” but her book signing session took too long, leaving no time for “Amsterdam” to become acquainted with her “life work.”lxxxiv In addition there had not been much time left for the press conference, which was not just attended by members of the press, but also by some lingering guests. Topping all of that was “Miss Mary Pos, who at times treads onto the slippery ice of journalism with her graceful little shoes.” The Dutch expression of treading onto slippery ice, meaning taking risks, is here rewritten with a gender-biased and belittling slant.

55 This patronizing and chauvinist tone continues in the remainder of the editorial. Pos had posed the “accusing” question why Mrs. Roosevelt had not personally taken action in the case of Ambon. With a smile Roosevelt had apologized, stating “Because that is not my job, do you see?” This is taken up by the (unnamed, but presumably male) editor of Vrij Nederland who concludes that “Miss Mary Pos” did not “see” this like all others present. This caused such a commotion against Pos after Roosevelt’s departure, the editor claims, that Pos also disappeared from the venue with a “quickness that did not match her self-confidence.”lxxxv The incident at the Amstel Hotel is covered by two more newspapers that, although not naming Pos explicitly, are mostly focused on the skills with which Roosevelt refuted Pos’ questions, and quote questions that differ from the ones in the Vrij Nederland editorial. An unnamed female reporter (“redactrice”) of De Tijd [The Time] likewise complained about the little time available for a thorough exchange of thoughts on complex issues such as Roosevelt’s chairwomanship for the UN commission on human rights. Then she states,

56 It was somewhat embarrassing that one of those present, a well-known female publicist, resolved to make use of this occasion to bring up our Dutch policies vis-à-vis Indonesia, and more or less demanded of the Commission of Human Rights to provide accountability. This offered the others present the opportunity to admire the power and the tact with which this disgraceful attack was refuted.lxxxvi

57 The Indonesian newspaper De Preangerbode refers to an anonymous journalist who asked an “inappropriate question” about the possible effect of the petitions signed for Ambon, which were submitted to the UNO. Roosevelt being “an extremely intelligent woman” and a “natural diplomat,” however, could not be lured into impulsive

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answers.lxxxvii She merely stated that these petitions would be shared with the respective governments. The newspaper does not only praise Roosevelt for being very tactful, for weighing each question scrupulously, and repeating it in the correct context, but also for being knowledgeable about the existence of the island and its current situation. The account then criticizes the “journalist” in question for pressing for an answer: “’Could you not employ your personal influence at the support of millions of people?’ Mrs. Roosevelt briefly smiled, charmingly and humbly, upon which she merely stated: “In the United Nations I have little personal influence’.”lxxxviii

58 The account does not name the mischievous “journalist”. Noteworthy, however, is that on the very same page, in a next column, Mary Pos is explicitly pointed out as having created another, but very different, scene. “Do you still remember Mary Pos? As a journalist she repeatedly visited, toured, and reported of Indonesia.” Recently, the column reports, she was summoned in court for parking in a pedestrian zone. When the judge resolved the case by offering either a small fine or two days in prison, Pos stated that for her it was easy to decide: being in jail would provide her with a splendid opportunity to write an account of incarcerated life. In the midst of great merriment she left the courtroom.lxxxix

6. Conclusion

59 The Dutch writer Mary Pos, a self-proclaimed first female travel journalist, was one among a group of American and European female journalists who in the 1930s and 1940s found its way into the male bastion of journalism. Many gatekeepers played a role in this process, for instance by offering to be interviewed, acting as intermediators, writing positive reviews of their work, and functioning as role models and sources of inspiration. Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt had such an impact on Mary Pos. They allowed her to attend their press conferences and had personal sessions with her. Their work and their lives inspired the once small-town Dutch journalist, and offered examples of the public persona in which Pos could mirror herself.

60 Whereas at least according to her own travel narratives Pos was able to bond with FDR in terms of jovial conversation and shared ethnic/national background, this was not so with Eleanor Roosevelt. Although Pos’ published work suggests that they fully agreed on issues such as women’s roles and intercultural understanding—indeed in Pos’ Ik zag Amerika the two women seem to speak as one—her personal accounts show that they at times had trouble understanding each other. That is no wonder, of course. Pos and Roosevelt came from very different national and cultural contexts, and their professions, status, and personalities were poles apart.

61 Pos changed her original positive assessment of Roosevelt into a rather unfavorable one. In addition, she seems to have felt alienated and marginalized among the self-assured, ambitious and modern women she met during press conferences organized by or for the Roosevelts. This was partially caused by the competitive attitude of her colleagues and intercultural differences, but also perhaps by her own provincial and orthodox religious background, her somewhat naïve and stubborn stance, as well as her lack of tact and inadequate knowledge of world politics.

62 Still we could say that in her lecturing and travel writing Pos, very much like Eleanor Roosevelt, challenged existing gender expectations and stretched the boundaries of her own gendered maneuvering space. Both women had to negotiate

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with various discourses of femininity available to them at the time, with biases and expectations. Both supported a resilient role for women in making connections with men, and between countries and cultures. Although Roosevelt operated on a much more global and political level, and with an entirely different set of tools and means, and although she had a far greater and much more civic and diplomatic reach than Pos, both women questioned and affected ideas of national and gender identity among those who made up their audience.

NOTES i. Het Dagblad: Uitgave van de Nederlandsche Dagbladpers te Batavia 4:50, 30 November 1948, 2. This newspaper was published in the Dutch East Indies. ii. Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 167. The occasion was the UN General Assembly’s passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December, 1948. Two years later, Roosevelt would be introduced to the Dutch as “the First Woman of a world-in-the-making,” see “In het vizier: Ontvangst [In sight: Reception],” Vrij Nederland: Onafhankelijk weekblad, 10:43, 24 June, 1950, 1. iii. See, for instance, “‘Ik zag Amerika’: Babbeltjes van mej. Mary Pos” [I saw America: Babbling of Miss Mary Pos] in De Tijd, 4 December 1940, 3; and “Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” De Vrije Pers Dordrecht, 1 February, 1946. iv. Mimi Schippers, “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony,” Theory and Society 36 (2007): 93-94. v. Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (2nd ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 184– 185. vi. Babs Boter and Suzanne M. Sinke, “Adjusting and Fulfilling Masculine Roles: The Epistolary Persona in Dutch Transatlantic Letters,” in Marcelo Borges and Sonia Cancian, eds., The History of the Family, Special Issue on “Migrant Correspondence” (forthcoming 2016). vii. Maurine H. Beasley, ed., The White House Press Conferences of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York & London: Garland, 1983), x. viii. Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 85, 100-101. ix. “[…] she occasionally lit up a cigarette herself just to make her strike against the double standard,” Betty Boyd Caroli, First Ladies: From Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) (revised and updated edition), 204. “At a time when most Americans still thought flying too dangerous to try, Eleanor Roosevelt delighted in leading the way. She was photographed alongside planes and interviewed inside, doing more for the aviation industry, it was sometimes said, than anyone since Charles Lindbergh,” Caroli, First Ladies, 200. Mary Pos’ travels were oftentimes sponsored by the KLM. Many photo portraits of Pos show her posing in front of airplanes, as is the case for Roosevelt. x. J. William T. Youngs, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 176; Caroli, First Ladies, 193. xi. Biographer Maurine Beasley’s observation that Roosevelt “Involv[ed] herself in never-ending pursuits [that] enabled her to ward off attacks of depression to which she was subject throughout

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her life” (Transformative, 87) could very well apply to Pos. “Persona” here refers to Mineke Bosch’ work on the performance of public identity. She has theorized this in “Persona en de performance van identiteit: Parallelle ontwikkelingen in de nieuwe biografische geschiedschrijving van gender en van wetenschap,” Tijdschrift voor biografie (Fall 2012) 1:3, 10-21. xii. Mary Pos, letter 23 June, 1956, Box 5, Folder 36, Correspondence related to publications 1940-1956, n.d., Collection 529, Mary Pos Papers, Historical Documentation Centre for Dutch Protestantism (1800 to the present day), Free University Amsterdam. Hereafter “Mary Pos Papers, HDC.” xiii. Mary Pos, “Dinsdag, 21 Dec. 1937,” Diaries 1936-1938, Box 6, Folder 43, Mary Pos Papers, HDC. xiv. Mary Pos, “Pers conferentie President Roosevelt, 21 Dec. 1937,” Diaries 1936-1938, Folder 43, Box 6, Mary Pos Papers, HDC; Pos, Ik zag, 221. xv. Pos, Ik zag, 221. xvi. Pos, Ik zag, 222. xvii. Pos refers tot he newspaper as “Nw. rotterdammer,” but she may have wished to refer to the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad. Mary Pos, “Pers conferentie President Roosevelt, 21 Dec. 1937,” Diaries 1936-1938, Folder 43, Box 6, Mary Pos Papers, HDC xviii. Ibid. xix. Pos’ rendezvous with the President will resonate in her postwar lectures. One newspaper report of a lecture quotes Pos as pointing out the greatness of Roosevelt’s character, his brilliance, his idealism and altruism, and his unwavering Christian faith, “Amerika en President Roosevelt: een onvergetelijke avond”, review of lecture by Mary Pos, Ons Noorden, 13 March, 1946,. Folder 57, Box 8. xx. The signed photo portrait will later be included in an photo in which Pos poses next to a wall in her Dutch home covered with photo portraits, pointing at the photo of FDR. See image 1. “Vijf Werelddelen dragen haar voetstap: In een huis vol herinneringen woont Nederlands meest bereisde vrouw [Five continents hold her foot step: In a home filled with memories lives Mary Pos, the most travelled woman of the Netherlands],” n.d., n.p., Box 64, Interviews with Mary Pos, Typescripts and Interviews 1940-1941, 1949, 1963, n.d., Mary Pos Papers, HDC. xxi. Pos, Ik zag, 222. xxii. Ibid. xxiii. Mary Pos, diary entry Friday 13 April, 1945, “Roosevelt dood [Roosevelt dead],” Folder 45, Diaries 1945-1952, Box 6, Mary Pos Papers, HDC. xxiv. “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” De Waarheid Dordrecht 30 January, 1946; “Amerika en President Roosevelt: Een onvergetelijke avond [America and President Roosevelt: An Unforgettable Evening],” Folder 57, Box 8 Reviews Ik zag Amerika; “Mary Pos sprak over Amerika en Roosevelt” [Mary Pos spoke about America and Roosevelt],” typed manuscript for Dordtsch Dagblad 30 January, 1946, Folder 51, Mary Pos Papers, HDC. xxv. “Amerika en President Roosevelt.” xxvi. “Mary Pos sprak over Amerika.” xxvii. For an early example of Roosevelt’s discussion of the issue of intercultural understanding, see My Day, 25 November, 1939. https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/myday/ displaydoc.cfm?_y=1939&_f=md055433 xxviii. Beasley, Public Quest,117. xxix. https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1937&_f=md054831 xxx. Mary Pos, letter to Walter, Tuesday 21 December, 1937, Washington, Folder 10, Box 1, Correspondence, Mary Pos Papers, HDC. xxxi. Schippers, “Recovering,” 91. xxxii. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Introduction,” Eleanor Roosevelt: Vol II The Defining Years, 1933-1938 (New York: Penguin, 2000); Beasley, White House Press Conferences, 1, 3-4; Beasley, Transformative,

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97; Allida M. Black, Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Colombia University Press, 1996), 25. xxxiii. In 1930, Mirjam Elias shows, only 38 of the 600 members of the Dutch circle of professional journalists (NJK) was female; the separate Roman Catholic organization counted three women amongst her 200 members, in Mirjam Elias, “Voor zover plaats aan de perstafel: Honderd jaar vechten om een plaats te veroveren,” Els Diekerkhof, Mirjam Elias, Marjan Sax eds., Voor zover plaats aan de perstafel: Vrouwen in de dagbladjournalistiek, vroeger en nu (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff 1986), 27. Elias also notes that, during the Depression years, many Dutch women reporters working for newspapers were requested to write on domestic and women’s issues (idem, 26). Writing on Dutch journalistic history, Frank van Vree points out that in 1940 Dutch dailies, who had on average 10 to 12 reporters working for them, hardly hired women. See Frank van Vree, “Beroep: journalist. Beeldvorming en professionalisering,” in: Jo Bardoel, Chris Vos, Frank van Vree, Huub Wijfjes, eds, Journalistieke cultuur in Nederland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 159. For the U.S., Lumsden has concluded on the marginal position of American female reporters between 1920 and 1940. See Linda Lumsden “‘You’re a Tough Guy, Mary—And a First-Rate Newspaperman’: Gender and Women Journalists in the 1920s and 1930s,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72:4 (Winter 1995): 913-921. xxxiv. Lumsden, “Tough Guy,” 914, 918. xxxv. Maurine Hoffman Beasley, “Women and Journalism in World War II: Discrimination and Progress,” American Journalism 12:3 (1995): 328. xxxvi. Maurine H. Beasley, “The Press Conference of Eleanor Roosevelt,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Corvallis, OR , August 6-9, 1983): 1. xxxvii. Idem, 7. xxxviii. Beasley, “The Press Conferences of Eleanor Roosevelt,” 1; Black quoted in Beasley, “The Press Conferences of Eleanor Roosevelt,” 4. xxxix. Beasley, The White House Press Conferences, 2. xl. Idem, x. xli. Idem, 2. xlii. Black, Casting, 25. xliii. Lumsden, “Tough Guy,” 913, 917. This also holds for the few Dutch female journalists who were on the dailies’ payroll: during the 1930s they had no time for collective feminist actions, and did not see any point in it: “each struggled for herself” (Elias, “Voor zover plaats,” 25). xliv. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 103. xlv. Pos, Ik zag, 224. xlvi. Idem, 224. xlvii. Ann Cootrell Free, one of the regulars at the press conferences, recalls years later “how women reporters rushed up the White House stairs in an unseemly dash for front-rown seats in the second-floor Monroe Room” (Beasley, Transformative, 88). xlviii. Pos, Ik zag, 224. Pos does not make clear whether other (female) foreign correspondents were granted a seat up front. xlix. Other women writers who attended Eleanor Roosevelt’s conferences have similarly described the place, such as Sally Knapp, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1949), 97. l. Pos, Ik zag, 225. li. Mary Pos, “Bij de First Lady van de Ver. [sic] Staten: Een vrouw, die zichzelf durft te zijn” [with the First Lady of the U.S.: A woman who dares to be herself].” De Telegraaf 17 April, 1938, 7. lii. Pos on occasion described first ladies as simple, as is the case when she portrays Mrs. Elizabeth Verwoerd Schoonbee, the South African Prime Minister’s wife when she visits the couple in the 1960s. Mary Pos, Wie was Dr. Verwoerd? (Utrecht: De Banier, 1968), 125.

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liii. Mary Pos, “vervolg conferentie Mrs. Roosevelt [continued conference Mrs. Roosevelt],” Box 8, Folder 55, “Typescripts of articles and lectures 1948 and n.d.,” n.d., Mary Pos Papers, HDC. liv. Pos, Ik zag, 225. lv. Idem, 226. lvi. Caroli, First Ladies, 195. lvii. During those years Pos had several lovers, including the Swiss one mentioned above. . Pos was not a believer in sex radicalism, as for example defined by Mary K. Trigg in Feminism as Life’s Work: Four Modern American Women through Two World Wars (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2014). Pos’ diaries indicate that she felt rather guilty about her secret love affairs, but when reproached about her infidelity she would retort that she would negotiate with God later on. It seems that most of those who read Pos’ work and attended her lectures were not aware of her love life. Pos’ successful career appears not to have suffered from rumours about such private details. lviii. Mary Pos, “vervolg conferentie Mrs. Roosevelt.” lix. Ibid. lx. Mary Pos, undated and untitled lecture on “het leven van de vrouw in Amerika [woman’s life in America],” Folder 55, Box 8: Typescripts of articles and lectures, 1948; n.d. lxi. Pos Ik zag, 44-45; Pos, undated and untitled lecture. lxii. Pos, undated and untitled lecture. Pos does not mention here that at this time Dutch women still had to deal with shortages, low wages and other Reconstruction problems. lxiii. Pos, Ik zag, 227. lxiv. Beasley, The White House Press Conferences, 16, 25. lxv. Beasley, Transformative, 98. lxvi. Black, Casting, 25-26. In this sense the press conferences showed an interesting dynamics of reciprocity: whereas Roosevelt saw her job partially as educating her “press girls” (Beasley, The White House Press Conferences, 1), many reporters in their turn supported Roosevelt, and “some actively helped her avoid awkward situations by coming to her defense if questions seemed hostile. They saw her as naïve and in need of their protection,” Beasley, Transformative, 112, 88-89. lxvii. Beasley, The White House Press Conferences, 10. lxviii. Pos, Ik zag, 226. lxix. ibid. lxx. Emphasis added. “vervolg conferentie Mrs. Roosevelt” [continued conference Mrs. Roosevelt], Box 8, Folder 55, “Typescripts of articles and lectures 1948 and n.d.,” n.d., Mary Pos Papers, HDC. In none of her written work does Pos use the term “age of Amazons,” neither has she otherwise referred to a matriarchal or utopian place. I therefore tentatively assume this is Roosevelt’s phrase. lxxi. Roosevelt, Eleanor, “My Day,” 23 December 1937, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ displaydoc.cfm?Y=1937&f=md054831 lxxii. Pos, undated and untitled lecture. lxxiii. It is unclear which Finnish reporter was present, possibly Salama Simonen (later Hirvonen) (1910-2007), Anni Voipio (1906-1983) or Irma Helena Karvikko (1909-1994). Finnish women obtained the right to vote in 1906, the Dutch in 1919. lxxiv. Mary Pos, “vervolg conferentie Mrs. Roosevelt.” lxxv. Ibid. lxxvi. Ibid. lxxvii. Ibid.. lxxviii. Pos, Ik zag, 227. lxxix. Mary Pos, diary entry 5 July, 1950, Folder 45 (Diaries 1945-1952), Mary Pos Papers, HDC.

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lxxx. Pos was not the only one who drew attention to the Ambon case during Roosevelt’s visit. When the former First Lady called on the Zealand town of Oud Vossemeer on 24 June, 1950, where her late husband’s relatives received her enthusiastically, she was offered a bouquet of flowers by a delegation of Ambons. According to the local newspaper this was meant to point out the hazardous situation in Ambon. Eilandennieuws, http://www.oudvossemeer.com/ roos1.htm#.WBvsY8lAFf4 lxxxi. Ibid. lxxxii. https://ilibrariana.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/mary-pos-1904-1987-de-eerste- vrouwelijke-reisjournaliste/ lxxxiii. The discussed editorial or column titled “In het vizier” was possibly written by Johan Winkler (1898-1986), who was chief editor of Vrij Nederland starting in 1950. Henk van Randwijk, who was chief editor until Winkler took over in 1950, is most almost certainly not the author. He and Pos were both members of a Protestant Christian authors’ society (Christelijke Auteurskring), had jointly contributed to a collection of poetry (Verzeild bestek: Uitgave ter gelegenheid van het tweede lustrum van den christelijken auteurskring 1929-1939, 1939, red. G. Kamphuis et al. Kampen: Kok Publishers 1939), and had supported Pos when Het Parool accused her of collaboration with the Nazis in the Summer of 1945. lxxxiv. “In het vizier,” 1. lxxxv. Ibid. lxxxvi. De Tijd 106:3, 20 June, 1950, 3. lxxxvii. “Notities uit Nederland,” AID “De Preanger Bode,” Tuesday 4 July 1950, 1. Beasley discusses Eleanor Roosevelt’s media training, which included guidance in not being impulsive (1987, 42). lxxxviii. Ibid. lxxxix. Ibid.

ABSTRACTS

Mary Pos, self-proclaimed first female travel journalist from the Netherlands, met Eleanor Roosevelt first in 1937 during a women-only press conference at the White House, and then in 1950 when Roosevelt visited Amsterdam. This essay examines Pos’ published and unpublished reports of these encounters in order to see which professional and psychological forces were at work in the transnational and gendered arena of journalism in the late 1930s and early 1950s. Secondly, it will investigate potential correlations between Roosevelt’s and Pos’ ideas on women’s rights and intercultural understanding.

INDEX

Keywords: Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gender identity, journalism, Mary Pos, Netherlands, press conferences

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AUTHOR

BABS BOTER Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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Reframing Eleanor Roosevelt’s Influence in the 1930s Anti- Lynching Movement around a ‘New Philosophy of Government’

Melissa Cooper

1 Lynching and mob violence spiked at the beginning of the 1930s as racial tensions heightened during the Great Depression.i With growing public concern over the treatment of black Americans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt faced increasing domestic and international pressure to curtail mob violence. Even German Chancellor Adolf Hitler wrote to FDR in “protest against an uncivilized custom of broiling helpless victims by mobs,” and encouraged FDR to deplore mob violence. “I would consider it a great favor,” he wrote, “if you would use your own good and powerful office to better protect your defensless [sic] black people.”ii Similarly, leading American civil rights activists pressured the President for a federal solution to lynching throughout the decade. Recognising FDR’s willingness to push through legislation to aid national recovery in the wake of the economic crisis, prominent organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hoped that the President would also lend his powers to aid the campaign for civil rights.

2 With the belief that every citizen, regardless of race, was entitled to due process, the NAACP resolved that it was the role of the state to be a guarantor of justice. Between 1934 and 1935, the NAACP lobbied the White House for its support of the Costigan-Wagner federal anti-lynching bill. Named after Democratic Senators Edward P. Costigan of Colorado and Robert F. Wagner of New York, the bill outlined provisions for the federal government to prosecute participants in lynch mobs, public officials, and law enforcement officers who failed to protect prisoners in their custody against a mob. Ultimately the Costigan-Wagner bill, as well as all subsequent attempts to legislate against lynching, did not succeed; every bill fell victim to a filibuster in the Senate and no anti-lynching legislation was ever passed by Congress. It was because of these anticipated filibusters and southern objections to anti-lynching legislation during

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the 1930s that the NAACP pursued presidential endorsement of their bill so doggedly. The benefits of this endorsement would have been incredibly valuable to the NAACP as the presidential actions that could result in the passage of their anti-lynching bill were numerous.iii

3 In theory the liberalism espoused by the FDR aligned with the liberalism championed by the NAACP as both advocated greater state intervention to remedy social inequalities: the Association maintained that it was the federal government’s responsibility to protect black lives and the New Deal offered hope to reformers who sought greater federal intervention in problems such as poverty, poor housing, and unemployment. But in practice, FDR remained silent on the bills and did not accede to the NAACP’s demands. FDR even told NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White that he would not endorse the bill. In a 1934 meeting with Walter White at the White House, FDR was reported to have said, “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, [Southern Senators] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass.”iv Despite this, the NAACP continued to pressure FDR for his support in the hope that if the President recognised the need for such a bill he would endorse the Association’s efforts.

4 But as FDR’s White House staff tried to keep White and the controversial subject of anti-lynching from the president’s attention, the NAACP corresponded with Eleanor Roosevelt in order to develop an alternate route through which to reach the president. There is wide-sweeping academic agreement regarding Eleanor Roosevelt’s part in the 1930s anti-lynching movement. Her role as conduit between FDR and Walter White has been uncontended for decades and her influence has always been regarded as positive. Current interpretations of Mrs. Roosevelt’s influence in the anti-lynching movement can been split into two categories. The first concerns the impact it had on her own reputation and public image. Scholars such as Tamara K. Hareven and Mildred Abramowitz praised Mrs. Roosevelt for her work with black Americans. They suggested that she was ahead of her time, and in many cases single-handedly fought discrimination and promoted equality to Americans in such a way that they would not lose their American ideals.v Her willingness to engage with black social issues such as lynching therefore benefited her own image and is seen as evidence of her personal political views.

5 The second line of interpretation considers the effect of Mrs. Roosevelt’s actions on how black Americans perceived FDR. As James R. Kearney argued, when FDR was unable or unwilling to endorse anti-lynching legislation, Mrs. Roosevelt reassured the NAACP of the President’s interest, and placed the administration in opposition to lynching. Consequently, the First Lady assured black audiences that it was “not the intention of those at the top” that black Americans should be subject to discrimination.vi Nancy J. Weiss, and later Doris Kearns Goodwin argued that such comments, combined with Mrs. Roosevelt’s willingness to engage with black Americans, boosted the image of the administration. In Kearns Goodwin’s book No Ordinary Time, the author noted that “though the president had taken no specific initiatives in behalf of the Negroes, and had failed to support the anti-lynching campaign, he managed, with Eleanor’s substantial help, to convey to blacks that the administration was on their side.”vii Mrs. Roosevelt’s efforts therefore contributed to a shift in the black vote from Republican to Democrat during FDR’s second term elections as her rapport with the black electorate reflected well upon her husband.viii

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6 Because Mrs. Roosevelt acted as an unofficial representative of the administration, her communications need to be understood in light of FDR’s attitude towards lynching and the political position that he espoused. This will show how effectively Mrs. Roosevelt communicated the administration’s position to the NAACP and will highlight her intentions in the messages she conveyed. For this reason, this article first considers FDR’s anti-lynching rhetoric to establish FDR’s views on lynching. While scholars have argued that FDR shied away from lynching and the anti-lynching movement to maintain the support of southern senators for his economic policies, in fact, FDR spoke about lynching three times during this period.ix The rhetoric in these speeches challenges the traditional narrative surrounding FDR and lynching and suggests that FDR wanted to bring lynching under the umbrella of his federal crime control reforms, in doing so distancing himself from the NAACP’s anti-lynching bill.

7 This essay then reinterprets Eleanor Roosevelt’s role as conduit between FDR and the NAACP in light of FDR’s views. Accordingly, this study argues that through wishful thinking and enduring optimism, in her correspondence with Walter White, Eleanor Roosevelt placed the administration in support of the NAACP’s federal anti-lynching bill, a bill that FDR did not support. Consequently, this heightened tensions between FDR and the NAACP, who expected FDR to act on the Costigan-Wagner bill’s behalf. The intention in this article is to interrogate one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s early attempts as First Lady to intervene in national politics. Her role in this instance came at a time when she was unsure of her reach as First Lady. After only a year in the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt was uncertain of how far she could go to support controversial causes, such as anti-lynching and desegregation, without damaging FDR’s political aspirations. Mrs. Roosevelt’s communications with anti-lynching activists reveal that her own attempts at domestic diplomacy drew upon her previous political experience in order to build relations between black reformers and the administration in the 1930s. But what scholarship has neglected to-date, and this article seeks to reconcile, is how her actions impacted on relations between the NAACP and FDR, and how they affected the NAACP’s political aspirations.

FDR’s Stance on Lynching

8 When Eleanor Roosevelt acted as a conduit between the Walter White and FDR she often directly relayed messages between the two men, in doing so she shared the President’s thoughts on lynching. FDR’s stance on lynching and anti-lynching have typically been defined by his public silence on the NAACP’s federal anti-lynching bills. This silence has previously been explained and excused by FDR’s need to keep quiet on controversial subjects in order to push through his New Deal Economic reforms.x His aides argued that it would not be politically expedient for him to be associated with the anti-lynching movement and often purposefully kept anti-lynching from his attention. This essay does not contest that FDR distanced himself from the bills. It does, however, challenge accepted notions about FDR’s stance on lynching and anti-lynching.

