No Ordinary Time, Page 80

  There was much to talk about that night. Across the ocean, London was reeling from a terrifying barrage of Germany’s newest weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, a pilotless rocket-powered craft launched from giant concrete bunkers in German-occupied territory in northern France. The V-1 carried more than twelve thousand pounds of high explosives and fell indiscriminately on people and buildings alike. In two weeks, nearly three thousand people had been killed and over ten thousand wounded. Had the V-1 and its even more formidable successor, the V-2 liquid-fuel rocket, been developed earlier in the war, the balance of power might have been fatally tilted against the Allies. But by July 1944, the Allies were moving forward in every sector of the war.

  In Normandy, the last German strongholds in Cherbourg had surrendered. On the Eastern front, the Red Army had begun a powerful new offensive that found its troops surging westward into Poland. More than 130,000 Germans had been killed in the last week of June, and sixty-six thousand taken prisoner. And in the Southwest Pacific, after a series of assaults, Allied troops were advancing rapidly along the coast of New Guinea.

  Beyond world events, there were memories to share: silly stories Roosevelt loved to tell and retell, “all the ridiculous things,” Lucy later wrote, he liked “to say—and do—and enjoy.” Years later, Anna’s son Johnny Boettiger could easily understand why Anna and Lucy got along so well, and why this meant so much to the president. “The three of them had a capacity for loving humor, for having fun. It wasn’t a tight, ironic sense of humor. It was a silly humor that didn’t respect the boundaries they all imagined Eleanor would impose.”

  It was after midnight when Roosevelt retired, but he awakened early the next morning so he could take Lucy on a day trip to Shangri-la. Were Lucy and Roosevelt lovers at this point? It is impossible to know, though, given the state of Roosevelt’s health, doubt remains. Still, even if they did not share the same bed, it is reasonable to imagine that there was a pleasing sexuality in their friendship.

  Yet, of all the pleasures Lucy gave, perhaps the most important was her willingness and ability to talk to Roosevelt about what was happening to his health. Having nursed her husband through illness for seven years, she must have been highly attuned to the fear and frustration of being inside a body that was breaking down. If Roosevelt was able to talk at all about his fears, about what it was like to be in pain, about the prospect of death, it would have been with Lucy. With everyone else, he had to summon up his energies to be cheerful. But with Lucy, it is possible that he was able to drop his act, to admit his fears and demonstrate his anger.

  • • •

  While Roosevelt was enjoying the company of Lucy Rutherfurd, Eleanor was in Hyde Park celebrating a noteworthy advance against segregation in the South. That Saturday, July 8, 1944, the War Department issued an order to all commanding generals directing that all “buses, trucks or other transportation owned and operated either by the government or by government instrumentality will be available to all military personnel regardless of race. Restricting personnel to certain sections of such transportation because of race will not be permitted either on or off a post camp, or station, regardless of local civilian custom.”

  The War Department directive spoke squarely to the primary source of racial tension in the South. Restricted by law to a few seats at the back of the bus, Negro soldiers were often relegated to stand at the bus stop for hours as overcrowded buses passed them by. Where separate buses were provided for Negroes and whites, the “colored” buses usually ran on less frequent schedules, forcing Negro soldiers to watch as dozens of “white” buses containing empty seats drove past.

  There were scores of incidents. In Savannah, Georgia, forty-three miles from Camp Stewart, the Greyhound bus terminal had separate ticket windows for whites and coloreds. One employee handled both windows; he regularly made the colored GIs wait until all the whites were taken care of, even if the colored GIs had arrived first. It could take up to twelve hours for the Negro soldier to buy a ticket. Yet, if he was late getting back to camp, he was considered AWOL and issued a service penalty.

