The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (64 page)

Naturally, it is a great benefit to the talented young to be afforded every opportunity to develop their skills to their utmost. Russia is the only country which, next to its politicians and scientists, pays its highest salaries and gives its highest honor to its artists and its intellectuals.

But, while the salary may be higher and the recognition greater, in some basic ways the restrictions of life in Russia are the same, whether one is at the top or at the bottom of the scale. One rule seems to hold true: there is practically no privacy in Russia.

The number of rooms you are allowed to have in an apartment depends on the number of people who are to live in it. If there are four people, there are only two rooms. On the other hand, whether you are allotted six rooms or two rooms, your rent is still only 1 per cent of your income.

Before I left New York on this second trip to Russia, a letter appeared in the
New York Times
, written by a Russian woman who challenged the paper to publish it. She wrote that she wanted to hear from American women. Russia wanted peace, she said, and we did not. What were American women doing about it? She asked foreigners to come and see her, to discover for themselves how people lived in Russia.

At the request of the
New York Times
I answered her letter, and while we were in Leningrad we went to visit her. She lived in a new house on the outskirts of Leningrad, up five flights of stairs. There was an elevator but it never ran. She welcomed us, tremendously proud of her apartment, which, from her standpoint and that of most of her fellow countrymen, was palatial.

She had five children under twelve years of age, and the son went to a boarding school but came home for weekends. She was allowed three rooms, a bathroom, and a big kitchen. This meant that the smallest boy slept in the room with his mother and father, the two girls had a bedroom, and the two older boys slept in a room which served also as dining room and living room.

Her letter, I feel sure, had been supervised and approved by the government. To her delight it had brought her a number of answers, about three hundred, I think. Some of her other correspondents had come to see her, as we did.

We found her very friendly—indeed, most Russians are personally friendly to Americans—but nothing could shake her conviction that we, as a nation, threatened Russia and wanted war. Before the end of our visit, I think we had convinced her that we ourselves did not want war, but she still believed firmly that the United States did.

Why did our country have bases? she asked. We were ringing Russia round with bases. Which, of course, is true. But that Russia could conceivably constitute a warlike threat she brushed aside as nonsense, as hostile foreign propaganda.

When we left Leningrad we were touched to find that she had bothered to come to the train, in the middle of the night, to see us off.

The visit left us with a blank feeling of failure. There was no personal hostility between us. None at all. But there was an unshaken conviction that the United States not only threatens but actually desires and seeks war. Here we are, equipped with the best communications in the world, and yet we have not learned how to use them in a way that can reach people.

The friendliness of these people, always apart from the political bias in which they have been conditioned, is astonishing. I have noticed, over and over, when they come to the United States, even if they have met you only most briefly before, they greet you as though you were a long-lost friend, almost appealing for affection.

At one time the National Council of Women arranged, through the State Department, for two Russian women to visit the United States. A group of us raised the money for the trip, hoping that if they could see for themselves something of American life and the American temper it would give them something new to tell their people on their return.

These women lived here in private homes and were free of supervision by their own government, and, naturally, by ours, while they were in this country. I cannot believe that the visit was wasted. The more such visits are sponsored the better it will be for us because, if we continue to fail to tell our story convincingly abroad, at least the evidence is here at home without the telling.

All this is a digression from the problem of emotional disturbance. We visited the Pavlov Institute, and watched the training of various types of animals. The most interesting, of course, were the monkeys but we were warned not to get too close to the cage of the big ones, particularly if they did not happen to be good-tempered at the time. We also saw dogs being trained and being experimented with in many ways. It was not difficult to see how, out of this conditioning of animals, could come the theory of the conditioning of children. We also visited institutions where children who were handicapped by illness or some infirmity were spending the summer months, and where the care was excellent.

Then we went to a hospital where people are diagnosed. Anyone who thinks that he needs help can go to a clinic. If he can cope with his problem without going to a hospital, that is fine. Otherwise, he is treated in the hospital. This place cares for those threatened with mental and emotional disturbances and provides aftercare when they have returned to their normal lives.

The interesting thing is that there appeared to be no lack of man power for nursing in the Soviet Union. Here we are lucky if one nurse has only forty patients. In the Soviet Union one nurse had no more than four patients and a really disturbed person gets almost constant attention. This is possible because all the women in Russia are mobilized.

Of course, with the modern drugs the change in the mental hospitals is very great. We did see one room where patients were still given shock treatment, but this method of therapy is gradually disappearing.

There is a shortage of some of the new drugs in the Soviet Union. I do not know how serious this may be but, of course, it would make a difference in the treatment. In the particular hospital which I visited I saw very few badly disturbed people. I remember one young girl who had come in, thinking she had a monkey in her stomach. The nurse never left her for a minute.

I returned from Russia late in the fall of 1958 and attempted after my second visit to balance my impressions against those of my first one.

What stood out most sharply were the changes. The year before, there had been only trucks on the road. Now there were a large number of small cars and a considerable number of larger cars, all of them of Russian make.

The year before, my first impression as our plane circled Moscow, had been of the number of cranes where new building was going on. This time I found a number of new apartment houses had been built and the city was expanding. There were apartment buildings going up to house two million people.

The year before, the people had appeared to be uniformly drab. Clothing was not important in the economy, so the people had to do with what was provided. This time they were much better dressed. The expression on their faces when we saw them at the end of the day’s work was happier, less anxious than it had been when they were closer to the Stalin regime.

