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My husband Francis and I met in England as students at Oxford. After our marriage, we had been living in Geneva where he was on the staff of the World Student Christian Federation, and I began to review French and German books for The Saturday Review of Literature. But the Americans we saw who lived as permanent spectators in other countries disturbed us; we wanted to come home and get into our own national life. The obvious place for us to settle was New York, where each of us had worked before marriage. But we agreed that while it was a great place to go for a weekend, New York was no place to live and work, let alone bring up a family. We came to Washington.
Washington, D.C., in 1930, was a small town, mildly important as the seat of the national legislature, a place where President Coolidge habitually had taken a nap after lunch. Newspaper bureau chiefs frequently assigned arriving young journalists -- Kenneth Crawford was an example -- to the White House on the ground that since nothing really newsworthy was likely to break there, the fledglings could learn their way around while experienced reporters covered the more important executive offices -- Andrew Mellon's preserve at the Treasury, the Justice Department's antitrust division, and such regulatory agencies as the Tariff Commission -- and paid close attention to the town's distinctive institution, the Congress.
The conspicuous innovation in government offices, the huge new Department of Commerce, spreading a roof two blocks long and one block wide, between 14th and 15th Streets below Pennsylvania Avenue, neared completion. It symbolized the prestige that had accompanied Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce in Coolidge's cabinet and creator of an elite corps of commercial attaches in the Foreign Service, to the White House in March 1929.
The good residential and diplomatic section of the city lay to the northwest, out Massachusetts Avenue as far as the partially built National Cathedral. Led by the new million-dollar residence-chancery of Great Britain, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, embassies formerly located on upper 16th Street were relocating beyond Dupont Circle. In 1925 the smart new Mayflower Hotel had opened its doors on Connecticut Avenue near the intersection with Massachusetts, on the site of a pond where the Isaac Waltons of Washington's cliff-dweller families had quite recently been accustomed to gig frogs for bait.
East of the buildings clustered around the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue deteriorated on its way to the Capitol -- the two- and three-story houses where 19th-century congressmen used to board during the short legislative sessions and the old National Hotel, where Henry Clay lived and died, were moldering into a souvenir-shop slum. In 1911, 15 of these facades had been masked by the aluminum siding on Kann's enlarging department store.
Between the Mall and the Potomac River and still further east beyond the houses of Congress, much of Washington's black population congregated in obscurity, daily trundled to their low-paid, mostly domestic or day-laborer jobs, on the obligatory back seats of the streetcar. City ordinances forbade their entry into "white" theaters and restaurants, and clerks in central-city department stores treated such potential customers frostily. White Washington still recalled its shock when President Theodore Roosevelt offered tea at his office desk to Booker T. Washington.
The land south of the Potomac in the District's original Ten Mile Square had long been retroceded to Virginia. Still remembering the War Between the States, its inhabitants looked to their own capital at Richmond rather than to the Federal City. In somnolent Georgetown, the town's Maryland origins were still remembered; on northern heights, however, landmark mansions like Dumbarton Oaks and Evermay were connected with the fashionable world of Massachusetts Avenue by Teddy Roosevelt's Buffalo Bridge across Rock Creek.
In a certain number of great houses, private entertaining -- or semi-private, for politics was the common interest that brought guests together -- took place with Edwardian magnificence. At the Larz Anderson house at 2118 Massachusetts Avenue, now the headquarters of The Society of the Cincinnati, dinner was served on Sevres below portraits by Sargent. Across the street, the Townsend musicales were queened by the later Mrs. Sumner Welles in the ballroom of the mansion that is now the Cosmos Club. The Chicagoan Robert Lamont, as soon as Hoover made him Secretary of Commerce, occupied the chateau de la Loire on Kalorama Road that is today's French embassy residence. The Edward B. McLeans -- he owned the Washington Post and she owned the Hope Diamond -- lived behind the serpentine walls of the flamboyant Massachusetts Avenue residence, now the Embassy of Indonesia, built by the Colorado silver king and senator, her father. On Dupont Circle, Cissy Patterson, of the newspaper family that published The Chicago Tribune and New York's Daily News, directed Washington's Herald (later The Times-Herald) from the white marble setting that now houses the Washington Club. In the midst of these palaces, Princess Alice, daughter of Teddy Roosevelt and wife of Nicholas Longworth, Speaker of the House from 1925 to his death in 1931, held court at 2009 Massachusetts Avenue, in a modest dwelling whose prestige outlived the era of its more opulent neighbors.
