Eleanor and Franklin (121 page)

Alexander located four college-trained men who he thought would make a good impression and gave them a little preliminary coaching. “You've got to look him right in the eye and tell him this. Mrs. Roosevelt wants you to, and when she wants you to do anything, it's perfectly safe. She's doing this, I'm not.” The president sensed
something was up and he began to filibuster, but Eleanor broke in; he should either talk to the young men or listen to them. Alexander thought his young men were “very convincing” and saw the president “begin to perspire.” Before dinner was over Eleanor had one boy after another sit next to the president.
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In point of fact the battle was won, partly because Franklin had been persuaded that the camps should be under civilian administration and partly because with the outbreak of the war the Army was calling up reserve officers. “I am enclosing a copy of the memorandum which I am asking the President to sign tonight,” Hopkins wrote Eleanor. “Alexander says this will do the business.” The memorandum was addressed to Paul V. McNutt, the head of the Federal Security Agency, and suggested a special training agency to prepare new leadership for the CCC to replace the reserve officers being drained off by the armed forces.
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The danger of a jobless, alienated generation of young people was by no means over. “One third of the unemployed workers in the nation are young people fifteen to twenty-four years of age,” the American Youth Commission reported as the war broke out. “The rate of unemployment is higher among youth between twenty and twenty-four than in any other age group and highest of all for young people between fifteen and twenty who are out of school and seeking work.” But in the NYA and CCC and the Office of Education—if the latter could get more inspired leadership
‡
—the tools were beginning to be available for a comprehensive attack on the problems of jobs and education for young people. They were not sufficient. When a Republican speaker at a Youth Congress dinner attacked the youth program of the government with the statement that “American youth does not want to be mollycoddled. . . . It sees no future in government agencies, in which it merely graduates from NYA to CCC and from CCC to WPA,” Eleanor replied that she believed in the NYA, as she did in Social Security and other New Deal measures. “But never as fundamental answers, simply as something which has given us hope, which has given us perhaps a suggestion which might be followed by communities everywhere. . . . We have bought ourselves time in which to think, that is what we have done.”
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It was a great satisfaction to her that the young people in the Youth Congress thought along lines so similar to her own. In July, 1939, the annual meeting of the congress, billed as a “Model Congress of Youth,” seemed completely to vindicate her faith in the leadership of the group. The three thousand young people who attended the sessions were enthusiastic, informed, and united, it seemed, by a sense of shared goals and the feeling that everything was possible. They hit hard at the United States Congress, but Eleanor did not mind that, for this was the Congress that had killed the Federal Theatre Project and ruthlessly slashed the WPA and PWA appropriations. The demands of the young people were reasonable and concrete—a nationwide program of apprenticeship training, the extension to young workers of the provisions of the Wages and Hours Act, federal aid to education—and, in addition, to support an expanded NYA (the American Youth Act had been quietly shelved), the Youth Congress called for the establishment of a $500 million loan fund to help young people finish their schooling, establish homes, and get started in the world.

The high point of the pronouncements of the Youth Congress were the adoption of a creed and a resolution condemning all dictatorships, and Eleanor called the creed the finest thing she had seen come out of any organization. In affirmative terms it dedicated the congress to the service of the country and mankind, pledged itself to progress and social pioneering but only within the framework of the American system, vowed to keep America a nation where men and women could worship God in their own way, and ended with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. And since this did not satisfy a disruptive group of delegates who were demanding that the congress exclude Communists, fascists, and Nazis, it went on record in opposition to “all forms of dictatorship, regardless of whether they be communist, fascists, nazi.” The sessions in the burgundy-gilt decorated Manhattan Center ballroom, wrote
Time,
represented the “closest approach to a U.S. youth movement.”
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“There are perfectly practical things that I want to say to you young people,” Eleanor said in her remarks to the Youth Congress. “You will want to learn a little more parliamentary law. . . . It is all very well to have a great many very nice ideas but if you can't say them so that any child of five can understand them, you might just as well not have them. . . . The best English is always the simplest.” She went on to urge them to get to know their own communities and to take on work that might not be as glamorous as marching in parades:

Organize first for knowledge, first with the object of making us know ourselves as a nation, for we have to do that before we can be of value to other nations of the world and then organize to accomplish the things that you decide to want. And remember, don't make decisions with the interest of youth alone before you. Make your decisions because they are good for the nation as a whole.

One of those present in the press box was H. L. Mencken. “I always like to listen to people who really believe in things,” he commented.
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Eleanor took the creed and the resolution on dictatorship and sent them to the many people who were critical of the congress, including such good friends as Elinor Morgenthau, who had confessed that much as she wanted to help out anything Eleanor was interested in, “I myself have never been completely sold on the American Youth Congress.”

“I for one am grateful for the courage of youth,” Eleanor's covering letter read, and to the Catholic leaders who were outspokenly hostile to the congress, she wrote, “I do not see how anyone can say it is Godless.”

 

*
Although this recommendation was not adopted, the CCC was a highly popular activity and Congress did approve a three-year extension of the agency on June 24, 1937.

†
See Chapter 49.

