The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (65 page)

It was the season of Ramadan when we reached Shiraz, Iran, to visit my daughter Anna, whose husband was stationed there. Iran, of course, is not Arab, but many of its problems are similar to those of its neighbors in the Near East. The chief problem, it seemed to me, was poverty. The mass of the people have become poorer and poorer; their health has deteriorated; and so, in a disastrous way, have its natural resources. Or, more likely, the loss of natural resources has brought about the poverty. The mountains of Iran, once clothed with forests and covered with fertile soil, are bare now. The land is desert. And with this loss of the fertility of the soil, this loss of forests, has come an inevitable economic instability.

The health of the people is generally poor, with trachoma, tuberculosis and malnutrition the biggest medical problems. The country exists in a kind of flux. The tribes are unwilling to settle down into village life until they can be convinced that such a way of life offers more advantages. They want to be sure that there will be an opportunity to work gainfully, that health conditions will be better, that there will be educational advantages.

So far as the masses are concerned, this is still preponderantly an illiterate population. While there are schools in Shiraz and even in some of the villages, the compulsory education law is not enforced.

To add to the difficulty, so far as future improvement is concerned, the Iranian has no sense of community responsibility. The position of women is still inferior. All this militates against improved social conditions that might arise from the will of the people themselves, their desire and determination to better their own lot and that of their fellow countrymen.

In Shiraz we visited the Jewish community and found it grim indeed. These people were living in one-room huts, without sanitation. There were not even doors or windows—just holes cut in the walls so that people could go in and out, and to admit a little light. As a rule, there was a little charcoal brazier in one corner for cooking and heating. Bedding was rolled up in the daytime and covered the floor at night.

From Iran we went on to Israel, where we spent Easter week. Since my return I have tried to analyze what makes the difference in atmosphere between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the great country of Iran.

I think the greatest difference lies in an atmosphere in Israel that one does not find in many other countries. Its young people may be chiefly responsible for it. They are excited by the dream of building a country and they work at it with gusto, with all their strength, with exhilaration and a kind of exaltation that cannot fail to impress the visitor. Difficult as conditions are, long and hard as the people labor, they do it in an atmosphere of faith and hope and conviction. It is the absence of these qualities in the other countries that is so disheartening. For men cannot live without hope. If it is not engendered by their own convictions and desires, it can easily be fired from without, and by the most meretricious and empty of promises.

I was much amused on my return from Israel to discover that wherever I lectured for the next few months people appeared to be less interested in world affairs than they were in the fate of a camel that Nina had bought in Israel but which we were unable to bring into the country, at the orders of the Department of Agriculture. Eventually, the camel was given to a poor Bedouin.

What I had learned on these two trips was much on my mind when I returned home. Why, I wondered, were we not more successful in helping the young nations and those in transition to become established along democratic lines? Why was it that the Russians were doing so much better? The answer can be oversimplified and an oversimplification is false and misleading. But part of the answer, and I thought a major part, was that Russia had trained its young people to go out into the world, to carry their services and skills to backward and underdeveloped countries, to replace the missing doctors and teachers, the scientists and technicians; above all, to fill the vacant civil service jobs, prepared not only by training for the job itself but by a complete briefing in the customs, habits, traditions and trend of thought of the people, to understand them and deal with them. Where they go, of course, they take with them their Marxist training, thinking and system.

And our young Americans? Were they being prepared to take their faith in democracy to the world along with their skills? Were they learning the language and the customs and the history of these new peoples? Did they understand how to deal with them, not according to their own ideas but according to the ideas of the people they must learn to know if they were to reach them at all? Had they acquired an ability to live and work among peoples of different religion and race and color, without arrogance and without prejudice?

Here, I believe, we have fallen down badly. In the past few years I have grasped at every opportunity to meet with the young, to talk with college students, to bring home as strongly as I can to even young children in the lower grades our responsibility for each other, our need to understand and respect each other. The future will be determined by the young and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American Dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.

No single individual, of course, and no single group has an exclusive claim to the American Dream. But we have all, I think, a single vision of what it is, not merely as a hope and an aspiration but as a way of life, which we can come ever closer to attaining in its ideal form if we keep shining and unsullied our purpose and our belief in its essential value.

That we have sometimes given our friends and our enemies abroad a shoddy impression of the Dream cannot be denied, much as we would like to deny it.
The Ugly American
, impressive as it was, struck me as being exaggerated. True, one of the first American ambassadors I ever met in an Eastern country was appallingly like the title character in the novel. There are doubtless many others, too many others; men who accept—and seek—the position of representative of their government abroad with no real interest or respect for the country they go to, and no real interest or respect for the image of their country which they present to other people.

Such men buy their position by gifts of money to their party or seek them because of the glamorous social life they may lead in exotic places.

“Oh, you must go there. You’ll have a wonderful time. And the polo is top-notch.”

They often do not know the language of the country; they are not familiar with its government or its officials; they are not interested in its customs or its point of view.

The Russians—and I say it with shame—do this better. They are trained in the language, history, customs and ways of life of a country before they go to it. They do not confine themselves to official entertaining but make a point of meeting and knowing and establishing friendly relations with people of all sorts, in every class of society, in every part of the country.

