Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  But the NYA and CCC together only partly met a problem whose dimensions were just beginning to be appreciated. Dr. Homer P. Rainey, the director of the prestigious American Youth Commission, a privately funded research group of educators, industrialists, and union leaders, estimated that the number of young people out of school and out of work was actually five and a half million, and he, too, as Eleanor had in 1934, stressed that it was not primarily a Depression phenomenon; even after recovery the nation could still be faced with the problem of idle young people.

  Public-service employment, Eleanor began to feel, might have to be a permanent feature of the American system, a concept she hinted at in her support in 1936 for proposals to establish a Department of Education, Social Welfare, Health and the Arts. Such a department, she felt, should include a youth-service division that might embrace the NYA, CCC, and government-sponsored apprenticeship training programs. But she broached this idea very cautiously; in 1936 the Republicans were in full tilt against the NYA, using such battle cries as “it ignored the Office of Education,” “its administrative costs were excessive,” “it was bad for the morale of youth,” and “relief should be returned to the localities.”17

  If the program was to be expanded rather than dismantled, the president had to be kept informed and indoctrinated. He was under unremitting pressure to reduce WPA expenditures. The school lobby remained hostile to the NYA and, at the National Education Association convention in 1936, publicly attacked the program. When Charles Taussig, whom the president had appointed chairman of the NYA Advisory Committee, showed Eleanor a sheaf of letters from high-school students expressing gratitude for the NYA jobs, she wrote on them, “Give me to show President. . . . ” She invited the NYA Advisory Committee to hold its sessions at the White House and arranged to have the president sit in on part of them.

  A plea from a group of girls who had been at the NYA’s Camp Jane Addams at Bear Mountain Park in New York State underscored that more than the NYA was needed. They had regained health and an interest in life during their stay at the NYA camp, the girls said, but once back in New York City few of them had been able to find jobs. “Now after four weeks of tramping through the streets more than one girl says there is nothing left except suicide or tramping on the roads.” The girls had formed themselves into a unit of the Workers Alliance, a radical-led organization of the unemployed. What could Eleanor say to them? She sent a note to the regional director of the NYA, Mark McCloskey, “Will you see the girls and try to put them in touch with proper people?” But what could anyone tell them when there were no jobs?18

  She repeatedly discussed with Aubrey Williams the problem of what to do with young people who were not absorbed by the business system. They considered the establishment of youth settlements—a kind of American kibbutz—with the government providing the land and the young people being put to work building houses for themselves, an idea that was being put into effect by the Resettlement Administration, but not as a youth project. She and Taussig tried to persuade some leading industrialists to turn over the development of new inventions to youth-staffed factories. When a young Texas couple wrote that because of Depression wages they were afraid to start a family, she asked her husband, “Couldn’t the government extend a loan to such couples?”19

  Her sense of the tentative and stop-gap qualities of the programs so far launched by the government to deal with an estranged younger generation quickened her own efforts to keep a channel of communication open with them. Some of the young people who had been meeting with her had become interested in the American Youth Congress, which had a reputation for radicalism. All the more reason, it seemed to her, that the adult world should try to stay in touch with the youth. For young people to want to rebel against a world of Depression, fascism, and war seemed to her a healthier way of relating to it than to drift along in a kind of mindless conformity.

  “You have got to frame new objectives,” she told the graduating class at the University of North Carolina. “You have got to decide what you want in this country. . . . I know that all of us would like to see a country in which there is no poverty, in which every one has a minimum income on which a decent standard of living can be sustained. How are we going to reach that objective . . . ? We have got to think out new ways for doing things.” She had listened to economists, philosophers, and theorists “until sometimes I have a feeling that it would be a very good idea if some people would go out and try some new things and not be fettered always by a feeling that they must simply wait until somebody else has done something, until somebody else can find out surely what thing is best to try. This will not get you into any trouble.”20

  She scorned the conformists. She noted that Brandeis as a young lawyer had been warned he was throwing away his career because the words “the public” appeared too frequently in his briefs and arguments. It had been her observation “through many long years that frequently the man who thinks he is throwing away his career because he believes in something and acts on his belief, in the end makes his career. Perhaps the most valuable lesson to youth in Justice Brandeis’ 80th birthday is the way Justice Brandeis lived his life.”21 She preferred young people who were nonconformist, idealists, and willing to take risks on behalf of their ideals.