‡
In July, 1939, Eleanor discussed with Aubrey Williams how to persuade the Carnegie Foundation, whose head admired Dr. John W. Studebaker, the commissioner of education, to finance an assignment for him outside of the government.
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46.
FROM PACIFIST TO ANTI-FASCIST

I
N
1936, I
RWIN
S
HAW, A YOUNG MAN JUST OUT OF
B
ROOKLYN
College, penned
Bury the Dead,
a dramatic broadside against war that was morally so shattering and sure in its sense of theater that it quickly moved from amateur performance to Broadway production. “What is there so dear that it is worth dying for?” Shaw argued. “Very few things . . . and never the things for which one nation fights another.” The play's lines, as earlier noted, hit Eleanor like “hammer blows.”
¹

Her own conviction about war's folly took shape in World War I, and was strengthened by her tour of Europe's battlefields and hospitals. She had returned a dedicated Wilsonian, resolved never again to sell a war bond, and when Carrie Chapman Catt, the suffrage battle won, summoned women to the struggle to prevent another war, she found an ardent recruit in Eleanor.

“How can we study history?” Eleanor cried out at the 1934 meeting of Mrs. Catt's organization, the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War. “How can we live through the things that we have lived through and complacently go on allowing the same causes over and over again to put us through these same horrible experiences? . . . Anyone who thinks,” she continued, “must think of the next war as they would of suicide.” In New York a peace march going down Fifth Avenue carried placards proclaiming:

MRS. F.D.R. SAYS:
“
WAR IS SUICIDE!
”

Out in Indianapolis, the headquarters of the American Legion, the women's auxiliary solemnly pronounced that “she is the number one pacifist in the country today.”
²

But though she preached the futility of war, Eleanor did not subscribe to the belief that it was never right to bear arms or to resist evil with violence. She had had too much experience with the clash of wills and the stubbornness of self-interest in American politics to
ignore their reality on the international level. And if in her efforts to introduce some leaven of Christian forbearance and sacrifice into America's response to the world she leaned too heavily on the hope that trust and love might evoke an answering echo in nations as well as individuals, her husband was always there to remind her of harsher realities. As the aggressive designs of fascism unfolded in the thirties, Franklin Roosevelt went with his wife as far as he could to demonstrate America's will to peace—in response to his own convictions, it should be said, as well as to her pleas—but he also educated her and, through her, a large section of the peace movement, that in the absence of internationally agreed disarmament, a preparedness program also had a place in a strategy for peace.

“I am afraid that I am a very realistic pacifist,” Eleanor wrote soon after the Roosevelts had entered the White House and protests came to her about her husband's proposals to build the Navy up to treaty limits. “We can only disarm with other nations; we cannot disarm alone.” Was she correctly interpreting the president's policy, she asked Steve Early, sending him a copy of the letter that she was sending out in response to pacifist protests. Early forwarded her letter to the secretary of the Navy. It met his approval. Roosevelt's determination to build the U.S. Navy up to treaty strength reflected an anxiety about Japan. Germany, too, was arming, and, as Eleanor explained to pacifist leaders who felt the Western democracies were unresponsive to Hitler's demands for equality, it was “at present . . . very difficult to deal with Germany normally, because while she is demanding that other nations disarm, she herself is arming in every way she can under cover.” But the real impetus for American rearmament, which in the first years of the Roosevelt administration was chiefly naval, came from the Pacific. Franklin, his wife later said, felt Japan had delusions of grandeur. “I remember his concern about Guam and the islands of the Pacific way back when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. I think his suspicions of Japan were based on his own outlook of what he felt made the Pacific safe for us. In all the war games, Japan was always considered the enemy in the Pacific.”
³

When the National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War came to Washington for its 1935 session, Eleanor had the leaders to dinner at the White House, and placed Mrs. Catt next to her husband. He promptly proceeded to explain to her, as he already had to Eleanor, why he felt that if peace was to be preserved America had to build a navy second to none and do it as fast as possible. “The President is a
sincere friend of organized world peace,” Mrs. Catt wrote afterward. “He would like to see the country in the League and the World Court, but what he really relied on to preserve peace is our Navy! And if I were in his shoes,” the white-haired, grandmotherly woman declared with a show of spirit, “I would want the biggest navy in the world!”
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The chief concern of that White House dinner was to canvass the outlook for the World Court resolution which was moving toward a decisive vote in the Senate. In the absence of internationally agreed disarmament, Eleanor accepted her husband's arguments for a naval-building program, but her hopes for peace rested in international collaboration, and, since the League of Nations was still a taboo issue in American politics, in U.S. adherence to the World Court. At one of her first press conferences she had startled her listeners with the intensity of her plea that the United States had to find a basis on which to cooperate with the rest of the world if civilization was to be preserved, and it was largely the prodding of the women with Eleanor in the lead, that, once the Roosevelts had arrived in Washington, had moved court adherence back into the area of practical politics.
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Franklin had just about caught his breath after the difficult negotiations with Maxim Litvinov on recognition of the Soviet Union when Esther Lape was in pursuit of him through Eleanor about the World Court. She reminded Eleanor that in the spring of 1933 the president had indicated to the two of them that he intended to seek adherence to the court early in the 1934 session of Congress. “I know how many things seem more urgent in the domestic situation,” Esther argued. “But the Court issue is critical also, and the ratification of the three Court treaties might, in our judgment, have a stabilizing influence on the international atmosphere out of proportion to what may seem to some the intrinsic importance of the issue.” But Franklin, who was the greatest politician of his time, sent back word through Eleanor that “politically speaking and judging by the present time, it would be unwise to do anything about the World Court.” The women were not convinced. They undertook to show the Senate that the court issue was not “cold.”
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