Eleanor and Franklin (132 page)

At dinner with a few Youth Congress leaders the night before the institute opened, Eleanor told them how her son John, whom she had seen in Cambridge, had asked her to pass on to “Pa” his strong feeling that the United States ought to keep out of the war and not get
involved on the side of either the Allies or Germany. John was worried about the way the president's policies gave the appearance that he was inching the country toward intervention. She had passed on John's message to the president, Eleanor said, her eyes twinkling as she added that she also noted that it came from his son, not from a Communist.
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Loyal to her Youth Congress friends, Eleanor, who rarely counted political risks, especially when she was dealing with young people, spared no effort to help the institute. She was beginning to be aware of “grass roots” efforts to change the policies of the congress, but she thought they reflected the way young people were feeling, not Communist manipulation.

She organized a committee of congressional wives, headed by Mrs. Garner and the wife of the Speaker, Mrs. Bankhead, to canvass official Washington for free lodgings for the overflow of youth delegates, and she sat at the telephone with George Allen, the district commissioner, seeking some 500 extra beds from hotels, a welfare institution, and Fort Myers, which set up cots for 150 boys. The Monday before the institute convened she had a congressional reception at the White House where the Youth Congress leaders pressed for action on the American Youth Act. She helped the Youth Congress obtain a government auditorium and administration speakers. She persuaded the president to speak to them from the rear portico of the White House.

He took a more objective view of his wife's young friends than she did. He was neither impressed by the logic of their growing isolationism nor persuaded that they were as innocent of Communist ties as they protested. Yet he, too, was not sure how the Communist problem should be handled in the organizations in which they were active. If there was a chance to save the organization he thought liberals should make the fight and not simply withdraw. That was the advice he had sent to Aubrey Williams in regard to the Workers Alliance, the organization of the unemployed. “FDR wld like to see Dave Lasser [the head of the Workers Alliance] change name & purge communists who put Russia first,” Eleanor advised Williams.
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Eleanor also told the president of the split that had developed within the American Student Union and of the formation of a liberal caucus to oppose the Communists.
*
When the president saw Lasser later, he
suggested that the Workers Alliance organize along similar lines and that a fight be made. Like his wife, he understood why, lacking jobs, unsure of their future, searching for a sense of brotherhood, young people and the unemployed responded sympathetically to radical doctrines. “The Communists are dangerous only as we ourselves fail,” Eleanor wrote. It was a sentiment with which the president agreed, but he was also a realistic politician, and while he accepted this as a prescription for the long run, he had little patience for the point of view that he heard from his wife's young friends, a point of view that she at times seemed to share. In mid-January some Youth Congress leaders were present at a White House dinner when Eleanor asked the president whether she had been right to advise the Youth Congress leaders to revive and re-introduce the American Youth Act. Yes, he replied, provided the young people made clear in their proposals where he was to get the money. Young people felt, Eleanor retorted, that less money should go to armaments and more to social services. “All right,” the president said, pushing back in his chair. “Let's accept the opinion of youth, but I want my protest recorded for history.”

“Youth needs are a form of national defense,” Abbott Simon of the Youth Congress volunteered. “Do we need all these battleships?” The president thought this was utopian nonsense and that the trouble was that the young people were plain ignorant about matters of naval strategy. Eleanor refused to let the argument rest there: Wasn't it the responsibility of leadership to give the country information so that they could decide such matters intelligently? Patiently Franklin outlined his picture of the possibilities. He was fearful of a Russo-German victory in Europe and seizure of the British fleet, followed by efforts to penetrate the Western hemisphere, first through trade and then through military and political arrangements. The United States had to be armed to prevent penetration of the continent and disruption of the hemispheric system, the president emphasized.

Wasn't it possible to combine both armaments and NYA? Of course, the country had to do both, he replied, but at the moment it was more urgent to arm than to increase the appropriation for NYA. Turning to Simon, he said, “You will have to wait a year. You can wait a year.” “I want you to say all those things to the Youth Congress
pilgrimage next month,” Eleanor remarked to the president as he was being wheeled out.
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Soviet Russia's invasion of Finland proved to be another dividing line between Communists and non-Communists. At Hyde Park the week before the pilgrimage, the president drove over to Val-Kill with Missy for lunch. Eleanor asked him if he would deal with the fears of young people that the United States might get involved, especially if a government loan was made to Finland. He scoffed at such fears; neither Germany nor Russia would declare war on the United States because of such a loan. Nor was he willing to say, in response to a suggestion from a youth leader who was present, that however he felt about the issues it was healthy for young people to organize to keep America out of war. The United States had a stake in preventing a Russo-German victory, he replied. It was useful to keep Russia and Germany guessing as to whether the United States might not come in.

Presidential suspicions of the Youth Congress were strengthened when, a few days before its pilgrimage to Washington, a message came to press secretary Bill Hassett from a columnist stating that the youth group had been holding meetings in New York City at which it was voting on resolutions to censure the president because of his policies, including his desire to aid Finland. Did the president still plan to address the pilgrimage, the columnist asked. “Yes,” Hassett replied, but Roosevelt took some precautionary measures, such as vetoing the request of the Congress to have its chairman speak from the portico. “You will notice the big ‘NO' that the President put beside the paragraph, as to anybody else speaking,”
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Commissioner Studebaker of the Office of Education and Aubrey Williams were asked by Hassett to submit suggestions for the president's speech. Studebaker sent over seven pages of amiable generalities, none of which were used. The draft submitted by Williams had a little more fire to it but it flattered youth, and the president, bent on some plain talk, discarded that, too. The young people had begun to irritate him; his wife's leaning over backward to put the best face on their arguments irritated him even more. But he could not reproach her directly—there were, a Roosevelt assistant observed, “strange reticences” between the two.
†
What he could not say to her directly,
however, he could say in a speech to the Youth Congress and the country, and it was a speech he wrote himself.
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Saturday, the day of the pilgrimage, was a chill, rainy February day. The paint on the hundreds of placards ran and those that escaped disfigurement by the rain were blown about in the wind. But the blustery weather made the youthful marchers more defiant as they paraded up Constitution Avenue.

