No Ordinary Time, Page 54

  To Negroes across the country, Waller became a symbol of oppression, “of Negro toil in the white man’s fields, of Negro fate in the white man’s courts, of every black body which has swung at the end of a rope from barn or bridge.” The injustice was made all the more conspicuous by comparison with a mirror-image case in the same county. R. G. Siddle, a white farmer, shot and killed an unarmed Negro sharecropper during a quarrel. Charged with murder, Siddle was acquitted by an all-white poll-paying jury in less than fifteen minutes.

  As news of the Waller case spread, A. Philip Randolph formed a nationwide committee to pressure Virginia’s Governor Colgate Darden to grant clemency. On June 16, a two-hour blackout was staged in Harlem; on every street, in every tavern and barbershop, the lights were turned out to protest the Waller verdict. Within a period of several weeks, seventeen thousand letters reached Darden’s desk.

  Eleanor became involved when Odell Waller sent her a handwritten note from his cell in the Richmond Prison: “I relize [sic] I’m a stranger to you, I have heard lots of people speak of what a nice lady you are and what I can hear is that you believe in helping the poor . . . . I was raised in Virginia on a farm. I never had a chance to make anything not even a good living. I always worked hard but I couldn’t get anything out of it. I raised some wheat with a man named Oscar Davis an [sic] he took all of the wheat and I tried to get my share of it he wouldn’t let me have the wheat. We got in a quarrel. And I shot him to keep him from hurting me not meaning to kill him. He carried a gun an [sic] I was afraid of him . . . . Please write to the Governor and get him to have mercy on me and allow me a chance. You will never regret it.”

  Moved by Waller’s plea, Eleanor asked the president to intervene. Decisions on clemency were strictly the prerogative of the governor, and presidential action would be considered highly inappropriate. Roosevelt circumvented this dilemma with “a wholly personal and unofficial note” to the governor, signed by “an old friend who just happens to be President.” In the note he described a similar case that had occurred when he was governor of New York. A man had shot his neighbor in the midst of an argument after the neighbor advanced against him in a threatening way. Though the jury convicted him of murder in the first degree, Roosevelt had the sentence commuted to life imprisonment and was always glad he had done so.

  The president sent a copy of this letter to Eleanor with a covering note which reflected a poignant yearning for praise from his toughest critic. “Dearest Babs. Didn’t I do good? Aren’t you proud?” Eleanor was thrilled. “It’s a grand letter. Thanks.” she replied.

  Despite the president’s letter, Governor Darden decided, after ten hours of testimony at a clemency hearing, to refuse commutation. In desperation, Randolph and Walter White journeyed to Washington the day before the execution to see the president, unaware of the personal letter the president had already sent Governor Darden.

  When Randolph’s delegation arrived in Washington, Roosevelt was at Hyde Park, a fact that could not be disclosed since the president’s comings and goings were kept secret in wartime. Told simply that an appointment was not possible, the group turned, as always, to Eleanor. With only eighteen hours left until the execution, Eleanor tried all day to reach Franklin at Hyde Park. Each time, Harry Hopkins told her the president was unavailable. Roosevelt knew why she was calling and, realizing there was nothing more he could do without making matters worse, was avoiding her calls.

  As the hours passed, with Randolph’s delegation waiting by the telephone at the NAACP headquarters, Eleanor became frantic. Between the late afternoon and the early evening, she called Hopkins four or five times, begging him to plead her case with the president. Still, the president refused to come to the phone, and Eleanor, Hopkins later remarked, “would not take ‘No’ for an answer.” Finally, Hopkins realized that Eleanor was taking out her anger on him, that she had drawn the conclusion he was not pressing her case with the president adequately. “I felt that she would not be satisfied until the President told her himself, which he reluctantly but finally did . . . that under no circumstances would he intervene with the Governor and urged very strongly that she say nothing about it.”