9 While FDR avoided talking about specific anti-lynching bills, he confronted lynching throughout his presidency and spoke about it three times between 1933 and 1935. Surprisingly, scholars have neglected to analyse FDR’s anti-lynching rhetoric. But this is largely because FDR spoke rarely on civil rights issues and even more infrequently about lynching. These speeches, however, clearly outline FDR’s position

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on the subject, and reveal that just like his New Deal economic reforms that aimed to build on “the ruins of the past,” FDR framed lynching in the language of social and political disrepair, extending his ‘new philosophy of government’ to combat lynching.xi While FDR did not outline any specific policies on lynching during this time his speeches suggested he wished to expand the powers of the federal government to allow it to fight lynching. FDR’s practice of using rhetoric to frame future policy refers to what scholars have deemed ‘the rhetorical presidency,’ an essential feature of the ‘modern presidency.’xii As he did with his New Deal reforms, FDR also rhetorically framed lynching during his first term as president. When FDR appeared to take no action on lynching, instead he laid the foundations for future federal action by establishing his own anti-lynching rhetoric. This essay therefore first considers FDR’s anti-lynching rhetoric between 1933 and 1935—the period when he was seen to take the least action against lynching—to understand his position on lynching and how he legitimised potential future federal reforms against the practice.

10 In December 1933, FDR spoke for the first time about lynching in a speech to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC). FDR asserted that “we know that [lynching] is murder and a deliberate and definite disobedience of the Commandment, ‘Thou shall not kill.’”xiii While on the surface the President appeared to merely denounce mob violence, the broader context of the speech actually contained the seed of what would become FDR’s public strategy towards lynching during his time in office.xiv

11 Up until the 1930s lynching had been largely understood to be a consequence of cultural conflict with social and economic causes, yet during his speech FDR presented a simplified explanation for lynching.xv Just like America’s other social ills, he suggested, lynching was just another sign of a country in disrepair. First and foremost, lynching was a symptom of broken government: “The judicial function of government is the protection of the individual and of the community through quick and certain justice. That function in many places has fallen into a sad state of disrepair.”xvi FDR highlighted that lynching had flourished because the function of government had been inadequate. While lynching has been talked about in terms of the law for a century by social commentators, activists, and journalists—even the NAACP made these arguments to justify federal intervention—the federal government had never openly recognised this until this point.

12 FDR attributed the state of government to a detrimental cultural exchange that resulted in the corruption of those in “high places.” There was no longer a “great gulf that separated the privileged from the underprivileged,” he mused, and values of low culture had seeped into those of the ruling elite. But, FDR declared, “we do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch law,” and deplored law enforcement officers who took part in the practice. In order to fix the situation, “it must be part of our program to re-establish [the proper function of government].”xvii The solution to mob murder, according to FDR, was to tackle the root cause; lynching was a problem of government that could in turn be solved by the function of government. Since their founding the NAACP framed lynching in terms of race and the law, whereas FDR firmly framed lynching in terms of the law and only the law.xviii FDR had turned lynching into a colour-blind issue that had a colour-blind solution.

13 In no uncertain terms FDR situated his anti-lynching rhetoric firmly within the context of his nation-building New Deal policies that legitimised the expansion of

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federal powers in the national interest. Crime, just like economic crises, could be solved by strong government, he argued. FDR therefore called for “action by collective government… toward the ending of practices such as [lynching].”xix FDR brought the rhetoric of civil rights in line with his other policies byframing mob violence in the bureaucratic language of the New Deal. But this was a significant speech as it clearly marked FDR’s desire to end lynching and hinted at how it might be achieved.

14 Following FDR’s denouncement of lynching in his speech to the FCC the NAACP were convinced of FDR’s interest in seeing an end to lynching. Walter White even sent a telegram to the President expressing his gratitude. “Thank you a thousand times,” White exclaimed, “for your magnificent and unequivocal condemnation of lynching tonight. Twelve million negroes and many millions of whites applaud your every word.”xx The excitement of a presidential statement condemning lynching and advocating federal action meant that NAACP activists expected FDR to progress towards an endorsement of their federal anti-lynching bill. Consequently, White bombarded the White House with letters and telegrams imploring the President to speak out in favour of the Costigan-Wagner bill. Stephen Early, FDR’s Press Secretary commented that “[White’s] file of correspondence is voluminous,” as he relentlessly sought presidential endorsement.xxi While FDR’s first speech unequivocally denounced lynching it was vague on the details about how the federal government would quash the practice. Given the NAACP had a ready-made next step in the form of their anti- lynching bill, it made sense to them that FDR would go on to endorse their bill. While the NAACP advocated their Costigan-Wagner bill, the President would later suggest a solution that extended federal powers to make law enforcement more effective to tackle such crimes.

15 Proving that his comments on lynching in his speech to the FCC were not a one-off, the President reaffirmed his commitment to stop lynching a month later in his State of the Union Address on 3rd January 1934. FDR claimed that “crimes of organized banditry, cold-blooded shooting, lynching, and kidnapping have threatened our security.”xxii He called for their “immediate suppression” and asked the Congress to cooperate, to build “a new structure designed better to meet the present problems of modern civilization.”xxiii While lynching was not a primary focus of the State of the Union address, it’s inclusion in the speech indicated a firm desire for the eradication of lynching. The State of the Union address typically allows the president to recommend issues to Congress for their consideration. Given that in the rest of the speech FDR mentioned providing further relief for unemployment, regulating business, ending crimes that stemmed from prohibition, seeking repayment of debts owed by foreign nations, and taxation reform—all areas that he later took action on—his inclusion of lynching in this particular speech was a compelling indicator that anti-lynching was on the president’s agenda.

16 FDR’s anti-lynching rhetoric was inextricably bound with his rhetoric surrounding the ‘war on crime.’ The war on crime was an initiative that saw the federal government expand their role towards crime control to tackle crimes—broadly those mentioned by FDR in his State of the Union Address—which developed out of the prohibition era.xxiv In order to achieve this, under FDR’s advisement, the Department of Justice proposed a legislative program for tackling crime that Attorney General Homer Cummings deemed the ‘Twelve Point Program.’xxv The Program dealt with racketeering, the transportation of stolen property in interstate or foreign commerce, stealing from banks operating

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under the laws of the United States, fleeing the state to avoid prosecution or the giving of testimony, to name just a few.xxvi But b oth the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) pursued agendas that would increase federal authority to tackle a range of crimes during the first half of the 1930s. Whilst a provision to make lynching a federal crime was not explicitly a part of this program, FDR’s anti-lynching rhetoric suggested that federal powers could be expanded to tackle lynching in the same way. Historian Clare Potter offered an explanation for the absence of lynching on the programme by arguing that the war on crime “projected a vision of a moral and efficient state,” designed to rally white middle class voters around the New Deal and increased federal intervention without disturbing racial or class hierarchies.xxvii Open support for an anti-lynching measure was likely to lose FDR support. But in extending federal powers to fight crime more broadly, lynching could be tackled by the institutions of federal law enforcement.

17 Evidence of an alternate approach to tackling lynching came at an address given by FDR to a national conference on crime convened by Attorney General Homer Cummings between 10th and 13th December 1934.xxviii The conference met to discuss the future of federal crime control and was attended by six hundred representatives from national, state, and local institutions as well as independent organisations.xxix The conference appealed to its delegates for ideas on how to transform federal crime control and FDR gave an address to the delegates that escalated his anti-lynching rhetoric and revealed his own remedy for lawlessness. His address featured recurrent themes from his previous speeches showing that lynching would be included in a broader program for crime control.

18 FDR advocated a disimpassioned response to lynching. In doing so he attempted to divert public attention away from the crime itself towards more practical solutions. “At one moment popular resentment and anger may be roused by an outbreak of some particular form of crime such, for example, as widespread banditry; or at another moment, of appalling kidnappings; or at another, of widespread drug peddling; or at another, of horrifying lynchings.” But the American people, Roosevelt argued, “must realize the many implications of that word ‘crime.’ It is not enough that they become interested in one phase only.”xxx While FDR mentioned lynching, he only did so to reinforce his point that the crime could not be reduced by targeting the perpetrators alone. In doing so, he distanced himself from the NAACP’s Costigan-Wagner bill that focused specifically on lynching and bringing lynchers to justice.

19 With no specific crimes on the agenda, it was clear that this conference was about the function of federal government and how to make it a more effective machine for tackling crime. FDR asserted that the federal government was not prepared to deal with contemporary crime and lamented that criminals “have been better equipped and better organized than have the officials who are supposed to keep them in check.” According to the conference programme, the delegates considered “crime prevention, detection, apprehension, police administration, prosecution, court organization and administration.”xxxi There were significant problems with many of these phases of crime control that had been identified as contributing factors in lynchings. Some lynchings were advertised in advance and could have been prevented with a more efficient response from law enforcement. Additionally, law enforcement had trouble in apprehending lynchers; members of mobs frequently absconded, or were well known to have taken part in a mob but were still never apprehended. Few lynchers were ever

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prosecuted at local or state level either, indicating that there were several aspects of the criminal justice system and crime control practices which could be reformed to stop lynchings.

20 FDR made a direct statement regarding the increase of federal power, and more specifically, its capability to tackle crime. The President proclaimed that, “Widespread increase in capacity to substitute order for disorder is the remedy.”xxxii This was a distinct rhetorical escalation from a year earlier when he had only alluded to the idea of federal intervention. It reflected the nature of FDR’s rhetorical methods. He would float an idea and then gradually strengthen the rhetoric surrounding it until he could assert what he wanted, and felt that he would be supported.

21 It appeared then, that both the NAACP and FDR had the same goal: for the federal government to take responsibility for lynching. FDR’s methods for doing so, however, were profoundly dissimilar to the NAACP’s. Instead of endorsing the NAACP’s federal anti-lynching bill that sought to bring lynchers to justice—something that would have hurt his broader New Deal legislative agenda, FDR used strategic rhetoric in speeches to suggest that a better way to stop lynching was to expand the powers of federal law enforcement to make the state more effective at each phase of crime control, removing the need to make lynching a federal crime or for FDR to publically support the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign. In light of this, FDR’s lack of public endorsement for the Costigan-Wagner bill cannot merely be explained away as a lack of interest in the issue. The President did not simply ignore lynching because it was politically expedient to do so. Instead, FDR was active in shaping his own anti-lynching strategy, it was just not the one the NAACP advocated. But unless these speeches were read and interpreted side by side, the thrust of FDR’s arguments would have been easily missed. The speeches were spaced out over the period of a year and to make things even less clear, his speeches were never solely about lynching. His anti-lynching rhetoric was presented alongside other New Deal reforms—especially in his State of the Union speech and his address to the crime conference. Additionally, FDR’s words were just that—words. During his first term he offered no tangible policies that directly related to lynching. For this reason the NAACP could not understand why FDR would not speak out in favour of their bill given his denouncement of lynching and clear statements that the federal government should assume responsibility for the practice.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Opposition to Lynching

22 Bearing in mind that FDR did not firmly situate lynching within his crime control rhetoric until long after the Costigan-Wagner bill was introduced into Congress in January 1934, the NAACP pursued presidential endorsement for their anti-lynching bill during this time on the basis that FDR firmly denounced lynching in December 1933 and January 1934. But as Walter White’s biographer, Janken, noted that as the Costigan- Wagner bill progressed through Congress, “getting FDR’s attention, however, was becoming more difficult, as his staff who were more favourably disposed to southern politicians, tried to filter out African American perspectives from the President’s attention.”xxxiii White was forced to look for alternative channels through which to access the president. It was for this reason that White forged a relationship with the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to establish an informal route to the president.

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23 During the campaign for the Costigan-Wagner bill, whenever White required action from the White House, he would ask Eleanor Roosevelt to try to sway FDR around to his way of thinking. White urged Mrs. Roosevelt to soften FDR’s objections to the Costigan- Wagner bill, persuade him to insist on congressional votes, to get her to arrange meetings with the president for him, to make appearances and speeches at numerous events, to get FDR to speak out against lynching or in support of anti-lynching legislation, and to present FDR with articles or information regarding lynching.xxxiv But if FDR opposed the NAACP’s anti-lynching legislation because he had his own vision to bring lynching under the control of the federal government, then Mrs. Roosevelt’s communications with Walter White had very different consequences to those previously argued. This section therefore reinterprets Mrs. Roosevelt’s communications with Walter White in light of FDR’s speeches on lynching in the early 1930s. Accordingly, it argues that Mrs. Roosevelt achieved two key things in her communication with Walter White. Firstly, she reaffirmed the notion that the administration opposed lynching. This was consistent with FDR’s rhetoric, and led Walter White to persist in seeking FDR’s endorsement. But in communicating that message to White, she also unofficially placed the administration in favour of anti- lynching legislation.

24 In communicating with Walter White over anti-lynching legislation, Mrs. Roosevelt pushed the boundaries of the First Lady’s involvement in White House politics and established her own role as First Lady. In her autobiography Mrs. Roosevelt said that all she expected of her husband during his presidency was “that [the administration] would be interested in accomplishing the things that should be accomplished since government is supposed to serve the good of the people.”xxxv In bringing lynching and the NAACP to FDR’s attention, Mrs. Roosevelt positioned herself as FDR’s conscience, and nudged him to consider marginalised issues of national importance.

25 Mrs. Roosevelt built upon her political experiences during the 1920s to communicate with the NAACP. In the previous decade Mrs. Roosevelt was a member of the Women’s Trade Union League and the Women’s City Club of New York, formed to coordinate middle-class female reformers in New York City. She was also in the New York Democratic Party and acted as a facilitator between female reformers in the social justice feminist movement and male politicians.xxxvi She knew the importance of building relationships between reformers and politicians to form coalitions and successful political partnerships in order to enable legislative reform. She built on her skills in the women’s reform movement and lent her experience to facilitate a relationship between the NAACP and FDR’s administration later in the 1930s. Just as Mrs. Roosevelt had expanded the role of women in national politics a decade before by pushing to include reform issues within the Democratic Party, Mrs. Roosevelt expanded the role of First Lady to advocate for specific reforms that she thought her husband should champion as President.

26 With this experience behind her Mrs. Roosevelt corresponded with Walter White on issues that concerned their drive to push a federal anti-lynching bill through Congress. It is important to start by noting that Mrs. Roosevelt was aware of FDR’s position on the Costigan-Wagner bill. FDR had personally informed his wife of his objections to such a bill when she asked him if he would ask Congress to pass an anti- lynching bill on behalf of the NAACP. FDR replied in a memorandum, “In view of the simple fact that I keep repeating to Senate and House leaders that the White House asks

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only three things of this Congress (appropriations, a tax bill and a relief bill)… I think that no exceptions can be made at this session.”xxxvii While the First Lady openly communicated these objections to White it highlighted that Mrs. Roosevelt knew of FDR’s stance against the NAACP’s bill, and that any comments made that did not align with this stance were entirely her own.

27 Despite this, Mrs. Roosevelt had a tendency to give a hopeful spin to each situation when she relayed FDR’s refusals to accede to the NAACP’s demands. Minor embellishments to FDR’s words gave the NAACP hope of action on FDR’s part when he had committed to no such thing. When communicating FDR’s message that he would not ask Congress to push through the Costigan-Wagner bill she said to White, “[FDR] says, in view of the fact that he is only asking three things of Congress, he does not see how he could specify this particular bill.” But in the same message she also speculated on FDR’s actions: “Of course he is quite willing that it should be pushed by Congress itself, and I feel quite sure he will give it any help he can.”xxxviii FDR did not say that he was willing to help the bill in his memorandum to the First Lady. But in trying to give the NAACP a positive outlook she alluded to potential presidential action to help the bill. Placing the administration in favour of anti-lynching legislation has previously been considered to be a positive consequence of her correspondence. However, it becomes problematic if FDR did not actually support the Costigan-Wagner bill and had his own ideas about how to bring lynching under the remit of the federal government.

28 With little direct access to the President, White’s only way to gauge the President’s position on the anti-lynching bill was through Mrs. Roosevelt’s correspondence. Fortunately for White, the First Lady frequently relayed FDR’s hopes for the NAACP’s bill. After a particularly brutal lynching in Marianna, Florida, in which black farmhand Claude Neal was lynched for the suspected rape and murder of local white girl Lola Cannidy, White sent reports of the Association’s investigation into the lynching to highlight the NAACP’s case for legislative reform and dispute claims that an anti- lynching law was not needed.xxxix In the hope that details of this gruesome lynching would sway the president in the Costigan-Wagner bill’s favour, White contacted Mrs. Roosevelt to champion the bill on their behalf. She replied, “I talked with the President yesterday about your letter and he said that he hoped very much to get the Costigan- Wagner Bill passed in the coming session. The Marianna lynching was a horrible thing.”xl She continued to suggest that FDR supported anti-lynching legislation and on more than one occasion Mrs. Roosevelt suggested that FDR was “going to do everything he could” to get the Costigan-Wagner bill passed, that he was working “quietly to avoid raising too much opposition to the bill.”xli In doing so, Mrs. Roosevelt’s correspondence implied that FDR was taking an active role in aiding the passage of the Costigan-Wagner bill. Continuously denouncing the crime and alluding to presidential action gave the NAACP hope that FDR was on their side and had an interest in seeing the Costigan- Wagner bill passed because of a genuine interest in seeing an end to the crime.

29 Furthermore, with the intention of being optimistic after the Neal lynching, in addition to speculating on her husband’s actions, Mrs. Roosevelt also speculated about the actions of the Department of Justice in response to the lynching in 1934. The NAACP demanded action from the DOJ on the case because Neal was taken from his cell in Alabama and across state lines by lynchers to Florida, where Neal was later killed. The NAACP attempt to get Attorney General Cummings to act under the 1934 amendment to the Lindbergh Kidnapping Act—part of FDR’s legislative program for crime control—

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which enabled federal action “for ransom or reward or otherwise.” Cummings did not yield to the NAACP’s requests. “I have serious doubts,” he wrote in an internal memo, “whether a court, bearing in mind that is it a criminal statute, would give it so sweeping an interpretation,” because he did not believe that Congress passed a Kidnapping statute wide enough in scope to use in the prosecution of lynching.xlii Despite this, and without contacting the DOJ to determine their official stance, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote to White, “I wish very much the Department of Justice might come to a different point of view and I think possibly they will.”xliii White was overjoyed after reading the First Lady’s letter. It “brightens the scene immensely,” he replied, “in bringing us good news that the President is hoping to get the Costigan-Wagner bill passed in the coming session of Congress and that the Department of Justice may act in the Claude Neal case.”xliv Mrs. Roosevelt’s wishful thinking only set Walter White and the NAACP up for further disappointment when both FDR and the DOJ continued to take no action.

30 But by instilling the NAACP with hope about future federal action, it actually delayed progress on their broader anti-lynching campaign. As the NAACP saw the opportunity for federal action, the Association continued to invest time, money, and effort in pursuing legislative avenues that the administration did not support—and would be difficult to push through Congress without open public support by FDR. However, the Association’s reactions show that the NAACP had great trust in the First Lady and her insider knowledge. She had a great personal ability to form positive political alliances. However, Mrs. Roosevelt was clearly ill-informed on the stance of the DOJ, and regularly told Walter White that FDR hoped the bill would pass when he personally advocated for alternative solutions. They trusted her suggestions over their years of experience in communicating with the White House and the constant rejection they faced from federal law enforcement agencies in their attempts to bring lynchers to justice.

31 After the Costigan-Wagner bill fell victim to a filibuster in 1935, Roosevelt’s administration was clearly taken aback about Walter White’s reaction to the situation, and in particular FDR’s continued silence on the bill. Stephen Early commented that “Frankly, some of [White’s] messages to the President have been decidedly insulting.”xlv In response to FDR’s silence on their anti-lynching bill White resigned from his position as member of the Advisory Council for the Government of the Virgin Islands. In his resignation letter, White wrote,

32 It is a matter of great disappointment that you as President did not see your way clear to make a public pronouncement by means of a message to the Senate or otherwise, giving your open endorsement to the anti-lynching bill… It is my belief that the utterly shameless filibuster could not have withstood the pressure of public opinion had you spoken out against it… In justice to the cause I serve I cannot continue to remain even a small part of your official family.xlvi

33 White’s reaction was telling of his expectations of the President. Ultimately, Mrs. Roosevelt’s reassuring letters led Walter White to place greater faith in the President than he should have. White had been expecting the presidential action that the First Lady had suggested and was outraged enough to resign his position in protest when that did not transpire. By implying the administration was in favour of the NAACP’s

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anti-lynching bill, Mrs. Roosevelt only set White up for disappointment when FDR remained silent.

34 Mrs. Roosevelt specifically told White that FDR wanted to see the bill passed and that he hoped that it would pass. Even though she did not specifically say that FDR would actively work to get the bill passed, she did not tell Walter White that FDR would not work to get the bill passed either. This left the task of interpreting her letters up to Walter White. Desperate for any scrap of presidential support, White therefore took any positive message he received from Mrs. Roosevelt as confirming his belief that FDR wanted to see the bill passed. White wrote once that “I know personally of the President’s deep interest in lynching and of his desire to see the Costigan-Wagner bill passed.”xlvii This was a belief that Mrs. Roosevelt had reassured him of whenever FDR’s stance was questioned. But FDR had specifically said that he could not ask Congress to pass the bill, and his speeches on crime control suggest that he had his own anti- lynching agenda that conflicted with the NAACP’s methods. White’s resignation from his position indicated that FDR had not acted in the way that the Secretary had expected, in large part because Mrs. Roosevelt had not adequately managed the Secretary’s expectations, and on some occasions had embellished FDR’s responses in order to instil hope when the outcome looked bleak.

Conclusion

35 FDR’s anti-lynching rhetoric suggested that he wanted to bring lynching under the control of the federal government on his own terms, and not those of the NAACP. This gives an alternative explanation to his silence on the NAACP’s bill. Instead of remaining silent to avoid controversial subjects when he needed the support of southern senators to pass his New Deal measures, FDR instead laid the foundations for alternative federal action that did not involve the civil rights organisation.

36 FDR may have publicly denounced lynching in his speech to the FCC, in his State of the Union address in 1934, as well as at the Attorney General’s Conference on Crime, but he never spoke out publically in favour of anti-lynching legislation. There was a disjuncture between the NAACP’s solution to lynching and what FDR suggested. Instead of support the Costigan-Wagner bill or make lynching a federal crime, FDR laid the foundations for how he would tackle lynching. FDR rhetorically assuming federal responsibility for mob murder by arguing that lynching was a problem of the function of government. FDR therefore aimed to solve lynching by making the different aspects of crime control and criminal justice, from crime prevention to prosecution, more effective. Unfortunately FDR left no paper trail regarding policy initiatives for his anti- lynching strategy. Only FDR’s public speeches remain, but the rhetorical patterns present in these speeches are consistent with how FDR constructed rhetorical narratives to support his other legislative proposals.xlviii

37 Instead of destroy the NAACP’s hope of realising their objective of securing presidential endorsement for their federal anti-lynching bill, Eleanor Roosevelt offered the NAACP hope despite knowing that FDR would not endorse bill. In suggesting that the executive branch would take more action than they actually did, and subtly placing the administrations in favour of anti-lynching legislation, Mrs. Roosevelt raised the NAACP’s expectations towards the administration. Consequently, NAACP leaders became ever more frustrated when FDR did not speak out in favour of their bill. Mrs.

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Roosevelt’s communications therefore did not have entirely positive consequences for the administration. While black Americans may have seen the First Lady’s engagement with the lynching issue as a symbol of friendship, in this case it only made the NAACP more sceptical of FDR’s ability to ensure that the civil rights of black Americans were protected.

38 The First Lady had a great ability to gain the trust, friendship, and support of black leaders within the NAACP. She made them feel as though they were heard, even if she could achieve little for their anti-lynching bill personally. But Mrs. Roosevelt was successful in bringing the NAACP’s reform movement to the President’s attention, and it was important to her that FDR heard the Association’s arguments for an anti- lynching bill, even if he did not agree with them. This reflected her ability to build her own positive relations with reformers, although this did not translate seamlessly when she tried to bridge the gap between the NAACP and the Roosevelt administration. But it showed how Mrs. Roosevelt applied her knowledge of political reform to aid anti- lynching activists achieve their legislative objectives.

NOTES i. Statistics collected by Tuskegee Institute presented in Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 4-5. ii. Adolf Hitler to FDR, 1 June 1933, Box 93-A, Papers as President: Official File, FDR Papers, FDR Library. iii. First FDR assembled data and information from studies in the field of the proposed legislation, then he publicised the legislation to generate public support and to bring to bear the influence of constituents on their Congressmen. Using his relationship with congressional leaders he would later see that his bills were referred to sympathetic committees to ensure their passage. The President could therefore influence legislation through his personal relationships with individual senators, something the NAACP were keen to exploit. If presidential endorsement or active support for the Costigan-Wagner bill was obtained then, in essence, the president could lobby on behalf of the NAACP, relieving the civil rights activists of their mammoth task. Wilfred E. Binkley, President and Congress (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 317. iv. Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White, (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 169-170. v. Tamara Hareven, ‘The Social Thought of Eleanor Roosevelt,’ PhD Thesis, Ohio State University (1965), 156; Mildred Abramowitz, ‘Eleanor Roosevelt and Federal Responsibility and Responsiveness to Youth, the Negro, and Others in Time of Depression,’ PhD Thesis, New York University, (1970). vi. James Kearney, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: The Evolution of a Reformer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968), 84-5. vii. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time – Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 163-165. viii. Nancy Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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ix. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown (New York: The Modern Library, 2003),356-7; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time - Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 163; Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Betrayed: A History of Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 34; Kevin McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15; Garth E. Pauley, The Modern Presidency & Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 26-7; William E. Leuchtenburg, The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 58; Daniel Kato, Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 138; Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, Black Culture and the New Deal, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), x. x. This has been the prevalent view in scholarship for decades. One main reason for this narrative, and it’s because FDR never took notes in any of his meetings or recorded his private conversations. Therefore there is very little archival material available in regards to FDR’s stance on lynching for historians to analyse. Historians have therefore only taken FDR’s silence on anti- lynching bills, and his failure to endorse the movement as evidence that he had no desire to end lynching; Kevin McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 40; Nancy Weiss, Farewell; Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2014); Kearns Goodwin, Ordinary. xi. FDR, Message of the President to the Congress of the United States, 3 January 1934, FDR Papers, Master Speech File, Series 2, Reel 2, on microfilm at the FDR Library; FDR, Speech to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, 6 December 1933, FDR Papers, Master Speech File, Series 2, Reel 2, on microfilm at the FDR Library. xii. Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987); James Pfiffner, The Modern Presidency (New York: Cenage Learning, 2010); Krebs, R. R., ‘Tell Me A Story: FDR, Narrative, and the Making of the Second World War,’ Security Studies, 24:1 (Jan-March, 2015) 133. xiii. FDR, Speech to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, 6 December 1933, FDR Papers, Master Speech File, Series 2, Reel 2, on microfilm at the FDR Library. xiv. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America was a white religious organisation and around twenty-five Christian denominations were represented at the meeting. xv. For contemporary literature on lynching see: Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes ofLynchingsin the United States, 1892-1894 (1895); Arthur Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Montclair: Patterson Smith Publishing Corporation, 1969) (originally published 1933); NAACP,Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889 – 1918(New York:Negro Universities Press, 1969) (originally published in 1919); Ida B. Wells,Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases (New York: New York Age, 1892); Walter White,Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch(New York: A. A. Knopf,1929); James H. Chadbourn, Lynching and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 1933). xvi. FDR, speech at Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, 6 December 1933, FDR Papers, Master Speech File, Series 2, Reel 2, on microfilm at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, New York. xvii. Ibid. xviii. While lynching has been talked about in terms of the law for a century—and even the NAACP made legal arguments for the federal government to stop lynching—the federal government had never recognised this until now. xix. Ibid. xx. Walter White to Franklin Roosevelt, 6 December 1933, NAACP Papers, Box I: C206, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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xxi. Stephen Early to Mrs Scheider, 5 August 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 623, FDR Library. xxii. Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, 3 January 1934, FDR Papers, Master Speech File, Series 2, Reel 2, on microfilm at the FDR Library. xxiii. Ibid. xxiv. Clare Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 110. xxv. ‘A Twelve Point Program,’ address by Attorney General Homer Cummings to the Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 19 April 1934, accessed on 29/01/16 at http://www.justice.gov/ag/speeches-5. xxvi. From an address at “The Attorney General’s Crime Conference,” 10 December 1934, in Carl Swisher, (ed.), Selected Papers of Homer Cummings: Attorney General of the United States, 1933-1939 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 43-4. xxvii. Potter, War on Crime, 110. xxviii. Transcript of FDR’s ‘Address to the Conference on Crime’, 10 December 1934, accessed online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14792. xxix. Swisher, Selected Papers of Homer Cummings, 50. xxx. FDR, ‘Address to the Conference on Crime’. xxxi. Ibid. xxxii. Ibid. xxxiii. Kenneth Janken, Walter White: Mr. NAACP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 219. xxxiv. Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt, 3 December 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 606, FDR Library; Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt, 18 March 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 623, FDR Library. xxxv. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Harper, 1961), 191. xxxvi. John Thomas McGuire, ‘Beginning an ‘Extraordinary Opportunity’: Eleanor Roosevelt, Molly Dewson, and the expansion of women’s boundaries in the Democratic Party, 1924-1934,’ Women’s History Review, 23:6, 923-5. xxxvii. Franklin Roosevelt to Eleanor Roosevelt, 9 March 1936, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 623, FDR Library. xxxviii. Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White, 16 March 1936, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 623, FDR Library. xxxix. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); NAACP, ‘The Lynching of Claude Neal,’ 1934, NAACP Papers, Part 7, Series A, Reel 9, on microfilm at the Cambridge University Library; Memorandum for Walter White, 14 November 1934, NAACP Papers, Part 7, Series A, Reel 9, on microfilm at the Cambridge University Library. xl. Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White, 23 November 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 606, FDR Library. xli. Eleanor Roosevelt quoted in Janken, K. R., Walter White: Mr. N.A.A.C.P. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 209. xlii. Attorney General Homer Cummings to Assistant Solicitor General MacLean, 28 November, 1934, in Swisher, Selected Papers of Homer Cummings, 38-39. xliii. Ibid. xliv. Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt, 23 November 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 606, FDR Library. xlv. Stephen Early to Mrs Scheider, 5 August 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 623, FDR Library.

