Eleanor and Franklin (133 page)

There was a stir of dissent and an answering movement of approval.
She cut both short almost sternly: “I want you neither to clap nor hiss until I have finished and then you may do whichever you like.” Aware that many in her audience wondered why so much solicitude was being shown for “poor little Finland” by people like Herbert Hoover who had shown none for other victims of aggression, she went on: “I agree with you that a stand should have been taken when Ethiopia was attacked. I agree with you in your sympathy for Spain. I agree with you in your sympathy for China and Czechoslovakia, but I also have sympathy for Finland.”

In a remark that indicated she was aware of what was going on, one which the Youth Congress leaders decided to omit from the transcript of the “highlights” of her replies, she then said:

I know the reasons advanced to justify the Russian invasion of Finland. Some of my Communist friends have told me. But in all fairness it ought to be said there is no excuse for a big nation attacking a little nation that has not attacked the big one.

Therefore, our sympathy as a free people should be just as much with the Finnish people as it would be with any other small nation which is invaded.

A question on why the administration was cutting the budget for social legislation brought a blunt “I'll tell you why” response. That was what the people back in the localities wanted: “You will notice that even with the pared-down budget, Congress cut it further, which is an indication that you have not been busy forming public opinion in your communities, because Congress is responsive to you.”

Her most moving statement came in response to a rhetorically worded question which said “we want jobs and education in America, not an M.A. in Flanders fields.” The United States, Eleanor said, was “a very peace-loving nation. You are not the only ones who don't want war. I don't think there are many older people in this country who want war, and certainly none of us who know what war is like.” She defended the president. The audience should not forget

that we have four sons who are just the ages to go to war. Do you think that the President wants war? But nobody knows what they may face when the world is going through a cataclysm. I could agree with you right this minute that I don't want war, but I don't know what you might say under different conditions six months from now.

There was rebuke for Abbott Simon, who had criticized French treatment of the Spanish refugees. Was it fair to criticize France “when we do so little” and when, “mind you, there was a bill in Congress to bring in some children, all of whom were to be paid for, the money had been acquired, and which couldn't be passed because the people of this country wouldn't back it.” The United States was in no position to “sit in too harsh judgment on other nations.”

At the end of an hour, the audience ran out of questions. She thanked it for listening with patience and courtesy: “I am very, very fond of many of your leaders and I am sure I would like to know all of you personally,” she said on leaving. She was given a standing ovation.
¹⁶

The institute left her deeply troubled. The booing of the president had disconcerted her. Tommy was furious. When the Youth Congress leaders arrived at the White House for tea later that day she dressed them down. “How dare you insult the President of the United States?” she demanded. Later, the president sent for her, and when she marched into his study and stood before his desk, Roosevelt looked up at her and said quietly, “Thank you, Tommy.” To his wife the president, perhaps because he sensed how bad she felt, spoke consolingly. “Our youngsters are unpredictable, aren't they?” Yet indignant as she was over the lack of respect for the presidential office, she regretted the president's speech. It had been too much like a lecture and was based on the assumption his audience had no brains.
¹⁷

She had wanted the president to meet the young people and explain his point of view, to let them know his worries about the international situation and the political considerations that kept him from pushing harder for domestic legislation. Young people did not sense the mood in Congress. When Vice President Garner had told her that if Dave Lasser's Workers Alliance brought 100,000 unemployed to Washington they should be stopped by force, she had responded hotly that she would go down and join the demonstrators. The president was persuaded that if business did not provide people with jobs, government would have to get more heavily involved in business, but he also felt it would take another Depression to convince the country there was no other course. These were the considerations she had wanted the president to elaborate for the young people at the institute, but he felt they would not listen because they were under Communist influence.
¹⁸