  With a heavy heart, Eleanor placed a call to Randolph. She spoke simply and directly. “Mr. Randolph. I have done everything I can do. I have been to the President twice. And the President has said to me this is a matter of laws and not of men and if I go back to the President he will be displeased with me.” A young black activist, Pauli Murray, was listening in to the conversation between Mrs. Roosevelt and Mr. Randolph. “There were five telephones in that office, and there were two of us glued to each telephone. I could hear tears in her voice.”

  The next day, at 8:35 a.m., Odell Waller was strapped into an electric chair at the Virginia penitentiary. “Have you ever thought,” he wrote in a final statement, “about some people are allowed a chance over and over again then there are others allowed little chance, some no chance at all. I worked hard from sunup to sundown and it ended in death for me.” At 8:45, the prison doctor declared, “Waller’s debt to the community has been paid.”

  Waller’s death had a powerful effect upon the Negro community. “We lost the fight to save his life,” Randolph told his followers, “but even so we went a step forward. The Negroes are learning to use pressure. We didn’t get quite enough pressure to crack this case but we almost did.”

  Predictably, Eleanor’s public support of Waller drew a new round of criticism from white Southerners. “I cannot understand your sympathy for a Negro who murdered a white man,” a resident of New Orleans wrote. A Virginian complained that she had watched the papers daily for accounts of Odell Waller. “I am very much disappointed that you do not devote more of your time to the Red Cross, the USO and help win the conflict rather than indulge in creating disorders among Americans. You are helping to make the Negroes uppish and forward.”

  During this same period, Eleanor received an angry letter from Pauli Murray. Writing in pain and disappointment, Murray suggested that the president had never been as forthright about race as his Republican rival Wendell Willkie, and that there were even times when she doubted that any white man had the capacity to solve the racial problem.

  Eleanor was saddened and angry when she read Murray’s letter. “I wonder if it ever occurred to you that Wendell Willkie has no responsibility whatsoever. He can say whatever he likes and do whatever he likes and nothing very serious will happen. If he were to be elected President, on that day, he would have to take into consideration the people who are heads of important committees in Congress . . . people on whom he must depend to pass vital legislation for the nation as a whole. For one who must really have a knowledge of the workings of our kind of government, your letter seems to me one of the most thoughtless I have ever read.”

  Knowing what Pauli Murray did not know and what she could not tell her, that the president had sent a letter to the Virginia governor in Waller’s behalf, Eleanor judged her criticism totally unfair. Still, she held out her hand to the young militant with the suggestion of a personal meeting to talk things over. When Pauli arrived at the White House, Eleanor went over to her, hugged her, and mentioned Waller right away, saying what a terrible night it had been. “And this just removed all the anger,” Murray recalled. “We met as two people—a bond of sympathy—we had been through a painful experience together.” During this meeting, a friendship was born which lasted until Eleanor died.

  • • •

  In the weeks that followed, Eleanor could not shake the feeling that, on the critical night before the execution, Harry Hopkins had deserted her. One night she vented her frustration and anger directly at Hopkins. “She must’ve said a few very tough things,” Diana Hopkins later suggested, and “he was a very frank guy and he must’ve really said something very tough to her.” Eleanor took to her room for days. The White House staff assumed she was sick. “It’s the first time I’ve ever known her to turn her face to the wall,” Tommy told Esther Lape. “I
was very disturbed.” When Eleanor journeyed to New York the following week, she told Esther Lape, “Something happened to me. I have gotten used to people who say they care for me but are only interested in getting to Franklin. But there was one person of whom I thought this was not true, that his affection was for me and I found that this was not true and I couldn’t take it.” If their relationship had faltered before, it was now broken.

  Outwardly, Eleanor’s poise and dignity prevailed. She took it upon herself to plan Hopkins’ wedding. The ceremony took place in front of the fireplace in the president’s study on July 30, 1942. “A very nice affair,” Hassett recorded. The fireplace was banked with greens, the president’s desk was covered with white flowers, and vases of roses were everywhere. Franklin wore a white linen suit, Eleanor a blue-and-white polka-dot chiffon. “Harry trembled like an aspen leaf throughout the ceremony,” Hassett observed, “but managed to fish the wedding ring out of his pants pocket at the proper time.” A luncheon for one hundred guests followed.

