Eleanor and Franklin (119 page)

Within Miss Ilma's congress, a group of young southerners organized another coup, and by April, 1935, Miss Ilma had repudiated the group. The left-wing American Youth Congress hastened to point this out to Eleanor when it protested her plan to attend a meeting of the more conservative group. She was prepared to attend the left wing's meeting, too: “If you can prove to me that you are a bona fide organization, representing a big group of young people, I shall be glad to come and listen to you under the same conditions.” She acknowledged that she had not liked the southern group's slurs against those “who might happen to think along more radical lines, and I made the point very clearly that I believe every shade of thought should be represented in every Youth Congress and the young people should be given free expression.”
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By January, 1936, the radical-leaning American Youth Congress was in complete possession of the field and it again invited her to address its National Council, which was to meet in Washington. This time she accepted. Other people were better qualified to address their meeting, she replied, “but I will gladly come to one of your sessions to answer any questions you may want to ask of me, to the best of my ability,” and since there were some criticisms of the Youth Congress that she did not want to make publicly, a small group might want to come to tea at the White House, where she could talk more freely. Some of the president's advisers cautioned her not to go because the young people were so radical and would “ask unpleasant and critical questions,” she disclosed later, but she answered them that

We ought to be able to meet all young people and defend the things we believe in. It may not always turn out as we hope. We may find ourselves targets of criticism. I wonder if it does us much harm. The real thing that is harmful is the knowledge in our hearts that we are afraid to face any group of young people. Open discussion between the rising generation and the older generation is a really important thing.
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She arrived at Methodist Hall accompanied by Aubrey Williams. The young people came to the council meeting charged with hostility toward the government and all its representatives, including Eleanor
Roosevelt. The previous June when NYA officials had approached Waldo McNutt, chairman of the Youth Congress, for an endorsement of the newly established NYA, McNutt “laughed. The Congress laughed,” a youth leader wrote. The NYA was derided as “a sop” and the Youth Congress drafted an American Youth Act which it itself conceded would cost $3.5 billion a year and which critics said would cost $20 billion. The questions at the National Council meeting were barbed. Young Communist vied with young Socialist in taxing Eleanor with the inadequacy of the NYA. “You don't have to tell me that the Youth Administration doesn't touch the whole problem. I know that,” she replied. More was needed, she agreed, but she did not know the whole answer to the nation's economic and social problem—and neither did they. However, “it is wrong to be quite as divided as some of us are getting. I think it is good for some of us to get together sometimes.” She understood youth's impatience. Changes did seem to “take forever,” and “I used to be awfully impatient when I was your age,” but a “free people eventually” found ways to put things right.
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The purpose of the Youth Congress session in Washington was to lobby for passage of the American Youth Act. At tea at the White House, Eleanor told the Youth Congress delegation, which included a Negro girl, that the Youth Act was unrealistic: it involved “too large” an expenditure. It also reflected “a keen distrust for administrators,” an NYA analysis of the bill commented, but Eleanor was too tactful to put it that way. Its administrative features had not been “thought through,” she said, and offered to put the group in touch with people who had drafting experience. Had she been disturbed by the questions that had been put to her at Methodist Hall? a member of the group asked hopefully. She laughed—the youngster reminded her of her own children when sometimes they had behaved scandalously and waited eagerly for her to respond with appropriate agitation. She had not been disturbed at all. Although the young representatives had tried to outdo each other in the militancy and truculence of their questions, which had covered the whole gamut of radical concern—unemployment, racial discrimination, suppression of liberties, militarization of youth—they had not bothered her at all.
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Mark McCloskey, the New York NYA official who, although a product of Hell's Kitchen, had his own problems with the young radicals, was struck by her patience and tact at Methodist Hall. He understood better, he wrote later, “how to work with some of our youth organizations, which at times, to say the least, are trying.” She replied
that “I have so much sympathy for those youngsters it is never hard to be patient. But I sometimes feel that the exact amount of honesty which they can stand is a question. I was really more honest with the few that came to see me later on.”
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She would need a great deal of patience. Some of those who came to tea were filled with youthful swagger and the certainty that they in Marxism, not she in Christian ethics, had the key to history and human happiness.

“She's a good woman utterly lacking in knowledge of social forces and systems and why good men are helpless without organizations,” one of the participants wrote to a friend.

She thinks she can reform capitalists . . . by inviting them to the White House for dinner and a good talking-to. I'm convinced she's opposed to fascism, and that she as well as her husband would go much further if they felt they'd have support. But every time they take an even mildly progressive stand they antagonize some group or other within the Democratic Party which in their view it is important to hold together at all costs in order to insure re-election and other legislation which is not progressive. It was a pleasant tea. We stayed for two hours. We had little cream puffs and were waited upon by butlers. She was always sympathetic but helpless or sure that education alone would provide the solution.
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But not all the delegates to the National Council meeting were so condescending. “She stood the gaff wonderfully,” one of them reported to the press. And even the Youth Congress
Bulletin
admitted to some admiration when it began its account, “For a solid half hour the First Lady stood up before a barrage of questions.” Eleanor's success worried the Young Communist League, which sent her a stiff letter of rebuke for her “negative” attitude toward the American Youth Act. Her invitation to the young people to search for new answers since the old ones no longer served was “empty” rhetoric; since she refused to endorse the American Youth Act, “we are forced to conclude that you are not genuinely interested in helping the youth of America. What other conclusion can we reach?”
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She did not like to be misrepresented, especially when the purpose was so obviously to maintain young people in a state of belligerence and suspicion toward government and the older generation. She had not said the Youth Act would not meet the needs of youth, she replied.
“What I said was that the Youth Act is badly drawn and impractical, but it may serve as a basis for better legislation after it has been thoroughly discussed.”

