Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  He took a more objective view of his wife’s young friends than she did. He was neither impressed by the logic of their growing isolationism nor persuaded that they were as innocent of Communist ties as they protested. Yet he, too, was not sure how the Communist problem should be handled in the organizations in which they were active. If there was a chance to save the organization he thought liberals should make the fight and not simply withdraw. That was the advice he had sent to Aubrey Williams in regard to the Workers Alliance, the organization of the unemployed. “FDR wld like to see Dave Lasser [the head of the Workers Alliance] change name & purge communists who put Russia first,” Eleanor advised Williams.11

  Eleanor also told the president of the split that had developed within the American Student Union and of the formation of a liberal caucus to oppose the Communists.* When the president saw Lasser later, he suggested that the Workers Alliance organize along similar lines and that a fight be made. Like his wife, he understood why, lacking jobs, unsure of their future, searching for a sense of brotherhood, young people and the unemployed responded sympathetically to radical doctrines. “The Communists are dangerous only as we ourselves fail,” Eleanor wrote. It was a sentiment with which the president agreed, but he was also a realistic politician, and while he accepted this as a prescription for the long run, he had little patience for the point of view that he heard from his wife’s young friends, a point of view that she at times seemed to share. In mid-January some Youth Congress leaders were present at a White House dinner when Eleanor asked the president whether she had been right to advise the Youth Congress leaders to revive and re-introduce the American Youth Act. Yes, he replied, provided the young people made clear in their proposals where he was to get the money. Young people felt, Eleanor retorted, that less money should go to armaments and more to social services. “All right,” the president said, pushing back in his chair. “Let’s accept the opinion of youth, but I want my protest recorded for history.”

  “Youth needs are a form of national defense,” Abbott Simon of the Youth Congress volunteered. “Do we need all these battleships?” The president thought this was utopian nonsense and that the trouble was that the young people were plain ignorant about matters of naval strategy. Eleanor refused to let the argument rest there: Wasn’t it the responsibility of leadership to give the country information so that they could decide such matters intelligently? Patiently Franklin outlined his picture of the possibilities. He was fearful of a Russo-German victory in Europe and seizure of the British fleet, followed by efforts to penetrate the Western hemisphere, first through trade and then through military and political arrangements. The United States had to be armed to prevent penetration of the continent and disruption of the hemispheric system, the president emphasized.

  Wasn’t it possible to combine both armaments and NYA? Of course, the country had to do both, he replied, but at the moment it was more urgent to arm than to increase the appropriation for NYA. Turning to Simon, he said, “You will have to wait a year. You can wait a year.” “I want you to say all those things to the Youth Congress pilgrimage next month,” Eleanor remarked to the president as he was being wheeled out.12

  Soviet Russia’s invasion of Finland proved to be another dividing line between Communists and non-Communists. At Hyde Park the week before the pilgrimage, the president drove over to Val-Kill with Missy for lunch. Eleanor asked him if he would deal with the fears of young people that the United States might get involved, especially if a government loan was made to Finland. He scoffed at such fears; neither Germany nor Russia would declare war on the United States because of such a loan. Nor was he willing to say, in response to a suggestion from a youth leader who was present, that however he felt about the issues it was healthy for young people to organize to keep America out of war. The United States had a stake in preventing a Russo-German victory, he replied. It was useful to keep Russia and Germany guessing as to whether the United States might not come in.

  Presidential suspicions of the Youth Congress were strengthened when, a few days before its pilgrimage to Washington, a message came to press secretary Bill Hassett from a columnist stating that the youth group had been holding meetings in New York City at which it was voting on resolutions to censure the president because of his policies, including his desire to aid Finland. Did the president still plan to address the pilgrimage, the columnist asked. “Yes,” Hassett replied, but Roosevelt took some precautionary measures, such as vetoing the request of the Congress to have its chairman speak from the portico. “You will notice the big ‘NO’ that the President put beside the paragraph, as to anybody else speaking,”13

  Commissioner Studebaker of the Office of Education and Aubrey Williams were asked by Hassett to submit suggestions for the president’s speech. Studebaker sent over seven pages of amiable generalities, none of which were used. The draft submitted by Williams had a little more fire to it but it flattered youth, and the president, bent on some plain talk, discarded that, too. The young people had begun to irritate him; his wife’s leaning over backward to put the best face on their arguments irritated him even more. But he could not reproach her directly—there were, a Roosevelt assistant observed, “strange reticences” between the two.† What he could not say to her directly, however, he could say in a speech to the Youth Congress and the country, and it was a speech he wrote himself.14

  Saturday, the day of the pilgrimage, was a chill, rainy February day. The paint on the hundreds of placards ran and those that escaped disfigurement by the rain were blown about in the wind. But the blustery weather made the youthful marchers more defiant as they paraded up Constitution Avenue.

  SCHOOLS NOT BATTLESHIPS

  the front ranks shouted, reviving a slogan of the early thirties.