SCHOOLS NOT BATTLESHIPS

the front ranks shouted, reviving a slogan of the early thirties.

PASS THE AMERICAN YOUTH ACT

the answering cry came back. Occasionally the marchers broke into song:

No Major, no Major, we will not go,

We'll wager, we'll wager, this ain't our show.

Remember that we're not so green

As the boys in seventeen.

Their clothes sodden and their placards bedraggled but their spirits high, 4,466 marchers were clocked entering the White House gates. They had arrived an hour early and they stood, cold and miserable, awaiting the president, whose speech was scheduled to be broadcast at 12:30. McMichael led them in singing of
America
and
America, the Beautiful,
punctuated with the staccato chant:

PASS THE AMERICAN YOUTH ACT

When the president came out onto the portico, Eleanor, who in a rain cape had been circulating among the marchers with words of motherly cheer, went up to join him.

It was a stern speech with few pleasantries and no effort to play up to his youthful listeners, as the introductory paragraph made clear when the president told the group that it had a right to advocate change, although with a different form of government “this kind of a meeting on the White House lawn could not take place.” The rain poured down and the statistics poured out—on how much better off
the country was compared with 1932. Young people should not “seek or expect Utopia overnight,” nor were young people the only ones in the country who had problems. Much still remained to be done, and his administration was ready to move “as fast as the people of the country as a whole will let us.”

Up to this point his audience had been unenthusiastic but polite. Now the president swung into his “final word of warning”: do not pass resolutions on subjects “which you have not thought through and on which you cannot possibly have complete knowledge.” The New York Youth Council's condemnation of a loan to Finland as “an attempt” to force the United States into an imperialistic war was “unadulterated twaddle.” A ripple of boos and hisses were quickly hushed; if the president heard them, he did not deign to notice. American sympathy was 98 per cent with the Finns, he continued, and it was “axiomatic” that America wanted to help with loans and gifts. It was silly and absurd to think that because of such loans the Soviet Union might declare war on the United States or that the United States was going to war with the Soviet Union. That brought him to the subject of the Soviet Union: whatever his earlier hopes from that experiment, it was today “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” The boos started again, and again they were suppressed.

Some of his audience were said to be Communists, the president continued, and they had a right to be so, provided they confined their advocacy of change “to the methods prescribed by the Constitution.”
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It was a verbal spanking, one most of Washington sympathized with, taking Walter Lippmann's view that these young people were “shockingly ill-mannered, disrespectful, conceited, ungenerous, and spoiled.”

When the Youth Congress returned to the Labor Department auditorium, most of its adherents, neither contrite nor shaken, were ready for a speaker who could give plausible and expressive shape to their resentment and hostility. CIO head John L. Lewis, a powerful orator and gifted phrasemaker and, like his youthful audience, resentful of Roosevelt who he felt had patronized him, was ready for them. With ten to twelve million unemployed, including four million young people, he began, “Americans cannot live on statistics.” The audience exploded in glee. Ovation succeeded ovation as Lewis scored his points with a mocking commentary on Roosevelt's speech that did not omit Finland—the mineworkers had passed a resolution substantially like the one the president had labeled “twaddle”—and ending with a bid:
“as chairman of Labor's Nonpartisan League, I issue an invitation to the American Youth Congress to become affiliated, to come to a working arrangement with Labor's Nonpartisan League.”

Bedlam ensued. The leaders of the Young Communist League did not conceal their satisfaction. The Youth Congress, despite its switch in policy, could still be a force. The rest of the day, the speeches of the delegates themselves, with a few minor exceptions, sounded the themes set forth by Joe Cadden, the secretary of the Youth Congress, and lent respectability by Lewis—“the government is letting us down,” “all our social gains are threatened by the trend toward a war economy,” the NYA was becoming an instrument for militarization of youth, and the CCC was being curtailed in order to force young people through economic pressure to join the Army.

Eleanor was present during Lewis's speech, sitting on the platform, knitting; her face was impassive, but inwardly she was shaken as she observed the group applauding positions which had some merit to them and reflected some real anxiety, some genuinely unmet need, but which, taken in the whole, were suspiciously close to the Communist line.

This was the atmosphere in which she brought the institute to a close on Sunday night with a question-and-answer period. For an hour she stood—tall, dignified, and unsmiling, in a black evening dress and wearing a corsage of orchids presented by the congress—dealing with the sheaf of questions given to her by Jack McMichael. “The nation probably has not seen in all of its history,” wrote Dewey L. Fleming in the
Baltimore Sun,
“such a debate between a President's wife and a critical, not to say hostile, auditorium full of politically minded youths of all races and creeds.”

Shouldn't the institute have passed a resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Finland, was the first question. It was from Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt who, with some other conservative critics, had been heckling the congress from the sidelines.

Eleanor had always been very careful not to impose her views on the congress. Her reply was double-edged: “No. I don't think you should go on record for anything you don't believe in—however, I think it is only fair to say that I do not think you fully understand some of the history underlying many situations in Europe, the Far East, and other places in the world.”