The collapse of Herbert Hoover's New Economic Era had left the Republican administration nonplussed. When Hoover was an admirable distributor of European relief during and after World War I, the disruption in which he worked had been caused by military hostilities; the disintegration that confronted him after 1929 was of another variety. In his American Individualism, the president had written: "We build our society upon the attainment of the individual; and the individual, though aided by "an enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding," in turn must "stand up to the emery wheel of competition." Currently, the emery wheel was rasping into raw flesh, and the enlargement of a sense of responsibility was negligible.
The two chickens in every pot that had figured in Mr. Hoover's last campaign slogans turned into a gruel as thin as that fed to the lengthening breadlines in the cities. During the last two years of the Hoover administration, Capitol Hill's reaction to the crisis was hardly less supine than that of the executive arm even though the 1930 elections had given the Democrats their first House majority since World War I. Texan John Nance Garner became speaker, and the committee chairmen changed, but few ideas emerged.
By the 1932 presidential election, the old order's laissez faire had outlasted popular tolerance. The hobo song of the uprooted men who rode the rods of the freight trains looking for work called it, "Pie in the sky, by and by -- it's a lie." The next administration would act on a new theory of the purpose of government, and as it did so, would remember the forgotten man.
On March 4, 1933, the unforgettable timbre of FDR's voice inaugurated the great change. Within hours, he had called Congress to meet in special session four days later. The ideas generated over the winter by his Brains Trust -- Rexford Guy Tugwell, Adolf Berle and Raymond Moley -- were quickly given legislative form and dispatched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill. The Hundred Days tore off the calendar, one after another.
After the depression of 1921, the country's rural population, then numbering 53.8 million in a total population of 122.8 million, had failed to recover while the industrial sector flourished. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace's mandate to revive it was a foremost objective of the new regime. At the same time, other executive agencies vied with Agriculture in intensity. While public works were no novelty, the range of programs initiated by Harold Ickes at Interior was immense. Shorter-term undertakings to put purchasing power quickly into the hands of the unemployed were centered in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, headed by Harry Hopkins, who had been in charge of a similar organization in New York while Roosevelt was governor. The CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) offered outdoor jobs. Ickes' former Chicago law partner, Donald Richberg, an attorney for railway labor unions, joined General Hugh Johnson at the NRA (National Recovery Administration).
In these, the liveliest of the New Deal agencies, as in the Social Security Board and in the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) a little later, the entry of government into the economic life of the country was pioneered. Bright young men and women flocked to Washington -- Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter's "hot dogs" were only the most conspicuous product of word-of-mouth recruitment services. They put in uncounted hours with a gusto like Jefferson's when the 18th-century revolutionaries drafted the first written constitutions and set themselves to make them work, saying, "We are now about the most fascinating of subjects, government."
Like earlier pioneers, they took off in directions that were often uncoordinated. Power was heady stuff. Some of the attorneys in pursuing the magnates whom FDR designated as "malefactors of great wealth" were not above making charges of dubious validity. Planners were frequently unable to resist the temptation to play God, or at least to assume that father-knows-best. FDR's preferred method of work contributed to the untidiness. Calling in a knowledgeable colleague, he would ask him to assemble his best thoughts on a current issue by early next week. The colleague would depart, walking on Cloud 9. But next week, he discovered that Cloud 9 was not exclusive turf; when he arrived at the White House to report, he usually found two or three others, as surprised as he to discover they had all been given the same assignment. The session usually turned into a cockfight. Mischievously delighted, FDR watched. Their passionate arguments pro and con gave him insights he could never have got from memoranda delivered through channels. But his method often confused the channels.
