The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (54 page)

Like all the Middle Eastern and Asian countries, Pakistan has been terribly handicapped by her lack of technical experts, people qualified to draw up, appraise and carry out the necessary development programs. To meet this need the Pakistan government, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, the UN Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, and the International Bank have wisely collaborated to set up in Pakistan a center where this kind of training is available. It seems to me to represent the best kind of international thinking and co-operation.

The spirit of the people of Pakistan is something one does not soon forget. There is courage and great vitality. They are determined to make their government succeed, and their nation a cohesive force. In talking to the men at the head of this government I was convinced that their devotion and intelligent approach, with the resolute support of the people, cannot fail to make Pakistan a great country.

We landed in New Delhi on February 27, and I was overwhelmed to find Prime Minister Nehru there to greet me, with a number of other officials and his sister, Madame Pandit, head of India’s delegation to the UN. I was also extremely glad to see waiting for me Ambassador Chester Bowles and his wife. In them I was greeting good friends whom I had known for many years.

We drove directly to Government House, the official home of India’s president, Rajendra Prasad, where, as protocol required, we were to spend our first night. The following day we were to move to the home of the prime minister and stay with him for the rest of our visit.

During the course of that first meeting I asked Prime Minister Nehru about a article on India’s recent election, which I had read before leaving the United States. It described how people had spent days traveling through tiger-infested jungles in order to vote; how some of the primitive tribes had trekked miles across deserts, blowing little flutes, and announcing when they finally reached their destination that they had come to worship the god “Vote.” Out of India’s 360 million people, 90 million voted.

I told Prime Minister Nehru that I had been long enough an observer of political life to know that no great outpouring of voters occurs unless someone has done some remarkable campaigning. He beckoned me into his office and pointed to a map on the wall, which traced all his campaign trips before the election and showed how many miles he had traveled by air, train, boat and automobile—altogether 25,732. Not included, however, were the miles he traveled by bullock cart, on horseback and on foot. At the bottom of the map is a line reading: “The Prime Minister, it is estimated, talked personally to thirty million people in his audience.”

The first two years of India’s independence were complicated, as they were in Pakistan, by the staggering refugee resettlement problem. The country’s needs were studied but there was much to be done, and everything needing to be done at once.

Nevertheless, though India has far to go, she has made an inspiring beginning. This new democracy seems to evoke the kind of passionate devotion among its leaders that our forefathers had for the democratic government they were establishing in America. Perhaps this is one of the greatest contributions the young democracies can make to the older ones. We have grown stale; we are inclined to take everything for granted. Perhaps we may draw from people who ford rivers and walk miles of jungle trails in order to vote a new sense of our responsibility and a revival of our forefathers’ readiness to pledge “our lives, our sacred honor, and all our worldly goods” for the idea they believed would make this country a place worth living in.

What the leaders of India want and are determined to have is a democracy that is indigenous to their country, based on their own past and the character of their own people. It is in helping India to build in its own way and on its own strength that Ambassador Bowles has done such a remarkable job. In the less than half year he had been in India at that time he had made great strides in seeing that foreign aid was intelligently co-ordinated and applied. Perhaps even more important, he had given Indians an entirely new idea of American officialdom and a new confidence in our motives and our good will.

We must face the fact that in the years after the war our popularity took a terrible tumble in India, as it did throughout the Arab countries. Having shaken off the domination of one foreign power, they are understandably determined not to fall under the influence of any other. Even Nehru, it is said, was at first wary of Ambassador Bowles’s suggestions for Point Four aid, lest they conceal some attempt at economic domination.

In addition, we have against us their feeling that because our skins are white we necessarily look down upon all peoples whose skins are yellow or black or brown. This thought is never out of their minds. They always asked me pointedly about our treatment of minorities in our country.

As I traveled about India during the next few weeks, the immensity of the task this new government faces became overwhelmingly apparent. India has two problems that seem to me particularly urgent: one is how to grow more food; the other is how to control the rising tide of her population.

With the food problem looming so large, India has had to put increased agricultural production ahead of everything else. Right now she spends $600 million a year and more importing food and cotton she could grow herself, simply to maintain the present inadequate level of diet and keep her textile mills running. She needs not so much to bring more land under cultivation as to get more from the farm land she already has. For instance, an Indian farmer gets only half as much wheat from an acre as an American farmer and only about one fifth as much cotton. To introduce modern methods to the farmers in the villages, India needs thousands of trained men: technical specialists of all kinds, agricultural chemists, experts in soil science, ecology and sanitation, mechanics who can repair implements, engineers to lay out irrigation and drainage works.

Water is another problem. India’s great rivers contain more than enough for her needs but at present only a small part of the flow is being used. Only one fifth of her farm land is regularly watered.

International co-operation in many forms is giving magnificent impetus to improved food rations, technical assistance, health care. What can be done in these ways was vividly dramatized to me at Etawah, a district composed of some 700,000 people, scattered among many small mud villages. The idea for this agricultural experiment was suggested by Albert Meyer, a New York architect, who is responsible for many of India’s new buildings and is designing the new capital of the Punjab. Etawah is an Indian project. We furnish technical assistance and advice, and supplies that must be bought abroad, on the self-help principle that is the basis of all Point Four aid, but the plan is an Indian plan and what has been done has been done by the Indian people themselves.

