Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  * “Mrs. Roosevelt?” an old-time resident of Warm Springs remarked to a New York Times reporter on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, “well, she was what you’d call a Negro lover, wasn’t she?” (New York Times, April 13, 1970).

  † Chapman’s version differs slightly from White’s.37 The Negro leader proposed that Miss Anderson sing in Lafayette Park, and when Chapman said the park did not lend itself to a concert, White asked, “What can you do?” Had he given any thought to the effect it might have “if we used Lincoln Memorial on Easter?”

  “Oh, my God,” White responded with fervor. “If we could have her sing at the feet of Lincoln!”

  Chapman said he would check into the legal position. He called in Felix S. Cohen, assistant to the solicitor, a brilliant lawyer. What would be the legal obstacles if the secretary should allow Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial?

  “I haven’t briefed it, but I would gamble my reputation that there is nothing that stands in your way except courage.”

  “That’s all I want to know. I’m going to see the Secretary. Do a little briefing in case we run into trouble from the Park Service.”

  45.THE YOUTH MOVEMENT

  “I HAVE MOMENTS OF REAL TERROR,” ELEANOR SAID IN MAY, 1934, “when I think we may be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.”1

  Harry Hopkins shared this sense of urgency. At a dinner at the White House Eleanor had noted gratefully his rejoinder to one of Franklin’s advisers who had cautioned that a certain relief approach be “tried out very slowly.” “Well, but I’ve got 10,000,000 unemployed to take care of,” Harry objected. And one out of every four, perhaps one out of every three, of these unemployed, it was believed, were young people under twenty-five.2

  In 1933 Eleanor had pressed Harry to develop “some kind of definite program” for this group, and in March, 1934, was after him again: “The youth of the country is still very much on my mind.” One of Roosevelt’s first actions during the “hundred days” had been the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps, but while Eleanor considered the reforestation camps a successful experiment, she was groping for a broader solution. She believed in the concept of universal youth service, of which the CCC might be the germ, but she did not like to see the camps administered by the Army. Of course, those who thought that the trouble with the young was that they lacked discipline and initiative—and this view was almost as prevalent in the thirties as in the sixties—considered the Army’s involvement the best feature of the program. Compulsory training under the Army, one woman wrote Eleanor, would eliminate feminine neuroses and straighten out the “hitch-hikers . . . loafers . . . racketeers and that vast army of lazy men who really do not WANT to work.” But Eleanor, who felt that the adult world, not youth, was to blame for the economic disaster that had befallen the nation, rejected this view, fearing that it was impossible “to give military training without having a trend toward using armies for military purposes.”3

  She saw universal youth service as a substitute for war, a way to satisfy “certain things for which youth craves—the chance for self-sacrifice for an ideal”—which war had furnished in the past.4

  She was attracted to the plan Prestonia Mann Martin presented in Prohibiting Poverty because the Young Workers Corps suggested by Mrs. Martin provided a way in which to enlist the energies and enthusiasm of America’s youth for national purposes that, unlike the labor youth battalions of Hitler and Mussolini, would be neither militaristic nor nationalistic. Henry Goddard Leach, publisher of the Forum, turned to Eleanor for a “precept” that would pull together the youth of America—student, CCC recruit, Girl Scout, “reds, pinks and white”—in the way the five-year plan kept Russian youth “whistling and active all day” and “racial purity” had German youth “marching through the streets . . . in a glow of high idealism.”

  The need for a creative formula was very much on her mind, Eleanor replied. Young people had to feel when they left school that they were of use somewhere: “I think we could start out and make them the producers of the necessities of life during the first two or three years and in return give them their living and a training of some kind which they can use later in earning a living.” She would like to see them enlisted in a crusade for social justice, and, most important of all, shouldn’t they themselves to be encouraged to formulate “what they think would be a fair deal all around as well as a new deal?”5

  By May, 1934, her thinking had begun to crystallize. The problem of young people who were both out of school and out of work was not going to disappear, she feared, not even with economic recovery. She noted predictions that a hard core of five million unemployed would always remain, with the consequence that at least a million young people who left school each year would be jobless. “Now what are you going to say to our youth who are not wanted in industry? We have no plans for you! We offer you nothing, we simply restrict your activities. . . . I would like to see us institute a volunteer service to the country open to both boys and girls.” She envisaged a two-year enlistment, with the volunteers, like the CCC boys, housed in camps and paid on the same basis, but put to work in the communities at public-service employment, in government jobs (“which would be better done if the personnel could be increased”), and in nonprofit-making organizations such as hospitals, settlement houses, schools and colleges, and libraries. The program would cost the country money, she conceded, but so did the idleness of young people in the form of vandalism and crime and increased expenditures on jails, asylums, and hospitals.