By Roosevelt's second term, the phase of the New Deal that had caused the forgotten man in the South to sing "Beulah Land" with fervor was about over. Administrative attention turned to the setting of social values as parameters to the exercise of business initiative. Limitation of the power of industrial combinations, establishment of regulatory agencies such as the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), provision of unemployment and retirement benefits, recognition of workers' rights to collective bargaining were high on the new agenda. Organized labor increased in strength -- from 3,392,800 in 1930 to 7,282,000 a decade later. Even the workers near the bottom of the heap, in the unskilled occupations that are most intractable to organization, obtained some justiciable backing under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It specified a minimum wage of $.25 an hour and a workweek of 44 hours. Recovery, particularly re-employment, was by no means complete, but stalled industrial motors were starting up again, and the forthcoming war accelerated them.
In Western Europe, the "phoney war" smoldered through the winter of 1939-40, but with spring, Hitler invaded Norway and Sweden, and his blitzkrieg started its blast through Holland, Belgium and France. The Maginot Line collapsed. The Dunkirk disaster followed.
By mid-May, I had begun organizing a National Policy Committee (NPC) meeting to be held June 29-30 under the title, Implications to the U.S. of a German Victory. But at the end of May, Richard Cleveland, son of the former president and an attorney in Baltimore who had been the NPC's first chairman, called me up to say he thought we should hold a smaller session on the subject, at once. So on Sunday, June 2, 1940, nine people gathered at our home in Fairfax: besides Richard and ourselves, Stacy May of the Rockefeller Foundation; Winfield Riefler of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Whitney Shepardson, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and his Anglo-Irish wife, Eleanor; the aeronautical engineer Edward P. Warner, chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board: and M.L. Wilson, undersecretary of agriculture.
Beneath the ancient oak trees on Pickens Hill, we sat in a circle, each giving in turn his or her reaction to the very present danger of a Nazi conquest of Britain. Until that moment, none of us had quite recognized in our innermost selves the convictions that we now found awesomely and unanimously evident: The United States must enter this war.
Whitney Shepardson retired to Francis' study and emerged with a brief declaration that we called "A Summons To Speak Out." Next day, Francis and I compiled a cross-country list of some hundred names to whom we sent the statement, inviting signatures. Some recipients, like Warner and Wilson of our original group, could not sign because of their official positions -- the publicly stated policy of the Roosevelt Administration at that time was limited to cash-and-carry sales of arms to Britain and France. But on Monday, June 10, 1940, The New York Times and the Herald-Tribune carried the "Summons" over 30 rather influential names from 12 widely separated states and the District of Columbia. It was the first call of citizens to fellow citizens to accept the test of war.
On the previous Friday, just before giving our release to the press for Monday's papers, I had telephoned Morse Salisbury at the Department of Agriculture: "Get me off the payroll this afternoon. I've signed something so far ahead of administration policy that I would be an embarrassment to you on Monday morning."
The "Summons to Speak Out," to its signers and to that part of the public that approved its contents, firmed up a conviction somewhat comparable to that of their 18th-century predecessors after Thomas Paine published his Common Sense in January 1776. But the balance between those who were convinced that the time was now and those whose response was either "Later!" or "Never!" tilted much less quickly in our direction. The last sentence of Churchill's speech of February 9, 1941, "Give us the tools and we will finish the job," phrased by and inserted at the request of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's liaison with the Prime Minister, restated U.S. policy. Yet even the Lend-Lease Act was not passed until March, and still more time elapsed before Roosevelt declared a full national emergency. It was 18 months after publication of the Summons that the Japanese bombed the United States into war.
