The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (56 page)

Thirty-four
    

The Long Way Home

MISS CORR
and I continued on a western route around the world, stopping first at Hong Kong, which has become a fascinating crossroads of the free world in Asia. I was kindly received at Government House by Governor General Grantham and by American diplomatic officials stationed at this sensitive spot adjoining Communist China.

“Would you like to see the border of Communist China?” the governor general asked me.

“Indeed I would,” I replied, “if that is possible.”

As it turned out, it was no problem at all. The British general in charge of the border patrol called for me at my hotel the next morning and we drove over the hills to a little stream that separates Hong Kong from China. To my surprise, the “line” between the free world and the Communist world at this point is only a single strand of barbed wire and there is a bridge, guarded by police, over which a considerable number of Chinese go back and forth every day. These Chinese live on the Communist side but they own land on the Hong Kong side of the border stream and are permitted to cross each morning, often driving cows or pigs and carrying their farm tools, to work the land. Then in the evening they return across the bridge to the Communist side.

There did not seem to be many guards on either side of the border, but it was patrolled regularly. Nevertheless, a number of Chinese continued to flee across the frontier to Hong Kong every day or so.

“They were storekeepers, people with small means, who would have remained at their homes,” the head of the border police told me, “but they said the Communist officials kept calling them up for questioning and bedeviling them until they finally decided they would stand it no longer.”

Talking with other officials and with refugees I got the impression that many of those who had fled to Hong Kong were neither Communist nor anti-Communist. They just wanted to be let alone and to be given a chance to earn a living. If the government did not try to tax them too heavily, they did not really care who ran it or whether it was corrupt; they just wanted to be left in peace.

The next day I met two gentlemen who had come from Taipei (Formosa). They represented the United States Committee to Help Chinese Refugees and were also busy trying to counteract the flood of Communist propaganda literature which comes into the Hong Kong area. This propaganda was largely cheap little books with pictures that misrepresent everything done by the United States or the United Nations as bringing death and destruction. Such propaganda was circulated widely among even the poorest Chinese and, so far as I could discover, little was being done by the democracies to offset these false stories.

I could not go to Taipei and not see Madame Chiang. But I knew that if I saw her I would have to tell her I did not think her dream of regaining China was possible. I felt that Chiang Kai-shek had had his chance and had not used the right methods to unify the country, and I did not believe that he any longer had any chance to do so. So I did not visit Taipei.

I might mention here that in 1955 I made a second visit to Hong Kong and found that there was more traffic across the little bridge leading to Communist China than when I had been there the first time. There were Chinese soldiers with rifles on the other side of the border and one of them had a camera with which he took a picture of our party. Dr. Gurewitsch, who was with me on the second trip, quickly adjusted his camera and took a picture of the Chinese guards, but before he could snap the shutter all the Communist soldiers lowered their rifles and more or less concealed them behind their backs. I suppose they were acting in accordance with their instructions to avoid giving an appearance of stern military rule on the Communist side of the barrier. No one spoke, however, and we were told that there was no fraternization between the soldiers on either side of the line.

At five o’clock on a beautiful day in late June Miss Corr and I skimmed over the brown fields of Turkey and caught a first glimpse of the wonderful greens and blues of the Mediterranean just before landing at Istanbul. I had not expected anyone to meet us at that hour of the morning but, to my horror, there stood our consul general, Mr. Macatee.

“You should not have come!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, yes,” he replied, always the perfect diplomat. “It is so rare for me to get up at this time of morning that I am grateful to you for the opportunity to see the world when it is so beautiful.”

I could well imagine that he would have much preferred to go back to bed instead of escorting us to the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine Wall and the Bosporus. The early-morning light made the minarets and the domes beautiful.

Much too quickly it was time to return to the airport and catch the plane to Athens. We found upon our arrival that it was a holiday. We zigzagged through narrow, twisting streets, getting our first glimpse of the Acropolis. I was pleased to learn that Governor Adlai Stevenson was in Athens and would come to tea that afternoon. We arranged to visit the Acropolis and to see some of the excavations being made in Athens under our American group.

On some of our trips we saw many signs of American influence in Greece. Near Delphi there was a huge threshing machine near the road, well labeled to show that it had come from the United States as part of the Marshall Plan. We stopped to talk with the people running the machine and they told us that it quickly did work that would have taken days with slow-moving animals and men using old-fashioned implements. It was obvious in many places that America was having an influence on the Greeks as well as on other parts of the world. But whether this was bringing us friends I did not know.

While in Athens I had the good fortune to go out to luncheon in the country with King Paul and Queen Frederika. Our embassy had handled the arrangements and, as usual, they sent a dignified but slow-moving limousine to take me from my hotel to the palace. I started out about half past eleven, rolling sedately out of the city and up into the hills to the summer palace. It was cooler there and as we were rolling happily along there was a roar of a high-powered motor behind us and a racy sports car zipped around us and went bowling along the road at high speed.

I got a quick look at the occupants and realized that the King was driving and the Queen was beside him. They were dashing along the road as if they were racing drivers out for a morning’s test spin, and making the most of it. They went so fast, in fact, that before we reached the palace we caught up with two automobiles which had passed us in pursuit of the King’s car, but had broken down later.

“Those are the men who guard the King,” my driver said with a chuckle.

I found the Queen to be charming, warm and intelligent. The King’s personality is not so warm, but he is an able man and greatly interested in the young people of his country, where there are so many orphans from war and disaster and where so many are hungry. I believe that I receive more letters asking for help from Greece than from any other country. At luncheon the Queen told me of her efforts to alleviate this poverty.