  “After Harry married Louise,” Diana Hopkins recalled, “FDR was more lonely than ever before.” Though Hopkins was still living at the White House, the relationship was not the same. Of course, Princess Martha was still available for conversation and companionship. Almost every weekend during the spring and early summer of 1942, the usher diaries reveal, the president spent the majority of his leisure time with Martha, either at her Pook’s Hill estate, at the White House, or at Hyde Park.

  It was a time of loneliness for Princess Martha as well. Though she filled her days with work for Norway—giving speeches about Norway’s struggle for freedom, visiting Norwegian marine stations in the U.S.A. and Canada, entertaining Norwegian seamen posted on the East Coast, attending official banquets, hosting special events at the Norwegian Embassy—she was far away from her country, her husband, and her closest friends.

  Both were in search of companionship, and they found it in each other. During this period, Diana Hopkins was told, the president would ask Louise Hopkins to chaperone for visits with Martha. “No sooner would Louise return to the White House from her volunteer work as a nurse at Columbia Hospital,” Diana recalled, “than there would be a message that the president wanted her to join him for tea with Princess Martha immediately. There was no time even to get out of her uniform. She had to jump in the car and drive with the president to Martha’s estate . . . Then they’d get there, and Princess Martha would say, ‘Louise, why don’t you go and see the children?’ And so Louise would go and see the children, and the president and Martha would have tea, and this was one hell of a tough situation for [her].”

  • • •

  In the summer of 1942, the accustomed rhythms of daily life were disrupted in every factory, business, and home by the institution of rationing and price control. In his April address to the nation, the president had explained that rationing of scarce commodities was the only equitable solution to the shortages brought about by the war, since it prevented those who could pay the most from getting whatever was available and forced those in less fortunate circumstances to go without.

  While the machinery for the rationing of consumer goods was being devised and set in motion, the government established a series of regulations at the manufacturing level. To ensure a sufficient amount of cotton and wool to supply the army with more than 64 million flannel shirts, 165 million coats, and 229 million pairs of trousers, the War Production Board mandated a new “Victory” suit for civilians, with cuffless trousers and narrower lapels. Reductions in the amount of cloth allowed also led to shorter, pleatless skirts, rising several inches above the knee, and to the creation of a new two-piece bathing suit.

  Women took the loss of pleated skirts and one-piece bathing suits in stride, but when the rubber shortage threatened the continuing manufacture of girdles, a passionate outcry arose. Though government sources tried to suggest that “women grow their own muscular girdles, by exercising,” woman argued that “neither exercise nor any other known remedy” could restore aging muscles to their original youthful tautness. Without “proper support from well-fitted foundation garments” to hold the abdomen in place, there was no way, journalist Marion Dixon argued in a contemporary health magazine, that a woman past thirty could keep her posture erect or do physical work without tiring. “Certainly,” Dixon concluded, “Uncle Sam does not want American women to wear garments that would menace their health or hamper their efficiency, especially during wartime, when every ounce of energy and effort is needed.”

  The government heeded the women’s cries. Not long after the first public discussion of curtailing girdles, the War Production Board announced that foundation garments were an essential part of a woman’s wardrobe, and as such could continue to be manufactured, despite the precious rubber involved!

  The first step in developing the rationing system was the creation of a list of essential items in short supply. Each item was then given a price in points, and each man, woman, and child in the country was given a book of stamps. The stamps in each ration book—worth forty-eight points each month, and good for six months—could be spent on any combination of goods, from meat, butter, and canned vegetables to sugar and shoes. When a sale was made, the retailer would collect the points and use them to replenish his stocks. Ration books were priceless possessions, as Mrs. Harold Calvert of Oklahoma City found out when her two children ate all the coupons from her first book and she had to present the damaged book before being issued a replacement.

