LETTER: Typed letter signed, to her son, Elliott.
Eleanor Roosevelt On Anti-Semitism And Racism
Roosevelt, Eleanor. Typed letter signed, “devotedly Mother,” to Elliott Roosevelt, November 11, 1938, with autograph postscript: “Thanks for forwarding mail. I’m waiting to hear about Xmas wishes and Ruth’s wire for Thanksgiving.”
One leaf of White House letterhead; recto only; two horizontal creases. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
Unpublished; we acquired this letter directly from John Roosevelt’s widow, Mrs. Irene Aitken.
Written the day after Kristallnacht, Eleanor Roosevelt’s Armistice Day letter touches on the personal, the political, and her own strong feelings about anti-Semitism and racism in the wake of the infamous Nazi atrocity. She begins by asking Elliott’s help in finding a job for a young man who wanted to become an airplane mechanic. “I am sure that any kind of job you offer him, he would be glad to take and word [sic] hard.”
In the second paragraph she turns to the midterm elections: “I was terribly distressed not to have more time with you and Ruth but when the returns began to come in, I was glad I made the decision to get home in time to vote.” Here she is referring to the close election contest in New York between Governor Herbert Lehman and Thomas E. Dewey. The Democrats barely held off the Republicans in Franklin and Eleanor’s home state, but New Deal candidates were defeated in droves throughout the rest of the country, especially in the South, where Roosevelt’s attempt to “purge” the conservative Dixiecrats from the party proved a complete failure. None of the candidates Roosevelt campaigned against were ousted, and Eleanor saw the swelling Conservative tide as not merely a midterm rebuke to the party in power, but as evidence of an ugly sympathy for right-wing ideas both at home and abroad.
“I am afraid there is an anti-semitic wave sweeping over the country,” she continues, “and I do hate religious prejudice”—with “& racial” added in autograph as an important and necessary afterthought—“with my whole heart.” In her younger days, Eleanor indulged in the genteel anti-Semitism of the Protestant upper classes, but with the rise of Hitlerism in the 1930s she grew beyond the narrow prejudices of her class and strongly opposed the racist ideologies of the Nazis—and their American sympathizers like Father Coughlin, who told his 20 million radio listeners that the pogrom was a justified response to “Jew-sponsored” Communism. Few Americans joined the Radio Priest in condoning the attacks, but revulsion against Nazi barbarism did not translate into sympathy for Jewish refugees. When a reporter asked FDR on November 15 if he would “recommend a relaxation of our immigration restrictions so that Jewish refugees could be received in this country,” the President replied, “That is not in contemplation. We have the quota system.” A Fortune magazine poll taken in 1938 showed that only 5 percent of the American people were willing to raise those quotas to admit more Jews. Even Eleanor chose not to become a vocal proponent of immigration reform and refugee relief, but she did speak out consistently against racial and religious bigotry, often to the discomfiture of her husband. It seems fitting, therefore, that she ends her letter, after expressing regrets at not having seen her grandchildren, by telling Elliott of her return to Washington, where “I must say I was somewhat of a surprise to the White House when I walked in, and it upset them a little, but then I think it is good for them to be stirred out of their routine once in a while!” She would continue upsetting things a little, in the White House and the world, for the rest of her life.
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