  Here was the germ of the National Youth Administration. But Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams had to be sold on it, Franklin had to be persuaded, public opinion had to be educated, and young people had to be involved in shaping the program. In particular, she wanted young people to speak up. Although she declined an invitation to sponsor a magazine called Modern Youth because she thought it a little too flamboyant for the First Lady to endorse, she thought that there was “no question but what a forum is necessary” where young people could express themselves and clarify their thinking. One way to overcome the estrangement of young people from their elders and the society they had created, as she had suggested to Henry Leach, was to involve them in the search for a solution.

  As honorary chairman of the Mobilization for Human Needs, the nation-wide community-chest drive that took place in the autumn, Eleanor was distressed to hear Newton D. Baker suggest at the Mobilization’s 1934 conference that there were many places where young people today could earn a living if they had initiative and spirit. “I confess that my own imagination has been extremely lacking in the last few months!” she wrote him afterward. “If you have any convincing suggestions as to how to stimulate the imagination of young people and how to direct their energies, I shall be more than grateful. My mail is filled with pleas for help.” Baker took refuge in a lawyer’s argument: “I am afraid your question is unanswerable. The boys who have to be helped with suggestions are just the ones who have not the initiative to make a place for themselves even when the benches all seem full.”6

  She refused to indict the young: “a civilization which does not provide young people with a way to earn a living is pretty poor” was her view.7 She attended a mobilization meeting whose sponsors wanted to educate the public as to the value of such organizations as the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls, and the YMCA and YWCA, all of which were having trouble raising money during the Depression.

  Twenty-five youthful representatives of these organizations were seated on a platform, and a selected audience of three hundred adults heard them discuss the problems they were facing and asked them questions. As Eleanor listened she became “more and more uncomfortable. It was perfectly evident that the young people hadn’t really had a chance to argue things out. Their ideas were, many of them, very half-baked.” It was equally evident to her that many of the
older people who should have been sympathetic and understanding were quick to leap on the young people. “Well, I haven’t any patience with you young people,” one of them said. “You are afraid of life. Why of course you can get jobs if you want jobs.”8

  If they wanted to meet with her and go on with the discussion, she told the young people afterward, she would be happy to make available the Sixty-fifth Street house in New York for that purpose and also to help them contact some sympathetic adults who might be of use in thinking things through. They accepted. “We met once a month and I brought all kinds of people up from Washington.” The group included representatives of the Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls, the Y’s, a rabbinical student, and even a young Communist who truculently refused to accept her offer of tea. At the very first meeting members of the group challenged her about the discrepancy between the code of ethics they were taught in school, church, and home and their daily observation that grownups and the business world did not live by that code. “We want our young people to have these beautiful ideals,” Eleanor commented as she recalled the exchange. “The only way for them to have them and keep them is for us to have lived by them but we haven’t made a world in which it is very easy to live by them.” The group had a little difficulty in deciding what it wanted to discuss, but by the second meeting it had adopted the suggestion of John Lang, the representative of the National Student Federation of America, that discussion should focus on “What the Federal Government Can Do to Establish a Youth Service Unit.” This fitted in with Eleanor’s thinking.9

  All through 1934 the Office of Education had been holding conferences, preparing studies, and making reports on what the federal government might do, but with the cautiousness that was characteristic of entrenched federal bureaucrats, it moved at a snail’s pace. “I am really concerned about our youth problems over here,” Eleanor wrote Florence Willert in England early in 1934. “So many young people get to the age when they want to work and marry and cannot find any work to do. We are trying all sorts of things but I do not feel that we have gotten very far.”10

  The president was in no hurry to move beyond the CCC in having the government subsidize youth employment and training. When Eleanor handed him a report on youth joblessness to read during a trip down the Potomac he shrugged it off, handing it to his naval aide to read. The dismissive gesture may have reflected a burdened man’s wish to be permitted to relax, but Fulton Oursler witnessed a heated exchange during a dinner at the White House which indicated that the president’s impatience also reflected uncertainty over what the government’s youth policies should be. The president, as he sometimes did when he was undecided as to what course to pursue, baited Eleanor. She hated to bring up business, she said to Franklin, but nowadays she had only “chance opportunities like these” to talk with him seriously.

  “We are going to fix a regular time—in the morning,” Franklin interrupted her with a smile at the Ourslers.

  She had been talking with young people who represented the youth movement, Eleanor said, referring to the group that had been meeting at the Sixty-fifth Street house.

  “What do they want?”

  “They want jobs.”

  “They—and who else?” countered the president.

  Eleanor reported what she sensed of the impatience of the young people with the older generation. He should listen to Charles Taussig on the subject, she suggested.

  “Is he an American youth?” the president heckled her, knowing full well that Taussig was president of the American Molasses Company and a New Deal supporter. “He is your friend,” Eleanor came back.