  PASS THE AMERICAN YOUTH ACT

  the answering cry came back. Occasionally the marchers broke into song:

  No Major, no Major, we will not go,

  We’ll wager, we’ll wager, this ain’t our show.

  Remember that we’re not so green

  As the boys in seventeen.

  Their clothes sodden and their placards bedraggled but their spirits high, 4,466 marchers were clocked entering the White House gates. They had arrived an hour early and they stood, cold and miserable, awaiting the president, whose speech was scheduled to be broadcast at 12:30. McMichael led them in singing of America and America, the Beautiful, punctuated with the staccato chant:

  PASS THE AMERICAN YOUTH ACT

  When the president came out onto the portico, Eleanor, who in a rain cape had been circulating among the marchers with words of motherly cheer, went up to join him.

  It was a stern speech with few pleasantries and no effort to play up to his youthful listeners, as the introductory paragraph made clear when the president told the group that it had a right to advocate change, although with a different form of government “this kind of a meeting on the White House lawn could not take place.” The rain poured down and the statistics poured out—on how much better off the country was compared with 1932. Young people should not “seek or expect Utopia overnight,” nor were young people the only ones in the country who had problems. Much still remained to be done, and his administration was ready to move “as fast as the people of the country as a whole will let us.”

  Up to this point his audience had been unenthusiastic but polite. Now the president swung into his “final word of warning”: do not pass resolutions on subjects “which you have not thought through and on which you cannot possibly have complete knowledge.” The New York Youth Council’s condemnation of a loan to Finland as “an attempt” to force the United States into an imperialistic war was “unadulterated twaddle.” A ripple of boos and hisses were quickly hushed; if the president heard them, he did not deign to notice. American sympathy was 98 per cent with the Finns, he continued, and it was “axiomatic” that America wanted to help with loans and gifts. It was silly and absurd to think that because of such loans the Soviet Union migh
t declare war on the United States or that the United States was going to war with the Soviet Union. That brought him to the subject of the Soviet Union: whatever his earlier hopes from that experiment, it was today “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” The boos started again, and again they were suppressed.

  Some of his audience were said to be Communists, the president continued, and they had a right to be so, provided they confined their advocacy of change “to the methods prescribed by the Constitution.”15

  It was a verbal spanking, one most of Washington sympathized with, taking Walter Lippmann’s view that these young people were “shockingly ill-mannered, disrespectful, conceited, ungenerous, and spoiled.”

  When the Youth Congress returned to the Labor Department auditorium, most of its adherents, neither contrite nor shaken, were ready for a speaker who could give plausible and expressive shape to their resentment and hostility. CIO head John L. Lewis, a powerful orator and gifted phrasemaker and, like his youthful audience, resentful of Roosevelt who he felt had patronized him, was ready for them. With ten to twelve million unemployed, including four million young people, he began, “Americans cannot live on statistics.” The audience exploded in glee. Ovation succeeded ovation as Lewis scored his points with a mocking commentary on Roosevelt’s speech that did not omit Finland—the mineworkers had passed a resolution substantially like the one the president had labeled “twaddle”—and ending with a bid: “as chairman of Labor’s Nonpartisan League, I issue an invitation to the American Youth Congress to become affiliated, to come to a working arrangement with Labor’s Nonpartisan League.”

  Bedlam ensued. The leaders of the Young Communist League did not conceal their satisfaction. The Youth Congress, despite its switch in policy, could still be a force. The rest of the day, the speeches of the delegates themselves, with a few minor exceptions, sounded the themes set forth by Joe Cadden, the secretary of the Youth Congress, and lent respectability by Lewis—“the government is letting us down,” “all our social gains are threatened by the trend toward a war economy,” the NYA was becoming an instrument for militarization of youth, and the CCC was being curtailed in order to force young people through economic pressure to join the Army.

  Eleanor was present during Lewis’s speech, sitting on the platform, knitting; her face was impassive, but inwardly she was shaken as she observed the group applauding positions which had some merit to them and reflected some real anxiety, some genuinely unmet need, but which, taken in the whole, were suspiciously close to the Communist line.

  This was the atmosphere in which she brought the institute to a close on Sunday night with a question-and-answer period. For an hour she stood—tall, dignified, and unsmiling, in a black evening dress and wearing a corsage of orchids presented by the congress—dealing with the sheaf of questions given to her by Jack McMichael. “The nation probably has not seen in all of its history,” wrote Dewey L. Fleming in the Baltimore Sun, “such a debate between a President’s wife and a critical, not to say hostile, auditorium full of politically minded youths of all races and creeds.”

  Shouldn’t the institute have passed a resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Finland, was the first question. It was from Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt who, with some other conservative critics, had been heckling the congress from the sidelines.

  Eleanor had always been very careful not to impose her views on the congress. Her reply was double-edged: “No. I don’t think you should go on record for anything you don’t believe in—however, I think it is only fair to say that I do not think you fully understand some of the history underlying many situations in Europe, the Far East, and other places in the world.”

  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.