Baffled as the Roosevelts may have been by the dogmatism and occasional antics of the Youth Congress, the demonstration on the whole strengthened the administration’s efforts to get congressional support for its youth program. “I know that your work has yielded some good results and will yield more,” Aubrey Williams informed the Youth Congress later that day. “And I am in a pretty good position to know whether it yields anything or whether it doesn’t.” When William Hinckley, the chairman of the congress, asked the Roosevelts to send greetings to a “Model Congress” in Milwaukee over the July 4 week end, the president did so, and Eleanor wrote on the letter that she had received “I can only wish them wisdom and good luck.”35
She felt her presence and help were having a calming effect upon the hotheads. She spoke to the opening session of the New York State Model Youth Legislature at City College in New York, the congress affiliate that was most heavily influenced by radical thinking. Her subject was peace, and she argued against the isolationism implicit in the Oxford Pledge, which thousands of young people had recited at campus peace meetings, vowing not to fight in any war the United States government might undertake. “We felt you had a difficult task on your hands,” Mark McCloskey wrote afterward. The meeting had gone well, she thought.36
Hinckley, reflecting the viewpoint of the Youth Congress leadership, wrote that her speech had given “great help in counter-acting what I consider a very inappropriate tendency among some young people at the present time to hold that the Oxford Pledge is the answer of youth to the very complex problem of the organization of peace.” But it was a pompous letter, and it was disingenuous—while public opinion, shocked by the advance of fascist aggression, was in flux, it is doubtful that the New York Youth Congress would have approved Roosevelt’s call to “quarantine the aggressor” or voted down the Oxford Pledge and the Ludlow war-referendum amendment had there not been a change in Communist policy that reflected Moscow’s search for allies against Hitler.† To Eleanor, a long-time battler for the Wilsonian principle of collective security, it appeared that “these young people are beginning to be a bit more stable and are a little bit better able to think things through.”37
The president evidently agreed with this appraisal. Early in January, 1938, the officers of the World Youth Congress, which had been set up in Geneva, Switzerland, in August, 1936, and to which the American Youth Congress was affiliated, wrote asking Eleanor’s help with the Second World Youth Congress, which was to take place at Vassar College in August, 1938. They wanted her to attend and to help them get financing. She asked her husband if she should accept and if Congress could be asked to make an appropriation toward its expenses as it had done for the meeting of the Rural Women of the World. “It is all right to accept this,” the president told her, “but do not try for an appropriation because there are twenty or thirty international organizations that if we were consistent we would also have to help.”38
Her sponsorship of the Second World Youth Congress displeased the Catholics, who were already irritated with her support of the Loyalists in Spain and her known advocacy of birth control. A priest sent her an editorial from America, the Jesuit weekly, called “Radicals at Vassar.” It regretted her patronage of the congress and noted that the bishops through the National Catholic Welfare Conference were discouraging attendance by young Catholics. It denounced the gathering as anti-Catholic, anti-religious, and pro-Communist. “I do not doubt that there are many Communists among them,” she replied, “but they are not strong enough to rule the entire group. I have watched them and met with them over a period of four years and I have seen them grow into more sensible and reasonable young people. I think it is a great mistake to simply condemn them and do nothing about it.”39 To Eleanor, youth’s radicalism was not a badge of untouchability but a plea for help and understanding. To James E. West, the adult executive of the Boy Scouts of America who wrote to explain his organization’s avoidance of the Vassar sessions, she replied,
I do not question the fact that because the conservative organizations have somewhat held back, it has left the predominating representation to the left-wing group but that is a fault on the part of the conservative organizations and no excuse from my point of view for not trying to keep in touch with these groups and helping them to be as sane as it is possible for youngsters to be.