The extremist rhetoric of the Young Communist League did not surprise her, but that of the Youth Congress leaders did, as did their puzzling unresponsiveness to suggestions that would help them become more effective. At the end of the year she turned down an invitation to serve on the advisory board of the congress. She was too busy.

Also, I am afraid that you have not done the things which would give me enough faith in you. I have heard you make statements which were not correct and after they had been explained and corrected, I have heard you make them again. While I am certainly in sympathy with the youth of today, I do not think anything will be accomplished unless every question and every problem is honestly and fairly dealt with.
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But then suddenly her pleas for greater realism began to have an effect, so it seemed to her. The Youth Act was revised—slightly, but revised—and the new version was sent to her by Abbott Simon, national legislative director, who asked to see her in connection with both the bill and a youth “pilgrimage” that was scheduled to descend upon Washington. “I spoke to the President,” she advised him, “and if you are not afraid of the cold, he says he would be quite willing to come out on the south portico and say a few words to the group if they will gather at the back of the White House.”
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Franklin had often teased Eleanor about the youth movement, but he, too, saw an unsolved problem in what to do about the hard core of jobless young people. He was preparing to recommend that the Civilian Conservation Corps be made a permanent government agency,
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and while there was much good-natured rivalry and occasional friction between the two over the comparative virtues of the CCC and the NYA, when the latter proved to be more acceptable than the CCC, he became increasingly amenable to Eleanor's pleas that it, too, be envisaged as a permanent tool of government. At times he was even willing to admit that the educational program of the CCC left a great deal to be desired.
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While two years earlier he had fled from meeting the youth leaders, now he was not only willing to have the legislative representative of the Youth Congress to dinner, but spent the evening advising him on the conduct of the pilgrimage sessions in Washington and the advisability, if the youth group wanted to get a hearing from Congress, of framing recommendations that were specific, concrete, and limited. “You indicated last evening,” Simon wrote him, “how complex the solution of the problems facing young people must be and how interwoven with every other important phase of national planning, and I believe you will agree with me that these factors should also receive the necessary attention in formulating any definite policy.” But Roosevelt's friendliness also heightened Youth Congress suspiciousness. They argued among themselves about whether the president was trying to set up a government-supervised youth movement. Although the Communist group in the congress, in line with its new Popular Front policy, was now intent on cooperation with the administration, the old dogmas still had an influence, and the young Communists were sensitive to the taunts of the young Socialists that cooperation between youth and the New Deal was “opportunistic,” “reformist,” and a “sell-out.” Simon wrote, asking to see the president again: “I feel very strongly that before making the arrangements for the Conference absolute, that it would be of very great value to obtain more specifically the viewpoint of the President on a great many of the questions which our meeting will decide.” The letter revived Eleanor's fears about the congress's sense of practicality. “Shall I ask for Sunday supper and give another chance?” she queried her husband. “The President says he is extremely sorry but he does not have a single free minute,” she wrote Simon the next day. “I also regret that I cannot give you any more time as I have given you every opportunity I possibly can.”
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Although the plan to have the president address the young people fell through, he did agree to receive a delegation of their leaders after the congress had paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. This, too, was almost torpedoed by an act of youthful ebullience which some of its instigators labeled militancy, but which horrified the young Communists who were intent on working with Roosevelt. As the paraders reached the White House and the line slowly snaked around its rear, the shouts “Schools not battleships,” “Pass the American Youth Act,” and “Abolish the ROTC” became louder, the paraders more excited, and the District police more anxious. Orders were issued to the patrolmen on motorcycles to hurry the parade on to the finishing
point. Sit-down strikes were very much in the air—Flint auto factories were occupied at that time by their workers—and the youthful paraders, spurred on by some of their leaders but not by the Communists, responded to police proddings by sitting down on the pavement and going limp. This threw the police into a frenzy, and they raced their motorcycles, exhausts wide open, in and out among the sit-downers. William Hinckley and Abbott Simon, the two youth leaders who had obtained the parade permits, were hauled off to jail. But then the White House intervened and told the police to take it easy. Marvin McIntyre received a group of youth leaders who had been scheduled to present American Youth Act petitions, and they demanded that Hinckley and Simon be freed. McIntyre told them to finish the parade and that the leaders would be released. Finally everything was straightened out, and calm returned. In the afternoon the president received a delegation of the congress, a meeting at which Eleanor and Aubrey Williams were also present. It was a friendly gathering. The president laughed off the “sit-down” incident. He had been arrested in Germany while on a bicycle tour, he recalled, suggesting that Germany had always been an overly bureaucratic state. He heard their story, the Youth Congress delegation reported, “on what the depression has done to millions of young people, admitted that we were on the right track in seeking federal aid for the nation's hard-hit young population, although he didn't agree with us on the sum the U.S Government could ‘afford' for this purpose in 1937.”

Baffled as the Roosevelts may have been by the dogmatism and occasional antics of the Youth Congress, the demonstration on the whole strengthened the administration's efforts to get congressional support for its youth program. “I know that your work has yielded some good results and will yield more,” Aubrey Williams informed the Youth Congress later that day. “And I am in a pretty good position to know whether it yields anything or whether it doesn't.” When William Hinckley, the chairman of the congress, asked the Roosevelts to send greetings to a “Model Congress” in Milwaukee over the July 4 week end, the president did so, and Eleanor wrote on the letter that she had received “I can only wish them wisdom and good luck.”
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