  In Louisiana, a group of nine Negro GIs boarded a train for transfer from the hospital at Camp Claiborne to the hospital at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. The train was delayed for twelve hours. “The only place that would serve us was the lunch room at the station,” one of the nine reported. “But we couldn’t eat where the white people were eating. To do that would contaminate the very air of the place, so we had to go to the kitchen. That was bad enough but that’s not all. About 11:30 that same morning, about two dozen German prisoners of war came to the lunchroom with two guards. They entered the large room, sat at the table. Then meals were served them. They smoked and had a swell time. As we stood on the outside and saw what was going on, we could scarcely believe our own eyes. There they sat: eating, talking, laughing, smoking. They were enemies of our country, people sworn to destroy all the so-called democratic governments of the world . . . . What are we fighting for?”

  Resentments multiplied. In Beaumont, Texas, Charles Rico, a black private, was ordered off a bus because he took a vacant seat in a section reserved for whites. After he left the bus, he was beaten by a white policeman and shot twice through the shoulder and the arm. In Mobile, Alabama, where bus drivers were authorized to carry firearms to enforce local laws and customs, Private Henry Williams, a black soldier, was shot and killed when he walked to the wrong section of the bus. In Montgomery, Alabama, a black nurse, Lieutenant Norma Greene, boarded a bus after a shopping tour in preparation for overseas duty. When she refused to get out of the bus after the driver told her it was a “white” bus, she was so badly beaten that her nose was broken and her eyes were blackened.

  “[Negroes] have been instructed to regard themselves as soldiers,” warned Truman Gibson, civilian aide to the Secretary of War. “They are not conditioned to withstand the shock of attitudes” to which they are subjected day in and day out. One black corporal, insulted by a conductor, threw a “colored only” sign out the window. He was immediately arrested and carried back to camp as a common criminal. “Honey, I am so hurt inside,” he wrote his girlfriend, “so much that I don’t really know what to do . . . . Just think I may have to fight some day, but honey what will I be fighting for, surely not the rotten conditions we have to bear down here.”

  For months, Eleanor had been pushing the War Department to do something about the public-transit situation. Responding to innumerable letters from black soldiers, she had barraged the War Department with questions and comments. She understood, she wrote John McCloy, that, if the bus was privately owned, there was nothing the army could do about it. But if it was an army bus, then it was unconscionable to allow segregation to stand. “These colored boys lie side by side in the hospitals in the southwest Pacific with the white boys and somehow it is hard for me to believe that they should not be treated on an equal basis.”

  Though the directive of July 8, 1944, covered only government-owned or -operated buses, liberals hailed it as “an important step forward in the fight to abolish discrimination,” and the Negro press treated it as a great victory. “Extra! Extra!” the Baltimore Afro-American headlined: “US Army Bans Jim Crow.” “Here It Is!” the Pittsburgh Courier enthused, publishing the full text of the order.

  Among Southern whites, not surprisingly, the order provoked a fiery protest. Governor Chauncey Sparks of Alabama warned the White House that its malicious action threatened to break down “the essential principle of race relations in the South.” As a consequence, Southern politicians would find it extremely difficult “to hold the south within its traditional democratic allegiance in the years to come.”

  Once again, Eleanor Roosevelt became the target of Southern criticism. A new round of rumors spread, stories of “Eleanor Tuesdays,” days when Negro women supposedly went out into the streets en masse with the goal of knocking Southern white women to the ground. There is no evidence that such days actually existed, but so widespread were the rumors that
many white women in the South were afraid to go out of their houses on Tuesdays.

  Despite the hysterical overtones of the Southern protest, the War Department refused, this time, to back away from its assertion that all soldiers should be treated alike. “This knowledge,” army historians observed, “raised morale higher in many units than the construction of the most elaborate service club.” Never, Howard University Dean William Hastie assured John McCloy, “have I seen so much enthusiasm and goodwill generated by a particular bit of official action . . . . I think it means more to the Negro soldier than you can possibly realize.”

  • • •

  Dramatic changes in the navy that summer gave Eleanor further cause for satisfaction. Under James Forrestal, the boyish-looking financier who had succeeded Frank Knox as secretary on May 11, 1944, the navy was taking unprecedented strides toward racial equality. Within weeks of becoming secretary, Forrestal had instituted a series of experiments designed to bring an end to the navy’s dismal record in the use of Negro personnel.

