Eleanor Roosevelt to Stephen Feeley

27 June 1946 [Hyde Park]

My dear Mr. Feeley:

I remember very well talking to my husband about his hopes for the candidates and at that time, he told me that he felt if General O'Dwyer could be run for Mayor of New York City, Mr. LaGuardia could be induced to run for the Senate, as running mate for Senator Mead² as Governor and that the ticket would be a winning ticket.

I know there has been considerable discussion as to whether consideration might be given to Mr. LaGuardia in view of the fact that at the time of the Mayoralty campaign, no understanding was arrived at and he was not particularly tactful about the Democrats, and there also was a feeling among some of the high Democrats that ex-Governor Lehman³ should be running with Senator Mead for Senator.

I am in no position to know what anyone is planning to do. I think it is important if Senator Mead decides to run for Governor, the strongest possible candidate for the Senate.

I do not think, however, that my husband should be quoted because when a man is dead, one can not be sure of how he would feel, given new conditions and he might feel quite differently about a situation, so I think you should be careful in any publicity to state the whole background and circumstances of the original feeling. He was always very fond of Senator Mead and I know would have wanted to give him the wisest political advice at any time.

                                        Very sincerely yours,

TLc AERP, FDRL

1. Stephen V. Feeley to ER, 24 June 1946, AERP. For Ickes's response, see Document 10.

2. For biographical information on James Michael Mead see n5 Document 10. Mead ran a losing campaign against Dewey in 1946 on a platform calling for a continuation of New Deal policies and programs (Smith, 459-63).

3. Herbert H. Lehman (1878–1963), FDR's lieutenant governor, succeeded FDR as governor of New York and served until 1942. He then led international relief efforts, becoming the director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which he and FDR helped create, in 1943. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1946 (FDRE).

Eleanor Roosevelt and Conscientious Objectors, Part 1

ER's attitude toward conscientious objectors (COs) was complex and evolved over time. In her My Day column of September 5, 1945, she wrote:

I found it very hard during the war to have much patience with the young men who were conscientious objectors. I knew that in those cases where they belonged to religions which did not permit them to take part in war, it often required more courage on their part to live up to their convictions than it would have taken to go into the services and serve with the majority of their friends. In spite of that, it was hard to keep down the feeling that they were exercising this freedom to live up to their religious beliefs at the expense of some other boy's sacrifice.

Now, she wrote, the atomic bomb had made it possible for the human race to commit suicide if it did not give up war. To prevent that danger will "require more thinking on our part and some real convictions—two things that most of us don't find easy." She cited the stories of two people who had lived up to their convictions in the way she felt would now be necessary: one was a conscientious objector who died after contracting polio as a result of his work inoculating monkeys with the polio virus at a Yale School of Medicine lab; the other was a veteran who picketed Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo's office because of Bilbo's racist statements. Furthermore, ER had come to admire the conscientious objectors who volunteered to work in mental hospitals during the war as an alternative to military service: "I think it is truthful to say that these volunteers have raised the standards of care for the mentally ill. They did their work with devotion and often with religious fervor such as is rarely contributed by the usual paid attendant." In doing so, these men improved conditions for a segment of the population that ER had long believed was poorly served.¹

ER had less sympathy for conscientious objectors who refused alternative service. On June 20, 1946, she received an appeal from ten conscientious objectors imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota.² They said that her position as the chairman of the Commission on Human Rights "prompts us to write you of one of the violations of human rights in the United States."³ They noted that they were among 2,000 objectors imprisoned for violating the Selective Service Act because "they felt impelled by their consciences or by commands from a Supreme Being to so act." Some were not granted conscientious objector status by their draft boards; others refused to perform noncombatant work in the army, work without pay in labor camps for COs, or endure what they considered unjust conditions in the camps. "The courts," they complained, "with rare exceptions, refused to consider evidence or testimony, offered as a defense by a conscientious objector at his trial, which would show that the conscientious objector was being tried for disobeying an illegal order issued by the draft board." They argued that they could only be released through amnesty or a commutation of their sentences, since the parole system did not work for them:

Parole released some men from prison under such restrictions as to constitute a modified form of imprisonment. Because we do not feel we should cooperate in the punishment of prisoners of conscience, we would not comply with the conditions of parole if it were offered. Parole does not meet the basic issues nor is parole applicable in a considerable number of cases, including our own, and thus some must serve their entire sentences.

They noted that President Truman had the power to grant amnesty⁴