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xlvi. Walter White to Franklin Roosevelt, 6 May 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 623, FDR Library. xlvii. Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt, 20 November 1934, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Box 606, FDR Library. xlviii. Colleen Shogan, The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006); Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987); James Pfiffner, The Modern Presidency (New York: Cenage Learning, 2010).

ABSTRACTS

This article looks at Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in the 1930s anti-lynching movement. In particular, the article reinterprets the impact of Mrs. Roosevelt’s role as conduit between FDR and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. This article proposes that Mrs. Roosevelt’s correspondence should be re-contextualised around a fresh interpretation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s stance on lynching. In light of this, Eleanor Roosevelt’s early attempts at domestic diplomacy between FDR and the NAACP did not have entirely positive consequences.

INDEX

Keywords: Anti-Lynching, Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady, Franklin D Roosevelt, National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), Walter White

AUTHOR

MELISSA COOPER University of East Anglia

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Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations: “Diplomacy from Below” and the Search for a New Transatlantic Dialogue

Raffaella Baritono

1 In January 1946 Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman’s choice for the American delegation, took part in the first assembly of the United Nations in London. In appointing the former First Lady, Truman recognised that Eleanor Roosevelt, more than others, embodied the ideals that were to underpin that new statement of international order; above all she stood for the values, aims and hopes of a part of American civil society which wished to take part in the administration’s decisions and contribute to building a democratic peace-seeking international order. The new administration saw it as crucial to the success of that project that civic associations and non-governmental organizations be a party to it, as most recent works have pointed outi. Eleanor rose to this challenge, though the urge and desire to voice civil society’s opinion was to come up against a hard-nosed realpolitik that turned the United Nations into a prime duelling ground between the two superpowers emerging victorious from the Second World War. What I wish to show, in a nutshell, is how Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambition to do “diplomacy from below” – voicing the claims of civic associations and the ordinary citizen – soon merged with American public diplomacy and to some extent came to share its values, albeit critically.

2 The definition “diplomacy from below” or bottom-up diplomacy is intended to highlight the citizens’ wish to contribute to creating international relations by active participation, cooperating with the traditional diplomatic channels. At times this concept has been confused with “public diplomacy” which is seen as an American innovation. Nicholas J. Cull’s definition for this last is “the process by which international actors seek to accomplish the goals of their foreign policy by engaging with foreign publics.” This is based on the hardly revolutionary operations of “listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange diplomacy and international

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broadcasting.”ii So while the concept of public diplomacy “includes both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ aspects,”iii that of “diplomacy from below” simply refers to bottom-up processes and is distinct from other grass-roots methods. Alan K. Henrikson points out the close connection with the theory of popular sovereignty.iv Hence the idea that in a public diplomacy setting “even ordinary citizens believe they can legitimately participate.” Henrikson thus feels we should speak of “citizen diplomacy,” and the idea was taken up by Dwight D. Eisenhower as early as 1956 when calling the White House Conference on Citizen Diplomacy that would lead to the programme that was to become People to People International. The same approach would be adopted by the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy which maintained that “the individual has the right, even the responsibility to help shape U.S. foreign relations ‘one handshake at a time’”. Hence Henrikson argued that “the target of citizen diplomacy … is not the ‘states’ of other countries, but their ‘peoples’. It is a direct society-to-society interaction.”v My own view, however, is that “diplomacy from below” places the accent on the complex dynamics of society-state-international organization, as occurs with the United Nations. In this perspective the notion of “diplomacy from below” – which has been employed to cover a number of divergent contextsvi - may usefully be applied to the role that Eleanor Roosevelt sought to make her own (with the associations’ approval). Except that – and this is my point – the official mandate conferred on the former First Lady would eventually restyle that ambition more traditionally as public diplomacyvii.

3 Within the vision of bottom-up diplomacy, as in the stark realpolitik of public diplomacy, it was of fundamental importance that transatlantic dialogue should underlie the new international relations. But Mrs Roosevelt, I feel, stood for an important new development from the kind of Atlanticism pursued by intellectuals like Walter Lippmann: to Eleanor Roosevelt transatlantic relations were both bi-univocal and open to a whole world context. As I shall be arguing later, the line taken by Mary Nolan in her recent book The Transatlantic Century catches this important point. As she puts it, “In the increasingly global twentieth century, Europeans and Americans never gazed only across the Atlantic, and transatlantic relations were triangulated and complicated by competition and conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.”viii

Not an eccentric choice

4 On 21 December 1945 Harry Truman told Eleanor Roosevelt he was appointing her a member of the American delegation to the first session of the UN assembly to be held at the beginning of January in London. Heading the delegation was former Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius. Truman’s letter was somewhat vague as to the duties and goals conferred on the delegation, but he concluded with the remark that Eleanor, and all the other representatives of the US government, bore a solemn responsibility to convey that government’s deep commitment to the new institution and its lofty task of preserving world peace and laying the foundations of mutual trust, furthering the economic and social wellbeing of the world’s peoplesix.

5 Eleanor did not there and then accept: her son would recall how she felt she lacked the diplomatic qualities needed for Truman’s mission. Truman’s proposal came at a delicate moment in Eleanor’s life, a point fraught with uncertainty: how to rearrange her life after years of active political engagement; what new course to give her political passions that had by no means subsided with the end of her long stint as First Lady;

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how above all to carry on the political vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt which she by and large shared – though in no passive, indeed in a frequently critical, spirit (as over the racial issue); how, in particular, to further the new international order which in effect held out the prospect of a New Deal for the World.

6 In his book The Years Alone, one of Eleanor’s closest co-workers, Joseph Lashx, recalled how Harold Ickes, who had long been a minister in the Roosevelt government, had suggested Eleanor might run for senator in New York State. Other stalwarts of the late President urged her to stand as governor or even President of the United States, seemingly convinced that she alone had the stature, conviction and personality to carry through the reform program that her husband’s death had curtailed: for example, proper application of that Second Bill of Rights – FDR’s own definition – which was meant to bring the States into line with western social democracy.

7 Eleanor refused all these suggestions for a number of reasons. She was loath to hinder her children’s political careers, she felt the time was not yet ripe for a woman president, nor did she wish to accept political office and then find herself shackled by internal Democrat strife and decisions. As she would state in the first interview she gave on board the Queen Elizabeth bound for London, “For the first time in my life I can say just what I want. For your information it is wonderful to feel free.”xi

8 When Truman’s nomination came, in some respects it resolved Eleanor’s hesitations. To accept the task was a way of commitment to the most important project she had shared with Franklin. Institutionally, that position would legitimately throw herself into the issues of peace and internationalism on which she had been engaged since the years following World War I. As she wrote in Look, 9th July 1946, in an article explaining “Why I Do Not Choose to Run:” “when I was offered an opportunity to serve on the United Nations organization, I accepted it. I did this ... because it seemed as though I might be able to use the experiences of a lifetime, and make them valuable to my nation and to the people of the world ... I knew, of course, how much my husband hoped that, out of the war, an organization for peace would really develop. It was not just to further my husband’s hopes, however, that I agreed to serve in this particular way. It was rather that I myself had always believed that women might have a better chance to bring about the understanding necessary to prevent future wars if they could serve in sufficient number in these international bodies.”xii

9 What does need explaining is why Eleanor, reputed by friends and foes alike in 1945 to have great political depth and knowledge of the institutional principles and rules, should think fit to reply as an official United States delegate: “it is wonderful to feel free?” My own answer is that Eleanor could sense, though not fully comprehend the asperities of, the coming bipolar conflict; and she also felt that, political and institutional though it might be, her appointment was a clear token of the importance the new administration attached to what US civil society thought. Actually, as Rowland Bruckner has observed, since 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt had begun cooperating with non-governmental organizations in “wrestling with postwar human rights objectives.”xiii That appointment, therefore, sent a signal to the network of civic associations; it represented “the public,” to use a term in vogue with the liberal progressive milieu for which Eleanor stood. I would thus venture to suggest that Eleanor felt a responsibility not so much towards the administration, as towards the sovereign people, the ultimate source of democratic legitimation. The actual state of affairs would prove quite different, however: the institutional role would come to

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outweigh the need to voice the claims of the people. Her position was only apparently “a-political”: in actual fact it was the outcome of a process of political education and engagement. Truman’s choice was far from eccentric.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to pacifism and internationalism

10 The First Lady’s internationalist commitment dated from the early 1920s. The crucial meeting was with Carrie Chapman Catt in April 1921 at a scheme to rally a woman’s crusade for peace. Out of this her links would intensify with the social feminist network involved in issues of peace and social justice: “peace, bread and freedom,” to paraphrase Jane Addams’ famous pamphletxiv: there was the League of Women Voters, the Consumer’s League, and the Women’s Trade Union League. And with it came her ever-intensifying work inside the New York Democrat party.

11 Throughout the 1920s Eleanor’s pacifist battle had hinged on the ever-denied demand that the US join the World Court, as well as on other projects for peaceful settlement of conflict: for instance, the prize offered by Ladies Home Journal editor, Edward Bok, in 1923 for the best peace policy proposal, or the petition for a referendum demanding the United States cooperate with the technical agencies of the League of Nations. The World Court battle and the women’s pacifist campaign would also mark her early years as First Lady: in 1935 she held an event at the White House in honour of Jane Addams, and would openly lobby the Senate and the President on behalf of the World Court. In 1935 Eleanor Roosevelt went on the air in favour of ratification two days before the Senate voted, openly standing for an issue she had pursued since the mid-Twenties.

12 From 1933 on, her peace campaign was initially bolstered by news of the situation in Europe – supplied mainly by women from international and pacifist organizations. It was thanks to Eleanor and her network that Franklin had first-hand accounts of events in Nazi Germany that summer of 1933. They came from women pacifists like Alice Hamilton, who had lived in Germany, a guest of Clara Landsberg, the German Jewish suffragette. It was the Nazi threat that finally decided Eleanor Roosevelt to take her distance from the rigidly pacifist position. After a period of public silence on foreign policy issues, in 1938 she published This Troubled World and burned her bridges with pacifism. Eleanor’s public silence (her muzzling, according to Blanche Wiesen Cook) not only radicalized her stand on racial and social issues, but went with a growing commitment to the associations campaigning for refugee welcome and urging the government to take a new internationalist stand. While it was chiefly the Kristallnacht that led Eleanor to speak out on events in Germany and join issue with the anti- Semitism of certain State Department officials, it was her battle for the World Court that persuaded key exponents of new internationalism that Eleanor might be a prime point of reference. One such was James McDonald, High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations and leader of the Foreign Policy Association. McDonald canvassed Eleanor to lobby the White House and State Department to have American consuls issue visas or not slow down the procedures granting refugees admission to the USA. Likewise Clark Eichelberger, director of the League of Nations Association and other internationalist organizations, first contacted Eleanor Roosevelt in the late Thirties when he was invited to the White House along with other prominent youngsters.xv

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13 Eleanor not only put pressure on her husband to take a stronger stand or remove obdurately anti-Semitic consuls, but used her daily column My Day to publicize organizations such as the United States Committee for the Care of European Children or the Emergency Rescue Committee. In her piece on 26 June 1940, Eleanor painted the European situation in dramatic colours: “This morning I started out early to attend a meeting of the United States Committee for the Care of European Children. I am thankful beyond words that it is going to be possible to do something for these European children, but my heart is heavy when I think of the tragedies which haunt the lives of many grown people.”xviShe went so far as to authorise the last-named committee to use her name if that might expedite immigration bureaucracy, as Ingrid Warburg Spinelli – wife of Veniero Spinelli, brother to the more famous Altiero, one of the founding fathers of European federalism - recalls in her autobiography, where she stresses the First Lady’s role and the pressure she brought to bear on the State Departmentxvii.

14 This, then, was the background against which the change occurred in Eleanor Roosevelt. As early as 1934 she was being dubbed a realistic pacifistxviii; any abstract notion of peace would simply cloud the realization that only a just mechanism might, if necessary, act via a police operation or, in the worst instance, bolster defence systems in readiness for inevitable war. Against the entrenched providentialism and exceptionalism of the isolationists, Eleanor Roosevelt argued that the United States as a nation must look at what was happening across the Atlantic and the Pacific, but without any illusion that she was immune.xix

15 In 1945, hard on her involvement in the movement that led to her visiting war camps in England and the Pacific, Eleanor was thrust by Truman’s appointment into what her autobiography called “the most wonderful and worthwhile experience in my lifexx.”

Public diplomacy or diplomacy from below?

16 To some extent Truman’s decision to include Eleanor in the official delegation was an act of public diplomacy, a sop to public and international opinion. Her fame as a liberal, attentive to questions of social and racial justice, her penchant for listening to others, her conviction that American policy must favour the expansion of democracy and rights without imposing a political model, would make her an icon of political democracy, especially in the work she did on the Commission for Human Rights. Truman himself admitted as much: when Eleanor died, and he commented on Eisenhower’s decision to leave her out of future American delegations to the United Nations, Truman said “I made use of her. I told her she was the First Lady of the World.” In a 1954 letter Truman wrote: “She has been one of our most effective forces against Communist propaganda in many vulnerable spots in the world.”xxi

17 Back in 1945, however, public diplomacy in the broadest description of it – viz. “the whole range of communication, information and propaganda under control of the government”xxii – was, as many scholars have pointed out xxiii, beginning to shape up around a public-private network involving a sizable involvement of civic associations and non-governmental organizations. This forestaste of public diplomacy in action came at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, which involved 42 “pressure groups” and other invited observers after America’s absence from Dumbarton Oaks had

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been heavily criticised by religious groups, labour, women’s associations and internationalist movements.

18 Around the issue of setting up and bolstering the United Nations there was a climate of internationalism that was no longer a matter for the elite: it spread within civil society through the work and commitment of the civic associations. As a pamphlet for the League of Women Voters put it, “If we accept the premise on which the United Nations Charter is based … then we must roll up our sleeves and to go work to make the United Nations Organization work, and to develop it eventually into a world organization with its own measure of sovereignty”xxiv.

19 The creation of the Division of Public Liaison inside the State Department in 1944 was connected with this wartime strategy of involving associations and groups that wanted to seize the “second chance.”xxv In 1942 Charles Eichelberger, one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s most constant interlocutors, wrote to the then Secretary of State Summer Welles that they should mobilise groups and sectors of the population like “labour, business, professional and housewives’ associations for assistance in an educational campaign.”xxvi As Christy Jo Snider remarked in an article a few years back, there were three reasons inclining the US leadership to involve and then incorporate non- governmental associations in the UN charter on the basis of article 71: first of all, the ability of various groups to influence public opinion; second, “American leaders valued these organizations’ ability to research, study, and organize international programs concerning world problems without touching limited governmental resources;” and third, “U.S. foreign policy elites were willing to bring transnational interest groups into the United Nations so that global government would have some control over NGO activities.”xxvii Relations with the NGO associations were thus crucial to any democratic redressing of the international order.

20 One of the officials from the Division of Public Liaison, Chester Williams, wrote to congratulate Eleanor on her nomination as UN delegate:

21 Some of us who have been cooperating with the national organizations represented by consultants and observers at San Francisco feel that American study and discussion of UNO could now be stimulated if the President and the Secretary of State would invite nation-wide discussion of the important world issues and the proper American position on such issues. Even more than discussion, we hope that the people might be urged to formulate their views and submit than directly or through their national organizations to the Department. ... One of my special responsibilities in the Department is to promote understanding of UNO and UNESCO through all channels of communication, especially through organized groups and the public platform.

22 There followed a description of the plans afoot to circulate material and involve scholars, foreign policy experts journalists, etc. xxviii. An “experiment in democracy” was how this was described by Dorothy Robins, secretary of the association created by Eichelbergerxxix.

23 With her political and intellectual background, Eleanor Roosevelt appeared someone who, more than other men and women, might act as a link between the elites and the grass roots movements. As Bruckner has observed, “Her appointment brought

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instant credibility to the department’s human rights program from internationalist groups who knew of her work against prewar isolationism, her efforts on behalf of wartime refugees, and her support for postwar peace with the Soviet Union.”xxx Her appointment was ratified by the Senate with only one opposing vote - Senator Theodore Bilbo from Mississippi, who could not accept her position on civil rights - though she was also criticised by key names like John Foster Dulles, who thought her too liberal, or William Fulbright, who considered it disrespectful to the United Nations to send someone so little versed in foreign policyxxxi. Against this, however, there was an enthusiastic reception by associations and public opinion, albeit with a sprinkling of adverse comments.

24 The congratulatory letters Eleanor received provide an instructive picture of how American public opinion stood on the eve of the first session of the United Nations. With emotion still running high at the loss of FDR, there naturally prevailed the idea of Eleanor as the one best fitted to carry on the president’s international vision; her appointment seemed a tribute to the prime mover of the United Nations. At the same time, though, as the Atlanta Sunday Constitution wrote, “she, better than perhaps any other person, can represent the little people of this country and, indeed, of the world.”xxxii Mynnette Hastings from the National Congress of Parents and Teachers wrote: “It has been the hope of endless numbers of the ‘folks’ of this country that a woman – one of wide sympathies and deep understanding – might serve as one of our representatives when a new world order was being built on the wreckage of the old. … You could continue serving the people of this country and also extend your influence to those of other lands as well.”xxxiii

25 No less important was the weight attached to a woman being elected. A letter sent to Truman spoke of the satisfaction of women – and Democrat women in particular – and how Mrs Roosevelt not only possessed “comprehensive understanding of World Affairs” but “the courage to speak for the many millions of plain people both at home and abroad, whose interests are pleading for understanding and who fervently desire a wise solution of the problem that lead to war”xxxiv. The appointment acted as a kind of acknowledgment of women’s efforts for peace over the decades and their search for new ways of viewing the international set-up. This clearly transpires from letters written by women from the associations - the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Women’s Action Committee and the National Council of Jewish Women, to mention but a few – that had urged President Truman to include at least one woman on the delegation; and likewise by admiring individual citizens, men and women. R. Wimberly, on the South Carolina section of the AAUW, said that “a new day has dawned for the womanhood of the world as you become the spokesman of American women dedicated to the task of winning the peace and of affecting a collective security that will function adequately”xxxv. Roosevelt herself told the press how “she felt her appointment as a delegate to the United Nations Organization meant that there was a ‘demand for a woman’ member of the United States delegation and that she ‘naturally’ would accept it.”xxxvi

26 Not everybody saw eye to eye, of course. Hugh Macbeth, chairman of the United Races of America, was himself congratulatory (“you are the best representative which the American people have in the list of delegates to the United Nations Organization”), but saw fit to include a cutting from the Los Angeles Times that deemed the appointment “unfortunate.” Clearly echoing the sentiments of conservative public opinion, the

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newspaper thought that “she seems misplaced in a post which requires diplomacy, and a guarded tongue,” whereas “on various occasions she has made utterances which tended to promote bad feelings between races. Good judgment and good taste appear alike alien to her make-up. ... There are plenty of well educated, well qualified American women who could be named to such a post and would fittingly represent their country. But Mrs. Roosevelt is not among them.”xxxvii

27 To my mind, such letters showed that Eleanor not only continued to be appreciated, but was seen as an important reference person – a privileged interlocutor, almost “one of us” – by the association leaders. As a matter of fact, Eleanor’s relationships with civic groups and associations (most of them nonpartisan even if some were lined up with liberal values) dated many decades back. She was also member of some of them or she had served in their board of directors. Therefore, her appointment would not only guarantee they were involved, but was also seen as some kind of legitimation for bottom-up internationalism. Internationalism from below had been marginalised during the 1920s and 1930s, but began to gain new vitality after 1939, consisting above all in a new “take” on transatlantic relations, rather than an interest in other geopolitical areas. The difference was that, as a member of many associations that were girding themselves to contribute to the new international organization from inside, Eleanor Roosevelt could voice their arguments and objectives, turning the notion of “diplomacy from below” into concrete fact.

28 For example, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women Clubs wrote to her: “May we take this opportunity to assure you that the 91,000 members of this Federation stand ready to support any method of implementation the work and accomplishment of The United Nations Organization which, in your judgment as a delegate, seems judicious. Our Federation has stood energetically behind all the preparation for this new world organization and has been outspoken in favour of placing the responsibility for the use of Atomic Energy in the United Nations Organization.” Anna Lord Strauss, from the League of Women Voters, concluded her letter outlining her association’s priority points: “The national Board feels that part of its responsibility is to summarize the trend of League thinking so that it may be presented to those who are responsible for formulating our policy. May I assure you that our members are watching with deep interest and concern the evolution of the United Nations.”xxxviii

29 Eleanor immediately contacted the civic associations, volunteering her readiness to carry their issues into the international arena. Before setting off for the first UN assembly in London, she asked various associations to let her know their suggestions and how they felt about their own particular hobbyhorses. Many of them did send proposals, some detailed, while all expressed a keen desire to be in on this joint effort. This was not just a first flush of enthusiasm, the sense of a new epoch paying tribute, as it were, to the president’s memory and espousing his dearest cause. To Eleanor the importance of grassroots work and the link with the associations would be constant features of her commitment inside and outside the United Nations throughout the 1950s. Witness Eleanor’s work inside Americans for the United Nations after 1953 (when Eisenhower decided not to reconfirm her mandate). She and the association were intent on keeping up interest in the United Nations, even at a time of growing disaffection; they got up educational campaigns in schools and communities, projects for United Nations Days, and so on.xxxix

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30 As 1945 closed and 1946 opened, many issues emerge from her correspondence, regarding the specific concerns of the various interest groups and associations. Some questions are raised by all associations: primarily, establishing an Atomic Commission, a trusteeship for the colonial territories (obviously a close concern of the NAACP, together with the race discrimination issue, but also espoused by the League of Women Voters, the AAUW, the AAUN etc.), education and promotion of culture, and above all the issue of human rights. For example Clark Eichelberg, representative of the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, urged the General Assembly to set up a committee on atomic energy and on human rights, as well as tackling issues connected with trusteeship. Walter White, from NAACP, raised the subject of a settlement for the former colonies. Helen Reid, from the American Association of University Women, likewise argued for regulation of atomic energy and also raised the question of female emancipation and the need to promote a “constructive foreign policy.” Women’s rights, monitoring atomic energy, human rights, and education policy were also central points in a letter sent by Constance Sporborg, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubsxl.

31 Mynnette Hastings recalled, for example, how the subject of human rights was added to the San Francisco agenda after pressure from civic associations. She wrote: “While serving as a consultant at the San Francisco Conference, we not only supported the foregoing items [namely, the creation of UNESCO, the promotion of social policies in the fields of health care, child labor, social work and so on] but also the inclusion of ‘human rights’ in the various chapters of the UNO Charter; we also helped support the efforts of the women from other lands in urging that the word ‘sex’ be included in the Charter so that there might be no discrimination against them because of ‘sex’ as well as ‘race or religion’”.xli A demand voiced by all was that the Economic and Social Council be strengthened and, of course, that a High Commission on Human Rights be set up.

32 Eichelberger would later note: “Turning from security to human rights, our research affiliate, the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, has had a sub- committee working on the subject of human rights. We spearheaded the movement at San Francisco for the provision in the Charter that the Economic and Social Council must appoint a commission on human rights. We have prepared a brief memorandum giving the views of our committee as to how we believe the commission on human rights should be appointed and how it would proceed. Some of the delegates to the Preparatory Commission take the view that the commission would be more responsible if composed of Governmental representatives. Another view could well be that it would be more courageous if composed of distinguished individuals. We recommend as a compromise between the two ... We propose that Governments place for nomination the names of individuals to serve on the human rights commission ... .”xlii

33 But it was the General Secretary of The Church Peace Union, Henry Atkinson, whose explicit call for “security against want” most clearly stated a key issue of that Second Bill of Rights of Rooseveltian memory, central to the project for what was envisaged as a “world new deal.”xliii Eleanor Roosevelt echoed the sentiment in a 1953 pamphlet: “Philosophically minded UN people emphasize the point that the Charter’s wording starts ‘We the people.’ Not ‘We the Governments, the Dictators, Kings, Presidents or what not.”xliv

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Cold war constraints

34 Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts within the United Nations thus alternated constantly between work on commissions and relations with associations or broader public opinion via her daily column My Day in which she reported on events inside the United Nationsxlv. It was a labour of mediation often based on political realism which prevented her from espousing radical positions like Carrie Chapman Catt’s on disarmament, or bringing internal political bones of contention into an international organization. One example here was her initial resistance to a commission being set up on the condition of women; this is partly explained by the coolness of many American women activists, especially those gravitating round the Women’s Bureau who feared any airing of the laws on social protectionxlvi.

35 Nonetheless, Eleanor Roosevelt’s experience at the United Nations showed how her ambition to conduct diplomacy from below clashed with the needs and restraints imposed by her official role. My view is that in her time at the United Nations Eleanor Roosevelt took the same line as when First Lady: she sought to be a bridge between political power and civil society; she saw herself as a spokeswoman for public opinion, a listener, an interpreter of claims that needed to be laid before the organs of political decision-making. One might paraphrase Peter Willetts, and say that Eleanor acted as “the conscience of the world.”

36 To borrow a definition introduced by Bernice Robnett à propos of African- American womenxlvii, her ambition was to play the role of bridge-leader, a circular form of leadership, expressing the kind of women’s politics that had shaped her own political background. This was a function she was continually to cite throughout her career, as I have shown in an essay dealing with Eleanor’s 1950s trips to so-called third-world countriesxlviii.

