The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (66 page)

For people in young nations, which are still in a transition stage and setting up governments, such help could be more valuable than a large standing army or economic aid, particularly when in the new country there are few people capable of administering it effectively.

As I have said, this training and use of our young has been long in my mind. Wherever and whenever I could I have advocated it. Recently with the announcement of the Peace Corps, it appears that a similar plan will at least have a fair trial. Some of our young people will be given the opportunity to take up the slack in underdeveloped countries, and to bring our skills and our attitudes and our principles to them as free men. I am delighted that this has been done, and am hopeful that it may prove to be one of the most fruitful ways we have found of sharing our American Dream with others.

President Kennedy has initiated a Peace Corps through which he hopes the ideals of young, and perhaps not so young, Americans may be expressed to people throughout the world, particularly in the underdeveloped countries which need help at the present time. The methods of choosing people and arranging with the recipient governments are still being worked out. Colleges and universities that have programs for exchange will be aided where their programs seem to be worthwhile. This will be an educational job for Americans, giving them an opportunity to get a better idea of the world in which they live and at the same time will show a spirit of service which is prevalent in this generation of Americans but which has not had great opportunity so far for expression.

A suggestion has also been made for a younger U.S. group of older high-school age to work on forestry and soil conservation throughout the U.S. This would seem to me of great value but as yet this is not even in the active planning stage as far as I know, though I hope it will materialize before very long.

I have said that the Russians have accomplished by compulsion what we must accomplish voluntarily. But there is one element of this Russian training that I have neglected to mention. I don’t see why I neglected it, because it is of paramount importance. They have taught their young to feel that they are needed, that they are important to the welfare of their country. I think that one of the strongest qualities in every human being is a need to feel needed, to feel essential, to feel important. Too often our own youngsters do not feel that they are really essential to their country, or to the scheme of things. We have not had enough imagination to show them how very much we need every one of them to make us the kind of country that we can be.

In Austria, a short time ago, Mr. Khrushchev said that he expected a Communist world in his lifetime. We have no time to waste.

All this, you may say, is far from the American Dream. Not at all. The American Dream can no more remain static than can the American nation. What I am trying to point out is that we cannot any longer take an old approach to world problems. They aren’t the same problems. It isn’t the same world. We must not adopt the methods of our ancestors; instead, we must emulate that pioneer quality in our ancestors that made them attempt new methods for a New World.

For instance, we are pioneers today in the field of automation. There is no possibility of holding back automation, but we can, at least, profit by the mistakes of the past in dealing with it. The industrial revolution, which began in Great Britain, put machinery into the mills and threw out the people to starve.

Eventually Great Britain was much better off as a result of the industrial revolution. But, because it was not prepared to cope with it at the time, a far-reaching and unexpected thing happened. Out of the industrial revolution and its abuses came Karl Marx.

With automation we have a new situation and on the way we cope with it will depend the attitude of the world. Here we are the undisputed leaders. But we cannot handle it without planning. We must learn to foresee results before we act. We cannot afford, today, to throw a lot of people out of work without making some provision for them. True, the conscience of the people is different now; we would no longer sit by and let people starve and die. But if we are going to cope successfully, if we are to make this new technique a blessing to society and not a disaster, we have to make plans. We cannot blunder along, hoping things “will come out all right.” Government, industry, labor, all these must use their best brains, must be aware of and accept their full responsibility for the situation.

With decreased work hours there will come more leisure. What is to be done with it? Masses of people now working at machines, without any opportunity for self-improvement or bettering their condition, will be afforded new opportunities. But, unless we give them a background of education, they will not know how to make use of this opportunity for advancement. If they have no capacity for development, and no enterprise beyond sitting glued to a television screen, they will deteriorate as human beings, and we will have a great mass of citizens who are of no value to themselves or to their country or to the world.

It is a new industrial revolution that we are pioneering. The eyes of the world are on us. If we do it badly we will be criticized and our way of life downgraded. If we do it well we can become a beacon light for the future of the world.

And now, I see, my new concept of the American Dream is only the old one, after all. For, while those who started our government and fought for our right to be free may have thought in Old World terms to some extent, they, too, had a conception of the Dream being universal. The Thomas Jeffersons thought of education not for a handful, not even for their own country alone, but looked forward to the day when everyone, everywhere, would have the same opportunities. Today we have achieved so much more, in many ways, than our ancestors imagined that sometimes we forget that they dreamed not just for us but for mankind.

The American Dream is never entirely realized. If many of our young people have lost the excitement of the early settlers who had a country to explore and develop, it is because no one remembers to tell them that the world has never been so challenging, so exciting; the fields of adventure and new fields to conquer have never been so limitless. There is still unfinished business at home, but there is the most tremendous adventure in bringing the peoples of the world to an understanding of the American Dream. In this attempt to understand, to give a new concept of the relationships of mankind, there is open to our youngsters an infinite field of exciting adventure where the heart and the mind and the spirit can be engaged.

Perhaps the older generation is often to blame with its cautious warning: “Take a job that will give you security, not adventure.” But I say to the young: “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.”

Forty-one
    

Milestones

IN OCTOBER
of 1959 I reached my seventy-fifth birthday. It was a busy day, as most of mine are, with little time for introspection. Nonetheless, it was, in a way, a milestone, and I found myself looking back along the way I had come, trying to get a long-range view of the journey I had made and, if I could, to evaluate it. I wanted, if possible, to draw a kind of balance sheet, to formulate for myself the objectives I had had and to estimate how far I had achieved them.