For a few months after the institute, Eleanor, on the assumption that the leaders of the Youth Congress were susceptible to reasoned argument, gave them every chance to show where they stood. She
encouraged the large national organizations that remained in the Youth Congress to organize a liberal caucus inside the congress to fight the Communists, and found it enlightening that the officers of the congress were hostile to this caucus. She continued to help with the financing, but she also emphasized to the congress leadership that the “position of the American Youth Congress has got to be cleared up” on the Communist issue. At the request of the youth representatives who were fighting the Communists, she arranged an evening session at the White House with the president where, off the record, he might develop his thinking on many of the policies that worried young people. “He does not want it to be wholly Youth Congress, but to represent as many different groups as we can get together and whom we can trust not to go out and talk about it,” she wrote one youth leader whom she asked to submit a list of young people who should be invited.
¹⁹

The Nazis had overrun the Low Countries and were pressing their blitzkrieg into France when the president met with the group. For three hours he patiently answered every question put to him by the fifty young people seated on straight backed chairs in the State Dining Room. Though some of the questions implied that he had turned reactionary, he refused to be provoked. There were flashes of humor and occasionally the burden of his responsibilities touched his replies with sadness as he deftly sketched in the picture of a New Deal president conducting a two-front war—against Hitler and the dictators abroad and against the reactionaries at home.

The questions became repetitive. In one shape or another they reduced themselves to the plea that he should press harder for welfare legislation as a form of internal defense. And in one form or another his answer was that “merely shouting from the housetops—you cannot do it that way.” And when he was wheeled out, his cigarette holder jauntily angled, Harry Hopkins and Eleanor took up the defense of the president against the implications in so many of the questions that he did not see the needs of the nation as well as the questioners did. “After all, anybody who has watched him in the last seven years knows he is a pretty good judge of public opinion and where it is,” Hopkins noted, scarcely able to conceal his annoyance. Eleanor broke in: “A year and a half, two years ago, he said every single thing on defense that he said aloud today to individual members of Congress and gave the very same reasons . . . and the reason that he can get them today is that circumstances hit the people of the United States in the head.”
²⁰

It was extraordinary that in the midst of a grave international crisis the president of the United States was willing to devote an evening to the youth groups to explain and defend his policies. Why did he do so? Of course, he enjoyed the give and take of such a session, having for years handled the sharper, better informed questions of the White House press corps. He liked young people and had been comforted by the belief they were on his side, and it disturbed him that they should now be so distrustful and confused.
²¹
While he had questions about the Youth Congress leaders, he knew that there was widespread doubt, apprehension, and cynicism among young people who were in no way influenced by the Communists. His own sons were prepared to do their duty, but in varying degrees doubted that American involvement would have any happier outcome than it had in 1918. It grieved and worried him to see young people turn up in such large numbers at the isolationist rallies of America First. His speech calling for 50,000 planes brought a flood of telegrams, mostly favorable, but he found it striking that most of the 20 per cent who wrote in opposition were members of youth organizations or college students.

The Youth Congress leaders riding the isolationist bandwagon were not moved by the president's arguments. Eleanor had been struck by their failure to ask the president questions about his foreign policy and was subsequently outraged when at public meetings they proceeded to accuse him of wanting to send troops to Europe. At Eleanor's request Ed Flynn lent his home for a fund-raising meeting for the Youth Congress, but because they distrusted the Congress, people either did not come or refused to contribute. Unless the congress clarified its position by passing a resolution that specifically condemned aggression by Hitler and Stalin, Eleanor saw little prospect of its getting funds in the future. Again and again, before the annual meeting of the congress on July 4, she said to the leaders, “You have really got to prove at this convention that there is no outside domination.”
²²

She refused to address or even to attend that meeting, despite the pleas of the congress officers. She arranged, however, to get reports from a number of observers, including Betty Lindley, her radio agent, and Thelma McKelvey, an official of the NYA. “We definitely felt that the minds of the delegates were made up before the speeches were given,” they reported to her afterward. “We have absolutely no proof of who may or may not be communists, but there is sufficient evidence to indicate that they hold a strong place in the policy formation of the Congress.”
²³

Eleanor still did not believe that the congress officials were Communists, but the resolutions and speeches at the Geneva meeting were along Communist lines and were exploited by Communist groups. She refused to go along with defeatist groups, and when she saw the Youth Congress leaders she advised them to read the section of
Mein Kampf
in which Hitler gave his methods of sowing dissension in the democracies.