  In the summer of 1934 an energetic, enterprising young woman named Viola Ilma sent her the program for an American Youth Congress to be held in cooperation with New York University. Miss Ilma wanted Eleanor to sponsor the congress, and while a wide range of youth and youth-serving agencies had said they would attend, Eleanor, a little unsure about Miss Ilma herself, was not prepared to be a sponsor. She did, however, send a letter which was read to the gathering in which she expressed an interest in the program “and hope that you will send me a report of the proceedings and any conclusions which you have come to.”22

  The congress was a tumultuous affair, and Viola and her friends, fearful of the radical youth groups, tried to keep a tight control of the proceedings. This played into the hands of the young Socialists and young Communists, who with the assistance of the Y’s and the Jewish and Protestant youth groups, organized a coup in the name of democratic procedure and took over the leadership of the congress. Miss Ilma and her friends walked out. For a time there were two American Youth Congresses feuding bitterly with each other. A calumnious but effective article in the New Masses even suggested Nazi inspiration for Miss Ilma’s initiative, noting that she had spent four months in Europe studying fascist youth movements, including a visit to Berlin, and that she had refused to disclose who had financed the congress. Several people sent the article to Eleanor, and Tommy wrote to ask how much truth there was in it. Her mother was Jewish, a distraught Miss Ilma replied, her staff was Jewish, and she herself was “an enthusiastic and confirmed democrat.” She had refused to answer the New Masses demand that she disclose the sources of her money, but she was quite prepared to have the gentleman who had put up the money write Mrs. Roosevelt.23

  Within Miss Ilma’s congress, a group of young southerners organized another coup, and by April, 1935, Miss Ilma had repudiated the group. The left-wing American Youth Congress hastened to point this out to Eleanor when it protested her plan to attend a meeting of the more conservative group. She was prepared to attend the left wing’s meeting, too: “If you can prove to me that you are a bona fide organization, representing a big group of young people, I shall be glad to come and listen to you under the same conditions.” She acknowledged that she had not liked the southern group’s slurs against those “who might happen to think along more radical lines, and I made the point very clearly that I believe every shade of thought should be represented in every Youth Congress and the young people should be given free expression.”24

  By January, 1936, the radical-leaning American Youth Congress was in complete possession of the field and it again invited her to address its National Council, which was to meet in Washington. This time she accepted. Other people were better qualified to address their mee
ting, she replied, “but I will gladly come to one of your sessions to answer any questions you may want to ask of me, to the best of my ability,” and since there were some criticisms of the Youth Congress that she did not want to make publicly, a small group might want to come to tea at the White House, where she could talk more freely. Some of the president’s advisers cautioned her not to go because the young people were so radical and would “ask unpleasant and critical questions,” she disclosed later, but she answered them that

  We ought to be able to meet all young people and defend the things we believe in. It may not always turn out as we hope. We may find ourselves targets of criticism. I wonder if it does us much harm. The real thing that is harmful is the knowledge in our hearts that we are afraid to face any group of young people. Open discussion between the rising generation and the older generation is a really important thing.25

  She arrived at Methodist Hall accompanied by Aubrey Williams. The young people came to the council meeting charged with hostility toward the government and all its representatives, including Eleanor Roosevelt. The previous June when NYA officials had approached Waldo McNutt, chairman of the Youth Congress, for an endorsement of the newly established NYA, McNutt “laughed. The Congress laughed,” a youth leader wrote. The NYA was derided as “a sop” and the Youth Congress drafted an American Youth Act which it itself conceded would cost $3.5 billion a year and which critics said would cost $20 billion. The questions at the National Council meeting were barbed. Young Communist vied with young Socialist in taxing Eleanor with the inadequacy of the NYA. “You don’t have to tell me that the Youth Administration doesn’t touch the whole problem. I know that,” she replied. More was needed, she agreed, but she did not know the whole answer to the nation’s economic and social problem—and neither did they. However, “it is wrong to be quite as divided as some of us are getting. I think it is good for some of us to get together sometimes.” She understood youth’s impatience. Changes did seem to “take forever,” and “I used to be awfully impatient when I was your age,” but a “free people eventually” found ways to put things right.26