When we look at the picture of Russian greed in swallowing one satellite nation after another and contrast it with the picture of American generosity in giving food, clothing, supplies, technical and financial assistance, with no ulterior motive in acquiring new territory, it is stupid and tragic waste that the use of incompetent representatives should undo so much useful work, so great an expense, so much in the way of materials of every kind.

Of course, what the Russians have accomplished in training their young people for important posts in the underdeveloped countries—which, I must repeat, may affect the future course of these countries—has been done by compulsion. That’s the rub. For what we must do is to achieve the same results on a voluntary basis. We do not say to our young people: “You must go here and take such a job.” But we can show them that where we fail the Russians will win, by default. We can show them the importance of acquiring the kind of training that will make them useful and honorable representatives of their country wherever they may go abroad.

Perhaps the new frontier today is something more than the new revolution in textiles and methods and speed and goods. It is the frontier of men’s minds. But we cannot cast an enduring light on other men’s minds unless the light in our own minds burns with a hard, unquenchable flame.

One form of communication we have failed abjectly in: the teaching of languages. Most school children have several years of inadequate teaching in one language or another. I say inadequate because the study of a language, after all, is inadequate if one cannot learn to read and write it, to speak and to understand it. During World War II the government found a simplified and most effective method of teaching such difficult languages as Japanese and Chinese to American GIs. In a matter of weeks they had mastered more of the language than formerly they would have acquired in the same number of years. And yet in our schools the old, cumbersome, unproductive methods are still in use.

It seems to me so obvious that it should not need to be said that we must increase and improve the teaching of languages to our young people, who will otherwise find themselves crippled and sorely handicapped in dealing with people of foreign races and different cultures.

These are things our children should be told. These are the conditions they are going to have to meet. They ought to be made to understand exactly what competition they will encounter, why they must meet it, how they can meet it best. Yet I rarely find, in talking with them, that they have been given the slightest inkling of the meaning of the Soviet infiltration of other countries, or that the future the Soviets are helping to build is the one with which they will have to contend. I rarely find that anyone has suggested that our own young people should have any preparation whatsoever to cope with the problems that are impending.

That is why, in the course of the past several years, I have fitted into my schedule, wherever I could, occasions to talk with the young. Sometimes they come up to Hyde Park by the busload to ask questions or to discuss problems. Sometimes I talk at their schools or colleges.

Last year, in co-operation with Brandeis University, I experimented with a new idea. I agreed to do a series of nine television programs, which were then sold to education television stations throughout the country. It worked so well that this year I have agreed to do ten programs.

In addition to this, I lectured to a class given by Dr. Fuchs on international law and international organization at Brandeis. There were only thirteen in the class, all students who hoped to go into foreign service either for business or for the government, five of them students from foreign countries. I was a little staggered by this assignment, as I felt sure that many of these young people were better versed in questions of international organization than I was. But at least I could discuss with them the tangled problems of foreign politics.

This, of course, was a specialialized sort of lecture course, and I found it interesting and stimulating, as I have always found teaching. But what I would have preferred to say to these young people was something like the following:

Today our government and the governments of most of the world are primarily concerned—obsessed—by one idea: defense. But what is real defense and how is it obtained? Of course, a certain amount of military defense is necessary. But there comes a point where you must consider what can be done on an economic and cultural basis.

It seems to me that, in terms of atomic warfare, we should henceforth have a small professional army of men who have voluntarily chosen military service as an obligation to their country. But what then? What about the hundreds of thousands of young people who leave school every year, either from high school or from college? Are they, from now on, to have no participation in contributing to the welfare of their country?

Far from it. As matters stand, we draft young men into the service, train them until they are useful, and then let them go. This seems to me monstrous waste.

It has long been my personal conviction that every young person should be given some basic training that might, eventually, be useful to his country. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that this could be handled either in school or at college, and instead of calling all young men up for compulsory military service, we could offer an alternative along these lines:

Whether you finish college, or high school, you may, if you do not want to spend two years of compulsory military training, decide what country you would like to spend two years in. You will be given two years of basic training, either during school hours or in the evenings. If you want to go, say, to Africa or to other underdeveloped countries, you will, from the age of fifteen to seventeen, be taught the language, the history, the geography, the economic background of the country. You will be prepared to take with you a skill, or be trained for the most crying need in many transition nations, to fill the civil service jobs that Russia is now so rapidly filling. Or, if you are preparing for a profession, you may make use of that.

New industries are needed in these countries, there are technical needs in almost all areas. The economy has to be bolstered in countless ways. New techniques are required in agriculture. And nearly all of these countries need teachers badly.

I was greatly interested and pleased to hear that Chester Bowles’s son turned down a scholarship at Oxford University to go to Nigeria, where he plans to teach in high school for two years.

What is saving Ghana today is that Sir Robert Jackson remained in the country after the withdrawal of Great Britain. He is using all his great experience and intelligence on behalf of the people as economic adviser to the Volta River Project. He is also being aided by his brilliant wife, the famous economist, Barbara Ward.