37 In a speech given in 1953, she said: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”xlix

38 Her battle over the founding of UNESCO, and the issue of refugees and human rights initially proved irksome to the State Department. So much was admitted by the very person who should have been the inside reference person, Archibald McLeish, who warned her: “I am worried about the Department’s attitude toward the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Constitution of which was drafted at our London meeting in November. The Department is traditionally scornful of that whole side of foreign relations – a side which is increasingly important from day to day.”l

39 Eleanor Roosevelt’s own account of the reception she got from other delegation members is here significant. She was assigned to Committee Three which dealt with economic, social and humanitarian issues. The appointment was decided by other

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members of the delegation without realising that such issues – especially that of refugees and their right to choose whether to go home or not – would be the scene of the first deadlock between the US and the Soviet Union. Nominated chair of the Nuclear Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt would play a prominent part in this breach, showing a flair for political mediation. The experience would alter her originally cooperative approach to the Soviets and reinforce her anticommunism, though she never saw them as any kind of race apart.

40 UN official James Frederick Green, who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt, felt that she could not be considered a ‘cold warrior’ even of a reluctant kind. To Green, “she wasn’t as strongly anti-Soviet and cold warrish as, say, John Foster Dulles was, or others in that period, but she fought the good fight all the way through. …I don’t think she had kind of the devil theory of communism that Dulles and others had”li.

41 The battles within the Human Rights Commission would curb Eleanor’s ambition to conduct “diplomacy from below.” She herself admitted this: “during the entire London session of the Assembly I walked on eggs. I knew that as the only woman on the delegation I was not very welcome.” Yet her diplomacy mixed with firmness in handling the refugees controversy won congratulations from Dulles and Vandenberg: they confessed they had been against appointment of her, but ‘we must acknowledge that we have worked with you gladly and found you good to work with. And we will be happy to do so again’.lii

42 Just as scholars of the state-private network have revealed dynamics of co-optation as well as cooperation between civic associations and US government, so with Eleanor’s cause: her “circular vision” of things soon found it had to bow to the needs and strategies of US foreign policy. In the end the female and professional associations’ “cooperative relationship” was forced to adapt to reality and give way before the power of cold war logic. Progressively, they would be absorbed in the politics of American propagandaliii, just as the vision of multilateral internationalism would be overshadowed by policies based on national interest and national securityliv.

43 Eleanor realised all too soon that her sense of “feeling free” was wishful thinking. As she admitted, “In London, fortunately, I agreed with the State Department position. But later I learned that a delegate does have certain rights as an individual and on several occasions I exercised my right to take a position somewhat different from the official viewpoint.”lv

44 This dilemma concerned many issues in which she was involved, from the problem of trusteeship and the recognition of Franco regime to women’s role in the UN organization, just to name a few. However, her dilemma is known to have become acute when it came to racial issues which were probably the cause closest to her heart. To the Afro-American movements, creation of the United Nations was an opportunity to voice their claims as part of a broader transnational movement against colonization. As DuBois wrote to Bethune during the San Francisco Conference, “The Negro in America has an unprecedented opportunity in this Conference on a World Security Organization, to lift his sights to encompass a world view of the problems of peace and to think in unison with the representatives of forty-six nations… Through this Conference, the Negro becomes closely allied with all the darker races of the world, but more importantly, he becomes integrated into the structure of the peace and freedom of all people, everywhere.”lvi In congratulating Eleanor on her appointment to America’s UN delegation, Walter White reminded her of the issues close to the heart of

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the NAACP especially the campaign to abolish “the entire colonial system,” and likewise to heed the minorities when choosing staff for the international organization and include the Afro-American colleges in the student exchange programme.lvii This was Eleanor’s golden opportunity to espouse the aims of civic associations and the Afro-American movement in particular. Yet when DuBois and White, as members of the NAACP, asked her to support the 1947 petition “Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of the Citizens of Negro Descent in the USA,” Mrs Roosevelt allowed her official position to prevail over her personal beliefs. On being presented to the Secretary General, the document caused ructions between the United Nations and the State Department, especially once third-world representatives and communist delegations took up the debate.lviii

45 As Eleanor wrote to White, there was clearly no question of not supporting the position, but a “proper procedure” needed to be struck. When White telegrammed for her to be present at a meeting convened to present an Appeal to the World at the United Nations, she turned him down, bowing to strong state department pressure. “I am very sorry that I can not be with you tomorrow morning at twelve o’clock. As an individual I should like to be present, but as a member of the delegation I feel that until this subject comes before us in the proper way, in a report of the Human Rights Commission or otherwise, I should not seem to be lining myself up in any particular way on any subject. It isn’t as though everyone did not know where I stand. It is just a matter of proper procedurelix”. The decision widened the rift between Eleanor Roosevelt and DuBois, though later she did help White and DuBois behind the scenes. An article in The Nation would comment: “Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt … is on the board of directors of the NAACP. Since she offered no constructive proposal of her own, she must have had to subordinate her well-known personal feelings to this country’s historical anti-Negro policy. Her dilemma is not new. It has frustrated many of our able political leaders.”lx

46 Her many speeches praising the work being done by the Commission on Human Rights – beginning with one of the most important: the address to the Paris Sorbonne in 1948 – in their turn needed frequent negotiation with the State Department who were constantly suggesting she remove the more problematic passages. Eleanor Roosevelt’s great political skills were nonetheless brought to bear on the cultural cold war and the confrontation between democracy and totalitarianism. She was thus able to ease tension, unravel knots and in the end gain approval for the Declaration of Human Rights with the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and South Africa abstaining. She also succeeded in her idea of a Declaration that was a manifesto of intent, on the model of the Atlantic Charter, and not a binding charter.

47 As Dean Acheson wrote to Eleanor in 1952 when she travelled to the Middle East, India and Pakistan, “your many speeches and personal appearances outside the Assembly, in which you presented the American viewpoint most successfully to the European public, were a major contribution to our general effort. I am sure, too, that your present trip will be a means of bringing the American views effectively to some of the Far Eastern peoples.”lxi

48 Acheson’s message brings me to my last point: the importance of transatlantic relations in Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision of things. The focus of the associations and the internationalist movement lay mainly in the Atlantic arena, though the issue of colonialism was kept alive, especially by the Afro-American associations.

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The transatlantic dimension of Eleanor Roosevelt diplomatic vision.

49 Eleanor’s political background, rooted in women’s progressive pacifist reformism, had gained a cosmopolitan and transnational quality and this reflected on those values which formed the basis of her political and intellectual vision. I am not able to explore this issue at length, but Eleanor’s maturing experience was coloured by Atlantic Crossings, that Atlantic dimension which, Daniel Rodgers argues, was a privileged area of fertile exchange between intellectuals, reformers and social workers from America and Europe (especially Britain) on issues of reform and social justice. This phenomenon dated from the early 20th century and in the 1940s received a new founding text in the Atlantic Charter.lxii

50 Relations between the American and British delegates had been very close during the San Francisco Conference, despite tension at their two differing approaches to the colonies issue. Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian and one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action in 1947, comments on this incomprehension between American liberals and their British counterparts: “American liberalism is equalitarian without understanding there are functional and fortuitous inequalities in even the most ideal community, whether National or International... British idealism thinks primarily in terms of the responsibilities of power; American idealism thinks primarily in terms of the disavowal of power in order to escape its corruptions.”lxiii

51 Intellectually, too, a significant swath of US liberalism to which Eleanor belonged and gave support (movements like Union for Democratic Action created in 1941, which would give rise to Americans for Democratic Action in 1947) continued to argue the inter-connectedness of domestic politics and international politics. They saw the transatlantic relationship as the basis for any expansion of the liberal democratic model. Again, a role was once again being played by the civic associations committed to the internationalist movement: there was the American Association of University Women, the League of Women Voters and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs; though when the Cold War set in after 1946, the issues of democracy and anti-communism came to overshadow their internationalism, as we have mentioned. In 1945-46, for example, the articles published in the Journal of the American Association of University Women highlighted the plight of the devastated countries of Europelxiv and invited members to forge links of cooperation and to help with reconstruction.

52 In one such article, Helen Dwight Reid listed ten ways in which each section of the association should contribute to international rebuilding. The same article contained a study on the documents underpinning the new order, including the San Francisco Charter, the Bretton Woods agreement and the Atlantic charter. It went on to raise the possibility of international cooperation, in light of the urgent need to restore dialogue and transatlantic exchange of knowledge. Groups of immigrants present in the community might be enlisted, while films and documentaries could be projected showing the situation in Russia, Great Britain and Latin Americalxv. But then, of course, as Deborah Stienstra has pointed out, “trans-Atlantic culture” had been a feature of women’s politics since the 1790s.

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53 While emphasising the deep bond between the United States and Great Britain, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke of interdependence, over and above the need for cooperation and rebuilding: “interdependence is what we have to learn if we are going to be willing to pay the price for peace.”

54 It was the notion of interdependence that led Eleanor to broaden the canvas to include other peoples, including the Soviet countries. In a Washington speech given in March 1946 she continued: “I am not minimizing what Great Britain did for us when she stood alone for a whole year … but we should not have our vision clouded by thinking that the English-speaking people of the world, despite their strength, can get along without the far greater number of people that are not English-speaking.”lxvi Yet only two years later that spirit of trust seemed to have been shaken: it was transatlantic dialogue that was to be strengthened, Anglo-American relations in particular. When she spoke at Oxford in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt claimed there were more than historical ties between the States and Britain: what united the two nations was the fact that their peoples wanted peace; above all they wanted freedom, and “that combination of peace and freedom is difficult to achieve in some parts of the world.” Such solidarity should be seen as a model for other peoples: “Solidarity between our two nations and other states bordering the Atlantic, will, we hope, spell greater economic security, better living conditions for the people of our nations and therefore a gradual demonstration that in freedom, the democracies can develop and bring about through the action of the people themselves, the same ends which the Soviet states feel can only be brought about through the wisdom of a few people at the top level and the control of the life of their people.”lxvii

55 The complicated mirror relationship across the Atlantic between the young American society and that beloved yet hated “Europe” lay at the root of American and European identity-building. It would go on existing, even if the image the mirror reflected was destined for other eyes: those of Eastern European peoples, and increasingly the new nations appearing on the international scene.

Conclusion

56 Eleanor Roosevelt responded enthusiastically to Truman’s appointment of her to the UN delegation. The new role enabled her to pursue her ideals of democracy and internationalism, and to go on cultivating relations with the civic associations – the warp and weft of the American democratic model. What is more, her membership of many associations working in a climate of enthusiasm to make the international framework more democratic – with a view to seizing this ‘second chance’ – made her the ideal interlocutor to voice their claims and implement their goals.

57 Although the deepening Cold War gradually made Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of a global order recede, Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment to promoting democracy and human rights never lost sight of the broader canvas, be it Eastern Europe or the post- colonial situation.

58 Nonetheless, her ambition to practise “diplomacy from below” was curbed by the harsh reality of bipolar conflict. Ultimately what prevailed was her increasingly significant role within the strategies of public diplomacy being implemented by the United States government.

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59 By now First Lady of the World, Eleanor reasoned in terms of a circular relationship; and although she can hardly be seen as a forerunner of “celebrity diplomacy” – to use Kofi Annan’s recent phraselxviii -, nonetheless unwittingly, even unwillingly, despite her open dislike of the contortions new-deal liberalism was indulging in at home and abroad, in the end she became a “global Eleanor”: the benevolent, supportive face of American hegemony, the example of an open society, tolerant of criticism and dissent, in which guise it formed a strongly seductive model.

NOTES i. See, among others, Christy Jo Snider, ”The Influence of Transnational Peace Groups on U.S. Foreign Policy Decision-Makers during the 1930s: Incorporating NGOs into the UN,” Diplomatic History, 27, 3 (June 2003), 377–404;Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War. The state-private network (London: Routledge, 2006); Andrew Johnstone, “To Mobilize a Nation. Citizens’ Organizations and Intervention on the eve of World War II,”in Andrew Johnstone and Helen Laville, eds., The US Public and American Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2010), 26-40;Andrew Johnstone, Dilemmas of Internationalism. The American Association for the United Nations and US Foreign Policy, 1941-1948 (London: Ashgate, 2009). ii. Nicholas J. Cull, “Public Diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories,” Annals, AAPSS, 616 (March 2008): 31-32. iii. Barry Sautman and Li Ying, “Public Diplomacy from Below: The 2008 ‘Pro-China’ Demonstrations in Europe and North America,” CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy, paper 11 (2011): 12. iv. Alan K. Henrikson, “Sovereignty, Diplomacy, and Democracy: The Changing Character of ‘International’ Representation-from State to Self?,” The Flectcher Forum of World Affairs, Special Edition, 37, 3 (2013): 112-113. v. Alan K. Henrikson, “Sovereingty, Diplomacy, and Democracy”, 119. vi. See, for instance, Renaud Morieux, “Diplomacy from Below and Belonging: Fishermen and Cross-Channel Relations in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 202 (February 2009): 83-125; Stephen Brier and Ferdinando Fasce, “Italian Militants and Migrants and the Language of Solidarity in the Early-Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 8, 2 (2011): 89-121. vii. Giles Scott-Smith, “Mapping the Undefinable: Some Thoughts on the Relevance of Exchange Programs within International Relations Theory,” Annals, AAPSS, 616 (March 2008): 173-195; Geoffrey Cowan and Amelia Arsenault, “Moving from Monologue to Dialogue to collaboration: the Three Layers of Public Diplomacy,” Annals, AAPSS, 616 (March 2008): 10-30; Eytan Gilboa, “Searching for a Theory of Public Diplomacy,” Annals, AAPSS, 616 (March 2008): 55-77; Nicholas J. Cull, “Public Diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories,” Annals, AAPSS, 616 (March 2008): 31-53. See also Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and The United States Information Agency: Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). viii. Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century. Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 9.

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ix. Truman to Eleanor Roosevelt, 21 December 1945 in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt. The Human Rights Years 1945-1948, ed. by Allida Black, vol. 1 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010): 158-59 x. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: Norton, 1972) xi. Memorandum press conference held by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt on Board of MS Queen Elizabeth Conference room, Jan. 3, 1946, in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 15, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, NL xii. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Why I Do Not Choose to Run,” Look, July 9, 1946, http://www.gwu.edu/ ~erpapers/documents/articles/whychoosenottor... xiii. Rowland Brucken, A Most Uncertain Crusade. The United States, the United Nations, and Human Rights, 1941-1953 (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 16. xiv. Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922) (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). xv. Interview with Mr. Clark Eichelberger by Dr. Thomas F. Soapes, Oral Historian, on November 15, 1977 for Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Transcripts, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, NL. xvi. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day”, June 26, 1940, My Day Project, Electronic Edition, Eleanor Roosevelt Project, http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1940&_f=md055616. See also “My Day” columns published on September 6, 1940; September 21, 1940, October 11, 1940, November 28, 1940, February 28, 1941, May 29, 1941, August 16, 1941, May 5, 1942, September 5, 1942, October 8, 1942, May 14, 1943. https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ xvii. Ingrid Warburg Spinelli, Il tempo della coscienza. Ricordi di un’altra Germania 1910-1989 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 114. xviii. Quoted in Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World: Eleanor Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (New York: Social Science Monographs, 1981), 12. xix. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Troubled World (New York, Kinsey, 1938). xx. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: HarperCollins, 1961), 299. xxi. Truman to Morgenthau, Sept. 25, 1954, in Eleanor and Harry: The Correspondence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, ed. by Steve Neal (New York: Scribner, 2002), 225. xxii. Ibid., 310. xxiii. See, among others, Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural War (New York: Granta, 2000); Helen Laville, Cold War Women. The International Activities of American Women’s Organisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World. America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). xxiv. Quoted in Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 70. xxv. Robert Divine, Second Chance. The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York, Atheneum,1967) xxvi. Andrew Johnstone, Dilemmas of Internationalism, 34-5. xxvii. Christy Jo Snider, “The Influence of Transnational Peace Groups”, 379. xxviii. Chester Williams, Dpt of State, to ER 25 December 1945 in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, Part I, reel 1. xxix. Dorothy B. Robins, Experiment in Democracy. The Story of U.S. Citizen Organizations in Forging the Charter of the United Nations (New York: The Parkside Press, 1971), 104. xxx. Rowland Bruckner, A Most Uncertain Crusade, 93. xxxi. James B. Reston, “UNO Delegates Confirmed But Policy Is Challenged,” New York Times, 21 December, 1945; “Senate Confirms U.N.O. Delegation,” Los Angeles Times, 21 December, 1945; “UNO Delegates Given Senate Confirmation,” The Washington Post, 21 December, 1945. See also Interview with Mrs. Helen Gahagan Douglas by Ms. Emily Williams, Oral Historian on January 22, 1979, Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Transcripts, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, NL

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xxxii. In ER Papers, UN Corr., Part I, Reel 1 xxxiii. Mynnette Hastings to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 26, 1945, in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication,Part I, Reel 1. xxxiv. Eva Lane to Truman, December 20, 1945 attached to Eva Lane (secretary of Berkely Women’s Forum) to Eleanor Roosevelt, 21 December 1945,in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. xxxv. See letters to Eleanor Roosevelt from Constance A. Sporborg, 28 December 1945; Mrs. Joseph Welt 21 December 1945¸ R. Wimberly 21 December 1945; Mary Ballard (21 December1945?)¸ Ella Boole, 10 January. 1946; Dorothy Elmhurst 4 January 1946, in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. xxxvi. “Mrs. Roosevelt Accepts”, The Washington Post, December 21, 1945. xxxvii. Hugh Macbeth to Eleanor Roosevelt, 21 December 1945, in in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. “One Unfortunate Choice for United Nations Delegate,” Los Angeles Times, 21 December, 1945. xxxviii. Josephine Schain and Mildred Burgess to Eleanor Roosevelt, 28 December 1945; Anna Lord Strauss to Eleanor Roosevelt, 3 December, 1946, in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1; see also Henry Atkinson to Eleanor Roosevelt, 27 December 1945; A.S. Goss, to Mrs. William Sporborg, 18 December 1945,in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. xxxix. Interview with Mr. Clark Eichelberger by Dr. Thomas F. Soapes, Oral Historian, on November 15, 1977 for Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Transcripts, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, NL. xl. See letters addressed to Eleanor Roosevelt by Carrie Chapman Catt 28 December 1945; Walter White 28 December 1945; Helen Dwight Reid 28 December 1945; Mrs. William Hastings 27 December 1945; Esther Lape, 21 December 1945; Vera Whitehouse 28 December 1945; Constance Sporborg 28 December 1945; Henry Atkinson 27 December 1945; C. Eichelberger 28 December 1945, in The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. xli. Mrs. William Hastings to ER 27 December 1945. See also, Rowland Bruckner, A Most Uncertain Crusade, 57. xlii. Clark Eichelberg, UN: The First Ten Years (New York : Harper & Brothers, 1955) xliii. Henry Atkinson to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 27, 1945. xliv. Eleanor Roosevelt and William DeWitt, UN: Today and Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953). xlv. See for instance Chapman’s request to recommend Dorothy Kenyon’s appointment to UN Commission on the Status of Women, Carrie Chapman Catt to Eleanor Roosevelt, 7 May 1946, in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, I, 305-6. Or how Eleanor Roosevelt dealt with the issue of the recognition of Franco’s regime and her correspondence with Freda Kirchwey and others. See The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, I, 411-417. xlvi. Helen Laville, “A New Era in International Women’s Rights? American Women’s Associations and the Establishment of the UN Commission on the Status of Women,” Journal of Women’s History, 20, 4 (2008), 34-56. xlvii. Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); See Raffaella Baritono, “’La leadership è una pianta delicata’: il concetto di leadership nel movimento delle donne americane fra Otto e Novecento,” Ricerche di Storia Politica, V, 3 (2002), 351-364. xlviii. Raffaella Baritono “’We must have eagle eyes’: Eleanor Roosevelt, the United Nations and the World Trips of the 1950s,” in Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono, eds., Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective (Turin: Otto editore, 2013), 61-89.

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xlix. Eleanor Roosevelt, “Where Do Human Rights Begin?”, 27 March 1953, in Allida Black, ed., Courage in a Dangerous World. The Political Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 190. l. MacLeish to ER 27 December 1945, The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. li. Interview with James Frederick Green By Emily Williams, January 21, 1980, Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Transcripts, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, NL. lii. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography, 308. liii. Helen Laville, Cold War Women. liv. Andrew Johnstone, Dilemmas of Internationalism. lv. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography, 306. lvi. W.E.B. DuBois to M. McLeod Bethune, April 30, 1945, in Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, Part III, Series 1, reel 4. lvii. Walter White to ER, December 28, 1945 The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962 , UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 1. lviii. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). lix. Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White, 22 October 1947, in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, I, 634. lx. A.G. Mezerik, “Negroes at UN’s Door,” The Nation, 13 December 1947. lxi. Dean Acheson to Eleanor Roosevelt, 13 February 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Library Archive, Hyde Park, N.Y., Box 4658 – Trip Files: Middle East and Pakistan, 1952 Folder E.R. Trip File 1952 (Feb-March), General Correspondences, Schedules, etc. lxii. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). lxiii. Reinhold Niebuhr, “American Liberals and British Labor,” The Nation, June 8 1946, 683-4. lxiv. See Dorothy F. Leet, “Recent Impressions of France and England. University Women Turn from Resistance to Rebuilding,” Journal of the American Association of University Women, 39, 2 (January 1946), 73-76. lxv. Helen Dwight Reid, “International Cooperation,” Journal of the American Association of University Women, 38, 4 (summer 1945). lxvi. Speech at Dinner in Honor of Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, United States Delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Sponsored by the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, of Washington, D.C., Thursday Evening, March 14, 1946, Grand Ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel, in Bethune Papers, Pt. 3, Subject Files 1939-1955, reel 17 lxvii. Eleanor Roosevelt Speech for Oxford, November 13, 1948 The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962, UN Correspondence and Publication, Part I, reel 7 lxviii. Mark D. Alleyne, “The United Nations’ Celebrity Diplomacy,” The SAIS Review of International Affairs, 25, 1 (winter 2005), 175-185.

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ABSTRACTS

In 1945, Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as a member of the American delegation to the first session of the United Nations in an effort to send a signal to the many associations who wanted to have a role in the redefinition of the post-war democratic order. ER’ s commitment to peace and social justice was an expression of internationalism ‘from below’, which was convinced that the challenge to enlarge and make democracy more inclusive, more respectful of gender, racial, and ethnic differences had to be won not only in the domestic political sphere but also in the international one. The paper will explore the intrinsic contradiction which was at the root of ER’ s engagement in the UN. On the one hand, she was conscious of her official status as American officer and the symbol of the American democratic model; on the other, her will to give expression and voice to the questions posed by American and European civic associations and their commitment to democracy, social justice and human rights in the growing Cold War climate provoked tensions and ambiguities that proved difficult to solve.

INDEX

Keywords: Clark Eichelberger, Cold War, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Internationalism, Public Diplomacy, United Nations

AUTHOR

RAFFAELLA BARITONO University of Bologna

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“And with all she lived with casual unawareness of her value to civilization”: Close-reading Eleanor Roosevelt’s Autofabrication

Sara Polak

1 It is by now a commonplace to say that Eleanor Roosevelt was a curious feminist.i One of the most powerful women in American history, and yet someone who determinedly played the part of the “wife of,” Eleanor Roosevelt organized her own press conferences to which only female reporters were allowed access, yet she also responded to a young woman’s wish to temporarily prioritize her job over having children: “Since you married him, I should think a baby was something you would both want.”ii Thus, she regularly said and wrote things expressive of a traditional, even Victorian, perspective. Roosevelt’s implicit denial of the possibility that the letter writer to Ladies Home Journal could prefer not to have a baby straightaway, even when that is what the letter writer explicitly says, is a case in point. The woman writes: “My husband is all for having a baby right away, but I want to keep on with my job until the war is over,” but Eleanor Roosevelt, at least within the context of the Ladies Home Journal has no time for such postponement of what she ought to want. On the other hand, Roosevelt’s actual actions often suggest a relatively radical feminism – the press conferences secured intellectually fulfilling jobs for many female reporters even during the Depression – and she was very committed to helping women’s groups and initiatives, and educating women about politics and global affairs in a broad sense, through a wide range of media, including many magazines, radio and television shows aimed at housewives.

2 Thus Eleanor Roosevelt’s discourse at times seemed to fall behind her practice, which in itself might be read as what De Certeau has called “tactics from the subjugated,” except for the fact that Roosevelt was, personally, all but subjugated.iii Those she supported often were, but in her own daily life she arguably had more power than she was legally or politically entitled to, given that she had not been elected to

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political office. As such she often, particularly as First Lady, needed to play down the extent of her power. Discursively positioning herself as traditionally feminine – modest, shy, deferential – often worked to support her position and her actions as unthreatening. She did at times weigh in in the public debate, for instance when, after the start of the US engagement in World War Two, she defended her husband’s position, but also at times opposed his political choices.

3 However, the overt purpose of her “My Day” column (that ran six days a week, from 1936 to 1962) was to discuss her own everyday life and First Lady-like business, and on most days she did just that.iv It seems that her strategy of domesticity, modesty and reticence in part also allowed her considerable space to act as she saw fit, especially in the margin of what was regarded as politically important or sensitive, both within Franklin Roosevelt’s administrations, and after his death as a public intellectual, diplomat and delegate to the United Nations.

4 In this combination of reticent domesticity – often read as modesty or even shyness – on the one hand, and militant, often successful, activism on the other, the domesticity was the most visible through Roosevelt’s writing. The activism was at least equally present, but it was not what forced itself into the public perception – to the contrary, Roosevelt’s interventions were often highly invisible, or at least, her role in them was invisible to the outside world. This invisibility of Roosevelt’s activism on the stage of public and foreign policy, and the emphasis on her homely writing, has led to a sense among many Eleanor Roosevelt fans and historians that she is not done enough justice in cultural remembrance. Jo Binker and Brigid O’Farrell, contributors to the George Washington University project which made a large portion of the Eleanor Roosevelt papers digitally available, complain for instance that Ken Burns’ 14-hour PBS documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), spends too little time on her life and achievements:

5 As a savvy producer and consumer of television, Eleanor Roosevelt would have been the first to appreciate Burns’s series on her family. She would have welcomed his interest in their lives and accomplishments but she would have been puzzled and dismayed at the amount of time devoted to her private life. (…) Eleanor Roosevelt’s contributions are often overlooked and undervalued.v

6 Although it may be fair to say that Eleanor Roosevelt’s contributions have been “overlooked and undervalued” – especially compared to Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt’s – I will argue that this effect can productively be read as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s highly successful self-presentation and invisible exercise of political power. As Blanche Wiesen Cook and others have already argued, there is ample evidence that, Eleanor Roosevelt despite her own statements to the contrary, enjoyed being involved in politics.vi One important way in which she played the political game was to present herself in such a way as to strategically allow other stakeholders to overlook and undervalue her contributions. This was, as I will show, with reference to Cynthia Enloe’s model of how international relations are invisibly negotiated, particularly successful in foreign policy.vii This essay, therefore, analyzes the genealogy and gendered politics of Eleanor Roosevelt’s clout in American foreign policy.