She told me that she hoped to visit the United States to study our rehabilitation hospitals where great progress has been made in helping handicapped or crippled children. Later she and the King did make the trip. I noticed that they reserved five days at the end of their official trip for unofficial visits in New York, and I wrote the Queen a note, asking whether she had been able to see the things she wanted to see.

She replied that she had not seen any of the things she really wanted to see, so I arranged a short tour for her. We guided her to several institutions in New York City that I thought she would want to visit. We went to the new hospital on the East Side where Dr. Howard Rusk has done so much to help the recovery of crippled children. The Queen was wonderful with the patients. One little boy who had had polio attempted to show her how he had learned to walk again, but in his eagerness he slipped and fell. It was the Queen who got to him before anyone else and picked him up.

“Never mind,” she said. “Many of us fall when we try to show what we can do. But I’ll help you and you show me again.”

Later, as we were walking in a sedate little procession, we passed a city firehouse. Looking through the big open door, the Queen saw the brass fire pole and paused.

“Do you think they would mind if I went in?”

“I’m sure they would be delighted,” I said. I went in and found a fireman on duty and introduced him to the Queen. She was much interested in the equipment and asked many questions.

“Perhaps it would be possible for you to demonstrate how the men answer an alarm,” I remarked to the fireman.

He said that would be simple, and rang the bell. An instant later the men began sliding down the brass pole from the second floor and quickly jumped onto their trucks. Then, last of all, their big cat came sliding down the pole. The Queen laughed and clapped her hands in delight. Then she thanked the firemen, said good-by, and we rejoined our little procession.

We left Athens by airplane on July 6, 1953, for Yugoslavia. Flying over Macedonia, in Yugoslavia, I was impressed by the fact that it looked like good farming country, in contrast to the arid appearance of the land in so many parts of Greece, particularly in the mountains.

“One reason for the difference is that the Yugoslav government has made a determined effort to reduce the number of herds of goats,” a Yugoslav told me. “Goats have been almost completely forbidden in some places. I can’t say this program has been entirely successful, but at least they no longer eat every blade of grass down to the roots as they often do in Greece. Why, they even eat the trees and I have actually seen them climbing up into the branches of trees to feed.”

We landed in Belgrade, where I was greeted by a number of old friends from the United Nations meetings.

My main purpose in visiting Yugoslavia was to interview President Tito (or Josip Broz, to give him his real name) but I was greatly interested in learning all I could about the country and its governmental system. I wanted to make my own observations of this man who had successfully fought the German army of occupation in Yugoslavia, who had established a government closely harmonized with Communist Russia after the war and had finally broken with the Comintern, declaring his independence of the dictates of Moscow.

I had been informed correctly that Yugoslavia was very different from Russia, where for generations peasants had been accustomed to living under the strict Czarist regime, to being attached to large family estates and to doing what they were told to do. It had always been difficult to tell the Yugoslavs anything. They fought foreign invaders and they fought each other for racial and religious reasons and sometimes perhaps for no reason at all. The Montenegrins, for instance, were never really conquered through the centuries of Balkan warfare. If an invader fought his way into the country, they retired to the mountains and defied anybody to come after them. The men were such traditional warriors that the women did, and continue to do, practically all the hard, everyday work.

At a luncheon with several government officials on my first full day in Yugoslavia, one of the undersecretaries of state told of changes that were being made in industrial management. “The state,” he said, “will not run the industries. They will be operated by councils of workers, and this system, where it is being tried out, already has improved production. Workers quickly find out that good management is necessary, that all must do their best and the deadwood must be eliminated if an industry is to pay.”

It was obvious that the Yugoslavs were experimenting in an effort to find government theories that would permit limited individual freedom within a Socialist framework.

In the next few days the people I talked with, including American officials and newspapermen, seemed to agree that there had been great changes in the government in the past year. Decentralization of governmental power had been encouraged, which I thought was quite remarkable in a dictatorship, where the leader or leaders usually want more instead of less power. Certain supervision and a measure of ultimate control by the central government would be continued, but it was evident that many more decisions were being left to the people’s committees even in the smaller village groups.

One thing that I observed almost immediately in Yugoslavia was that the people were neither worried nor afraid. I did not hear a single Yugoslav say anything about the danger of war, although their old enemy Germany was rapidly gaining strength on one side of them and they had broken with the Soviet Union and its satellites, which lie on the other side. Perhaps if you have always lived with danger you can’t afford to think with fear, or perhaps the people were too busy.

Later I made a trip to Sarajevo and on the way drove to Zenica, a good coal and iron ore center which was busily trying to become the Pittsburgh of Yugoslavia. The plants had been rebuilt and enlarged after the war and were already producing three times as much as they had before.

I asked many questions about how the plants were run and cleared up some of the theories that had been explained to me in Belgrade. For example, the theory is that the plants will be run by workers’ councils. But, while that is technically true, the fact is that the councils sensibly employ technical experts to operate the plants and the experts report to and are responsible to the councils. I met two American engineers employed by one plant to direct operations.

I kept finding out more about the changing industrial system. At Zagreb we visited the Rade Koncar factory, named for a factory worker who was a guerrilla leader during the war and was killed by Italian troops. The plant was making electrical transformers and other machinery needed for the development of power plants. Like others I had visited, it was operated by a workers’ council and technical experts.

“Our experts are new at this kind of thing and they have made some mistakes,” the manager told me. “But last year we ran at a profit.”