  The first change was reflected in a memo to the president on May 20. “Up to the present time,” Forrestal observed, though the navy had opened its general service ranks to Negroes in 1942, “the majority of Negroes have been employed in the Shore Establishment,” performing the arduous, prosaic work involved in handling ammunition and loading ships. To many Negroes, it seemed that they had simply “swapped the waiter’s apron for the stevedore’s grappling hook.” Looking at the situation, Forrestal concluded that precious energy, money, and morale were being wasted by the navy’s insistence on separating Negroes and whites. The time had come “to expand the use of Negro personnel by assigning them to general sea duty.”

  Forrestal’s proposal, which Roosevelt readily approved, called for Negroes to make up 10 percent of the crews of twenty-five large auxiliary ships. To the surprise of many, who had to revise their established notions and prejudices about the Negro’s proper place, the experiment worked remarkably well. Official navy records indicate that colored personnel were being “successfully absorbed in the ships’ companies.” The experiment was then extended to smaller vessels, where, against even higher odds, black and white crew members managed, with a minimum of fuss, to work, eat, and sleep together in extremely close quarters.

  Forrestal’s innovations came none too soon, for, that July, a bloody tragedy at the ammunition depot at Port Chicago in northern California provided unmistakable evidence of the bankruptcy of the navy’s old segregation policy. On the night of July 17, more than six hundred men, mostly black, were hard at work loading tons of ammunition, high explosives, and incendiary bombs into the holds of the S.S. Bryan. Shortly after 10 p.m., a deafening explosion erupted. The Bryan was sundered in pieces, everyone on the pier was instantly killed, the naval base was left in ruins, and the town of Port Chicago was damaged. Two hundred and two blacks were killed, and another 233 injured. “This single stunning disaster,” sociologist Robert Allen observed, “accounted for more than 15 percent of all black naval casualties during the war. It was the worst homefront disaster of World War II.”

  The loss of so many black sailors at once focused public attention on the injustice of racial discrimination in the navy, motivating Forrestal to press even more strongly for equality of treatment for blacks. In the weeks that followed, he moved in several directions at once: assigning white work units to Port Chicago and other ammo depots; stating that he no longer considered practical the establishment of separate facilities and quotas for Negroes who qualified for advanced training; appointing more Negroes to the navy’s V-12 program; insisting on Negro admittance to the Naval Academy; and issuing a far-reaching “Guide to Command of Negro Naval Personnel.” In this guide, which Commonweal regarded as “an outstanding document in the field of race relations,” the navy stated for the first time that it accepted “no theories of racial differences in inborn ability, but expects that every man wearing its uniform be trained and used in accord with his maximum individual capacity determined on the basis of individual performance.”

  The Negro press and liberal spokesmen were exultant, observing that change in the navy was now coming faster and further than anyone had thought possible. “This improvement” was all the more spectacular, Commonweal observed, “in that at the beginning of the war the Navy’s race policy was considered worse than the Army’s.”

  To Eleanor, the policy changes in both the army and the navy afforded profound gratification. Indeed, had she been given the choice between supplying the relaxation for her husband that Lucy was providing, or summoning her powers to effect a change in the lives of Negro Americans, she would undoubtedly have chosen the latter. After two decades of social activism, Eleanor’s commitment to the underdog had become such an integral part of her makeup that it is impossible to imagine her without a cause to fight.

  • • •

  On Tuesday morning, July 11, five days before the opening of the Democratic convention in Chicago, Roosevelt finally let it be known that he would accept his party’s nomination for a fourth term. At his regular press conference, he read aloud a letter he had written to Bob Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the letter, in a reversal of the famous statement General William Sherman had made when he renounced plans to run for office, he pledged that if the convention nominated him for the presidency he would accept, and that if the people, the ultimate authority, commanded him to serve he would have “as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post in the line.”