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Genealogy of a political career on the edge of the establishment

7 Early in the 1920s, when Franklin Roosevelt decided to take up his political career again after he had lost the use of his legs as a result of a bout of adult-onset poliomyelitis in 1921, Eleanor Roosevelt first entered the public arena, substituting for her husband, who was not yet ready to perform in public. Coached intensively by Franklin’s personal assistant Louis Howe, she embarked on the campaign trail and a variety of speaking engagements. While initially loathing the public attention and fearing the exposure, she quickly came to enjoy public speaking. As Franklin was forced to learn to cope with his disability, she had to learn to assume parts of his role and she did so with more enthusiasm and talent than anyone had expected.viii

8 Many historians and other commentators have argued that the period between 1918, in which Eleanor discovered the affair between Franklin and Lucy Mercer, and 1924, in which FDR mounted the national political stage again for the first time after suffering polio, was crucial to his personal development.ix But if these years were formative for Franklin, they certainly were for Eleanor Roosevelt too. She famously commented on her discovery of her husband’s affair that “the bottom dropped out of my particular world, and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”x What this “fac[ing] honestly” entailed precisely is not made explicit, but the suggestion is that Eleanor Roosevelt suddenly perceived herself to have inhabited a dream world without realizing it. This discovery was a confrontation with the political realism of her world, and her position of limited but employable power in it.

9 Roosevelt did not passively bear her ordeal, but her novel maturity was brought about by something that had happened to her, requiring a thorough adjustment. Her newly gained independence must be harmonized with her femininity, to address the culturally problematic incongruity between female autonomy and gender expectations. By thinking of her political activism as a function of how her marital love turned into mutually advantageous partnership, it becomes something that forced itself upon her. This fits in with her own self-presentation of someone who had taken on her highly visible role in spite of her natural inclinations. FDR’s personal assistant Louis Howe, acutely aware of the need after 1921 to have a mobile Roosevelt operate alongside, and literally in the name of, the recuperating one, is often credited, by Eleanor Roosevelt herself and others, as crucial in coaching her to occupy a mature position as an independent agent beside FDR. Such factors – Howe’s mentorship, FDR’s need for an able substitute – contributed to enabling Eleanor Roosevelt to juggle her femininity with a public role and the acquisition of political sway.

10 I use the notion of autofabrication as a term to complement Stephen Greenblatt’s celebrated term self-fashioning.xi In Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare Greenblatt discusses the production of selves of exemplary renaissance authors, arguing that they are both products of a particular culture with particular shaping demands on the individual, and also individuals reflecting on those cultural codes through their writing.xii Greenblatt argues that during and since the sixteenth century ideas of the self as mobile, and the belief that selves can be fashioned by internal and external factors, have acquired immense momentum in the Western world. The success of the term, also for fruitful analysis of individuals who lived long after the 16th century, suggests he is right. However, to understand larger-than-life political leaders

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such as Franklin Roosevelt it is not enough to regard them as products of a culture who simultaneously through their personalities contribute to the development of their culture. Especially in a modern mass media-driven democratic setting, a leader like FDR is also a public icon, presumably representing the majority of the electorate – however impossible it is for one individual to actually represent millions of people. At the same time the president of the United States is its commander in chief, the formal embodiment of executive power, a dynamic analyzed early and authoritatively by James MacGregor Burns.xiii This executive power is a life-and-death matter, a harsh fact that often needs to be obscured, for a personally portrayed democratic leader to survive politically. This conscious production of a positive public image, coupled with the necessary elision of visible power-wielding are the constitutive elements of autofabrication, complementary in the case of political leaders to self-fashioning.

11 Thus autofabrication goes further than self-fashioning in illuminating the cultural production of political leaders. Self-fashioning relates to the making of an individual self, driven by the person involved, and also to the self as the product of environmental pressures and circumstances, shaped by cultural and ideological demands. This concept on its own works well to think about the fashioning of most selves, but to consider the making of iconic political leaders, it is necessary to take into account on the one hand the fact that political leaders embody power over the life and death of their subjects, and on the other the fact that political leaders in modern democratic systems represent their electorate. As such, they need to project themselves as relatable public icons that a diverse audience can identify with, and that can function to obscure their exertion of power. Franklin Roosevelt exemplifies a very successful autofabrication, as his largely celebratory remembrance attests.xiv Eleanor Roosevelt was a crucial agent in FDR’s autofabrication and, because she survived him and remained publicly active and visible, of his legacy. What makes her particularly important is her faculty to informally and indirectly expand his influence into areas such as the domestic sphere, entertainment sections of mass media, and into the years after his death. Eleanor Roosevelt made FDR’s autofabrication more powerful, because she expanded his influence into areas that are not habitually considered the realm of presidential leadership, as well as beyond his own lifetime.

12 Limiting the concept of autofabrication to elected political leaders precludes the possibility that Eleanor Roosevelt had her own autofabrication, because she was not one. However, she was one of the agents in her husband’s autofabrication, and particularly after his death effectively and covertly used her own informal power – as if he were still president, and she the person with access to his wishes – while also presenting a consistent public image, visible but simultaneously stressing her modesty. Eleanor Roosevelt for instance used her deceased husband’s lingering authority when she – previously always signing off as “Eleanor Roosevelt” – starting signing of with “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt,” and her protective chairmanship of organizations that could potentially be targeted as having communist sympathies.xv

13 An example of Roosevelt’s ambiguous highlighting of her own modesty occurs in a column (“My Day,” February 4, 1958) in which Eleanor Roosevelt reviews the opening performance of Dore Schary’s play Sunrise at Campobello, a dramatic rendering of FDR’s illness with polio and initial rehabilitation. About the dramatic rendering of herself she writes: “Miss Mary Fickett did an excellent job of being a very sweet character, which she is in the play. I am afraid I was never really like Mr. Schary’s picture of myself, so I

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could even look upon the portrayal of myself in a fictional light!”xvi By calling Mary Fickett’s portrayal of herself “very sweet,” but denying that she ever was “really like” that, she both suggests her own modesty, and assertively refuses to regard herself as such. While endorsing the idea that sweetness is a positive trait, she herself implicitly declares herself impervious to that compliment within the negotiation of power. Her presence at the play’s opening night and her positive review of it, however, in themselves already lend weight as well as a suggestion of veracity to the play. Sunrise at Campobello was turned into a successful film in 1960, nominated for four Academy Awards and winning a Best Actress Golden Globe Award for Greer Garson’s role of Eleanor Roosevelt. Both within the cinematic universe of Sunrise at Campobello the Eleanor Roosevelt character is crucial to the narrative’s success, and outside of that the real Eleanor Roosevelt enabled its making – she mentions in a June 1960 column that the filming was “in full swing” at the main house and her private cottage at Hyde Park – and advertised and officiously authorized it.

14 Eleanor Roosevelt’s endorsement of Sunrise at Campobello, particularly her remark about Fickett’s “sweetness,” are exemplary of how she, through her role as agent of her husband’s autofabrication, also created her own public image – suggesting both that she was too modest to call herself sweet, and hinting at something sharper than the fictional rendering as sweet. However, the fact that this remains so vague functions both to stress Eleanor Roosevelt’s mysteriousness and her elusive power. On paper, Eleanor Roosevelt had no political power, but in practice she exerted a great deal of political influence, through her husband and later in his name. During FDR’s presidency the Democratic party often used her to keep in the fold particular parts of its constituency on the more radical left wing in exchange for small or symbolic concessions to groups Eleanor Roosevelt particularly advocated for, and her willingness to engage in such deals, often meant party officials would not be forced to address controversial or otherwise highly problematic issues.xvii

15 This meant that many politicians and other leaders were in Eleanor Roosevelt’s debt, and after Franklin Roosevelt’s death this was compounded by the fact that her voice came to implicitly inherit some of his authority. Many of Roosevelt’s citations of what her husband would have said or wanted, carried the suggestion of wifely deference, when really she appropriated his name and opinions to suit her own causes and convictions. For instance, in the “My Day”column of June 16, 1953, she invokes her husband’s feelings of desolation after Pearl Harbor to denounce the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (“As one contemplates Hiroshima, one can only say God grant to men greater wisdom in the future.”).xviii In doing so, she suggests that Franklin Roosevelt would have agreed with her that dropping atomic bombs on Japan betrayed a lack of wisdom, but there is little evidence that such would have been the case, had FDR been alive still in August 1945. Thus Eleanor Roosevelt’s, certainly at the time, controversial criticism of the choice to use atomic bombs, is given weight through FDR’s presidential authority by proxy, and simultaneously toned down by the humility expressed in deferring to Eleanor Roosevelt’s citation of her husband’s presumable feelings. This same diffidence is reflected in her invocation of God in the quotation.

16 However, by suggesting that her husband would not have condoned the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Eleanor Roosevelt “borrowed” some of his authority, continuing a much older pattern in which she had been one of his communication channels into places FDR was physically unable to go to, or areas of society and public opinion

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making that were simply not the president’s natural terrain. After FDR’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt’s continued representation of him of course did not support him politically, although it often did contribute to his celebratory remembrance. More importantly, however, it did contribute to Eleanor Roosevelt’s own authority and influence, while simultaneously constructing a public image of modesty and a gendered unwillingness to exert power. And, even if Eleanor was not formally a political leader, this combination of covertly using one’s political power, while covering this up through autonomously projecting a favorable and attractive public image, is precisely what marks autofabrication as a process different from self-fashioning.

17 Another key manner in which Eleanor Roosevelt expanded the reach of Franklin’s autofabrication, along the lines of culturally constituted gender expectations, is through operating as the writer and narrator of his nomos. A term defined by Robert Cover, a nomos is a “normative universe” which turns on the constant creation and maintenance of “a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void.”xix As head of the executive branch of the federal government, Franklin Roosevelt was profoundly involved in the creation and maintenance of that “world of right and wrong” on a political and legal level. While neither endowed with the power of legislation nor jurisdiction, he literally signed into law the bills that regulated and ordered American society and lives around the world. He was both in the executive and the dramatic sense of the word the lead actor, though simultaneously, he needed as part of his autofabrication to consider the desirability of displaying his power. Eleanor Roosevelt’s narrative of the nomos the President inhabited and participated in shaping, functioned as one vehicle for displaying some and occluding other elements of this dynamic. In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt effectively became the narrator of the nomos FDR was engaged in producing and sustaining, increasingly so over time, and continuing to act as the agent of his nomos and of his legacy after his death.

18 It is important to note that Eleanor Roosevelt filled a gap left by her husband through writing. Franklin Roosevelt spoke and acted – suitably for an executive and a dramatic actor. He left voice recordings as well as a library filled with documentary material of his presidency, but he wrote very little, and often prohibited note-taking in meetings with cabinet members or advisers. His signature was primarily performative, an act to transform a formulaic text into law, not a narrative kind of writing. Eleanor Roosevelt, in contrast, signed off her writings with her name, in her own handwriting, to stress their personal nature. Unlike Churchill, who, as the subtitle of David Reynolds’ book In Command of History, Fighting and Writing the Second World War has it, was both a major actor in and narrator of World War Two, Franklin Roosevelt did not write the history of the war or any event during his presidency.xx However, that role was taken on by Eleanor Roosevelt, through her daily newspaper column, monthly articles in numerous magazines, and a total of four autobiographies. I have argued elsewhere that the fact Franklin Roosevelt did not leave much writing or any memoir is part of his modernity and his preference for media – radio, photography, newsreels – that would accrue even more importance in the future.xxi Yet at the same time Eleanor Roosevelt’s writing contributed proverbially to his immortality, furthering the issues and ideals of his nomos through narrative.

19 Although I understand Eleanor Roosevelt’s writing here as contributing to Franklin’s autofabrication, it is clearly part of a double deal: by enabling his public image to reach new realms, Eleanor Roosevelt also created a massive platform for

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herself. Her narrative voice became a household article with unprecedented authority throughout the Western world. The public image she developed over time continued to relate back to her role as an agent representing FDR, often to lend authority to her own positions, as well as a sense of appropriate deference to a male leader’s perception. Nonetheless, Roosevelt assertively assumed and argued her own positions on national and international issues, packaged usually as intended to educate and inform American audiences with a relatively large distance from the machinations of international politics. In that shape, and channeled through the well-known voice of the US’s long- time First Lady, whom Harry Truman later dubbed “First Lady of the World,” Eleanor Roosevelt’s words were received as both unthreatening and commanding respect. Such gendered reception, and Roosevelt’s astuteness in catering to these unspoken expectations and needs of the formal stakeholders in the field of foreign policy, suggests that Eleanor Roosevelt did actually auto-fabricate herself as a politician would, but, through the use of gender and gender expectations, to the effect that she came across as less of a politician than she really was.

Beaches, Bananas, Bases: Eleanor Roosevelt and Foreign Policy

20 Eleanor Roosevelt’s manner of carrying herself as an activist influencer on the edge of the establishment during her husband’s presidency, and particularly thereafter in the arena of international politics, can productively be understood as foreshadowing Cynthia Enloe’s paradigmatic monograph Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990). xxii Enloe radically expanded the study of international politics beyond usual focus on powerful white men in dark-blue suits and red ties who hold final sway over the complex machinations of global international politics. The book argues that for a real understanding of this impenetrable and seemingly unalterable apparatus of world order, it is necessary to expand the focus to include the tourists, chambermaids, prostitutes, military wives at foreign bases and all others who have little formal power, but are impacted by and are part of the global choreography of international politics.

21 Enloe’s question “Where are the women in international politics?” is fruitful because it leads to an understanding of politics that is not limited to official institutional loci of power. The status quo of women around the world supporting the international political system as secretaries, wives and chambermaids seems so natural and fixed that the people involved are in perfect harmony with patriarchic ideology, unaware of their contribution. Since Enloe made this argument, however, some American women have achieved great formal power in international politics – Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice – partly perhaps as a result of increased awareness of the culturally constructed character of an apparatus that once seemed unchangeable or even predestined. However, I argue that Eleanor Roosevelt both an unconscious precursor to Enloe’s ideas and yet also a firm supporter of the patriarchic nomos her husband shaped and represented, used her understanding of her value to the patriarchal system to maximize her clout, and to obscure her exertion of power. Moreover, she functioned, through her position, also as a paradigmatic enabler of the later more formally established power positions of women such as Albright, Clinton, and Rice.

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22 Enloe’s research traces many examples of women crucial to the system of global international politics, for example examining how wives of soldiers at foreign bases played essential roles in turning the base into a community and also in creating and sustaining relationships between American military bases and their foreign local surroundings. She convincingly shows that these women were vital to the success, perceived legitimacy and continued existence of many bases. However, groups of military wives only started to claim recognition in the 1980s, until which time their crucial contribution had been taken for granted by themselves as well as by the male military leadership.xxiii Enloe argues that this presumption of wifely support is essential for male leaders, without being recognized as such. What she lays bare is essentially an internalized conviction that female contributions ought to be invisible sacrifices made out of devotion and borne in silence, rather than requiring a formal due in money or power on an equal footing with men. Her book wants to radically pull into the light the indispensable contributions of women which are nonetheless often made from marginalized or disempowered positions, in order to show the size and space of their agency, and their unused room for negotiation.

23 Enloe introduces an expanded notion of the realm of politics to show the potential for empowerment of those who are not or only marginally involved in political decision-making. If Eleanor Roosevelt had a similar agenda it was far less pronounced or radical, but she did understand that other spheres than the traditionally political could hold sway over political decision-makers. The key difference between Enloe and Roosevelt is that, instead of creating or demanding visibility to gain recognition, Roosevelt used the political invisibility of her gender and traditional spheres of operation to covertly exercise power. By operating informally, on the edge or outside of politics, she used this power to contribute to the enfranchisement of women, laborers, and minorities, by helping them in civically and medially symbolic ways, outside of traditional politics.

24 Thus, Eleanor Roosevelt, in practice if not explicitly in theory, shared Enloe’s vision that power could be exerted from marginal and seemingly non-political spheres – or in other words, that the political realm was larger than it is commonly perceived it to be, but unlike Enloe, she used this invisibility during the White House years as an opportunity to extend her agency to help the marginalized, rather than a problem reinforcing the status quo. She learned to substitute for Franklin Roosevelt physically, to act as a portal to the White House for marginalized groups, and thus to negotiate social and political victories on their behalf, and to use her prerogative to narrate and disseminate his story. As such she learned to use to his and her own advantage the gaps Franklin left to be filled. From that vantage point she could, famously, organize for black contralto Marian Anderson to sing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC in 1939, on the one hand a great symbolic act in the slow emancipation of African Americans before the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, and on the other an act that was indeed symbolic in the sense that it did little to increase the political influence or visibility of African Americans. As such, she could be argued to have placed many of the people she tried to help in a similar position to her own: not directly powerful, but located so that indirect influence might be exerted.

25 Her own empowerment as a woman through the limitations of her husband alerted her to the complex expectations of American femininity. In a “My Day” column on August 13, 1942, she wrote about the effort of women to preserve the “prewar world” in

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the absence of their husbands. She quotes at length from a text a friend has sent her of an inscription on a statue of the Pioneer Woman, a quintessentially American archetype:

26 … the line in the inscription which I like best: “And with all she lived with casual unawareness of her value to civilization.”

27 There we have the secret which should be driven home to every woman. In countless homes in this country today, there are women who are "casually unaware" of the great accomplishments which are theirs. They will be recognized by history, but today we forget them because they do their daily tasks so casually that their heroism and the vital place which they fill in our world passes almost unnoticed, and certainly unsung in the present.xxiv

28 Part of what is praiseworthy about the frontier woman, according to the inscription – which Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend both affirm remains of paramount relevance in 1942 – is her “casual unawareness” of her contribution. She is crucial but does not command, or get, her due reward in money or power, because she is unaware of her value. Her modesty and the casual nature of her accomplishment is part of her “value to civilization.” Roosevelt does not suggest that it should be otherwise, she does not spur the women “in countless homes” on to demand recognition of the “great accomplishments which are theirs.” However, she does explicitly stress that they “fill a vital place,” at home and during the war also in jobs left vacant by men, and moreover, that “their heroism” will be “recognized by history.” It “passes almost unnoticed” because women’s heroism culturally includes their renunciation of any claim to recognition in the present, but Roosevelt argues future narratives will not leave women’s heroism “unsung.” Thus, the suggestion is, that while these women may receive little material recognition in the form of money or power within the normative universe they inhabit, they will not escape the attention of future narrative. Whether or not this is really the case – Roosevelt’s own contributions to American history and culture tend to be underrepresented as Binker and O’Farrell note in their critique of The Roosevelt’s – the suggestion is that a modest place in the narrative and an invisible, but not powerless, position in the nomos, is suitable for the blueprint of the American woman.

29 However, Roosevelt also writes that this casual unawareness is “the secret which should be driven home to every woman,” alerting readers publicly to the value of women’s contribution, while simultaneously stressing the importance of its hidden nature. Thus, she draws attention to women’s uncashed checks, and at the same time praises their generosity in not demanding recompense. As discussed, this was her own strategy also: if she did require compensations in other forms, she did so, characteristically, not for herself, but for those groups and goals she wished to empower. In the broadened definition of the political Enloe suggests – which included groups and interests that were not always regarded as part of that realm – Eleanor Roosevelt thus did claim political power, while simultaneously disguising it.

30

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s casual unawareness in cultural memory

31 In American popular cultural representations, the Roosevelts’ informal and personal style still reverberates, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s officious acting as presidential substitute or supplement is a central part of that style. Even the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt could guide attention away from other issues, and allowed FDR an unofficial second voice, to own or to distance himself from as he saw fit, is in itself reflected in cultural memory. Instances of this can be found in the movie Hyde Park on Hudson (2012): throughout the film the suspicion is raised that the Eleanor character takes the initiative to serve hotdogs to the British King and Queen to humiliate them publicly through a vulgar snack associated with American Independence Day.xxv Thus she is portrayed as rebellious and politically active on the sly in the emotive margin of otherwise pragmatic and rational international politics. However, in the end the film suggests that the hotdogs were FDR’s plan after all, having made deliberate use of his wife’s reputation, in order to deflect any suspicion away from himself. What has come to be known as the Hot Dog Summit of 11 June 1939 was, according to David Woolner, planned in detail by FDR, including the hot dogs.xxvi Whether or not there is a historical basis to believe that he attempted, as he does in the film, to suggest that the hot dogs were his wife’s malicious idea, it is exemplary of an actual as well as a popularly remembered dynamic between them.

32 A key effect of casting Eleanor Roosevelt as an officious voice alongside FDR’s official one, especially together with her introduction of domesticity into the public icon, is that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, in autofabrication as well as remembrance, are extremely successful as the nation’s projected parents. The broad knowledge that during the presidency they shared no sex life is no problem here – indeed for the popular imagination, this might be thought of as an asset, especially since they did have five children to prove that they had had a sexual relationship in the past. This lack of an erotic relationship between them opens up the potential to fantasize about erotic relationships Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt may each have had with others, while yet, despite the imagined or real lack of sexual monogamy, they were real parents, and successfully functioned as symbolic parents to the nation.

33 This remembrance of the Roosevelts as a presidential couple whose officious acts and expressions are interwoven in their public policies and administration, is borne out for instance in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s paradigmatic No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II.xxvii This biography weaves the Roosevelts’ private and public lives into one, starting with what in a film would be a parallel projection of the German occupation of Europe in 1940 and FDR’s illness with polio in 1921. Thus, the home front is consistently interpreted as “national American” on the one hand and “domestic” – within the intimacy of the Roosevelts’ household – on the other. The suggestion throughout is that the Roosevelt home is a direct reflection of America as a whole, casting the family as an inclusive allegory for the nation and all its citizens.

34 No Ordinary Time consistently uses the first names of its narrative’s dramatis personae, and, like Daniel Petrie’s Eleanor and Franklin biopic, it often stages Eleanor Roosevelt as the narrator – presumably because the personal, familial side of the narrative relies heavily on Eleanor Roosevelt’s autobiographical writings.xxviii As the use

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of the first names already signals, the biography is intensely intimate. It strongly links private events in the Roosevelts’ lives to public affairs of American engagement in the war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance is framed in an elaborate discussion of the deaths of FDR’s mother and Eleanor Roosevelt’s brother in the months previous to December 7th, 1941. A great deal of attention is spent on the personal memories and grieving processes of both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the recurrent suggestion is that both worked so concertedly on preparing for the war they realized was coming, partly to alleviate their mourning, for instance when Goodwin quotes Eleanor Roosevelt’s memoir: “I think it was in an attempt to numb this feeling that I worked so hard at the Office of Civilian Defense that fall.”xxix

35 The final chapter similarly links Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal grief over her husband’s death, and her discovery that his extramarital relationship with Lucy Mercer-Rutherfurd had been revived, to her decision to continue to bear out his political and ideological legacy. As the war ended, Eleanor Roosevelt, according to Goodwin, also made peace with the past of her troubled marriage.

36 For the rest of her life, her son Elliott observed, Eleanor “chose to remember only the lovely times they had shared, never the estrangement and pain.” She loved to quote word for word the things they had told one another. She kept up the traditions he had established for the family – including the picnic on the Fourth of July and the reading of Dickens at Christmas. Maureen Corr, Eleanor’s secretary during the forties and fifties, remembers her “constantly talking about what Franklin did or what Franklin said or… how Franklin thought about this or that. And every time she mentioned his name you could hear the emotion in her voice and see the glow in her eyes.” …

37 In these first months on her own, Eleanor derived constant comfort from a little verse sent to her by a friend. “They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind, In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.” These simple lines, she wrote, inspired her to make the rest of her life worthy of her husband’s memory. As long as she continued to fight for his ideals, he would continue to live.xxx

38 Goodwin here interweaves public and private, suggesting that Eleanor Roosevelt’s constant mentioning of “what Franklin did or what Franklin said” was primarily motivated by her personal grief and wish to retain affectionate memories for herself. The final sentence suggests that Eleanor Roosevelt’s motivation for continuing “to fight for his ideals” after FDR’s death was to keep alive his memory, where I would read this as a pretext to claim space for her own political ideals. Goodwin does in this manner include the Roosevelts’ private life, and particularly Eleanor Roosevelt and the dynamics of their marriage in her discussion of the American executive war leadership. However, she does not, like Enloe, expand the scope of what she regards as political through including the Roosevelts’ private lives, but rather treats their lives as allegorical to national event, casting FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt as metaphorically parental figures to the nation. Together, or really, as a family, they are treated as premediating the US at war, and therefore able to guide the US through it. Goodwin does not, like Enloe, include the private and the officious in what she regards as political, but rather treats it as a separate level that mirrors the public level of international politics, a movement that Eleanor’s posing as “casually unaware of her contribution” alongside FDR in a sense makes possible.

39 Goodwin in her preface compares the United States and the Roosevelts noting that they share: “the sense of a cause successfully pursued through great difficulties, a

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theme common to America itself and to the family which guided it” (11). She suggests that the success of both the US and the Roosevelts hinged on the greatness of the difficulties experienced, and that the Roosevelts’ success in “guiding” America depended on their knowledge of those same “great difficulties.” Goodwin’s phrase “the family which guided it” firmly espouses the notion that Eleanor Roosevelt occupied a deputy position in leading the US, while expanding the presidency into the private and the officious, to benefit FDR’s public image as a paternal war president.

40 Although Eleanor Roosevelt remained very influential in her post-war career, her lowered visibility was an explicit choice – she was often invited to run for political office but continued to present herself rather as FDR’s “aura”, even if her projects in reality were more her own than extrapolations of FDR’s. As she wrote about this in an article in Look Magazine in 1948, following her refusal to run for vice-president with Harry Truman:

41 At first I was surprised that anyone should think that I would want to run for office, or that I was fitted to hold office. Then I realized that some people felt that I must have learned something from my husband in all the years that he was in public life! (…) The simple truth is that I have had my fill of public life of the more or less stereotyped kind.xxxi

42 Clearly she continued to auto-fabricate herself as FDR’s wife, suggesting that any fitness for political office would have to have been learned from him. Moreover, even if she continued to exert great influence, she also continued to pose as someone who only reluctantly, despite herself, and to her own surprise, had a public life at all.

Conclusion: First Lady for President?

43 In a December 1945 Gallup poll respondents were asked to name potential candidates who “might make a good president”, and Eleanor Roosevelt came fourth.xxxii This fantasy of Eleanor Roosevelt as presidential candidate has proved persistent. Robin Gerber’s historical “what if?” novel Eleanor Vs. Ike (2008) has Eleanor Roosevelt run for president against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and win, thus allowing her a position of real power in an imagined nomos.xxxiii Although Eleanor Roosevelt never in real life had the aspiration to become president or otherwise run for political office, and despite the fact that she would probably never have had a serious chance to be nominated within the Democratic party – not just because she was a woman, but also because she represented the party’s radical left wing – the idea that she could have been a good candidate is easily revived by Gerber. Ellen Feldman – author of Lucy (2004), a historical novel about FDR’s extramarital affair with Lucy Mercer – in her appraisal called Eleanor Vs. Ike “oh-so-timely” in the context of 2008, when Hillary Clinton was running for the nomination as Democratic candidate. It seems indeed that – much as Feldman’s own novel may have been inspired by Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky affair – Gerber is led to remember Eleanor Roosevelt as a potential presidential candidate by the events of 2008. Eleanor Roosevelt in the novel even encounters a five-year-old Hillary Rodham. If the novel aimed to stage a fictional premeditation of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Eleanor Roosevelt was the only historical character Gerber could have cast in the lead role. However, the novel does more than that – it draws Eleanor Roosevelt into the

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center of political power, a position in which it is only too easy to imagine her, especially with the benefit of hindsight.

44 Obviously, Hillary Clinton, too, has been aware of striking parallels between herself and Eleanor Roosevelt, possibly throughout her adult life. Clinton has said on many occasions that Eleanor Roosevelt functioned as a role model and inspiration for her, and even that she was wont to mentally “talk” with her: “[Eleanor Roosevelt] usually responds by telling me to buck up, or at least to grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros.”, Clinton wrote in 1995. She did this in a weekly syndicated newspaper column, which ran from 1995-2000, and was titled “Talking It Over”. It was modeled explicitly on Eleanor Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns.xxxiv Apparently, as an activist First Lady with a political agenda of her own, Clinton considered contributing to the narrative of her husband’s nomos, as Eleanor Roosevelt had done, helpful and appropriate.