  By and large, American housewives accepted the system of rationing cheerfully. When butter became scarce, they added a yellow dye to margarine to make it look like butter. When sugar was cut back, they substituted corn syrup and saccharin in cakes and cookies. They planted Victory Gardens in their backyards. They saved kitchen fats and exchanged them at the butcher shop for points. There were also black markets in every city—places where scarce goods could be sold outside the normal channels of distribution. For a premium, almost anything could be bought—nylon hose for $5 a pair, cigarettes for 30 cents a pack, boneless ham for twice the ceiling price.

  But nothing cut as deeply into the pattern of everyday life as the rationing of tires and gasoline. For millions of Americans who had known that “curious independence,” as Marquis Childs put it, which ownership of a motorcar brings, “the untrammeled right to go as far and as fast, or almost as fast, as your money will permit,” the most onerous restrictions were those on driving. A draconian order forbidding the sale of new tires anywhere in the country had been issued at the end of December, as Japan moved quickly toward the rubber-rich islands of Malaya and Indonesia. Since tire factories accounted for 75 percent of the country’s annual consumption of crude rubber, it was essential to freeze the current supply while a rationing organization could be devised.

  By early January 1942, a certificate program had been put into place; if an individual met certain standards of eligibility and could show genuine need, he was issued a one-time certificate that allowed him to buy a new set of tires. Determining who was eligible was a tricky process, as OPA Administrator John Kenneth Galbraith found out when he devised the list of people entitled to buy new tires. Galbraith’s first list—which included physicians, war workers, public officials, and others rendering essential services, but failed to mention ministers—produced an immediate explosion, particularly in the rural South. “Roosevelt was outraged,” Galbraith recalled, “that anyone could be so casual about both fundamentalist religion and the fundamentals of American politics. Ministers were promptly proclaimed essential.”

  Rationing of tires was followed by rationing of gasoline, which began on the Eastern Seaboard on the 15th of May, 1942. Though gasoline was not in short supply, the government believed that gas rationing was the only way to save rubber. The decision was made to start with the seventeen Eastern states and then extend the gas rationing westward. Consumers of gas were divided into different classes: the majority of drivers were granted A cards, which entitled them t
o five gallons a week; B cards were given to war workers, doctors, and others whose vocations required supplemental mileage; X cards were granted to those whose occupations required unlimited mileage.

  The misrepresentation of one’s status before the gas-rationing board carried a fine of $10,000 and a sentence of ten years in jail. Yet, within weeks, it became clear that thousands of motorists had wangled B or X cards when their work did not truly require them. Those who had willingly accepted A cards were bitter to find their neighbors in a privileged position. Public resentment grew when it became known that members of Congress had been automatically granted X cards. So angry was the outpouring of public sentiment that a resolution was introduced in the Senate requiring members to renounce their claim of special privilege. When the defiant senators defeated the resolution by a vote of sixty-six to two, the public mood darkened. “The very men to whom the whole country looks to set an example and to encourage the public to accept the personal inconvenience,” Raymond Clapper wrote, “are doing exactly the reverse. Instead of trying to cooperate they are cackling like wet hens to hold their special privileges.”

  When Roosevelt realized how badly muddled the gas situation had become, he moved in several directions at once. In mid-June, he initiated a nationwide rubber drive, designed not only to gather precious tons of scrap, but also to instill in the American psyche a sympathetic understanding of the rubber shortage before the inevitable need for extending gas rationing to the country at large came into play. To kick off the drive, he gave a fireside chat. “I want to talk to you about rubber,” he told the people, “about rubber and the war—about rubber and the American people.” He then proceeded to describe the present shortage, along with the plans for building a new synthetic-rubber industry. “That takes time,” he explained, “so we have an immediate need,” which the American people could help to fill if they reached into their homes and their yards to recover old rubber tires dumped into basements or garages or still hanging from apple trees for kids to swing on, as well as old garden hoses, rubber shoes, and rubber raincoats. A two-week period from June 15 to June 30 was set aside during which filling-station operators were authorized to take the old rubber in and to pay for it at the rate of a penny a pound.