This kind of introspection is one in which I rarely indulge. At times, of course, it is valuable in throwing light into dark places, but its danger is that one may easily tend to become self-absorbed in one’s voyage of discovery and self-analysis.

People still ask me frequently how I planned my career and what over-all objective I had in mind. Actually I never planned a career, and what basic objective I had, for many years, was to grasp every opportunity to live and experience life as deeply, as fully, and as widely as I possibly could. It seemed to me stupid to have the gift of life and not use it to the utmost of one’s ability.

I was not a gifted person but I was always deeply interested in every manifestation of life, good or bad. I never let slip an opportunity to increase my knowledge of people and conditions. Everything was grist to my mill: not only the things I saw but the people I met. Indeed, I could not express adequately the debt I owe to the friends who taught me so much about the world I live in. I had really only three assets: I was keenly interested, I accepted every challenge and every opportunity to learn more, and I had great energy and self-discipline.

As a result, I have never had to look for interests to fill my life. If you are interested, things come to you, they seem to gravitate your way without your lifting a hand. One thing leads to another and another, and as you gain in knowledge and in experience new opportunities open up before you.

Before my seventy-fifth birthday something else had happened that forced me to turn back and look at my past life rather than to look ahead, as I prefer doing. Dore Schary wrote
Sunrise at Campobello
, a play that dealt with my husband’s serious illness and his spiritual victory over being crippled. I can remember still the evening when the dramatist read his play to me. And I can remember the strange experience of seeing it performed.

I have been asked countless times how I felt about seeing myself, my children, my husband portrayed on the stage. Did I feel a sense of recognition? Did I say, “But it wasn’t like that at all?” Did I feel that my privacy as a woman had been invaded?

The truth is that I watched the play with complete detachment. It is true that when I closed my eyes Ralph Bellamy evoked the very quality and cadence of Franklin’s voice and I seemed to hear him speak. But, for the rest, it seemed quite impersonal; it was a play, so far as I personally was concerned, about someone else.

I think if the average person tries to look back he will be unable to remember what he was like, or how he looked, or even, except for major matters, what he did when he was young. He can remember only what he felt. Even in the case of my children I felt that I was watching the actions of quite fictitious characters. One of the best-drawn characters in that play, by the way, was Louis Howe. True, he was less untidy than the Louis I had known, but the lines were excellent and the portrayal was true of the man.

No, it was not by seeing the character of “Eleanor Roosevelt” on the stage that I could come any closer to an analysis of the woman who had now reached seventy-five years of age.

Looking back, I could see that the over-all objective of which many people spoke to me had no existence. It seems hardly human that anyone can plan his life clearly from the beginning, making no allowances for a changing or developing character or for circumstances.

I am sure that my objectives, during those early years at least, were constantly changing. In the beginning, because I felt, as only a young girl can feel it, all the pain of being an ugly duckling, I was not only timid, I was afraid. Afraid of almost everything, I think: of mice, of the dark, of imaginary dangers, of my own inadequacy. My chief objective, as a girl, was to do my duty. This had been drilled into me as far back as I could remember. Not my duty as I saw it, but my duty as laid down for me by other people. It never occurred to me to revolt. Anyhow, my one overwhelming need in those days was to be approved, to be loved, and I did whatever was required of me, hoping it would bring me nearer to the approval and love I so much wanted.

As a young woman, my sense of duty remained as strict and rigid as it had been when I was a girl, but it had changed its focus. My husband and my children became the center of my life and their needs were my new duty. I am afraid now that I approached this new obligation much as I had my childhood duties. I was still timid, still afraid of doing something wrong, of making mistakes, of not living up to the standards required by my mother-in-law, of failing to do what was expected of me.

As a result, I was so hidebound by duty that I became too critical, too much of a disciplinarian. I was so concerned with bringing up my children properly that I was not wise enough just to love them. Now, looking back, I think I would rather spoil a child a little and have more fun out of it.

It was not until I reached middle age that I had the courage to develop interests of my own, outside of my duties to my family. In the beginning, it seems to me now, I had no goal beyond the interests themselves, in learning about people and conditions and the world outside our own United States. Almost at once I began to discover that interest leads to interest, knowledge leads to more knowledge, the capacity for understanding grows with the effort to understand.

From that time on, though I have had many problems, though I have known the grief and the loneliness that are the lot of most human beings, though I have had to make and still have to make endless adjustments, I have never been bored, never found the days long enough for the range of activities with which I wanted to fill them. And, having learned to stare down fear, I long ago reached the point where there is no living person whom I fear, and few challenges that I am not willing to face.

On that seventy-fifth birthday I knew that I had long since become aware of my over-all objective in life. It stemmed from those early impressions I had gathered when I saw war-torn Europe after World War I. I wanted, with all my heart, a peaceful world. And I knew it could never be achieved on a lasting basis without greater understanding between peoples. It is to these ends that I have, in the main, devoted the past years.

One curious thing is that I have always seen life personally; that is, my interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person whom I have seen with my own eyes. It was the sight of a child dying of hunger that made the tragedy of hunger become of such overriding importance to me. Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, and finally to the world. In each case my feeling of obligation to do something has stemmed from one individual and then widened and become applied to a broader area.