45 Still, there is a major difference between Eleanor Roosevelt’s and Hillary Clinton’s potential space to become president after having been First Lady. Whereas Eleanor Roosevelt could only operate from the sidelines of the political establishment – influential for someone who did not hold elective office, but still a marginal position, from which she had to leverage her power on the sly – Hillary Clinton in many ways came to embody the Democratic establishment. Indeed, whereas male candidates, like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, may be competitive for the nomination as outsiders or more marginal figures, for a female candidate to become nominee for one of the major parties, being an establishment candidate with ample party support is vital. Eleanor Roosevelt could never have become that, and so, in reality was about as far removed from becoming president herself as she said, regardless of what polls among voters suggest in response to a hypothetical question, or authors later imagined.

46 On the other hand, to acquire the position she has now, Hillary Clinton does use strategies similar to Eleanor Roosevelt’s “casual unawareness”, not in the subservient style of the frontier woman, who is truly unaware of the value of her contribution, but, like Eleanor Roosevelt, astutely mindful of the need to seem unaware and unimposing. Especially in the race for the highest office in the United States, it was increasingly important for Clinton to perform a traditional gender role and expectations. Unlike her opponents, she had to smile in debates and speeches, limit modulations in her voice and gesticulation, and refrain from interrupting male candidates who did interrupt her. However, she managed also to communicate the existence of such implicit limitations to her audience, creating space for herself and others to challenge more explicit sexism in policies, such as the absence of parental leave, and the gender pay gap. She also called out her opponent on his blunt sexism, while at the same time countering society’s tendency to first-name women while addressing men by their surname, not by insisting on being called by her surname herself, but rather by addressing her opponent as Donald, something that seemed to irritate him.

47 Although Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt thus have operated in very different circumstances, and have (had) different strategies available, they both found ways to comply with limiting gender expectations, and yet negotiate those expectations, often invisibly, but still influentially. Although in real life FDR was a leading figure in his nomos and Eleanor Roosevelt a narrator of his narrative, who could not have obtained anything like Hillary Clinton’s executive power, she veered to that other side of the dialectic at times too.

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NOTES i. E.g. Judy Klemesrud, “Assessing Eleanor Roosevelt as a Feminist,” The New York Times, 5 November 1984. ii. Eleanor Roosevelt, “If You Ask Me,” Ladies Home Journal, January 1943. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers (Digital Edition).http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/IYAM/January1943.html. Retrieved 13 December 2015. iii. Michel De Certeau, Trans. Steven Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 38. iv. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (Digital Edition). https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. Retrieved 13 December 2015. v. Mary Jo Binker and Brigid O’Farrell, “This Is What Ken Burns Neglected to Tell You about Eleanor Roosevelt”, HNN.com. History News Network, July 12, 2014. http:// historynewsnetwork.org/article/157795 Retrieved 13 December 2015. vi. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I, 1884-1933 (New York: Penguin, 1993), 382. vii. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). viii. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007), 199. ix. E.g. Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt’s Massive Disability and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public (St. Petersburg (FL): Vandamere Press, 1985). x. Joseph P. Lash, Love Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1982), 66. xi. Sara Polak, “This is Roosevelt’s World” – FDR as a Cultural Icon in American Memory. Dissertation, Leiden University, 2015. xii. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1-10. xiii. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt, the Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, 1956). xiv. This is analyzed in detail by David Reynolds in “FDR’s Foreign Policy and the Construction of American History 1945-1955” and David Woolner in “FDR: Reflections on Legacy and Leadership, the View from 2008”, both in FDR’s World: War, Peace and Legacies. David Woolner, Warren Kimball, and David Reynolds, eds. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). xv. Dario Fazzi, A Voice of Conscience: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Anti-Nuclear Movement [forthcoming 2016], 59. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). xvi. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day”, February 4, 1958. http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ displaydoc.cfm?_y=1958&_f=md004030 Retrieved 13 December 2015. xvii. This argument is made, for instance, in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 185-186. xviii. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day”, 16 June, 1953. http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ displaydoc.cfm?_y=1953&_f=md002564 Retrieved 13 December 2015. xix. Robert Cover, Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, eds. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 95. xx. David Reynolds, In Command of History, Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004). xxi. Sara Polak, “This is Roosevelt’s World” – FDR as a Cultural Icon in American Memory. Dissertation, Leiden University, 2015.

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xxii. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics . xxiii. Ibid., 73. xxiv. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” August 13, 1942. https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/ displaydoc.cfm?_y=1942&_f=md056263 Retrieved 13 December 2015. xxv. Hyde Park on Hudson, dir. Roger Michell. Perf. Bill Murray. Day Break Pictures, 2012. Film. xxvi. Beth Michaels, “The Royal Hot Dog Summit of 1939.” HistoryAndHeadlines.com, June 11, 2014. http://www.historyandheadlines.com/royal-hot-dog-summit-1939/ Retrieved 13 December 2015. xxvii. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). xxviii. Eleanor and Franklin: The Early Years and The White House Years. Petrie, Daniel, dir. Writers: James Costigan and Joseph Lash. Perf. Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann. 1976-1977. xxix. Ibid, 279-280. xxx. Ibid., 633. xxxi. Quoted in Steve Neal, “Correspondence: 1948.” Harry Truman Presidential Library Website. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/eleanor/1948.html Retrieved 13 December 2015. xxxii. Maurine H. Beasley, Holly C. Shulman, and Henry R. Beasley, eds, The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia (Westport (CT): Greenwood Press, 2001), 394. xxxiii. Robin Gerber, Eleanor Vs. Ike (New York: Avon A, 2008). xxxiv. Cynthia Koch, “Hillary R[oosevelt] Clinton: Or, Channeling Eleanor and Franklin” FDR Foundation Blog September 17, 2016. [http://fdrfoundation.org/hillary-roosevelt-clinton-or- channeling-eleanor-and-franklin/] Retrieved October 15, 2016.

ABSTRACTS

Eleanor Roosevelt’s presumable modesty and shyness are among her most habitually applauded private characteristics, by academic historians and public educators alike (e.g. Binker and Farrell, Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin), and yet she remains the most powerful American female political agent who has never run for democratic office. This paradox is often understood as part and parcel of Eleanor Roosevelt’s enigmatic quality, but doing so mystifies rather than explains the rhetorical and cultural mechanisms that produced ER’s audacious modesty as a crucial factor in her success. This article uses methods from literary studies to analyze the rhetorical strategies and transnational reception of Eleanor Roosevelt’s self-presentation and reticence, in order to show how these created a position of great ‘soft’ power for her. I will close-read excerpts from Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns and magazine articles against contemporary and later representations of her invisible power and powerful invisibility. First I trace how ER cast an impression of modesty and reticence, and through that, of a seemingly innocent but powerful agency. Then I turn to American and transatlantic receptions of Eleanor Roosevelt’s self- presentation in the American and international establishment, focusing particularly on fictional and non-fictional projections of ER as a globally recognized maternal figure or, within the American context, a potential presidential candidate. I argue that what Roosevelt herself once termed “casual unawareness of her value to society” was crucial in the construction of a feminine power position that enabled her to wield unusual influence, both as first lady and as a public intellectual and diplomat. The article, through analyzing discourse and cultural construction,

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sheds new light on the detailed rhetorical mechanics of how Eleanor Roosevelt put her temperament to work in realizing her ideals.

INDEX

Keywords: Agency, Autofabrication, Bill Clinton, Casual Unawareness, Condoleezza Rice, Cultural memory, Domesticity, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Feminism, Foreign policy, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Hillary Clinton, Ken Burns, Louis Howe, Lucy Mercer-Rutherfurd, Madeleine Albright, Mass media, Winston Churchill, “My Day”

AUTHOR

SARA POLAK Leiden University

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s Radio Broadcasts in France

Anya Luscombe

1 In January 1952 one Frenchman was prompted by Eleanor Roosevelt’s broadcasts on the French National Network and Voice of America to send the former First Lady a poem:

2 When the radio broadcasts your voice,

3 The whole country hastens to hear your words.

4 Because you have the gift to dispel doubt

5 That sometimes haunts our soul.

6 (Hommage, 1952)i

7 While a poem was perhaps an unusual way to express admiration, this was by no means the only correspondence praising Mrs. Roosevelt and the work she was doing as part of the US delegation to the United Nations meeting in Paris. By the same token though, there were plenty of letters expressing criticism, even disgust. Mrs. Roosevelt was no stranger to receiving comments from listeners. Ever since she started her broadcast career in the 1920s, she had received, indeed courted, commentary. It was one way for her to see that her communicative strategies were having success and to obtain additional feedback. Mrs. Roosevelt first took to radio on behalf of the women’s City Club of New York in 1925ii and in the 1930s and 1940s she had several lucrative radio series. Radio gave her an income, which afforded her some independence as a woman and the ability to comment on important mattersiii, as well as the opportunity to donate to charities such as the American Friends Services Committee. However, it was also one part of the media mix she deftly used in her roles of human rights campaigner, political activist and educator, alongside her newspaper columns, speeches, books and articles for magazines (such as McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal). The mass medium of radio allowed her to reach a broader audience in the US and notably also, which is the point of this essay, foreign listeners in their homes abroad. Media is an essential part of public diplomacy, described by Nye as an instrument used by governments to “attract the publics of other countries […] through broadcasting, subsidizing cultural exports,

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arranging exchanges and so forth.” iv Particularly in the Cold War, radio was “one of the weapons of choice.”v

8 Mrs. Roosevelt was astute enough to realize the enormous impact radio communication direct into ordinary people’s homes could have and she capitalized on the medium’s ability as ‘soft power’ to reach the hearts and minds of Europeans to convince them of the American point of view by regularly appearing on VOA broadcasts. From November 1951 to February 1952, she hosted a series of VOA weekly radio commentaries for the French National Network, RDF, which were aimed at explaining to families in France and other French-speaking countries the workings of the UN and to urge Europeans to work together for peace. This paper adopts a case study approach and aims, by a close reading of these radio commentaries and US State Department documents,vi to assess the impact of ER’s messages, which were aimed at promoting transnational peace and human rights. In addition, the paper attempts to assess how American cultural diplomacy benefitted from Eleanor Roosevelt’s broadcasts. While there is a substantive body of literature on Cold War broadcasting, much of it focuses on broadcasting from the West, particularly the USA and Britain, to the countries behind the Iron Curtain.vii This essay aims to add a new perspective by examining radio in France. First, however, the next chapter will consider the role of US broadcasting to Europe and Mrs. Roosevelt’s views on its relevance.

US International broadcasting and the early Cold War

9 US international broadcasting in the early part of the Cold War (1946-53) was focused on the policy of containment.viii The Voice of America had started operations in February 1942 as part of the US policy to combat German propaganda and by 1944, the VOA was broadcasting in more than forty languages.ix After World War II, the State Department and politicians were less willing to continue to fund programming.x Mrs. Roosevelt argued that now was not the time to give up on international broadcasting; writing in her My Day Column of May 9, 1947 xi, she criticized Congressional representatives who only believed in appropriating funding for military projects:

10 It is a curious thing that just at this time Congress should want to silence the State Department's radio program, the Voice of America…

11 One grows to feel that our representatives in Congress are willing to give money for military opposition to Communism, but are not willing to give money to the spread of intellectual understanding of democracy. Yet if we do not want to see our sons go off to war again, we must spread the understanding of the value of our way of life and of our type of government…

12 [I]f we stop talking to the rest of the world, we cannot even tell them what our achievements have been, nor can we explain the reasons for the positions we take.

13 Mrs. Roosevelt also used her domestic radio programs to emphasize how international radio could act as a social force for good. In the January 26, 1949 edition of theEleanor &

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Anna Roosevelt Program, Mrs. Roosevelt told her listeners on the ABC network about a VOA program she had just completed in remembrance of her late husband.

14 [These Voice of America broadcasts are] really the way in which we […] as the United States government try to get across life of the United States, the thinking of its people, the facts about our country to the peoples in the rest of the Europe. It’s perhaps our best way of getting beyond the Iron Curtain…we don’t really know how much we get beyond, but we hope a good deal gets beyond.xii

15 She went on to dismiss fears voiced by several representatives in Congress and the American people about paying for propaganda. American listeners ought to think of Voice of America broadcasts as advertising, she argued. If it was perfectly natural for American consumers to accept commercial advertising, then they should also approve of propaganda which in her mind was a much needed chance to tell the truth:

16 Some of the ideas that people have about us in other parts of the worlds are strange indeed and the more we can change those ideas and the more we can get across the truth, the better it will be for the real things that have to be done in diplomacy and in our economics with other countries, practically even in military questions it’s necessary that other countries get to know us better. xiii(Her emphasis)

17 Mrs. Roosevelt appeared to believe therefore, that US, i.e. advertising-like, propaganda was distinct from the Soviet propaganda which consisted of falsehoods and fear mongering.xiv

18 As the perceived threat from the Soviet Union mounted, evidenced by developments such as the Berlin Blockade and the coup in Czechoslovakia in early1948xv as well as heavy Soviet investments in their own international broadcasting, political support slowly started to swing behind increased funding for the Voice of America. While the American public might be suspicious about propaganda, the US State Department saw it as a necessary alternative to an over-reliance on military strength in Europe. As Cull says, government officials worried that “military power dissociated from a persuasive idea may neither deter an enemy nor persuade an ally.”xvi Several government officials and reports argued for increased budgets for international broadcasting, stressing its importance both as a means to get beyond the Iron Curtain and to raise the morale of listeners in Western Europe who were trying to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Second World War. By 1950 President Truman called for ‘a campaign of truth’ to enable America to be heard round the world.xvii The US Under-Secretary of State, James Webb, proposed $130 million to be spent on new operators and transmitters.xviii Research by Nelson in the archives of the central committee of the communist party of the Soviet Union “confirmed that Communists believed that Western radio propaganda was the strongest and most effective weapon that existed for ideological intervention in the Soviet Union.”xix In October 1950, on The Eleanor Roosevelt Program, Mrs. Roosevelt interviewed Brigadier- General David Sarnoff, President of RCA, who had testified before a Senate Committee about the importance of the Voice of America. As the following part of the exchange shows, Eleanor Roosevelt remained concerned that still not enough funding was going to the VOA:

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19 Sarnoff: [W]e must do more than merely tell the story of America itself. We must tell the big truth about the big lie. What we need to do is to have counter propaganda first, that is, to dissect the lives that the communists are telling wherever they have facilities to tell them. If truth is incapable of overtaking untruth, then there’s something seriously wrong with our whole structure of life but I am confident that the truth will prevail. It must prevail […]

20 Roosevelt: In your testimony General […] [y]ou said that no matter how good our message may be, nobody can listen to it unless we furnish the facilities with which to transmit it. My question is, do you think our facilities are extensive enough and strong enough to be heard throughout the world?

21 Sarnoff: No, Mrs. Roosevelt, I do not think that the facilities of the Voice of America are sufficient, but I am glad that Congress recently acted favorably on the President’s recommendation to appropriate 57 million dollars for the Voice of America. As a result I am hopeful that the State department can now do a more comprehensive job.

22 Roosevelt: There’s a difference between 57 million and 200 million though that still has to be covered and that is something that we must consider I suppose. xx

23 The importance the US attached to broadcasting as a Cold War strategy was further emphasized by the setting up of Radio Free Europe in 1950 and Radio Liberty in 1953.xxi Mainly funded by US Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency, RFE also received donations from private individuals. In herMy Day column of September 1, 1951, Mrs. Roosevelt urged the US public to contribute to the Crusade for Freedom which sponsored RFE:

24 …Radio Free Europe […] has just opened a station powerful enough to reach over into the satellite countries. The opening date of the campaign is September 3 and the Crusade for Freedom will be appealing to all of us in this country for funds. Plans are in the making to expand their radio work and really bombard the Iron Curtain countries with as much truthful information as they can get across.xxii

25 It seems natural that radio should have played a key role in communicating America’s viewpoints at the time. While the number of radio receivers in European countries was significantly lower than in the USA, (e.g. 176 receivers per 1000 inhabitants in France in 1951, 207 in the Federal Republic of Germany and just 70 per 1000 inhabitants in the USSR - compared to an estimated 620 radio receivers per 1000 inhabitants in the USxxiii) it was nevertheless estimated that the vast majority of the population at the time did have access to news, information and entertainment through the wireless. For example, in the US zone in Germany, the VOA believed regular audiences were over six millionxxiv and the USIS Radio Unit in France wrote to the State Department in 1952 that approximately 20 million persons were considered radio listeners.xxv

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The USA and France

26 In the early 1950s European countries were still struggling to rebuild themselves from the ravages of war and trying to establish a “durable balance of power in Europe”.xxvi The sense of vulnerability felt by the citizens of Europe in the post-war period was aptly described by the Hungarian author and journalist, Arthur Koestler, in 1951:

27 Life in Europe has become a picnic in no man’s land…The reality of living in the no man’s land between the fronts, virtually defenceless against the threat of annihilation which may materialize next year or next month, is too hideous to be faced. And when reality cannot be faced the obvious solution is to escape into a neurotic dream world. From time to time Europe gets into a panic and then reality breaks through for a short moment of truth, like a flicker on the screen. But the psychic operator quickly readjusts the machine, and the shadowy delusion continues [...] “The inescapable conclusion is bitter to admit for us Europeans and unpleasant to accept for you Americans. We know that you haven’t asked for this tragic responsibility and that you are not prepared for it. But history casts its parts without regard for the actors’ wishes.xxvii

28 The vulnerability was palpable throughout Europe, not only in those countries in the Eastern part of the continent. The USA recognized that the Soviet sphere of influence had the potential to reach much further than the Communist side of the curtain; in particular it feared that France and Italy, where the Communist parties enjoyed a great deal of popular support, might be swayed towards the Soviet style of government over US style democracy. France had been devastated by the war; one fifth of all housing and much of the country’s infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed.xxviii Additionally, food shortages meant rationing was needed, which led to concerns about public health.xxix The Marshall Plan implemented in 1948 was seen as one of the remedies: if people had better standards of living, it was reasoned, they might not be as easily tempted by the Soviets.xxx However, as Alessandro Brogi argues, the US had to employ a far larger toolkit than merely economic diplomacy in France as there the Marshall Plan was “less understood and less appreciated” than in the rest of Western Europe.xxxi The Soviet Union’s efforts to cast itself as the only true advocate of peace and the US as “soulless warmongering capitalism”xxxii was well-received in many European circles, not only among Communists, but also intellectuals and conservative groups wary of Americanism; France had all of these three groups.xxxiii The USA’s need to get the French to agree to its post-war security plans meant it refrained from openly opposing French colonialism. On the contrary: between 1950 and 1954 America contributed $3 billion to France’s military campaign in Indochina.xxxiv Moreover, the US government poured vast sums of money into cultural diplomacy, including broadcasting, concerts, exhibitions and libraries.xxxv In May 1950, Under-Secretary of State, James Webb, called for militarily, economically and strategically vulnerable France to be one of the nations that should be targeted by the VOA as a matter of priority.xxxvi The VOA produced its

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own programs like Ici New York which was relayed over French stations and supplied materials and expertise to both RDF and France Inter.xxxvii The difficult situation facing the VOA in France at the time - and by extension US public diplomacy programs - is evident from reports sent from Paris to the State Department. They show a picture of frequently recommending increased funding and a better targeting of French audiences. For example, a Telegraph sent to the Secretary of State in July 1951 describes how the VOA program Ici New York had chosen to include more news of the Korean conflict because of a “need on the part of the French public to have more news. Today VOA is obliged to modify its perspectives which are chiefly psychological and therefore very complex. VOA must not (rpt not) only find radio listeners but retain them.”xxxviii The missive goes on to criticize the approach taken by a number of recent features:

29 June 8 Feature. 22 minutes on American economic situation. “Well done for Americans, not good for Frenchmen.”

30 June 22 Feature. Interview with Walter Whitexxxix. “Well done, but not convincing. White not known in France.”

31 June 26 program. Raymond Swing’s political “commentary does not carry sufficient weight […] he seemed to forget completely that France was also engaged in the Far East.”

32 The June 1950 report from USIS radio section in Paris mentions that 15,000 copies of the French language schedules for July-August would be distributed throughout France, as well as 1500 language schedules.xl The photograph on the cover of those schedules is that of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and her late husband’s dog, Fala.

Eleanor Roosevelt commentaries 1951-52

33 In the fall of 1951, Eleanor Roosevelt was in Paris with the US delegation to the sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly. Earlier that year, Mrs. Roosevelt, who had been a member of the US delegation to the UN since 1946, had handed over the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission to Dr. Charles Malik from Lebanon. Under Mrs. Roosevelt’s able chairmanship, the Commission had drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was approved by the General Assembly in 1948.xli The head of the VOA’s French service, Fernande Auberjonois, asked her to broadcast weekly commentaries about her work as he felt she was the “only logical choice […of person who could] establish a link with the French public.”xlii According to New York Times correspondent, Richard Gardner, Auberjonois thought “Mrs. Roosevelt had assets possessed in Europe by no one else – a beloved and respected name, a reputation in her own right as a diplomat and a fighter for social justice, and a simple feminine manner which would appeal to the average listener.”xliii What precisely is meant by a ‘simple feminine manner’ is not clear; possibly the “warm, persuasive voice” and the “kind, restful words”xliv mentioned by listeners quoted in the article are the characteristics Gardner and American readers in the early 1950s would think as constituting fitting behavior and tone for a woman.

34 The commentaries which ran from 18 November 1951 to 3 February 1952 were broadcast over the French National Network on Sunday evenings at 8 p.m. Paris time and could also be heard in Belgium, Switzerland, Eastern Europe and North Africa

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through the facilities of the Voice of America.xlv Although Mrs. Roosevelt singled out women in her audience for the first commentary by saying: “I think that what you want to know – especially you the women of post-war Europe…”xlvi, it is most likely that both genders would have been listening to the radio at that time of day at the weekend.xlvii In each approximately 1000-word commentary delivered in French, Mrs. Roosevelt aimed to explain the work of the US delegation at the Palais de Chaillot that week. She mixed personal stories about places she had visited and people she had met with information about the UN and the issues of peace and nuclear disarmament. As an accomplished broadcaster, she used a number of stylistic features to effectively communicate with her listeners, which will be highlighted in examples from three broadcasts.

Sunday November 18, 1951

35 In this first commentary, Mrs. Roosevelt’s style is a simple one, with mainly short sentences. She frequently uses the inclusive first person ‘we’ to denote to her audience that they share a common cause, i.e. to “work at building peace”. The most vivid and effective style figure in this particular talk is the metaphor comparing peace to a vulnerable plant, which Eleanor Roosevelt employs to make clear the abstract concept of peace:

36 I believe that peace is something you must cultivate with great care and tenderness.Like certain delicate plants and flowers peace needs warmth and love. Cynicism and abuse will harm it. However, if those who wish it well do something to protect peace, it can and it will grow.xlviii

37 The verbs that accompany the metaphor “cultivate, protect, grow” not only form a climax in themselves, but also add to the metaphor’s persuasive power by suggesting that peace will have a chance to blossom if all nations of the world work together on tending the jointly owned garden that is the globe. She extends the metaphor by going on to contrast delicate plants with weeds and by alluding to her own experiences of gardening appears to imply that she – just as other Americans who desire peace - knows what she is talking about:

38 Like most Americans, I have a garden. I know that nothing can really grow if the soil has not been cultivated, ploughed, and fertilized. Nothing grows in a poor soil. After the war, Europe’s soil was poor. We know then that a lasting peace could not grow from the acrid soil of human misery, among the shambles of war, in the cold shade of despair.

39 By using inclusive language and metaphors to explain abstract concepts like peace, Mrs. Roosevelt hoped to to achieve a favorable reaction from the audience to her, the US delegation and the message.

December 16, 1951

40 Mrs. Roosevelt uses the stylistic device of anticipation in this commentary to talk about the daily correspondence received by all UN delegates as a way to refute the Soviet argument that America does not desire peace:

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41 Certain correspondents send me criticism because, according to them, sometimes I judge severely my colleagues from the delegations from countries of the East.

42 They say to me: “Why don’t you carry out the policy of the extended hand?” To this I will reply: “Yes, but it is necessary that two hands be stretched out at the same time.” I have very often made this gesture. I found myself before people who do not dare to answer. I don’t think that they are afraid of us. They are afraid of themselves.

43 At times I should like to exchange a few words with a delegate whose views I do not share and who does not agree with me. But as soon as the conversation has begun, the other members of the delegation rush up and form a block.

44 She then chooses to focus on one particular letter she received which had been signed by 21 different people from La Plaine Montferrand. By stressing that these ordinary French people speak for themselves and do not engage in propaganda, she contrasts their genuineness and right of self-expression and critical thinking with the dishonesty and group-think of the Soviet delegates.

45 They honestly say what they have on their minds, without making any propaganda. They speak for themselves, not for a party or a foreign power. They speak without bitterness and I understand them well when they say: “We are terribly worried. We have known two wars and though our suffering is not yet alleviated nor our ruins rebuilt, there is already talk of a Third World War which would end in the destruction of humanity. You are the Organization of the United Nations on which we rely to maintain peace.”

46 Her reply to these writers is that “peace demands of us great effort and great sacrifices” […] Will we in the United Nations be worthy of your trust? I certainly hope so. We must be.” She then turns to the radio listeners as a whole with a direct message to those who might share the letter writers’ concerns: “hold firm to your will for peace; and make sure that peace is safeguarded by deeds and not merely by words.”

47 The French communist newspaper, L’Humanité, which had been critical of Mrs. Roosevelt’s previous commentaries, was particularly enraged by the December 16 broadcast. It accused France of being partial to the US by not offering other delegations the opportunity of taking to the airwaves.

48 [A]n excellent initiative on the part of France, […] to place the radio at the disposal of members of the principal delegations; an initiative which honors the radio, don’t you think? Yes. But the American delegation is the only one to benefit from it, and you can keep on waiting for the objectivity of Radio Paris to offer you a weekly broadcast by Malik or Vychinski.xlix

49 The editorial twice uses the phrase “embarrassed” to describe Mrs. Roosevelt’s attitude during what it calls her “obliged” reply to the people who have written to ask about

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peace. The tone of indignation is palpable when it accuses Mrs. Roosevelt of insincerity and piety:

50 Mrs. Roosevelt continues by insinuating that those who write to ask for an understanding with the East are speaking “for a party” or “for a foreign power” (as if she has a right to complain about that!) […]As a matter of fact, there is not one word in all her sermon about the five-power pact.

February 3, 1952

51 This final commentary in the series, which is slightly longer than the earlier ones, is not just a farewell to her French listeners, but used by Mrs. Roosevelt as an opportunity to defend her decision to “talk to you in your homes…on your network” and to launch a vociferous attack on the Soviet delegate Andrey Vishinsky. She shows a sense of American exceptionalism when she talks about the role that has been thrust upon the USA:

52 In the field [of nuclear disarmament] we are doubtless more perfectionist than the Soviets […] My country has been selected by destiny to carry at this time a heavy burden of responsibility. I am aware that new and thankless tasks will be ours to perform. We must accept them with pride. It is our duty to inspire confidence and assist the peoples of the world to recovery […] I believe that today, more than ever, that to quote “you have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

53 Eleanor Roosevelt fully understood what doing one’s duty meant as she herself had been the prime example of someone who had done exactly that throughout her career. Now it was her duty on behalf of the US to inspire the world and to carry on the legacy of her husband Franklin whom she quoted in the commentary’s final sentence. She for one, was ready - as Koestler had urged - to play the part that history had cast upon the United States.