  The purpose of the Youth Congress session in Washington was to lobby for passage of the American Youth Act. At tea at the White House, Eleanor told the Youth Congress delegation, which included a Negro girl, that the Youth Act was unrealistic: it involved “too large” an expenditure. It also reflected “a keen distrust for administrators,” an NYA analysis of the bill commented, but Eleanor was too tactful to put it that way. Its administrative features had not been “thought through,” she said, and offered to put the group in touch with people who had drafting experience. Had she been disturbed by the questions that had been put to her at Methodist Hall? a member of the group asked hopefully. She laughed—the youngster reminded her of her own children when sometimes they had behaved scandalously and waited eagerly for her to respond with appropriate agitation. She had not been disturbed at all. Although the young representatives had tried to outdo each other in the militancy and truculence of their questions, which had covered the whole gamut of radical concern—unemployment, racial discrimination, suppression of liberties, militarization of youth—they had not bothered her at all.27

  Mark McCloskey, the New York NYA official who, although a product of Hell’s Kitchen, had his own problems with the young radicals, was struck by her patience and tact at Methodist Hall. He understood better, he wrote later, “how to work with some of our youth organizations, which at times, to say the least, are trying.” She replied that “I have so much sympathy for those youngsters it is never hard to be patient. But I sometimes feel that the exact amount of honesty which they can stand is a question. I was really more honest with the few that came to see me later on.”28

  She would need a great deal of patience. Some of those who came to tea were filled with youthful swagger and the certainty that they in Marxism, not she in Christian ethics, had the key to history and human happiness.

  “She’s a good woman utterly lacking in knowledge of social forces and systems and why good men are helpless without organizations,” one of the participants wrote to a friend.

  She thinks she can reform capitalists . . . by inviting them to the White House for dinner and a good talking-to. I’m convinced she’s opposed to fascism, and that she as well as her husband would go much further if they felt they’d have support. But every time they take an even mildly progressive stand they antagonize some group or other within the Democratic Party which in their view it is important to hold together at all costs in order to insure re-election and other legislation which is not progressive. It was a pleasant tea. We stayed for two hours. We had little cream puffs and were waited upon by butlers. She was always sympathetic but helpless or sure that education alone would provide the solution.29

  But not all the delegates to the National Council meeting were so condescending. “She stood the gaff wonderfully,” one of them reported to the press. And even the Youth Congress Bulletin admitted to some admiration when it began its account, “For a solid half hour the First Lady stood up before a barrage of questions.” Eleanor’s success worried the Young Communist League, which sent her a stiff letter of rebuke for her “negative” attitude toward the American Youth Act. Her invitation to the young people to search for new answers since the old ones no longer served was “empty” rhetoric; since she refused to endorse the American Youth Act, “we are forced to conclude that you are not genuinely interested in helping the youth of America. What other conclusion can we reach?”30

  She did not like to be misrepresented, especially when the purpose was so obviously to maintain young people in a state of belligerence and suspicion toward government and the older generation. She had not said the Youth Act would not meet the needs of youth, she replied. “What I said was that the Youth Act is badly drawn and impractical, but it may serve as a basis for better legislation after it has been thoroughly discussed.”

  The extremist rhetoric of the Young Communist League did not surprise her, but that of the Youth Congress leaders did, as did their puzzling unresponsiveness to suggestions that would help them become more effective. At the end of the year she turned down an invitation to serve on the advisory board of the congress. She was too busy.

