The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (63 page)
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Authors: Eleanor Roosevelt
I can think of nothing more foolish than looking at the Russian scientific achievements and saying that we must rush to catch up with them by resorting to their methods. We have always said that our objectives were those that could be achieved only by a free people. Why should a free people slavishly follow a Communist lead? We must develop all our resources in our own way. We want our people to decide whether their children shall go to school, whether they shall be scientists or playwrights or mechanics. We don’t want to be told what to do. What the world wants today is leadership in the true sense, and we had better decide what we want to achieve and then go ahead and do it as leaders and not as imitators.
The only thing that frightened me in Russia was that we might be apathetic and complacent in the face of this challenge. I can well understand why the Russian people welcome the good that has come to them. But I cannot understand or believe that anything that has to be preserved by fear will stand permanently against a system which offers love and trust among peoples and removes fear so that all feel free to think and express their ideas.
It seems to me that we must have the courage to face ourselves in this crisis. We must regain a vision of ourselves as leaders of the world. We must join in an effort to use all knowledge for the good of all human beings.
When we do that we shall have nothing to fear.
FOR SOME TIME
my children and my friends have been warning me that I must slow down. They tell me that I am working too hard, seeing too many people, undertaking too many activities; that my interests seem to proliferate rather than to narrow. Which is certainly true.
I am willing to slow down but I just don’t know how. Even when I am aware that people have used my time unjustifiably, I find myself interested in them. Even when a new project makes demands on my already crowded schedule, I find it difficult to reject it, so long as it serves a useful purpose. But I do feel that I am too old now to undertake any course of action or embark on foreign travel unless I am convinced that it will, in some way, be useful.
I had been much troubled by my first visit to Russia, where I had spent nearly a month visiting institutions of many sorts, and had concluded by having a three-hour interview with Mr. Khrushchev. The more I thought of that visit and the conclusions I had drawn from it the more troubled I was. What seemed most frightening about the conditions I found in Russia, the trends I discerned, the possibilities I envisioned, was that the people of the United States appeared not to have the slightest grasp of their meaning in terms of our own future.
Basic in all this was the impression I had gathered from watching the training—or rather the conditioning—of children in the Soviet Union into disciplined, amenable citizens, prepared to obey any orders given them and incapable of revolt. To return to the United States after that trip and hear people talk blithely of the possibility of the Russian people’s rising up against their government (a situation made inconceivable by their conditioning from babyhood) or changing their attitude toward us (when every source of information is filtered through government hands) was more than disturbing. It was alarming. It meant that we were facing the greatest challenge our way of life has ever had to meet without any clear understanding of the facts.
There is in most people, at most times, a proneness to give more credence to pleasant news than to unpleasant, to hope that, somehow or other, things “will come out all right.” But this was not the frame of mind that created the United States and made it not only a great nation but a symbol of a way of life that became the hope of the world. One can fight a danger only when one is armed with solid facts and spurred on by an unwavering faith and determination.
So, when Dr. Gurewitsch decided, a year after the first trip to Russia, that he would like to go back and see whether he could learn the answer to some questions in regard to physical medicine, I was eager to return to the Soviet Union and, on a second visit, without the distraction of strange first impressions, find out for myself whether my first conclusions had been sound.
Dr. Gurewitsch, his wife Edna, and I started our tour, in 1958, by attending a meeting of the United Nations Associations which was being held in Brussels because of the World’s Fair.
The theme of the Brussels Exposition was “Better Living for the People Today,” and on the whole I did not feel that it was as effective as it should have been. A great many people criticized our building, which annoyed me very much, as I thought it was beautiful and the layout of the landscaping was unusually fine. Inside, however, the exhibitions were not well arranged, and the mechanical displays were not working.
One of the most popular, though unplanned, features of our exhibit was the appearance there of Harry Belafonte. He had a great personal success, and his presence was most valuable as an answer to much of the criticism of the Americans on their attitude toward colored people.
The Russian exhibit was monumental. It can be summed up as marching, marching, marching, piled on marching. Pictures of young Russians marching to school, marching to factories, marching with the army, all looking young, healthy and vigorous. To most people from the Western countries that much marching is supremely dull. They had, I remember, a cyclorama which lasted for an hour and a half (with more marching, of course), but which was less interesting and less informative than the one produced by the Americans, which lasted only twenty minutes.
How much ultimate value this kind of exhibit had, either for the Russians or for us, I have no way of knowing. My own over-all impression was that the Russian exhibit gave an effect of enormous power and drive; but, though they displayed the best they had to offer to the best advantage, it was not good enough to match what we have. On the other hand, I felt that here again we had not used, in the best possible way, an opportunity to show the peoples of the world what the United States is all about.
One of the most pleasant episodes during my visit to Brussels was a luncheon with Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, whom I liked very much.
Queen Elizabeth is a musician and an artist. She paints, she does sculpture, she plays several instruments. In addition, she is a woman who plants gardens. But I think the loveliest thing about her is that she is really concerned about people. Of course, being a queen, she is cut off from people in many ways so that her approach is necessarily unrealistic, but she really wants to learn. She has a beautiful soul and a longing to be of service to humanity. She gives with great generosity, not only with her head but with her heart.
From Belgium we flew to the Soviet Union. The first five days of our visit were given up to the activities of the Soviet Association of the United Nations, which had invited all of our delegation to be its guests. This meant that we would have only a little over two weeks for the work we wanted to do and therefore we decided to concentrate on Moscow and Leningrad.
As soon as we ceased to be the guests of the United Nations, I was simply a private tourist visitor, but I had no trouble in making appointments with any department or in seeing anything I asked to see.