Reactions to VOA commentaries

54 The USIS Radio Unit put the listening figures for Mrs. Roosevelt’s French commentaries at approximately five millionl, significantly less than the “at least 15 million” which The New York Times’ Richard Gardner mentioned in his 1952 article.li Whereas USIS figures presumably referred to those listening on French National Radio and Gardner’s reported estimate also included publics reached by the VOA relays (to Belgium, Switzerland, Eastern Europe and North Africa), it is impossible to verify the additional 10 million. As Risso cautions, statistics, surveys and anecdotes provided by national agencies and broadcasters cannot always be trusted, and scholars can only make an educated guess about a broadcast’s efficacy.lii According to Nye, government-funded radio broadcasts (US and British) “reached half the Soviet population every week and between 70 and 80 percent of the populace of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.”liii UNESCO figures, however, show a much more conservative pictureliv, and a reach of more than 70% does on the face of it appear somewhat over-optimistic. USIS acknowledged the difficulties inherent in determining actual sizes of audiences, let

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alone the impact of particular broadcasts. In the case of France where people could speak freely and data gathering would have been easier than behind the Iron Curtain, an estimate of five million for Mrs. Roosevelt’s broadcasts does seem feasible. Her broadcasts appeared to have much higher ratings than many other VOA programs broadcast over the French National Network. For example, Ici New York on weekdays attracted 1-1.5 million listeners, its Sunday edition an estimated 2-3 million, and weekly programs of American music appealed to more than 3 million. The USIS report of 1952 argued that the critical articles in the Communist Press, such as the L’ Humanité editorial in section 3.2 above were “one of the best proofs of effectiveness of [Mrs. Roosevelt’s] talks […]. These Communist attacks used Mrs. Roosevelt as a pretext for attacking the VOICE OF AMERICA.”lv

55 Letters from listeners available in the archives also offer an interesting, if only partial, insight into America’s cultural diplomacy efforts. VOA offices received large amounts of correspondence every month. According to the Guild Reporter, 98,630 letters were sent from a variety of countries to the VOA in the period October 1948 to May 1949, of which just two percent was unfavorable.lvi A December 1951 survey by the VOA speaks of several hundred letters that have been received by the Radio Diffusion offices in response to Eleanor Roosevelt’s commentaries. A second survey of reactions to the broadcasts, dated January 5, 1952 reports an increase in volume of mail: “approximately two thirds of the letters emanate from listeners with a relative modest cultural background and whose standard of living appears to be low”lvii. Many correspondents expressed admiration:

56 “Every time I listen to you I feel more deeply moved by your sincerity and your ardent desire to convince your listeners. No Frenchman can listen to you without expressing his deep gratitude. (Mr. F.L. retired)”,

57 others accused her of deceit: “You know full well, Madame, that the USSR does not intend to attack us… (A group of listeners...Rhone)”

58 or cast aspersions on what the writer considered ER’s lack of appropriate female behavior:

59 Although I am getting used to the cynical lies of the Voice of America I never would have believed that a woman, even an American woman, would dare side with the American warmongers…You dare speak of the Rights of Man while you emprison Communists and lynch negroes. (P.B. Sete, Harault)

60 The official view of USIS was that the commentaries were a resounding success, thanks entirely to the ER’s ability to speak plainly, as voiced by USIE Regional Representative Charles Hulten in a letter to Edward W. Barratt, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs:

61 I have yet to meet a person in Europe who doesn’t feel that the big problem the United States faces is to convince the people of Europe that our common adventure will not lead to fear […] One of the blessings of having had Mrs. Roosevelt in Paris for the last several months is that she has cut through the “footnote psychology” which besets people who

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write guidances and has said, simply and straightforwardly, that the United States wants peace. In doing that, she has not only had a terrific affirmative effect, but she has also provoked the communists and their fellow-travellers to exceptional counter-activity.lviii

62 The VOA went on to ask Mrs. Roosevelt to record messages in Italian, Spanish and German to reach audiences in many of the other countries to which it broadcast. lix

Conclusion

63 Broadcasting, in particular the Voice of America, was a key weapon in the US’ battle for the hearts and minds of the citizens of Europe, both East and West, during the early years of the Cold War. In France, the State Department acknowledged the importance of broadcasting and other forms of public diplomacy as a complement to economic and political strategies and to counter anti-American sentiment. Kelly posits that anecdotes are insufficient to measure the success of public diplomacy during the Cold War and that facts and judgments are more objective measures”lx ; Risso too argues that historians “cannot measure the actual impact of information programs on the public, [but] they can […] measure the perceived success of such programs in the eyes of their promoters and […] what their personnel thought were the interests, sensibilities, and concerns of their listeners.”lxi Primary research in the State Department files does then seem to confirm the importance and success of Eleanor Roosevelt’s radio contributions as does the fact that the Communist Press in France chose to complain about them. During her tenure at the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt was an official US diplomat, one of a select number of women to perform such an important role. As a stateswoman she was highly influential: “Without her leadership, the Declaration [of Human Rights] would not have been adopted and the Covenants on both civil and political rights as well as social and economic rights would not have been initiated.”lxii

64 Her official role did not mean she always concurred with President Truman’s or the State Department’s views, for example on social and economic rights where she felt America should do much more, or in her critique of the Truman Doctrine and the administration’s record on civil and political rights.lxiii Neither did her official role mean Mrs. Roosevelt was always fully informed by the government. Her assertion that the Crusade for Freedom which sponsored Radio Free Europe was “carried on not by the government, but by private funds and individuals”lxiv was evidently mistaken. In reality the CIA was heavily involved in the financing of Radio Free Europe and Mrs. Roosevelt’s plea to American citizens to contribute to the Crusade raises the question as to whether she was lying or being naïve. As someone who argued forcefully for telling the ‘truth’ at all times, perhaps she expediently chose not to probe further or possibly the Truman administration chose not to tell her about CIA involvement in order to exploit her role as a public diplomat at home and abroad.

65 Besides her official diplomatic position as a member of the US delegation to the UN and as chair of the Human Rights Commission, she deftly played the role of cultural diplomat and expertly used the media to aid her performance. Radio, in particular, was one of the tools she chose to promote the UN and by extension the superiority of American perspectives on transatlantic relations. To her, the medium was essential in helping to reach the ordinary men and women who were part of her imagined

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community of free global citizens, together striving for peace and universal human rights. As she said,

66 “It is high time […] that we not only have a stronger Voice of America but a very much better Voice of America, for we must declare our desire for peace. We must show that our efforts constantly made within our own nation, to bring about better understanding among people, are creating a greater devotion to the cause of peace in the world.”lxv

67 Soft power was in her eyes a legitimate and necessary form of truthful propaganda, distinct from the lies and obstructions that formed the propaganda of the Communists. Her radio performances enabled ER to be a Cold War warrior and gave the US direct entry into the homes of those transatlantic audiences it wanted to ensure were on its side in the struggle for peace.

NOTES

i. The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt 1945-1962 Part I: United Nations Correspondence and Publications. Reel 10. 184. Middelburg: Roosevelt Study Center Collection. This first stanza of the poem was translated by me and is a more literal translation than part of the poem which is referred to in a VOA memorandum (see note 58). In French the first stanza of the poem ran as follows: “Lorsque la radio diffuse votre voix, Le pays tout entier se met vite à l’écoute, Car vous avez de don de dissiper le doute Qui s’en vient obséder notre âme quelquefois.” ii. Blanche Wiesen-Cook Eleanor Roosevelt. Vol 1: 1884-1933(New York: Penguin, 1992). I am grateful to Maurine Beasley for her comments to me on this issue also. iii. Paul Belgrade, “Radio Broadcasts” in The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, Maurine H. Beasley, Holly C. Shulman & Henry R. Beasley , eds., (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001) 425-429. iv. Joseph S. Nye Jr., “Public Diplomacy and Soft Power”, in International Communication. A Reader, ed.Daya K. Thussu (London, New York: Routledge, 2008), 334. v. Linda Risso, “Radio Wars: Broadcasting in the Cold War”, Cold War History (2013, Vol 13, No.2): 145-152, doi: 10.1080/14682745.2012.757134. vi. For all radio commentaries, the texts are available in English as “Press Releases” from the US delegation to the UN Written transcripts in French are available for some of the commentaries. These documents are available on microfilm in the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands. Unfortunately, there are no audio recordings. The part transcription of the 1949 ABC and 1950 NBC radio programs quoted from later in this essay were typed up by the author from the audio recordings available at the FDR library in Hyde Park NY and the RSC in Middelburg, respectively. The US state department documents were consulted at the National Archives at College Park, MD. vii. For extended histories of the VOA, see for example Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency. American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Robert William Pirsein, The Voice of America. An history of the International Broadcasting Activities of the United States Government 1940-1962 (New York: Arno Press, 1979). Gary D. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda. The BBC and VOA in International Politics,

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1956-64. (London: Macmillan, 1996). Holly C. Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). On the BBC specifically, Alban Webb recently published a detailed account of its Cold War Operations: London Calling. Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) Also worth reading is Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens. The Battles of Western broadcasting in the Cold War (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997) and Alexander Badenoch, Andreas Fickers andChristian Henrich-Franke, eds., Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War (Institute for European Regional Research, Nomos, 2013). viii. Gary D. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda. The BBC and VOA in International Politics, 1956-64. (London: Macmillan, 1996). For a detailed consideration of US containment policies during the Cold War, see for example John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ix. See note 8. Further information is also available on the VOA’s history timeline on www.insidevoa.com. x. Cull, The Cold War, 20. xi. My Day. 9 May 1947, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers project. George Washington University. https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1947&_f=md000647. xii. Eleanor Roosevelt, Jan 26, 1949 Eleanor & Anna Roosevelt Program. ER recorded speeches and utterances. 80-5 (22). FDR Library, Hyde Park. xiii. Ibid. xiv. Propaganda that is like advertising is sometimes referred to as white propaganda. See Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2012). xv. See for example Michael Creswell, “’With a Little Help from our Friends’: How France Secured an Anglo-American Continental Commitment, 1945-54”, Cold War History, 3:1 (2002): 1-28, doi: 10.1080.713999975. xvi. Cull, The Cold War, 65. xvii. Cull, The Cold War, 53. xviii. Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens. The Battles of Western broadcasting in the Cold War (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 55. xix. Ibid., xiv. xx. Interview Eleanor Roosevelt with David Sarnoff (1951). Eleanor Roosevelt Program (1950-1951). New York: NBC.[Radio Series], Roosevelt Study Center Collection, Middelburg, the Netherlands. xxi. RFE’s first broadcasts were to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Radio Liberty broadcast to the Soviet Union in 16 languages. See http://www.rferl.org/info/ history/133.html. xxii. My Day. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers project. George Washington University. https:// www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1951&_f=md002002. xxiii. Statistics on radio and television 1950-60. UNESCO statistical reports and studies (Paris:UNESCO, 1963). xxiv. Talk by Foy D. Kohler to Institute for education by radio-television Columbus Ohio, May 4, 1951. Container 13: Speeches 1951, P315 VOA Historical Files, NARA, College Park, Maryland. xxv. Summary of USIS Radio Unit Activities, Dec 1, 1951 through May 31, 1952, D-107 p 44-52, Box 2385, RG59 511.51, NARA, College Park, Maryland. Even by 1961 less than 20 percent of households in France had a television set whereas 80 percent owned a radio. See Raymond Kuhn, The Media in France (London, New York: Routledge, 1995), 78 xxvi. Michael Creswell. “’With a Little Help from our Friends’: How France Secured an Anglo- American Continental Commitment, 1945-54.”, Cold War History, 3:1 (October 2002): 1. The worry of a possible Soviet invasion had prompted Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and

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Luxemburg to form a military alliance, the Western Union, which ultimately led to the creation of NATO. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 70. xxvii. Arthur Koestler, “The war of ideas”, America and the Mind of Europe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 47-60. xxviii. Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 101. Gabriella Gribaudi, Olivier Wieviorka, Julie le Gac. “Two paths to the same End? The Challenges of the Liberation in France and Italy”, in Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe 1943-47, eds. Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann et.al, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 91-116. xxix. Gribaudi,Wieviorka, Le Gac, “Two paths”, 95. xxx. William Hitchcock explains that Marshall also thought the only way to persuade France and others of the need to mobilize Germany was to create institutions that would regulate European recovery. Under the plan a total of $12.3 billion was spent on aid to the whole of Europe. William I. Hitchcock, “The Marshall Plan and the creation of the West”, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, eds. Melvyn P. Leffler, Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 154-174, doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521837194), 154 and 157. France received more money from the US than any other country. See Irving M. Wall, the United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), http://assets.cambridge.org/ 97805214/02170/sample/9780521402170ws.pdf, 2. xxxi. Alessandro Brogi, Confronting America. The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 111. xxxii. Giles Scott-Smith, Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network Cold War Rationale (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4. xxxiii. Brogi. Confronting America, 111. xxxiv. Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution. Modernization, development and US Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 28 and 39. xxxv. Brogi, Confronting America, 5. Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Culture and the Cold War in Europe”, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Melvyn P. Leffler, Odd Arne Westad (eds), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 398-419, doi: doi.org/10.1017/ CHOL9780521837194.020. xxxvi. Cull, The Cold War, 55. xxxvii. Ici New York was relayed daily by the French Radio, from 18.30 to 19.00 French time. Report by Radio Section. USIS. File no 811.20200 (D) 7-1946. Box 2383, RG59. 511.51 France, NARA, College Park, Maryland. xxxviii. Telegraph from BRUCE to Secretary of State, July 2, 1951. Box 2390, RG59 511.5141, NARA, College Park, Maryland. xxxix. Walter White was the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). xl. Report by Radio Section. File no 811.20200 (D) 7-1946. Box 2383, RG59. 511.51 France, NARA, College Park, Maryland. xli. Mary Ann Glendon, A World made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). xlii. Richard Gardner, “'First Lady' of the Voice of America.” The New York Times (Feb 3 1952). ProQuest Historical Newspapers database. xliii. Ibid. xliv. Ibid. xlv. Although the commentaries were delivered in French, here the English translations – issued as press releases of the US delegation to the UN – will be used. Press Release No. 1295, November 16, 1951. United States Delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Eleanor

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Roosevelt Correspondence. UN Part I. Reel 26. 522-543, and Reel 27, 0649, Roosevelt Study Center Collection, Middelburg, the Netherlands. xlvi. Ibid. xlvii. For a discussion of listening publics at various times of day, see for example Donna Halper, Invisible Stars. A Social History of Women in American Broadcasting. (Armonk, NY; London, UK: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). xlviii. The words in bold in the commentaries are my emphasis. xlix. Translation L’Humanité December 17, 1951. Enclosure D to Despatch No 1667 of December 26, 1951 from AmEmbassy, Paris, France. Copy in Summary of USIS Radio Unit Activities Dec 1 1951, through May 31, 1952. l. Summary of USIS Radio Unit Activities Dec 1 1951, through May 31, 1952. li. Gardner, “First Lady of the Voice of America”. lii. Risso, “Radio Wars”, 149. liii. Nye, “Public Diplomacy”, 336. liv. The number of receivers in for example Yugoslavia was just 22 per 1000 inhabitants. Statistics on radio and television 1950-60. UNESCO statistical reports and studies (Paris:UNESCO, 1963). lv. Summary of USIS Radio Unit Activities Dec 1 1951, through May 31, 1952. The use of capitals for VOICE OF AMERICA are in the original. lvi. Container 1, P315 VOA Historical Files, NARA, College Park, Maryland. lvii. Memorandum. January 5, 1952. Eleanor Roosevelt Correspondence. UN Part I. Reel 10. 584-589, Roosevelt Study Center Collection, Middelburg, the Netherlands. lviii. Letter from Hulten to Barratt, 7 Jan 1952, Box 2390, RG 59, 511.5141, NARA, College Park, Maryland. lix. Languages which she also spoke. lx. John Robert Kelly, “US Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Success Story?” The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 2 (2007): 53-79. lxi. Risso, “Radio Wars”, 149. lxii. Allida Black (2003). “Introduction”, The Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, 1945-1962. Part II: United Nations Correspondence and Publications (Bethesda, MD: UPA Collection, 2003). lxiii. Ibid. lxiv. My Day. 1 September 1951. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers project. George Washington University. https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1951&_f=md002002. lxv. My Day. 1 August 1950. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers project. George Washington University. https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1950&_f=md001662.

ABSTRACTS

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote books, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and was a regular broadcaster. Among the radio programs she hosted, and appeared on, were several for the Voice of America. While she was a US delegate to the United Nations in Paris in 1951 and 1952, Mrs. Roosevelt broadcast a series of weekly radio commentaries aimed at explaining to families in France and other French-speaking countries the workings of the UN and to urge Europeans to work together for peace. These weekly talks generated (as did all Mrs. Roosevelt’s broadcasts) a

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great deal of letters from the public: usually either extremely favorable or vehemently opposed to the views she expressed. The former First Lady saw the role of the VOA as fundamental to “spread[ing] the understanding of the value of our way of life and of our type of government.” This paper explores the connection between Eleanor Roosevelt and the official US radio propaganda in Europe in the early Fifties and the extent to which American cultural diplomacy benefitted from her presence on the airwaves.

INDEX

Keywords: Cold War, David Sarnoff, Edward W. Barratt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fernande Auberjonois, France, James Webb, media, public diplomat, radio, Radio Free Europe, RDF, Richard Gardner, soft power, USIS, Voice of America

AUTHOR

ANYA LUSCOMBE University College Roosevelt

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Conclusion: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Transatlantic Quest for Equality and Freedom

Dario Fazzi

1 The overt aim of this collection has been to provide a preliminary account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s multifaceted attempts to reshape the image of the United States abroad, her foreign entanglements, and, in particular, her formal and informal interactions with Europe. In dealing with such an ambitious goal, all the contributors have pointed out that one of Mrs. Roosevelt's main (public) diplomacy efforts was to translate the old demands of a certain American liberalism – i.e. internationalism, multilateralism, fair cooperation among the nations, and so on – into an effective and mutually enriching transnational, namely transatlantic, exchange.

2 To strengthen the validity of such an argument, the contributors have been following the way paved by Mary Nolan’s seminal volume on the Transatlantic Century. In her study, Nolan has not only demonstrated that the U.S. and Europe have constantly kept influencing each other in much more interdependent ways than it is usually argued, but she has also convincingly argued that, along with a steady flow of goods and capital across the Atlantic, a constant intercultural exchange has favored the strengthening of the transatlantic ties. This paradigm, which David Armitage and, more recently, Maurizio Vaudagna have defined as “circum-Atlantic” in the attempt to stress the relevance of “the larger relational networks that define the circulation of cultures, ideas, goods, and people” from Europe to the U.S. and vice versa, openly challenges the idea that U.S. hegemony has descended upon Europe in a unidirectional way, a concept that is very much entrenched in most of the literature on the so-called U.S. empire.i

3 Taken together these interpretations have had the merit to bring to the fore the strength of those varied personal interests and intercultural connections that have bound the two shores of the Atlantic inextricably together.ii The essays presented in this collection go along these transnational lines of inquiry and try to further substantiate such an unconventional approach by looking at the exemplary story of Eleanor Roosevelt. In doing so, the contributors have also implicitly accepted Joseph

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Rezek’s methodological invitation to refer to the transatlantic relations as a challenging multiplicity, and their analyses have therefore adopted a theoretical framework that has preferred to look at the transatlantic relations not only through the traditional lenses represented by grand strategies, military planning, economic exchanges, or state diplomacy, but also, and most prominently, through the paradigms of informal diplomacy, cross-cultural exchanges, ideology, popular culture, and personal encounters.iii

4 This collection represents therefore an attempt to search for the footprints that Eleanor Roosevelt has left in the long path traced by the Euro-American relations throughout the twentieth century. The major outcomes of this complex inquiry rest in the rendering of Mrs. Roosevelt's transatlantic effort mostly as a personal commitment, a relentless attempt to foster the ideals of equality and freedom across the Atlantic in order to preserve and support people’s primary role – and basic rights – in the international arena. Eleanor Roosevelt, indeed, fiercely believed that, to use FDR's second inaugural address words, the main task for the governments should be to “promote the general welfare and to secure the blessing of liberty.” Both of the Roosevelts realized fully that the most challenging part of this job was not “to add more to the abundance of those who have much;” rather, it was to “provide enough for those who have too little.”ivMrs. Roosevelt was a splendid interpreter of this genuinely liberal interest in paying careful attention to common people’s individual and collective needs, and she worked hard to improve their actual standards of living.v She kept advocating for the oppressed and the poorest not only as a social worker but also as a first lady, as a diplomat, a public intellectual, a communicator, a writer, and a mass educator.

5 Dario Fazzi’s contribution to this collection and Melissa Cooper’s one have tried to delve deeper into these dynamics, so as to explain the many ways in which, throughout her life, Eleanor Roosevelt has tried to advance the cause of equality and social justice. Her social activism has oftentimes reverberated in her own understanding of the Atlantic space, which she mostly considered as a space of opportunity for people’s empowerment and development. On the other hand, Raffaella Baritono’s analysis and Camelia Lenart’s contribution have vividly shown how such a major focus on social justice and reform did not only translate into staunch internationalism, but it also resulted into an attempt to deepen both the meaning and the purpose of the transatlantic exchange. Eleanor Roosevelt played a major role in qualifying the Atlantic space in moral terms, by assigning people in Europe and in the U.S. – the “below” level as Baritono puts it – the daunting task to preserve international stability and peace.

6 The other concept that Eleanor Roosevelt presented as a crucial building block for a new and more solid transatlantic exchange was freedom. Quite famously, her views on freedom found their synthesis in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.vi Having chaired the U.N. committee that had drafted that document, Mrs. Roosevelt had supervised all of the debates over the philosophical definition of human rights and, more importantly, had tried to negotiate a common, universal frame of reference for them.vii But she stressed in many occasions the importance of a quintessentially western principle, the “respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” That was the pillar upon which to establish new forms of transnational cooperation, across the Atlantic and beyond it, and build a new world order based on human rights.viii

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7 As Babs Boter has emphasized in her essay, intercultural understanding played a crucial role in Eleanor Roosevelt’s attempt to shape the transatlantic relations from below. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, indeed, this process had to convince people in Europe and in the U.S. that they shared a common interest, which was specifically the building of “a different and better future,” based on mutual respect among the people of the world.ix But, what made Eleanor Roosevelt’s appeal perhaps more authoritative was, as Anya Luscombe and Sara Polak have rightly argued, her unmatched ability to master a wide range of techniques of communication, mobilization, and consensus- building.x She conveyed her messages of freedom and equality through an impressive number of radio and TV addressees, public lectures, and widely syndicated columns, thus constantly reminding, especially young people in both Europe and the U.S., that they were the ultimate responsible for the successful establishment of world stability and peace. With her evocative rhetoric, she called for a new world order centered on citizens’ happiness and on their inalienable right to hope.

8 Eleanor Roosevelt firmly believed that, given their high standards of education and living, European and American people shared a compelling moral obligation to foster freedom and equality worldwide, two ideals that in Eleanor Roosevelt’s vocabulary were oftentimes used interchangeably with democracy. In transatlantic terms, thus, Eleanor Roosevelt’s most important achievement can be considered her unremitting effort to raise citizens’ full awareness of their own rights and duties. In doing so, she contributed to a large extent to laying the foundations for the transnational campaign in defense of western democracy – or the western idea of democracy – that has characterized most of the second half of the twentieth century. Mrs. Roosevelt’s legacy is therefore instrumental to ferret out the subsistence of a set of shared principles, values, and interests still affecting, for better or for worse, the transatlantic space and exchange.

NOTES i. See Maurizio Vaudagna, “Introduction,” in Maurizio Vaudagna (ed.), Modern European- American Relations in the Transatlantic Space: Recent Trends in History Writings (Turin: Otto, 8-9). ii. See Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and the United States, 1890-2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). iii. See Joseph Rezek, “What We Need from Transatlantic Studies,” in American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 4 (Winter 2014), 791-803. iv. See Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937, in Documentary History of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidency, vol. 50, FDR Selected Speeches, Document 18 (Bethesda: UPA, 2011), 166. v. See Dan Eshet, Fundamental Freedoms. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Brookline: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 2010). vi. The original version of the Declaration is available online, at the U.N. web page: http:// www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml.

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vii. A complex and detailed account of the Declaration and its enormous impact is given by Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001). viii. Jason Berger, A New Deal for the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 67-72 and Tamara K. Hareven, Eleanor Roosevelt. An American Conscience (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1968) 235-242. See also Allida M. Black (ed.), The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Vol. 1. The Human Rights Years, 1945-1948 (New York: Thomson Gale, 2007), 298. ix. See Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, January 28, 1942, in http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/. x. See Maurine Hoffman Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt. Transformative First Lady, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 77.

AUTHOR

DARIO FAZZI Roosevelt Study Center

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A Trustworthy Collaboration: Eleanor Roosevelt and Martha Graham’s Pioneering of American Cultural Diplomacy

Camelia Lenart

1 Shortly after FDR’s first inauguration Eleanor Roosevelt declared in an interview that all what she wanted was to remain “plain Eleanor Roosevelt, not the First Lady,” and to be useful.i Her activity during the White House years, as well as after them, proved that she achieved her goal of being useful to many causes and people, but not the one of being plain. Much is known and researched about ER’s activity in areas such asfeminism, civil and human rights, containment, and nuclear disarmament, while her complex and full life, her persona and emotional imbroglios were also closely deciphered and analyzed. However, ER’s role as a pioneer of American cultural diplomacy, and the way in which she innovatively created its foundation still needs to be established and explored. ER was one of the first American personalities who understood the necessity of using the “soft power” of arts in politics and diplomacy: she lobbied for federal support of the arts and created the path on which American cultural diplomacy would develop until its official inception in 1954.