For the first two years the project was headed by Horace Holmes, a Cornell-trained American agricultural expert from Tennessee. He had lived and worked with the farmers before he began to introduce any new ways. Then he induced a few of them to try something different as an experiment, perhaps imported seeds, different fertilizer, or a better tool. When they saw the difference these things could make they tried them on their own on a larger scale, and other farmers began to follow suit.

Already they had more than doubled their crop production; wheat which had grown about a foot high was now between five and six feet high. The cattle had improved and the cows gave more milk.

After our first two days in New Delhi we started by air on a trip that was to take us over a good part of India before we returned to the capital. That trip took us to Bombay and Trivandrum, the southwest tip of India, which has the highest literacy rate in India, 50 per cent as compared to an average of 10 per cent for the rest of the country. Now, as part of her Five Year Plan, India has drawn up a program to make education free and compulsory for all children between six and fourteen years of age. This means she will need about two million teachers and thousands of new schools.

From Trivandrum we flew to Mysore and from there on a sightseeing tour to Bangalore. The peak moment of all the sightseeing for me was the Taj. I will carry in my mind the beauty of it as long as I live. At last I know why my father felt it was the one unforgettable thing he had seen in India. He always said it was the one thing he wanted us to see together.

From Agra we flew to Jaipur and at length back to New Delhi, where we stayed at Government House with President Prasad, a gentle and quiet man with great strength of character.

It was at Allahabad, where I received an honorary degree, that I encountered the effect of Communist influence on the students. It is almost always difficult for us to realize why the Communist philosophy is easier for young Indians to accept than our own. We overlook the two major factors: they rarely know what we are talking about when we speak of freedom in the abstract; their most pressing problem, from birth to death, now as it has always been, is hunger. Freedom to eat is one of the most important freedoms; and it is what the Communists are promising the people of India.

From Benares to Nepal to Calcutta—so many crowded miles, so much want, so much ferment, so much blending of the timeless with the new. So much human need—and so little human communication, at least between Americans and Indians. One of these lacks of communication comes in our sense of values. Paul Hoffman, who asked me to lunch with him and his colleagues of the Ford Foundation in Los Angeles on my way home, crystallized this point. The American dream of the Horatio Alger success story is completely meaningless to the Indian. To him it is simply an indication of a struggle for material values. What we have failed to take to him is our spiritual values. An understanding of our own spiritual foundations may be one of the bridges we need to better understanding of the East and its people. We must show by our behavior that we believe in equality and in justice and that our religion teaches faith and love and charity to our fellow men. Here is where each of us has a job to do that must be done at home, because we can lose the battle on the soil of the United States just as surely as we can lose it in any one of the other countries in the world.

In the spring of 1953 I returned from a short trip to find bad news waiting for me. Miss Thompson was in the hospital. For several days I spent most of the time there. On April 12, on the anniversary of my husband’s death, I went to Hyde Park. On my return I walked into the hospital just as dear Tommy died. There had been no sudden change. She just died.

Tommy had been with me for thirty years. In many ways she not only made my life easier but she gave me a reason for living. In almost anything I did, she was a help but she was also a stern critic. No one can ever take the place of such a person nor does one cease missing her, but I am sure she would not have wanted to live to suffer the torture of being an invalid.

Though my work for the American Association for the United Nations began in the spring of 1953, it did not become intensive until autumn. Consequently, I accepted an invitation that spring to be one of a group of exchange people going from the United States to Japan. The trip was under the auspices of Columbia University, which acted as host in this country for the Japanese who came here. Our hosts in Japan were Shigeharu Matsumoto and Dr. Yasaki Takagi, who represented the International House of Japan and the Committee for Cultural Exchange.

The reason the Japanese invited me was that their women were just coming into the responsibilities of functioning in a democracy after centuries in which feudalistic concepts had dominated their lives and customs. The attempt to change over to more or less democractic concepts in a short time naturally created many problems both of a political nature and in regard to family life. Some of the Japanese leaders hoped that an American woman, talking to groups of the Japanese women and men, would be able to explain to them the meaning of democracy and the manner in which a democratic government functions.

The fact was that after World War II the United States had rather arbitrarily insisted on giving the Japanese a democratic constitution, telling them that now they were going to be a democratic country. But this did not automatically change the old customs or turn feudalism into democracy. There were various articles in the new Japanese constitution that had been taken almost verbatim from Western documents, and some of these meant nothing to the Japanese or merely confused them because of the great differences between their social and economic background and the social and economic concepts of, say, the United States or France. So a period of education obviously was necessary, and I was happy to have a chance to do whatever I could to help spread the idea of democracy.

One of the first persons I encountered in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was Marian Anderson, who had been singing with great success all over Japan. Later I held a press conference. I had always heard that the Japanese were avid photographers, but I never expected to see so many news photographers as greeted us in Tokyo. I was told that Adlai Stevenson gazed in wonder at them during his trip to Japan and exclaimed: “This is a photographic dictatorship!”

I will not attempt to describe our experiences in Japan in any chronological order because we covered so much ground in the five weeks we were there, but there were some highlights that stand out in my mind. A few days after our arrival we visited Princess Chichibu, the widow of the Emperor’s brother. The princess had gone to the Friests School in Washington when her father was ambassador there. After her marriage she had kept in much closer touch with the people of Japan than other members of the royal family. Her former friends came to see her regularly to talk over problems of farming and she kept busy working with the Girl Guides, similar to our Girl Scout organizations, and with Four-H clubs, which have been active in Japan since the war in an effort to help young farmers learn modern methods of production.