The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (57 page)

“A profit?” I said.

“Oh, yes, that is one of the incentives for high production. After taxes have been deducted, the workers’ council divides the profits, half going to pay interest and amortization on borrowed money or to improve the plant. The other half of the profits is divided among all the workers.”

“Do you think that arrangement has increased production?” I asked.

The manager looked at the head of the workers’ council and smiled. “Of course it has,” he said.

The head of the council expressed his appreciation for the aid that had been received from the United States since the Yugoslav break with the Comintern. In fact, almost everywhere I went in the country I saw signs of the benefits of American aid and was told many times that the people were grateful.

Speaking in a general way, I found Yugoslavia a delightful place to visit and an interesting country in which to study the changing industrial, social and political system. The people were well fed, but their diet is mainly meat, fish, fats and bread. It was like asking for the moon to ask for a glass of orange juice or a lemon for your tea—unless you were at the American embassy. The prices in the shops I visited seemed high. Friends later explained that both wool and cotton have to be imported and paid for in foreign currency, which was difficult for the government to arrange, so that the prices for these goods naturally were higher than one might expect. The price of foodstuffs seemed reasonable, but I could not understand why there was so little variety. Here was a country in which 70 per cent of the population was engaged in agriculture, yet there were only a few vegetables and fruits in the markets. Officials estimated that the average family had to spend from 50 to 80 per cent of its budget on food.

I talked to a number of farmers and decided that they were the least satisfied people in Yugoslavia. This was partly because the Tito regime originally followed the Soviet pattern of collective farms. After a few years this system was not a success and it was gradually changed to permit small private farms and to encourage co-operative farming. Some collective farms continued, however, in the best farming areas. The government provided all farmers with certain tools and with fertilizers and made available machinery such as they had never had before. But of all people, the farmers the world over are the most individualistic, and the Yugoslav farmers have been slow to accept new ways.

Industrially the country has certainly made progress and important social security measures have been instituted. Medical care is provided on a universal basis and the hospitals I visited were equipped with modern laboratory and research facilities, most of which came from the United Nations or the United States. Typhoid and malaria have been largely wiped out except in a few rural areas. Generally the medical services are better than one would expect in a country that calls itself as yet underdeveloped. There are unemployment benefits and old-age pensions under the social security system, as well as payments for all children. Considering the economy of the country, these payments are generous and make a great difference in the life of the people.

Changes have also been made in the school system, and in rural areas four years of school, from the age of seven to eleven, are obligatory. Then the child can go to technical school or to a factory school for several years. In the cities high school training is free and so is instruction at the universities, which are crowded.

These are important changes in the basic structure of the country and are in considerable contrast to conditions that existed before the war. The greatest difference in postwar Yugoslavia, however, probably is at the head of the government and I was eager to talk to President Tito.

Our trip from Zagreb to Brioni to call on President Tito was one of the most delightful days I spent in Yugoslavia.

We took the plane at Zagreb in midmorning and within a few minutes, it seemed to me, we had landed and were driving by automobile into Rijeka with Mayor Eda Jardas. Later we drove on down the Istrian coast and through lovely mountain country to a point opposite the island of Brioni, where the President’s boat was waiting for us.

The trip across about two miles of water to Brioni was quickly completed and we were on a wonderfully wooded island which made a perfect summer residence for a busy president. There was a hotel for guests and villas to which the marshal invited special guests. We—Miss Corr, Dr. David Gurewitsch and I—were driven in an old-fashioned victoria from the landing stage to a guest villa on the water, with a fine view of the sea. There are no powered vehicles on the island except jeeps used by the military or police units guarding the President, and the absence of noisy motors and gas fumes added to the feeling of peaceful quiet all around us.

Next morning I arrived at the President’s villa alone promptly at ten o’clock, riding in a victoria. There were no obvious signs of guards or police near the villa, although no doubt the marshal is protected in an unobtrusive way, as our White House is protected by the Secret Service men. I was ushered into a large room that the marshal uses as an office. At the door I could see Mr. Vilfan and another man at a desk far across the room and it made me think of the accounts of the office of Premier Benito Mussolini in Rome, where visitors had to walk across a huge, bare space of floor to reach the desk behind which stood the stern-faced Italian dictator.

As I entered, a young-looking man came across the room to greet me. For a few moments I could not believe that this was Marshal Tito because he seemed far too youthful. It was only after he had greeted me warmly and I had seated myself on a sofa beside him that I was able to observe that his hair was graying and there were deep lines of experience in his strongly molded face. He has great charm and a strong personality. His jaw juts out and he speaks in the manner of a man who gives orders and expects them to be obeyed. But he had a sense of humor, he was pleasant to me, and he conveyed the impression of speaking frankly and honestly.

Tito spoke a little English and some German, but most of the time we spoke through our translator, Mr. Vilfan, in order to be sure that there was no misunderstanding.

Later we all went down to the dock where we got into a speedboat to go to a small island that Marshal Tito uses as a retreat when he wishes to be alone. The marshal himself piloted one speedboat, taking me with him, and seemed to get a great deal of fun out of it.

Still later in the afternoon we took a short trip on the state yacht in the Adriatic. The security officers surrounding Marshal Tito were obviously nervous about the possibility of kidnaping, and the ship was accompanied by armed vessels while military airplanes were constantly overhead or nearby.

After dinner that night I talked to the minister of interior, who was one of the guests, about the number of political prisoners.