The bombing of Britain that had begun in May 1941, even before Dunkirk and the French collapse, continued. Early in the blitz, NPC board member Edward Warner, as chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, went to England to observe; he brought back eyewitness word of the thinness of the island's air defense. With Herbert Agar of The Louisville Courier-Journal, I had begun a short book warning of the consequences to the U.S. of a Nazi conquest of Europe. Warner cautioned us to be careful in phrasing the title; it was entirely possible, he said, that by the time it came off the press the remaining Spitfires and Hurricanes might have been further decimated, leaving London's skies open to the ruin Rotterdam knew. (We chose the ambivalent title, Beyond German Victory.)
Books like Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Wave of the Future were advancing the isolationist side. General Motors' biggest overseas holding was the German Opel Works; a GM executive, James D. Mooney, ran an article in The Saturday Evening Post supporting a neutralist stance. Another book, America and a New World Order, published over the name of Graeme K. Howard, G.M.'s vice president in charge of overseas operations, recommended accommodation to a Hitler-dominated European future. While opposing sides exchanged affirmations, our NPC turned talk into the beginnings of action.
Henry P. van Dusen, head of New York's Union Theological Seminary, had not been asked to sign the Summons; he stormed down to Washington to demand what we were going to do next, and to be sure he would have a part in it. His insistence helped stimulate formation in New York of the informal gathering of men of both political parties that became known as the Century Group, because of its meeting place at the club in New York. The Council on Foreign Relations gave Francis leave from his duties to act as its executive.
That year, 1940, was a presidential election year; up to that time, foreign policy had been regarded as no different from any other political policy, legitimately subject to partisan attack. As a candidate, FDR had therefore tried to avoid any overt act that might be used to solidify isolationist sentiment behind his Republican opponent Wendell Willkie. The bipartisan Century Group established a line of trusted communication between the two campaign headquarters. As soon as its Republican members received from Willkie, in a patriotic decision that certainly cost him hundreds of thousands of isolationist votes, assurance that he would not attack a move that was under White House consideration, the Democratic members passed the word to Roosevelt. The destroyer-base deal, under which the U.S. turned over to Britain 50 overage Navy destroyers in return for leases of a number of Atlantic bases, then went forward. Roosevelt's action had tremendous symbolic value, and the old ships had a practical utility in patrolling convoys of supplies across the North Atlantic.
It was a whole year later, on the weekend of December 5-7, 1941, that discouraged members of the NPC, meeting at St. John's College, Annapolis, canvassed the topic, "The Basis for Our Will to Win." No basis had appeared. That Sunday afternoon, after the gloomy group disbanded, I drove the New York broker, Alexander Sachs, and the radio commentator, Raymond Gram Swing, back to Washington. Francis had left early to join the latter part of a comparable session in Charlottesville, Virginia. Swing asked to be dropped at the Mayflower.
As I pulled over to the curb, a paperboy stepped up to the car. At 2:29 p.m., a flash in Washington newsrooms had broken news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since it was Sunday, few people were around when the word came. First to get an extra on the street was the Times-Herald. In the biggest type it owned, the headline shouted:
WAR EXTRA! WAR!
Japs Bomb Honolulu And Manila, Says F.D.R.
In a Pacific harbor, the will to win we had worried about had been galvanized.