  “All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” he went on, “but the future existence of the nation and the future existence of our chosen form of government are at stake.”

  While the president was making his momentous announcement, Eleanor was in Dayton, Ohio, preparing for a luncheon talk to a group of three hundred WACs at Wright Field. Approached by reporters, she said her husband’s decision was news to her. “The President doesn’t discuss these things with me. Many people think he does but most often the first I know of some decision is when I see it in the papers.”

  Eleanor viewed Franklin’s candidacy with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she believed her husband’s victory was essential for “the good of the country.” The thought of the Republican nominee, Governor Thomas Dewey, as president worried her deeply. “Dewey seems to me more and more to show no understanding of the job at home or abroad,” she wrote James. And though she realized that her husband had tended to tire more easily in recent months, she was convinced, she told James, that “if elected, he’ll do his job well. I feel sure and I think he can be kept well to do it.” On the other hand, the thought of another four years of White House life was almost more than she could bear. “I am very conscious of age and the short time in which I have to live as I like,” she admitted to Joe Lash, “and I know that it is such selfish thinking that no one has a right to even let it be in one’s mind.”

  There was no such ambivalence on Capitol Hill. When the news reached the Democratic senators, reporter Allen Drury observed, “it was as though the sun had burst from the clouds and glory surrounded the world. Relief, and I mean relief, was written on every face. The meal ticket was still the meal ticket and all was well with the party.”

  In accepting the nomination in advance of the convention’s decision on the vice-presidency, Roosevelt had discarded the club he might have used to drive the convention into naming the running mate he himself wanted. The choice of the vice-president would be left up to the delegates.

  “I am just not going through a convention like 1940 again,” he explained, recalling the lengths he had gone to ensure the re-election of Wallace. “It will split the party wide open and it is already split enough between North and South, it may kill our chances for election this fall and if it does it will prolong the war and knock into a cocked hat all the plans we’ve been making for the future.”

  The president’s apparent indifference to the choice of a running
mate worried his aides. “He just doesn’t give a damn,” Pa Watson observed. Had Roosevelt been in good health, his lack of concern about his potential successor would have been understandable. But since he at least suspected that he was unlikely to live out a full term, it remains incomprehensible.

  In truth, Roosevelt’s mind that summer was moving in a different direction; his dream was to join hands with Republican Wendell Willkie in the creation of a new liberal party that would combine the liberal elements of the Democratic Party, minus the reactionary elements in the South, with the liberal elements of the Republican Party. Since Willkie had been defeated at the Republican convention by the conservative wing of his party, Roosevelt hoped he would be receptive to the idea. “We ought to have two real parties,” Roosevelt told his aide Sam Rosenman, “one liberal and the other conservative. As it is now each party is split by dissenters.”

  To sound Willkie out, Roosevelt dispatched Rosenman to meet with him in New York in early July. “The meeting obviously had to be a complete secret,” Rosenman later recalled, “so I had lunch served in a private suite in the St. Regis Hotel.” Indeed, Willkie was so anxious lest anyone find out that he stepped into the bedroom of the suite when lunch arrived so the waiter would not recognize him.

  Willkie was instantly drawn to the idea. “You tell the President that I’m ready to devote almost full time to this,” he said. “A sound liberal government in the U.S. is absolutely essential to continued co-operation with the other nations of the world.” Willkie went on to say he would be glad to meet with Roosevelt to discuss the plan more fully but “he was convinced that the meeting should not take place until after the election.”

  Roosevelt was so pleased with Willkie’s positive response that he couldn’t wait. On July 13, he dictated a letter asking Willkie to join him as soon as possible for an off-the-record meeting either in the White House or at Hyde Park, “just as you think best.” Unfortunately, news of the letter leaked out, causing great embarrassment to both Willkie and Roosevelt. Now there was no choice, Willkie insisted, but to wait until after the election. (Roosevelt’s dream of creating a liberal party would never be realized. In the fall, while Willkie was in the hospital for a minor ailment, he had a massive heart attack and died.)