On the whole, however, the second visit intensified the basic impressions of the first.

Today the Russian people are well disciplined, amenable to direction, healthy and determined to build a place in the sun for themselves and for their country. In our thinking about them we must remember how the situation looks from
their
point of view.

They have no freedom, we say. But they never had freedom, so they do not miss it. Forty years ago they not only had no freedom they had no education, they had no health care, they had no hope of bettering their condition.

For them what has happened has been, on the whole, of great value.

And farther on there is China, 600 million people who, in eight years, have come even faster along the road to modernization—and indoctrination—than the Soviets had done in the first eight years after the revolution. Yet the only way we have found to cope with this growing danger, this mushrooming threat, is to ignore their political existence, by which they lose face and feel bitterness; and to refuse to trade with them, by which we force them to build up their own ability to produce the very things they might buy from us, thus acting as a spur to their industrialization. Surely there is no framework for building world peace and understanding through these methods.

Today we are one of the oldest governments in existence; ours has been the position for leadership, for setting the pattern of behavior. And yet we are supinely putting ourselves in the position of leaving the leadership to the Russians, of following their ideas rather than our own. For instance, when the Russians set up a restriction on what visitors to the country may be allowed to see, we promptly do the same thing here, in retaliation. Whenever we behave in this manner we are copying the methods of dictatorship and making a hollow boast of our claim that this country loves freedom for all. We owe it to ourselves and to the world, to our own dignity and self-respect, to set our own standards of behavior, regardless of what other nations do.

I came back from that second trip to Russia convinced that any talk of an uprising of the people against their government was baseless nonsense. But I came back believing more profoundly than before that, by practicing what we preach, putting democracy to work up to the very hilt, showing the world that our way of life has the most to offer the men and women and children of all countries, we could regain our lost leadership. Against those mindless millions we can oppose the unleashed strength of free men, for only in freedom can a man function completely.

Forty
    

The American Dream

IF THAT SECOND
trip to Russia aroused deep misgivings in my mind about the efficacy of the methods we have used in recent years in meeting the Soviet challenge, a journey which I made in 1958 to Morocco and another in the spring of 1959 to the Near East made me feel that we must think through once more our whole approach to world problems.

When I visited Morocco in 1958, the King kindly sent an aide with us and we were allowed to travel through the northern part of the country. This was the first opportunity I had had to see for myself the difficulties that arise in the transition stage between colonialism and independence. The troubles that Morocco was encountering were, it seemed to me, fairly typical of the basic difficulties of all young nations in transition.

As the French withdrew from the country, taking their nationals along, the villages found themselves stripped of teachers and doctors. Countless villages were without a single person trained to give medical assistance. The Moroccans were not yet prepared to replace the doctors, the teachers, and the service employees with their own men. It may be decades before they are ready to do so. Where, then, are the necessary people to come from? I’d like to go into this a little more thoroughly later on, because I feel in that answer lies the key, or one of the major keys, to the future.

As though this acute shortage of trained men were not enough, a severe drought had cut down the food supply drastically. The United States, through church organizations, had sent a considerable amount of food to alleviate the greatest need, but conditions were still bad.

Another, and unforeseen, difficulty was that the Moroccans had established markets, which are held on different days in different towns. With this new system they abolished the middleman, who was usually Jewish. This meant that Morocco found itself with a number of people who had no longer any way of making a living.

The great problem seems to be that, while people may be able to fight successfully for freedom, they may not yet be prepared to set up a stable and functioning independent government. The French pulled out, but the Moroccans had no one to replace them. They were totally unprepared for self-government. They were, in fact, much worse off than they had been a year before.

Today this is happening in a more drastic form in the Congo with the withdrawal of the Belgians. The time for colonization has, perhaps, gone forever, but some intermediate transition system is essential if chaos is not to follow.

A recent Afro-Asian resolution in the UN reveals the difficulty of the position by these words: “Inadequacy of political, economic, social or cultural preparedness” shall not serve as a pretext for denying independence. Now, we cannot deny that such a pretext has often been used in denying the right of self-determination. But it cannot be denied, either, that without some basic qualifications, self-determination will lead to self-destruction.

The visit, which I made with my granddaughter Nina in the spring of 1959, was very brief: one week in Israel, two weeks in Iran, with stopovers in Paris and London.

In Soviet Russia one is in a country where a way of life, a political and economic philosophy, has crystallized. In the Near East the situation is different, the fluctuating and uncertain position of young countries which are in transition from the ways of the past to those of the future, with no certain path to tread and with the ultimate goal still obscure. That is becoming the situation of an increasing number of infant nations as they shake off the fetters of colonialism, or of ancient laws and customs, and grope for their own place in the sun. And what that goal is to be, what kind of place they are to occupy, what political philosophy they will choose in the long run, will depend in great part on how we, in this country, prepare to meet the challenge.

Is what we are doing good enough? Have the changes that have revealed themselves in recent years, particularly in Africa and the Near East and the Latin-American countries, shown overwhelming evidence that we are doing an intelligent job, an adequate job? I am afraid not. Genuinely afraid.

To me, the democratic system represents man’s best and brightest hope of self-fulfillment, of a life rich in promise and free from fear; the one hope, perhaps, for the complete development of the whole man. But I know, and learn more clearly every day, that we cannot keep our system strong and free by neglect, by taking it for granted, by giving it our second-best attention. We must be prepared, like the suitor in
The Merchant of Venice
—and, I might point out, the successful suitor—to give and hazard all we have.