In 1941, I began writing a highly personal book, not published until 1943, that attempted to relate individual choices in the current fight for freedom with the choices of other individuals in equally momentous times in the American past. On both Francis' side of the family and mine, succeeding generations had been present, sometimes as participants, more often as part of the citizen chorus to history, at the time of the taking of most major national decisions. My Puritan Stoughtons came to New England with Winthrop, helped form Connecticut with Hooker, and went west, a state to a generation, all the way to the Rockies. My husband's 18th-century Scotch-Irish Presbyterians entered by the port of Philadelphia to begin a 1,000-mile trek down the Appalachians to South Carolina where some of them stayed, joining the French Huguenots who came directly to Charleston, while others went to Alabama and Mississippi as the Confederacy took form. Addressing the book to our boys -- I called it "Yours for Tomorrow." I ended it with these paragraphs:
"When your times come, what will your part be, I wonder. Will you live your lives on the forward edge of our tradition? Will you find the disturbing, radical new words that describe the world as it will be to the world as it is? Or will yours be the reactionary decisions that kill a tradition by holding tight to its past, by keeping it from moving until the time to move has run out? Will you exercise the power to govern, or will you fail, wilfully or placidly, to act until someone has taken the power to act away? My own time is evidence that in the tree of liberty, growth comes by fits and starts, through good seasons and bad.
"The liberties that are your heritage have been won, little by little, on the spot, in particular cases, by people who faced situations wholly comparable, in their time, to those you will face in yours. Their human hands upheld the future. Our society has no other support."
Helen Hill Miller is a remarkable Washingtonian. Born in 1899, she has led an active life in public affairs, in journalism and as a writer for most of the 20th century. At 95, she continues to write. Mrs. Miller, one of the Cosmos Club's oldest members, has occupied a front-row seat as an observer of American history and often has been on stage herself helping to shape the course of events. In a commencement ceremony in 1992 honoring her for exceptional community service, George W. Johnson, President of George Mason University, said: "She has packed more into one lifetime than most of us could manage in three."
In the early 1930s, after she and her husband, Francis Pickens Miller, settled in Fairfax, Virginia, Mrs. Miller joined the Roosevelt administration as a writer for Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. She witnessed the turbulent evolution of the New Deal and the dramatic struggle to recover from the Great Depression.
With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, Mrs. Miller plunged into a new endeavor, that of executive of the National Policy Committee. The NPC, centered in Washington with affiliates in other cities, tried to develop national policy goals to which specific programs could be related, and issued policy statements. As the war drew closer, the NPC joined the battle against American isolationism and the nation's policy of neutrality. In a statement that created quite a sensation, it advocated American intervention in the war to stop the Nazis from overrunning Europe and to support a beleaguered Great Britain. Mrs. Miller served as liaison with the British Ambassador in Washington in such matters as communicating Britain's needs to the U.S. government. At the same time, her husband, Francis, a founding participant in the NPC, served in New York in other pro-intervention campaigns, first from his post in the Council on Foreign Relations, and then from the influential ''Century group."
Mrs. Miller left government in 1940 and became the Washington correspondent of the London weekly, The Economist. She reported on Roosevelt's management of the war effort and the Truman administration. In 1950, she became Newsweek's economics reporter and from 1958 to 1962 was a contributing editor of The New Republic. A freelancer after that, she wrote for magazines ranging from Harper's to Esquire. Earlier, in the 1930s, she had written a biography of George Mason, the Virginian who was the author of the first American bill of rights. Now, she wrote The Case for Liberty, an account of colonial court cases before adoption of Mason's Bill of Rights. Her most recent book, published in 1990, is a biography of Colonel Daniel Parke, a 17th-century Virginia rake. She is currently writing about the Raleigh colonists.
Though never identified with the women's movement, Mrs. Miller drafted the report of the National Commission on the Status of Women, established by President Kennedy. She is fiercely independent. While in elementary school, she determined never to be economically dependent; before she married in 1927, in fact, she insisted that the marriage must be an equal partnership, including sharing of family financial obligations. When she celebrated her 93rd birthday, shortly after deciding to give up driving a car, The Washington Post said: "Miller has made few compromises in her life -- to gender, profession, motherhood or marriage -- and those she makes with age are based more on common sense than sentiment."
Mrs. Miller has written an unpublished account of her 65 years of observing the Washington scene, Washington Observed: A Reporter's Notebook. What follows are excerpts from the notebook -- notes about Washington in the 1930s and American interventionist efforts of 1939-1941.-- Ed.
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