“There are not really many political prisoners,” he asserted.

“Well, how many?” I persisted. “Would you say that as many as twenty-five political prisoners were arrested in a month? Or fifty? Or seventy-five?”

“Less than seventy-five,” he finally replied.

“What is the reason for most of the arrests?”

“The major reason,” he replied, “is for infiltrating Soviet ideas into Yugoslavia.”

This answer struck me as amusing, because that seemed to be the main thing feared by anti-Communist investigators in the United States!

Like many men who have acquired power, the President evidently loves it and has a certain vanity. But he is intelligent enough to recognize that in Yugoslavia he can have power in the long run only if the people give it to him voluntarily. As a result, I believe, he is concerned with providing a government that benefits the people, or at least enough of the people to maintain him in power.

“Do you believe the people are contented under your Socialist form of government?” I asked him.

He lit a cigarette and looked at me questioningly. “If you owned property and the government nationalized it, would you be contented?”

I said that I would not be happy about it.

“Then I will say that I don’t think everybody in Yugoslavia is content. But I believe the people realize that we are doing the things that will be best for our country in the long run.”

I asked him about the working of Communism in Yugoslavia, where practically everything is nationalized, although citizens have the right to own private property such as a house or a small farm of not more than twenty acres.

“We have been rather disappointed,” he replied, “that many of the workers’ councils have not allocated their surpluses for the good of the community as a whole but have merely divided the funds among the workers.”

I asked if he considered that his country was practicing Communism.

“Communism,” he answered, “exists nowhere, least of all in the Soviet Union. Communism is an ideal that can be achieved only when people cease to be selfish and greedy and when everyone receives according to his needs from communal production. But that is a long way off.”

He said that Yugoslavia was developing a Socialist state that was one step toward the distant aim of Communism. “I suppose,” he added, “that I might call myself a Social Democrat.” Marshal Tito does not want what is being developed in Yugoslavia to be called Communism, and he also objects to the use of the term “Titoism.” Every country should develop according to its own needs, he continued, and he does not want Yugoslavia to be held up as an example for others, since Yugoslavia’s system might not meet the needs of any other country.

“I am not a dictator,” he insisted. “We have a group—all of us were Partisans during the war—that works closely together and prepares for each step to be taken.” When a law has been prepared it is published in the newspapers; then various organizations, especially the trade unions, send the government letters containing criticisms and suggestions for changes. These criticisms are carefully analyzed, Tito said, and the law is redrafted and again published in the newspapers so that the people once more will have an opportunity to express themselves about it before it is sent to Parliament for consideration.

On the basis of our conversation, it seemed to me that the President conceived of the current government as a step forward in the education of the people. He was perhaps not sure what the final steps would be, but he hoped they would lead to development of a political body along socialistic lines with a social conscience that responds to the needs of the country rather than to individual needs. I concluded that he had a concept of self-government by the people quite different from ours, because there it comes from the top rather than from the bottom. But it did not seem impossible for our type of political philosophy to live and co-operate with the system that appeared to be developing in Yugoslavia.

I commented on the American aid that had come to Yugoslavia. “I have been favorably impressed by the appreciation and gratitude of the people here for that assistance,” I said. “But mere gratitude, important as it is, does not convince us that the government will not swing back to the Russian system when it has reached a point where American help is no longer needed or no longer important.”

“I am ready to repeat what I told your ambassador,” he said. “Regardless of whether the United States gives us help or not, the attitude of Yugoslavia toward the United States will not change.”

I doubt that many people will agree when Marshal Tito describes himself as a Social Democrat. He acknowledges that the use of force by the government was necessary in his country. I felt, too, that as yet there were inconsistencies in the development of his theories of government. But I left him with the opinion that this was a powerful leader and an honest one, with some kind of long-range concept of self-government by the people. And I thought that much of the future would depend on the United States and how well we could prove that our democracy is concerned about and benefits the people as a whole.

Thirty-five
    

Campaigning for Stevenson

MY PARTICIPATION
in political campaigns was interrupted after Franklin’s death in 1945, partly because I became a member of the delegation to the United Nations and took great pains not to mix political affairs with my official duties. I believed that the questions we were dealing with at the United Nations were of the greatest importance to our country’s position in the world and that they should not be approached from a partisan point of view.

In 1952 it was my opinion that Governor Stevenson would probably make one of the best presidents we had ever had, but I also believed that it was practically impossible for the Democrats to win the election because of the hero worship surrounding General Eisenhower. I did make a speech on the United Nations at the Democratic National Convention that year at the request of President Truman, and I came out for Governor Stevenson, but I did not intend to be active in that campaign and I was not.

Why, then, did I re-enter politics in 1956? I was out of the United Nations delegation at that time, and I believed as strongly as before that Adlai Stevenson would make a good president. For another thing, I had not been much impressed by the progress of what President Eisenhower called Modern Republicanism.

The Eisenhower brand of Republicanism seemed to me to be an acceptance of certain social advances that some of the younger Republicans regarded as important to the party’s status in our changing domestic picture. These things usually had their origin in the New Deal days but had become so much a part of the people’s thinking that Republicans who had not solidified in the old mold were willing to accept them and had more or less persuaded the President to think along the same lines. President Eisenhower had seen much of the international scene and was aware of the vital importance of our role in world affairs, but the net result of his administration had not been impressive, because there were enough old-line Republicans in powerful positions to keep the party, on the whole, a conservative, businessmen’s party.