Eleanor: A Spiritual Biography by Harold Ivan Smith

Author:Harold Ivan Smith [Smith, Harold Ivan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780664261641
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: 2017-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

NOT EVEN THE CHILDREN

Even before the war, the United States had resisted taking even the most vulnerable refugees—children. Mary Ann Glendon thought Eleanor’s emotional loss and loneliness as an orphan “helped to fuel her passionate commitment to those she regarded as disadvantaged” and those whom Jesus called “the least of these,” such as refugee children.

In 1939, Eleanor breached the congressional legislative process, a rarity for presidential wives, to push the admission of twenty thousand German Jewish children, all under age fourteen. The Washington Post covered her move on page 1 on Valentine’s Day, under the headline “First Lady Backs Move to Open U.S. to 20,000 Exiles,” sidestepping the trigger word, refugees. Eleanor proposed admitting ten thousand in 1939 and ten thousand in 1940. She plotted strategy with her friend Judge Justine W. Polier, daughter of Rabbi Stephen Wise, following coaching from FDR: “Get two people from opposite parties in the House and Senate and have them jointly get agreement on the legislation.”

Democratic Senator Robert Wagner and Republican Congresswoman Edith Rogers, Eleanor’s friends, introduced the legislation on February 9, 1939, cognizant that two previous quota-raising bills introduced by Jewish members of the House had died in committee. “I should prefer to let in 20,000 old Jews who would not multiply,” William R. Castle Jr., former undersecretary of state, informed Rogers.

Laura Delano Houghteling, FDR’s cousin, should have been more discreet: “Twenty thousand charming children,” she snarled in opposition to Eleanor’s efforts, “would all too soon grow into twenty thousand ugly adults.” The irony? Houghteling’s husband was FDR’s commissioner of immigration!

The Wagner-Rogers Bill stirred raucous bigotry during hearings. Agnes Waters, “representing” World War I widows, testified: “Why should we give preference… to these potential Communists” who eventually might attempt to topple the US government? Would her children, who she claimed were descendants of a signer of the Constitution, be deprived of their rights by an army of so-called innocent children, each of whom would grow up to be a potential “leader of a revolt against the American government”?

John Thomas Taylor, director of the legislative committee of the American Legion, testified that while veterans had concern about persecution, resources “directed to the children of our own country would do more good.” If the German children were admitted, Secretary Hull fumed, how long before Eleanor and her “do-gooders” would be back, asking to admit child refugees from Spain and China?

Helen Hayes, a prominent actress, and Dorothy Thompson, a journalist expelled from Germany for negative reporting, supported the proposal and appealed to members to imagine the courage required of mothers to give up their children to strangers. Hayes pleaded: “I beg you to let them in.” Former First Lady Grace Coolidge made headlines by announcing that she and friends would accept twenty-five of the children into their homes in Vermont.

Senator Robert Rice Reynolds (D-NC) volunteered to be drum major for the “nos.” On a national radio broadcast he howled, “Shall we first take care of our own children, our citizens, our country, or shall we bestow

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.