  Also, I am afraid that you have not done the things which would give me enough faith in you. I have heard you make statements which were not correct and after they had been explained and corrected, I have heard you make them again. While I am certainly in sympathy with the youth of today, I do not think anything will be accomplished unless every question and every problem is honestly and fairly dealt with.31

  But then suddenly her pleas for greater realism began to have an effect, so it seemed to her. The Youth Act was revised—slightly, but revised—and the new version was sent to her by Abbott Simon, national legislative director, who asked to see her in connection with both the bill and a youth “pilgrimage” that was scheduled to descend upon Washington. “I spoke to the President,” she advised him, “and if you are not afraid of the cold, he says he would be quite willing to come out on the south portico and say a few words to the group if they will gather at the back of the White House.”32

  Franklin had often teased Eleanor about the youth movement, but he, too, saw an unsolved problem in what to do about the hard core of jobless young people. He was preparing to recommend that the Civilian Conservation Corps be made a permanent government agency,* and while there was much good-natured rivalry and occasional friction between the two over the comparative virtues of the CCC and the NYA, when the latter proved to be more acceptable than the CCC, he became increasingly amenable to Eleanor’s pleas that it, too, be envisaged as a permanent tool of government. At times he was even willing to admit that the educational program of the CCC left a great deal to be desired.33

  While two years earlier he had fled from meeting the youth leaders, now he was not only willing to have the legislative representative of the Youth Congress to dinner, but spent the ev
ening advising him on the conduct of the pilgrimage sessions in Washington and the advisability, if the youth group wanted to get a hearing from Congress, of framing recommendations that were specific, concrete, and limited. “You indicated last evening,” Simon wrote him, “how complex the solution of the problems facing young people must be and how interwoven with every other important phase of national planning, and I believe you will agree with me that these factors should also receive the necessary attention in formulating any definite policy.” But Roosevelt’s friendliness also heightened Youth Congress suspiciousness. They argued among themselves about whether the president was trying to set up a government-supervised youth movement. Although the Communist group in the congress, in line with its new Popular Front policy, was now intent on cooperation with the administration, the old dogmas still had an influence, and the young Communists were sensitive to the taunts of the young Socialists that cooperation between youth and the New Deal was “opportunistic,” “reformist,” and a “sell-out.” Simon wrote, asking to see the president again: “I feel very strongly that before making the arrangements for the Conference absolute, that it would be of very great value to obtain more specifically the viewpoint of the President on a great many of the questions which our meeting will decide.” The letter revived Eleanor’s fears about the congress’s sense of practicality. “Shall I ask for Sunday supper and give another chance?” she queried her husband. “The President says he is extremely sorry but he does not have a single free minute,” she wrote Simon the next day. “I also regret that I cannot give you any more time as I have given you every opportunity I possibly can.”34

  Although the plan to have the president address the young people fell through, he did agree to receive a delegation of their leaders after the congress had paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. This, too, was almost torpedoed by an act of youthful ebullience which some of its instigators labeled militancy, but which horrified the young Communists who were intent on working with Roosevelt. As the paraders reached the White House and the line slowly snaked around its rear, the shouts “Schools not battleships,” “Pass the American Youth Act,” and “Abolish the ROTC” became louder, the paraders more excited, and the District police more anxious. Orders were issued to the patrolmen on motorcycles to hurry the parade on to the finishing point. Sit-down strikes were very much in the air—Flint auto factories were occupied at that time by their workers—and the youthful paraders, spurred on by some of their leaders but not by the Communists, responded to police proddings by sitting down on the pavement and going limp. This threw the police into a frenzy, and they raced their motorcycles, exhausts wide open, in and out among the sit-downers. William Hinckley and Abbott Simon, the two youth leaders who had obtained the parade permits, were hauled off to jail. But then the White House intervened and told the police to take it easy. Marvin McIntyre received a group of youth leaders who had been scheduled to present American Youth Act petitions, and they demanded that Hinckley and Simon be freed. McIntyre told them to finish the parade and that the leaders would be released. Finally everything was straightened out, and calm returned. In the afternoon the president received a delegation of the congress, a meeting at which Eleanor and Aubrey Williams were also present. It was a friendly gathering. The president laughed off the “sit-down” incident. He had been arrested in Germany while on a bicycle tour, he recalled, suggesting that Germany had always been an overly bureaucratic state. He heard their story, the Youth Congress delegation reported, “on what the depression has done to millions of young people, admitted that we were on the right track in seeking federal aid for the nation’s hard-hit young population, although he didn’t agree with us on the sum the U.S Government could ‘afford’ for this purpose in 1937.”