I did not try to see Mr. Khrushchev on this visit. I felt that he had had a great many American visitors and must have all the information he needed about us. Certainly, he had had plentiful opportunity to receive reports from those who had interviewed him.
My main object was to try to find out how many emotionally disturbed children there are in the Soviet Union and what treatment is being provided for them. The Russian answer to the problem of emotionally disturbed children lies, primarily, in their type of discipline, or conditioning of all children. They begin, as I have said before, when the child is two months old, and by the time he is seven years old the child is completely regimented. The Soviet children have little or no desire for freedom. Their conditioning and training has been carefully thought out to prevent deviation of any kind, on any level, from birth to death.
This conditioning provides, too, for the development of what one might call “safe leadership,” that is, leadership within certain carefully prescribed limits.
For instance, each school class elects its president, at the age of seven years. The classes for this age group average about forty pupils. The little president marches his class into the schoolroom and tells when to get up and leave. He passes them on to two children from an older grade who see them safely out of the building. Then this little boy returns to help the teacher tidy up the schoolroom.
“How,” I asked the teachers, over and over, “can you detect an emotionally disturbed child?”
They were disgusted. “Any deviation in behavior is reported immediately,” they told me.
This uniformity in behavior and in response is, it seems to me, the factor which Americans fail almost entirely to understand, either in its essence or in its potentialities. This large-scale conditioning of human beings is something so new in the world that we cannot grasp it.
I should think that it would destroy initiative completely, but though I have frequently asked them, no psychologist can tell me what the results of this gigantic experiment with human beings will be.
On my first visit I had watched the training of small babies. On this trip I studied the older children, their training, their discipline, their complete absorption by the Communist system.
Whatever else a child’s life in Russia may be, it is not easy. Indeed, life is easy for no one there. The children work in school from 8:45 until 1:45. If they have anyone at home, they return for a hot meal. Otherwise, this is provided by the school. For the next two hours, in the Pioneer Youth Home or room, they have exercises, supervised games, and are drilled in Marxism. Every child learns his Marxism backwards and forwards. By the time he leaves school he is prepared to take not only his skills but his political ideas with him wherever he may be sent, to whatever part of the world.
For another two hours there are outdoor games, also supervised. The Russian child is never alone. And when the school day ends he is assigned far more homework than falls to the lot of the American child.
As a part of the Pioneer Youth Movement, every big city provides a “children’s palace,” where the children go twice a week for two hours of various types of training and entertainment. This includes such diverse things as lectures on outer space, chess playing, storytelling, dancing and singing, and the development of handicrafts.
The one I visited was in Leningrad. The equipment was excellent and the shop equipment for training in manual arts was as good as or better than that in our own trade schools. And, of course, during the lectures or the games the training in Marxism is continued.
In the light of this standardized training, which is much the same whether one lives in Moscow or in a remote village, it is easier to understand why the teachers could tell me so promptly that “any deviation in behavior is reported immediately.”
Madame Muravyeva, who was in charge of social service for the Soviet Union, told me that every schoolteacher is trained to watch for signs of physical, mental or emotional disturbance. Where such disturbances seem to be a result of home conditions, the social services work to improve these conditions. Where more drastic efforts are needed, the child is sent to a sanitarium, where, the minister of health told me, preventive therapy is used.
I was told that inadequate housing in the big cities, bad relations between parents, and undesirable conditions caused by heavy drinking could create emotional disturbances in the young.
After sitting through many classes in schools and visiting many more, I came back believing that the Russians have fewer emotionally disturbed children than we do and less of a problem with juvenile delinquency, particularly in the early years. Their problem comes primarily with those young people who go into the technicons, a type of technical school, at fourteen, because they are judged not capable of higher education. Therefore, at seventeen they are ready to take a job and suddenly, after having had every moment of the time planned and occupied, except for the hours when they work, they are free, their own masters, with their own money.
It is a heady thing to be given freedom all of a sudden, even the limited kind in the Soviet Union. So this, inevitably, creates a problem. These are the youngsters who, Mr. Khrushchev says, behave like our zoot-suit youngsters and create a problem by heavy drinking.
Those who attend technicons are much the biggest group of the young in Russia. As in any country, there is a large percentage which cannot profitably be educated beyond a certain point. In Russia, however, the search for talent, for the exceptionally bright, for the artistically endowed or the scientifically minded goes on constantly, and such exceptional youngsters are provided with every opportunity to improve their talents, increase their learning, and acquire as much education as they can absorb.
There is no fear of eggheads in Russia. They know that the speedy development of the country, which has already grown in forty years from one of the most backward to one of the most modern nations, can be achieved only by using every scrap of talent, every scrap of brains and ability they have.
I do not mean that these talented youngsters are indulged. Far from it. I visited an art school in Moscow where children talented in painting and in sculpture are given the best possible tools to work with and every opportunity to learn. But their life is Spartan. Their beds are probably completely hygienic but they are far from comfortable. Their food is sufficient to sustain life but drab as diet. The cold, even in September, in the building where they live and work, struck us as we thought of what the winters must be like. Yet these children range in age from only eight to seventeen.
The corridors were lined with examples of their work and I was much interested in inspecting them. I found that what the very young did was fresh and interesting. But it seemed to me that, as they grew older, they became more imitative under their training. This was particularly accentuated in the field of sculpture. When I went to the class for seventeen-year-old boys and girls I felt that both the concept and the execution of practically all their work was stereotyped, tied to the past of the classical tradition, but with little individual expression or feeling for modern forms of development.