2 It was a very important endeavor and legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt, as unlike the French, Germans and Italians who had pursued cultural diplomacy since before 1914, and the Soviets who created a “Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations” in 1925, America did not have an active cultural diplomacy.iiWhat complicated the situation even more was that the American puritanical foundationiii and its “absorption in economic development”iv created a society rather indifferent to the arts. Thus, not only American state patronage of the arts was lacking, but also, unlike in most Western countries, the arts’ patronage by individuals was minimal.v When arts’ patronage started to develop, mostly after the beginning of the 20th century, there were the American women, such as Isabella Gardner Stewart, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Peggy Guggenheim, who were most visibly and actively involved in this activity.viInvited by

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the First Lady, Martha Graham performed at the White House some of her Americana pieces in 1937, during the intricate years of the American neutrality, preceding USA’s entry into the war. Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision of supporting the arts but also of making them an agent of political and diplomatic power was essential in the context of the Cold War and of the competition with Soviet Union. Following in her footsteps, the American politicians understood the power of the non-verbial language of dance to penetrate barriers and express political messages subliminally, thus “avant-garde” dancers such as Martha Graham were sent abroad as cultural diplomats.vii They had to prove the quality of American culture and American freedom,viii that America was more than a “ballet nation,”ix but also to demonstrate that American dancers could equal and even surpass the “Swans of Kremlin’s” innovation, quality, and artistry in dance.x

3 The choice of Martha Graham to represent the USA as a cultural diplomat was not coincidental. Besides being an American icon, Graham already toured Europe in 1950 and during the early 1954, prior to President Eisenhower’s establishment of the Emergency Fund for International Affairs to support cultural presentations abroad.xi Her performances, endorsed and helped by Eleanor Roosevelt, constituted a useful “rehearsal” of the American cultural diplomacy “offer” on the continent, while the exposure to — and practice of — politics in Graham’s earlier tours to Europe contributed to her “eligibility” for performing arts and politics in the complicated space beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1962, during the State Department tour in 1962, the famous American modern dancer would tour the communist countries Yugoslavia and Poland.xii

4 ER’s determination and ability in using art for making political statements is most discussed in the context of Marion Anderson, the African-American opera singer who was banned in 1939 by the Daughters of the American Revolution from performing in its Washington concert hall due to her race. ER, known for her anti-racism and determination to participate in solving the racial problems of the USA, resigned from the DAR organization, and afterward helped with Anderson’s concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday April 9, 1939, before an integrated audience. Anderson’s interpretation of “My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty” was a historic event, which exceeded the cultural boundaries, and carried political and social statements of major significances. ER’s association with Marian Anderson, and the role she played in the event were also a clear statement of the First Lady’s Civil Rights stance. Less is known and researched about another artist’s performance initiated and supported by the First Lady. On February 26, 1937, two years before Marian Anderson’s memorable concert, Martha Graham was “the first dancer ever asked to perform at the White House.”xiii Taking place during a sensitive historical time due to the European political developments of the thirties, and having the President in attendance, Graham’s performance marked the beginning of the collaboration between Eleanor Roosevelt and the famous dancer.xiv

5 Analyzing the collaboration between the First Lady of the White House and the First Lady of Dance is fascinating because it would be hard to find two persons and personalities, who, apparently, had less in common. The physical appearance of the tall, and not particularly sophisticated ER, was in sharp contrast with the petite and dramatic appearance of Martha Graham. While ER was the indefatigable humanitarian of her country and of the world during difficult times, approachable and warm, Martha Graham was the creator who navigated mostly in her selected artistic circles, dedicated

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herself to art, and was perceived mostly as distant and self-involved. But behind and beyond all this, both women were history makers, who offered humanity their exceptional best, and whose lives intersected in the field of American cultural diplomacy.xv

6 ER’s interest in the link between arts and politics can be traced back to her school years at Allenswood, in England. There she was influenced by its Headmistress, Mlle Marie Souvestre, who infused her students with the responsibility she had towards others and in bettering the world around her, and revealed to them the possibility of using the arts in the service of politics.xvi The First Lady, who felt strongly that American society had not done enough for the arts, became a supporter of them since her husband’s first mandate. The gesture was even more commendable as FDR did not have the arts on his list of priorities, and he was very cautious when it came to supporting them.xvii ER was a key advocate for the creation and development of "Federal One" (Federal Project Number One) in 1935, which was constructed as a subdivision of the Works Progress Administration (WPA,) and which sought to extend the relief of the New Deal to artists, actors, writers, and musicians.xviii ER was also the one who encouraged Henry Hopkins, more than the President, to continue with the project supposed to support “thousands of artists, musicians, actors, and writers.”xix

7 Federal One became a powerful tool for infusing art and culture into the daily lives of Americans, and ER was delighted in the artistic work crafted with federal dollars. Her commitment to this project was total, praising it in her columns and speeches, and defending it against congressional critics.xx She was particularly interested in the Dance Project, most active in Chicago and New York, where people from the dance milieu such as Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Ruth Page, and some of Graham’s dancers gave WPA-supported concerts.xxiThe involvement of ER in the arts’ patronage during the Depression created the image of the First Lady as a patron of the arts and associated her with the idea of State patronage. The number of letters received by ER from artists increased in an impressive way during the thirties, with a large part of the correspondence coming from the African-Americans. Due to her “wide vision” in this field,xxii “interest in contemporary art,” and her “very forward and progressive policy in the arts,”xxiii the senders were regarding the First Lady as the country’s most important and reliable arts’ protector. Dina Huebert of California, who was hoping to perform at the White House her “contemporary dances with American themes,” went even further, claiming that American art patronage was “synonymous with her (ER) name.”xxiv The role of ER as the patron of the arts was proven even more on the occasion of the visit by Britain's King George VI his wife to the United States.xxv The letters and messages received by ER from artists ready to perform for the royal guests tripled, even if it was widely known that the events and the programs at the WH were arranged by Henry Junge, Steinway and Sons. For Americans, the First Lady was becoming the most respected maker of the cultural image of their country, inside and out, while her involvement in the arts gave ER the opportunity to meet some of the most innovative American artists of the moment. Martha Graham was the right person at the right time in this endeavor, and her art was also able to convey the political message Eleanor Roosevelt believed in.

8 The two women met in 1936 through Rita Morgenthau (the sister-in-law of Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury under the Roosevelt administration,) at Neighborhood Playhouse. The occasion was a fundraising demonstration for the cause

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of the Civil War in Spain, in which the First Lady was very interested, as demonstrated by the correspondence with Martha Gelhorn.xxvi Graham was also teaching dance at the “School for Arts Related to the Theater” associated with Neighborhood Playhouse, and also performed during that evening. The next day, the dancer’s press agent and manager Frances Hawkins sent Roosevelt a letter and a souvenir booklet.xxviiOn December 20, 1936, Chronicle – an essential Graham work which openly opposed the war in Spain — was presented to the public at Guild Theater in New York, and the First Lady received an invitation and tickets.xxviiiShe did not honor the invitation, but very shortly after she requested Martha Graham to present “a few dances” at the White House, on the occasion of a birthday party for Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of Henry Morgenthau Jr. and one of ER’s closest friends. ER also invited Graham and her party to spend the night at the White House, which they gracefully declined. Louis Horst, Graham’s longtime friend, companion, and collaborator (supposed to have shared the room with Elliott Roosevelt) recounted the night to Agnes de Mille, peppering it with anecdotes, suggesting the well-known First Lady’s lack of formality in hosting people and in creating the menu of the White House.xxix ER recalled Graham’s invitation in the “My Day” column on March 1, 1937:

9 “Sunday—Friday night, Miss Martha Graham of New York came down and danced for us after dinner. I asked her afterwards if it did not require the most tremendous amount of training to keep her body under such perfect control and she told me she had to work four hours every day, and that if she took six weeks off in summer it took her two months to regain what she had temporarily lost. How few of us realize when we watch a performance that what may interest us for a short time requires so much hard work and devotion on the part of the artist.”xxx

10 However, ER’s admiration as well as the reasons for the invitation went beyond the sole artistic qualities of the American dancer and choreographer. As in Anderson’s case, the invitation was not the result of a spur of the moment idea or mere a social event, but one during which the First Lady also connected arts, politics, and expressed her political views through the soft power of the arts. The First Lady was aware of the Nazis’ aggressive politics and discriminations, and believed in her country’s role in saving the world from a terrible fate.xxxi In a letter sent to Elinor Morgenthau , — whom ER “prized most highly” for her friendship and commitment xxxii to the causes on they which worked together , — she shared the anguish over the Nazi’s rise to power in Europe and America’s involvement in a possible war.xxxiii She confessed that “the horrible German news” made her believe even more strongly that “if we remain neutral we will suffer in the end. It makes me sick.”xxxiv

11 By the time she was invited to the White House, Martha Graham’s art and persona were the Americana portrayal of the country’s prides, successes and challenges. Graham, a proud sixth-generation American with a line of Scotch-Irish ancestors which included Myles Standish, the English military officer who accompanied the Pilgrims on their journey on the Mayflower, developed her art innovation outside of the European influences, and aimed to create an “art of and from America.”xxxv In 1932 Graham was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial fellowship; she used it in order “to create something American,” and declined the modern dancer Mary Wigman’s offer to study with her in Germany.xxxvi During late 1935 Graham received an invitation, from the Reichminister of Volksaufklarung unt Propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, to perform at the International Arts Festival organized in conjunction with the Olympic Games in

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Berlin.xxxvii Graham refused, openly stating her disapproval of the Nazi treatment of Jewish people and the persecution of Jewish artists,xxxviii a gesture which was commented by numerous American newspapers, including New York Timesxxxixand Dance Observer.xl

12 Besides, Graham was at the peak of her Americana phase, creating dances focusing on American history, and her choreography, which until then was mostly viewed as “too modern and grim,” was now considered “devotedly patriotic.”xli With an artistic practice deeply ingrained in the rhythm of American life, Graham’s dances brought a distinctly American sensibility to every theme she explored. “A dance reveals the spirit of the country in which it takes root,” she wrote in her 1937 essay “A Platform for the American Dance.”xliiBetween 1934 and 1936, Graham created American Provincials, which “unsentimentally portrays the religion-frenzied Puritan and the mockery of her Philistine neighbors,"xliiiFrontier,“a symbol of a (the Americans’) journey into the unknown, and American Lyric “with its theme as the basic American right—freedom of assembly.”xlivAs mentioned, in 1936 she created Chronicle, while the year after Graham’s performance at the White House, she created Immediate Tragedy, Deep Song, also inspired by the Spanish Civil War.xlv In August 1938, just a year before the beginning of the Second World War, Graham created the masterpiece of her Americana works, American Document, “an experimental work which used the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation among its spoken texts.”xlvi

13 The end of the Second World War was a special time for ER, whose White House Years came to an end. She was conscious that for those “who lived in his (FDR) shadow” it was the time to “start under our own momentum and wonder what we can achieve.”xlvii The former First Lady continued to commit herself to the causes she believed in previously, including the one of cultural diplomacy, and to supporting artists such as Graham, with whom she “became good friends in the 1940s, attending meetings together and riding in the same car.”xlviii

14 The Americans, who continued to be regarded by Europeans as “culturally barren,” did not yet have a well-organized cultural diplomacy, problem which was becoming crucial during the Cold War’s competition.xlix Unlike in the Soviet Union, where the culture was heavily sponsored by the State, and where “a Soviet ballerina or a premier dancer carried travel permits equal to those of an army general,” in the United States the arts were still seen as a luxury.l The (un)importance of American cultural diplomacy, which had many opponents,li was a subject of debate in Congress. lii However, even those who agreed with the idea of cultural diplomacy, stressed that the task of it was, “to sell US to the world just as a sales manager’s job is to sell a Buick or a Cadillac or a radio or a TV set,”liii and that true American-ness should be shown abroad through “serious arts” and not by any means through modern dance. Only some preeminent Americans, like Eleanor Roosevelt and later on Dwight D. Eisenhower, agreed that Benjamin Disraeli’s idea that “a book may be as great a thing as a battle,”liv was still valuable in the new political context. The former First Lady and the new president were convinced the Americans could win the competition of the Cold War over “the human soul, the human heart, and the human mind” with the help of cultural diplomacy, and by controversial arts, such as modern dance.lv

15 At the end of June 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt’s column “My Day” informed the readers about her participation in the Security Council’s meetings in Paris, which was discussing some the problems of the “deeply agitated” postwar world. The former First

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Lady, now an accomplished politician of her own, also reflected on human nature, which was making people continue “their daily lives and do the things they planned to do” in spite of their worries. In her case, it meant seeing the Cathedral of Chartes, and watching the American dancer Martha Graham’s opening night “with Ambassador and Mrs. Bruce,” which she considered “ a most interesting performance and one which met with warm approval of the French audience, which is, at all times, an honest and critical one.” The French journals did not fail to notice their presence: Paris Presse reminded the readers that the former First Lady had applauded the dancer first at the White House in 1937,lvi while Le Parisien Libre commentedthat Graham was greatly admired by her compatriots, this explaining the presence of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mrs. Bruce at her performance in Paris.lvii

16 For some in the audience of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, ER’s presence at Graham’s performance on June 27, 1950, when “Martha Graham and her Company made a bow to Paris,” might have looked as just a gesture of support from one “American in Paris” to another. For those aware of ER’s involvement in the complicated mélange of American arts and politics since the 1930s, her presence at Graham’s performance had political and diplomatic connotations. The assumption was supported by ER’s own statement which suggested that it was a “planned” appearance and by the presence in the center box of the American Ambassador in France David K. E. Bruce and his wife.lviii The American Ambassador’s presence at Graham’s performance also had special significance, as before Graham’s tour he warned Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State in Washington about the complications which the American artists, including Graham, could encounter in Paris, where American artists were often treated with hostility.lix He also believed that the French impresario Anatole Heller, supposed to represent the American companies, was “unscrupulous and bungling,” thus suggesting that his role should be restricted and minimized. Most importantly, while emphasizing that even “high French officials” recognized the dangers, Bruce concluded his warnings to the Secretary of State that all these factors could negatively affect “Franco-American cultural relations.”lx To all these comments, Dean Acheson responded promptly and advised utmost care and “soonest completion.”lxi

17 The “endorsement” of American artists touring abroad by their country’s politicians was one of the characteristics of American cultural diplomacy before its official inception in 1954. During the early fifties, while designing its “grand cultural strategy” and trying to catch up with the progress of other countries in this field, American cultural diplomacy went through a “rehearsal” period when top American officials endorsed, supervised, intervened, and helped from behind the stage their cultural diplomats in the making. Beside Graham and other modern dancers, American ballet companies, jazz musicians, symphonic orchestras, and expressionist painters toured Europe. Most of them had private sponsorship (among others, Bethsabee de Rothschild and Lilla Acheson in Graham’s case, and Peggy Guggenheim in Pollock’s), but they also received logistic support from the State Department and the American Embassies abroad.lxii However, ER had practiced the “endorsement” of American artists — for outspoken political reasons — since the thirties. When Graham was invited to the White House, she was told that “there will be some people here who will be well worthwhile meeting,” and also that the White House was ready “to give some publicity for your appearances,” thus suggesting that the invitation to the White House was already an “endorsement” of Graham.lxiii By 1950 ER was even more aware that helping American artists was important, as during the early fifties “what Western Europe had

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lost in political power and political prestige it was now making up for in the arts,” anti- Americanism was on the rise, affecting not only the presence of the American artists touring abroad but also American political interests in the area.lxiv The situation was most complicated in France, especially in Paris, where there was an extra-sensitivity related to the radical changes of the postwar years, which were affecting the country’s and city’s cultural hegemony, in favor of the USA and New-York.lxv The same day as Graham’s performance, ER also visited the studio of Jo Davidson,lxvi the American sculptor acclaimed for his works on political personalities, including FDR and Harry Hopkins, and the bronze busts of the leaders of the First World War Allies.lxvii

18 ER’s resourcefulness in supporting and endorsing American art, artists, and cultural diplomacy was exemplary. Over the years, when royals and important heads of states were the guests of the Roosevelts, artists such as Marian Anderson — who was introduced to the British Royals in 1938 — were invited to meet them.lxviii “The most famous Dutch-Americans in the White House” developed a close friendship with the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina and her daughter Juliana since 1941, when the latter lived in exile in Lee, Massachusetts. Juliana would become the Queen of the Netherlands in 1948,lxix the year when ER visited her, when she went to the Netherlands to receive a doctorate in law from the University of Utrecht. The former First Lady saw Juliana for the second time in 1951,lxx while Juliana and her husband paid an unofficial visit to ER in Hyde Park, during their American tour in 1952.lxxi On April 9, 1952, the Royal couple accompanied the former First Lady to New York, where they spent a day without official engagements. In the evening they went on Broadway to see the musical “The King and I,” on which occasion, along with other famous people of American arts and culture, they met Martha Graham.lxxii

19 In 1954, on the occasion of Graham’s performance in The Hague, Queen Juliana and Princess Irene of the Netherlands were in the audience. As shown by a photograph never discussed so far, taken from a private collection, the Queen and the young princess are shown greeting Martha Graham in front of her dressing room. Graham, who was wearing her Chinese robe, with a bandana tying her hair, looked comfortable and also content next to the royal guests.lxxiii The momentum was a very special one, as the presence of royals at Graham’s performance in Europe was an unprecedented success for the dancer, but also for American diplomacy in Europe.

20 In spite of her desire to be “just” Eleanor Roosevelt, over the years ER became a skilled politician, who had a special talent and ability to seize an opportunity and use it for her causes. She invited Martha Graham to perform at the White House when the USA was contemplating its entrance in the Second World War. During the early fifties, the former First Lady, now a recognized politician and savvy diplomat on her own, used her prestige and connections in helping Graham during her tours in Europe. Accompanied by the American Ambassador David Bruce, Roosevelt attended Graham’s opening night in Paris, during the dancer’s difficult first European tour in 1950. When Queen Juliana of the Netherlands visited Hyde Park in 1952, she orchestrated the Queen’s meeting with Graham in New York City, thus, on the occasion of Graham’s second European tour, in 1954, the Queen attended the American dancer’s performance.

21 Debuted and developed during a time when Americans did not believe (yet) in the power of the arts in making and un-making political and diplomatic statements, ER’s trustworthy relationship with Martha Graham demonstrated the innovative and

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intricate way in which ER used arts in the service of politics, and her role in the creation of American cultural diplomacy. By the time of ER’s death, in November 1962, Martha Graham, the pioneer of modern dance, was at the peak of her role as a cultural diplomat, and was about to perform beyond the Iron Curtain, on her first State Department tour to Europe.lxxiv Her international tours, incepted with the 1950 performance in Paris attended by the former First Lady, proved that Americans could create world famous art, and also that, as Eleanor Roosevelt, the pioneer of the American cultural diplomacy envisioned, the “soft power” of the arts was an essential component of diplomacy and politics.

NOTES i. Jacobs, William Jay. Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Happiness and Tears (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), p. 69. ii. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945(London: Penguin, 2006), p. 33. iii. Ibidem. iv. Julia Margartet Carson, Mary Cassatt (New York: D. McKay Co,1966), p. 6. v. Alexander, Holmes, "American Arts and Patronage,” in College and University Journal, vol. 10, no. 3, 1971, p. 20-23. vi. See Whitney Chadwick, Women, Arts and Society ( New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), p. 322; Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New-York: Congdon & Weed, 1984); Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman,New World (Albuquerque :University of New Mexico Press, 1987);Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict ( New York: Bookthrift Co, 1982.) vii. Camelia Lenart, “Rehearsing and Transforming Cultural Diplomacy: Martha Graham’s Tours to Europe during the Fifties,” published in the Proceedings of Dance History Scholars Conference, October 2013. viii. Naima Prevots, Dance for Export (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 3. ix. Clare Croft, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 35. x. Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin. Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh, 2012), p. 4. xi. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/hope-for-america/cultural-diplomacy.html; accessed October 2016. xii. Camelia Lenart, “Dancing Art and Politics Beyond the Iron Curtain: Martha Graham’s 1962 Tour to Yugoslavia and Poland,” Dance Chronicle,vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, p. 197-217. xiii. Don McDonagh, Martha Graham: A Biography (New York, Praeger, 1973), p. 232. xiv. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Day by Day” http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/ daylog/february-26th-1937; accessed December 2015. xv. The artist would also give up her membership to the DAR after they stopped Marian Anderson from singing. Martha Graham, Blood Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 153. xvi. William Jay Jacobs, Eleanor Roosevelt. A Life of Happiness and Tears (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), p. 26-27. xvii. Marjorie Garber, Patronizing the Arts, Princeton University Press (August 17, 2008), p. 65.

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xviii. Karen Bel-Kanner, Frontiers: The Life and Times of Bonnie Bird. American Modern Dancer and Dance Educator (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 185-186. xix. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press,) p. 254. xx. Read more: http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ro-Sc/Roosevelt- Eleanor.html#ixzz3qBcqPuA9; accessed December 2015. xxi. Karen Bel-Kanner, Frontiers: The Life and Times of Bonnie Bird. American Modern Dancer and Dance Educator (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), p. 186; Interestingly, Paige and Graham would tour France in 1950, and both would be helped by the American Embassy in Paris while there (Letter from the Cultural Relations Department to the US Embassy in Paris, 10 May 1950, Minister des Relations Exterieures, R.C. 1948-1955, Serie II, Echanges Culturelles, Etats -Unis , Archives des Affaires étrangères (Archives diplomatiques), La Courneuve, France.) xxii. Letter to ER from Genevieve Jones, August 16, 1939, Box 440, Paper Events, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, WH Correspondence, 1933-1946, Presidential Library, Hyde Park. xxiii. Letter to ER from Dina Huebert, June 19, 1939, Box 440, Paper Events, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, WH Correspondence, 1933-1946, Presidential Library, Hyde Park. xxiv. Ibidem. xxv. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo, 1992), p. 199. xxvi. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume Two, 1933-1938 (New York: Viking Press, 1999), p. 455. xxvii. Don McDonagh, Martha Graham: A Biography, (New York, Praeger, 1973), p. 116-117. xxviii. Ibidem, p.119. xxix. Agnes DeMille, Martha. The Life and work of Martha Graham (New York, First Vintage Books Edition, 1992), p. 221-222. xxx. “My Day” March 1, 1937, https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/browsebyyear.cfm; accessed March 2016. xxxi. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.) xxxii. Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo, 1992), p. 123. xxxiii. Their collaboration was described in detail by the former First Lady in her autobiography: they worked together on the Democratic State Committee in 1928 (p. 148), the WPA projects (p. 176), while Morgenthau was her assistant in the Office of Civilian Defense (p. 225-229.) xxxiv. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume Two, 1933-1938 (New York: Viking Press, 1999), p. 283; ER’s implication in the problem of the possible war and of the American participation in it was described in detail in the chapter “Mobilizing for New Action” and “A Silence Beyond Repair.” xxxv. Julia Lawrence Foulkes, “Dancing America: Modern dance and cultural nationalism, 1925-1950,” PhD Thesis, University of Amherst, 1997, p. 3. xxxvi. Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, "Race," and Nation in Early Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 132. xxxvii. Don McDonagh, Martha Graham, p. 113. xxxviii. Agnes DeMille, Martha. The Life and work of Martha Graham, p. 223. xxxix. “German Invitation Refused by Dancer,” New York Times, March 13, 1936. xl. “Olympic Protest,” Dance Observer, April, 1936. xli. Maureen Needham Costonis, “Martha Graham's American Document: A Minstrel Show in Modern Dance Dress,” in American Music, vol. 9, no. 3, 1991, p. 297-310. xlii. Maureen Nedham, I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685-2000 (University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 176.

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xliii. Program, Martha Graham, Guild Theatre, November 10, 1935, Box 31, Martha Graham Collection Box 311, Music Division, Library of Congress. xliv. Program, Martha Graham and Dance Group, Mount Holyoke College, October 27, 1938, Martha Graham Collection Box 314, Music Division, Library of Congress. xlv. Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance view: Graham’s Deep Song: 51 and Still Protesting,” in New York Times, October 16, 1988; in 1937 these were only two among many solos created by other dancers and choreographers in sympathy with the suffering in Spain. Titles like Jose Limon's ''Danza de la Muerte,'' Lily Mehlman's ''Spanish Woman'' and Sophia Delza's ''We Weep for Spain.'' xlvi. Maureen Needham Costonis, “Martha Graham's American Document: A Minstrel Show in Modern Dance Dress,” in American Music, vol. 9, no. 3, 1991, p. 297-310. xlvii. Letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickok, April 19, 1945, in Allida M. Black, Casting her Own Shadow. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). xlviii. Martha Graham, Blood Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 153. xlix. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 19. l. Walter Terry, Frontiers of Dance. The Life of Martha Graham (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1975), p. 117. li. Leo Bogart, Cool Words, Cold War, Premises of Propaganda: Reassessing the USIA's Operating Assumptions in the Cold War (University Press of America; 2nd Revised edition, 1995), p. xxxv. lii. Ibidem. liii. Anthony Haigh, Cultural Diplomacy in Europe (New York: Manhattan Pub. Co, 1974), p. 77. liv. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 21. lv. Ibidem. lvi. Clipping, Paris Presse, June 29, 1950, signed Andre Varnod, Dossier d’artiste Martha Graham, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra Collections, Paris. lvii. Clipping, Le Parisien Libre, Dossier d’artiste Martha Graham, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra Collections, Paris; also see “On the Debut of Martha Graham in Paris,” Dance Magazine, August 1950, p. 10. lviii. Clipping, Le Parisien Libre, Dossier d’artiste Martha Graham, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra Collections, Paris. lix. His alleged collaboration with the Nazi was loudly disapproved by the American audience and the press. lx. Telegram, David Bruce to Dean Acheson, June 15, 1950, NND852916, RG 59, Box 2386, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MA. lxi. Telegram, Dean Acheson to David Bruce, June 20, 1950, NND852916, RG 59, Box 2386, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MA . lxii. Camelia Lenart, “Rehearsing and Transforming Cultural Diplomacy: Martha Graham’s Tours to Europe during the Fifties,” published in the Proceedings of Dance History Scholars Conference, October 2013. lxiii. Ibidem. lxiv. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005), p. 77. lxv. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 5. lxvi. 1947 the American Academy of Arts and Letters hosted a retrospective featuring nearly 200 of his works. In 1944, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. In the summer of 1949, he was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. lxvii. “My Day” June 30,1950, https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/browsebyyear.cfm; accessed March 2016.

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lxviii. Marian Anderson, My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography, University of Illinois Press; Reprint edition, 2002. lxix. Mollie Sommerville, Eleanor Roosevelt. As I knew Her (McLean: EPM Publications, 1996).p. 98; due to her mother’s poor health Juliana was a regent since 1947, and became a queen on 4 May 1948; see Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo, 1992),p. 199; see William Hoffman, Queen Juliana, The Story of the Richest Woman in the World (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 94. lxx. William Hoffman, Queen Juliana, p. 11; During the official visits to the States the queen and her husband always visited regions from New York State which still had a rich Dutch heritage. lxxi. State Department’s Program of Queen Juliana’s Visit in the USA, 1952, box 24950, M. Buitenlandse Zaken, 1945-1954, Nationaal Archief, The Hague. lxxii. Letter to Baron DeVos van Steenwijk, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, box 24948, M. Buitenlandse Zaken, 1945-1954, Nationaal Archief, The Hague. lxxiii. Camelia Lenart, “Dancing Art and Politics beyond the Iron Curtain: Martha Graham’s 1962 Tour to Yugoslavia and Poland,” Dance Chronicle,vol. 39, no. 2 (2016), p. 197-217. lxxiv. Ibidem.

ABSTRACTS

The article analyzes Eleanor Roosevelt’s intricate and innovative relationship with American arts during a time when Americans did not believe yet in the power of the arts in making (and un- making) political and diplomatic statements. Focusing on the collaboration between the First Lady and the modern dancer Martha Graham, it also proves that their partnership and its valuable and long lasting outcomes qualify them as pioneers of American cultural diplomacy. As the article shows, Roosevelt invited Martha Graham to perform “American Document” at the White House when the USA was contemplating its entrance in the Second World War. Like in the case of Marion Anderson’s invitation, Graham’s performance of modernism and patriotism was by no means a social event, but a conscientious decision to use the arts in the service of politics and diplomacy. The article follows Roosevelt’s visionary involvement in the inception of American cultural diplomacy during the early fifties, when the former First Lady, now a recognized politician and savvy diplomat on her own, used her prestige and connections in helping Graham during her tours in Europe. Accompanied by the American Ambassador David Bruce, Roosevelt attended Graham’s opening night in Paris, during the dancer’s difficult first European tour in 1950. Subsequently, when Roosevelt’s old friend, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, visited Hyde Park in 1952, she orchestrated the Queen’s meeting with Graham in New York City. On the occasion of Graham’s second European tour, in 1954, the Queen attended one of her performances, which was an unprecedented diplomatic and audience success for the dancer and American diplomacy in Europe. Based on research in archives, as well as public and private collections from the USA, The Netherlands, Britain and France, the article is not only a historical reconstruction of a special collaboration, but also an homage to the two fascinating First Ladies – of politics and dance – who pioneered American cultural diplomacy.

European journal of American studies, 12-1 | 2017 128

INDEX

Keywords: American Cultural Diplomacy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martha Graham

AUTHOR

CAMELIA LENART University at Albany, SUNY

European journal of American studies, 12-1 | 2017