  There was no young people’s problem, Franklin said, starting another tack; there was only the problem of the whole people. “Another delegation could come to you, representing men over 40 who can’t get jobs. . . . Such movements as a youth movement seem to be especially unnecessary.” Well, what then would he do about jobs for them?

  “They can join our CCC camps.”

  “The CCC is too militaristic.”

  This outraged Franklin. “It’s the last thing in the world it really is.”

  “Well, after all, my dear, it is under the supervision of the Army.”

  “That does not make it militaristic.”

  The education in the CCC camps was not worthy of the name, Eleanor insisted, and the only job training the boys received was in forestry.

  What can they be trained for? Franklin broke in—“brick layers?” Did she know how many unemployed bricklayers there were? “The CCC boys could be taught something useful,” she insisted. Their teachers were terrible, and with all the unemployed teachers, the CCC could have its pick. Eleanor returned to her suggestion that he should meet with a group of young people. He balked. He would not do so unless they had something concrete to propose.

  “They propose, as I told you, to have jobs!”

  Eleanor shifted to the political argument. The young people would soon be voters; Hearst knew that, and he was cultivating the college editors. Franklin relaxed. “There is a great deal to what you say. Tell your friends I shall be glad to consider the matter.” Her husband was “a practical politician,” she later said.11 If other arguments failed, he was always sensitive to the “purely political” argument.

  “And will you see them?” she pressed home.

  At this point, commented Oursler, “President Roosevelt winked at his wife.”12

  Public opinion was crystallizing. David I. Walsh, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Education, called upon Secretary Perkins to report on the extent of youth unemployment and what government should do about it. There were no accurate statistics, Madam Perkins informed the Senate, but estimates placed the number of out-of-school, out-of-work young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty at 3,300,000 to 3,363,000. The Labor Department recommended that some $85 million be allotted from relief funds to provide jobs for young people, that needy students be given stipends and that a few experimental camps be set up.13

  This is what the president did a few months later when by executive order he established the National Youth Administration and allotted $50 million out of relief funds for the program. Hopkins and Williams had been reluctant to present the proposal to the president because a youth agency in the government might have had political repercussions. “We do not know that the country will accept it,” they told Eleanor, and they did not even wish to ask the president and put him in the position of saying yes or no. She would present the proposition to him, she said, and find out how he really felt. She did so one evening when she went into his bedroom to say good night.

  “Do you think it is right to do this?” Franklin asked her. It would be helpful to young people, she replied, but he should also be aware of Harry’s and Aubrey’s fears that it might boomerang politically and raise the cry that he was trying to regiment America’s youth the way Germany was doing. “If it is the right thing to do for the young people,” Eleanor recalled his saying, “then it should be done. I guess we can stand the criticism, and I doubt if our youth can be regimented in this way or in any other way.”14 That was another side of him. He was not only the politician.

  NYA was close to Eleanor’s heart. She defended it against the old-line agencies, especially the Office of Education, which wanted to take it over. “The teachers of the country have always felt that education should be administered through the Office of Education,” a Richmond school official wrote her. The NYA was primarily a relief, not an educational, project, she replied, with incidental benefits to education. This was true, but her fundamental reason for keeping the new program out of the hands of the settled agencies was the need she felt for swift and venturesome action. Even Aubrey Williams, who headed up the NYA and was as hot-blooded a New Dealer as any in Washington, did not satisfy her sense of urgency. “Too late!” was her comment on a memorandum he sent her setting forth the need to concentrate on a training program for out-of-school young people instead of simply providing work jobs, as the
initial NYA program did. As he chose his state directors, Williams sent the names to her, and he also sent over monthly reports on the status of youth work projects. These elicited such queries as “What has been done about the Juvenile Court at Jonesboro, Arkansas?” “Have projects now been approved for Virginia and New Jersey, as well as California?” “Was the Oregon library project accepted or not?” “How has the vocational guidance program developed?”15

  A Tulsa school official complained about the multiplicity of forms the schools were required to fill out in connection with the NYA wages being paid to high-school students, and Eleanor asked Williams if they could be simplified. He agreed vehemently: “The only time I really get thoroughly discouraged is when the accountants, statisticians and procedure fellows get their way. We now have the matter ironed out so that instead of seven movements in the process of paying students, we now have only two.” At the end of the first half-year of the NYA’s operation, Williams published an article in Progressive Education entitled “Youth and the Government.” He thought it was pretty good, and sent it to Eleanor. “I am glad the NYA is getting busy,” was her restrained comment. When Ruby Black wrote Eleanor Roosevelt’s biography in 1940, she told Tommy that she was calling the chapter on the NYA “Inspiration of the NYA” because “inspiration” had the double meaning of “causing something to exist and keeping it on its toes.” And Mrs. Roosevelt should not be modest about her part in causing the NYA to come into existence, Ruby Black went on, “because both Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams without my even asking them, told me emphatically that Mrs. Roosevelt was responsible for the creation of the NYA.”16