To Dorothy Schiff Backer, a friendly newspaper publisher who before the Geneva congress had sent her an analysis made by Oliver Pilat of political alignments in the cabinet of the Youth Congress (David Dubinsky had sent her similar information), she had replied, “I do not feel that any one of them are permanently communists and I feel that I should cooperate in helping them solve the questions which really matter to them, because that is what will determine what they think and feel in the future.” After the Geneva meeting, however, she no longer felt she could cooperate with the congress. “Whatever the reasons,” she wrote congress leaders, “some of the resolutions you passed have a close affiliation with communist ideas and it does lay you open to being considered more or less organized and dominated by the communists.” But she still continued to see its leaders privately. She was genuinely fond of them, and, moreover, profoundly believed in the redemptive power of trust and love.
²⁴

Until the Geneva conference, Eleanor had hoped that the non-Communist group in the congress might prevail. She hoped the congress might be salvaged because in a time of crisis she considered it essential that youth's voice be heard. But as she faced up to the implications of Geneva and as the Youth Congress settled into a “Yanks-are-not-coming” isolationism, which, except for its pro-Soviet bias, was as rancorous and absolute as that of America First, she shifted her support to the International Student Service, which, with her blessing, reshaped its program in order to assist young people who were looking for an alternative to the Youth Congress and American Student Union.

There were too many constructive things to be done to waste any more time on the American Youth Congress, she replied to questions about her relationship to it. “I don't think their present attitude is constructive and I don't have time if I do not think a movement is constructive, to work in it.” She was now totally out of patience with the evasions of its leaders; they never spoke to her about Russia, she noted, but said only that they were followers of John L. Lewis. When the congress sent her its 1940 Armistice Day peace proclamation, she
fired back a query: How did it reconcile opposition to aid to England on grounds that it would involve us in war while at the same time urging aid to China? “If conscription for one year is weakening and undemocratic here,” she went on, “what do you think of Russia's conscript army [three years]?” In December the congress announced preparations for another Washington pilgrimage in February, 1941. They should expect no help from her, Eleanor wrote them:

I have been thinking a great deal about my own position in all this lately, because while I believe in the complete sincerity of you, and while I respect the way in which you work for your convictions, and therefore feel no differently personally toward any of you than I ever have, still I find myself in complete disagreement with your political philosophy, and therefore with the leadership which you at present represent in the youth movement. I do not think that you represent the majority of youth, but I do think you have a right to try to further your ideas and to express your opinions and you should be heard in every gathering. However, when I do not agree with you, I also have an obligation not to help you and not to appear to agree with you.
²⁵

In June, 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, and two months later the secretary of the Youth Congress wrote the president. “It has been some time since we have had the privilege of talking with you about our program and activities,” the letter blandly started. The Youth Congress had several ideas on how to combat the “appeasement” forces at work in the United States and which were holding back the “strong anti-Hitler sentiment of our generation.” They asked to see the president. Pa Watson attached a yellow slip to this letter on which his secretary typed, “Respectfully referred to Mrs. Roosevelt.” Mrs. Roosevelt sent it back with a white slip, “My advice to you is simply to say that the President is too busy.” The Youth Congress wanted her help, too, for an anti-Hitler youth conference in London. When she refused, they wrote back that she was “badly misinformed” about their views. They regretted their lack of an opportunity personally to tell her about their activities. “You seem to have forgotten,” she replied, “conversations all of you had with me in the summer of 1940, and therefore do not realize the effect that your convention attitude of 1941, and the changed position you had taken since the invasion of Russia has had on me.”
²⁶