The influence of the young Communists in the congress would be diminished to the extent that the congress took in “all groups of young people. I have always felt, however, that the attitude of staying away from a thing because you did not approve was not a helpful one and that it is better to try to fight anything which you felt harmful. This is better done from within than from without.”40
How could the older generation be self-righteous and dogmatic? When younger people asked her what the generation in control had learned from the World War, she had to say honestly, “I don’t know what we learned. I don’t think we learned anything and I think we are going very much the same way that generations of people have gone before.” She felt even more uncomfortable when these same young people then came back and said, “Well, you acknowledge that you don’t know what you learned. You acknowledge that you don’t like the world the way it is, but what are you doing about changing it?”41
The World Youth Congress assembled at Vassar College in August, 1938, two months before Munich. Rumors of Nazi mobilization swept the session and the worried Czech delegation cabled home for news. There were students from the battlefronts of Spain and China, and veterans of anti-colonial struggles in India and Indonesia and Cuba. The theme of the congress was affirmative—youth speaks out for peace—but the mood was militantly anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. The thirties, said the poet W. H. Auden, was “The Age of Anxiety,” and of all those who shared in the torments and troubles of those years, Eleanor’s heart was given most freely to the young. She could not stay away from the congress. She answered questions for an hour and a half and came back in the evening to participate in the entertainment. The eight hundred delegates from fifty-four countries seemed to her thoughtful and earnest, well-behaved and restrained. They did not seem to her the sinister characters some made them out to be, but “just like any other summer school students!” At the end of the congress she wrote:
The more I see of this group made up of young people from many nations, the more important I realize it is that in every nation older people who can see the desirability of certain changes in our civilization should work with them. In this way their thought and action will not be one-sided and the impetuousness of youth should gain some benefit from the experience of age.42
The young seemed to her the messengers of the future, and, indeed, the world-mindedness of the Youth Congress, their consciousness of the existence of Asia and Latin America, even of Africa did foreshadow the collapse of empire of the postwar era. The themes of the Youth Congress and American Student Union pronouncements sounded in the thirties—equality of educational opportunity, federal aid to the arts, public provision of medical care for all, the creation of the city beautiful through slum clearance and housing, the conservation of natural resources, guaranteed jobs, civil liberties, and equal political rights—would form the platforms for which their children would be fighting decades later. “I welcome you here to Washington,” Williams said after the sit-down demonstration; “I glory in the high, unequivocal grounds that you have taken. . . . I especially glory in the fact that you have taken such a fine and unequivocal stand with regard to no discrimination against race.”43
Eleanor’s subject at the New York Herald Tribune Forum a few weeks after the Vassar congress was “youth’s contribution in keeping the mind of the nation young.” She pleaded with her contemporaries, especially her husband, to keep themselves open to the influence of youth, to listen to the young people. The Youth Congress leadership was one more ally in the unceasing argument with Franklin over where to draw the line between what was needed and what was politically possible. Taussig invited Abbott Si
mon to attend a meeting of the NYA Advisory Committee. When the young man spoke at the session with the president, where others had been deferential he bluntly proposed that the NYA be extended to include 1,500,000 young people. The NYA had done valuable work, the president agreed, and should be continued, though he would not support increasing its responsibilities threefold. When the president’s Advisory Committee on Education headed by Floyd Reeves warned of “a lost generation of young people” and proposed that the CCC be removed from War Department control and combined with the NYA to form a National Youth Service Administration, the American Youth Congress was prepared to sponsor legislation to that effect.44
Youth Congress officials spoke up where the NYA officials had to follow the president’s lead, and Eleanor used them in her efforts to win the president over to doing more for young people. The NYA Advisory Committee met that fall (1938) at Val-Kill, and she invited Franklin to drive over to greet them. They clustered around his little Ford, and soon a “conference” was taking place under the trees in the bright October sunshine. May Craig, watching Eleanor, was greatly amused:
She was really an advocate: she wants the Youth Administration to get funds and go forward. So she would say “Well you see Franklin” every now and then when she felt she could put in a helpful sidelight. She has been around to practically every state, seeing the Youth activities, so she could really steer the conference.
The President hasn’t been married to her for so long without knowing her methods—doesn’t every husband? He knew she was trying to show him this Youth program because it is close to her heart. But he has an eye on the budget and knows how many other worthy projects need money.45
Part of Eleanor’s problem with Franklin was his distrust of the Keynesian theories of priming the pump and compensatory spending. She sent him the keynote speech made at the convention of the American Student Union whose theme was “Keep Democracy Working by Keeping It Moving Forward.” It was militantly New Deal in its outlook and enthusiastically pro-Roosevelt: “We must unite the campus for the objectives of the New Deal. We must unite the campus to play a decisive part in the 1940 election.”
“This is an interesting letter and speech,” the president commented in a memorandum:
If you want to start a discussion among the young people some day, get them to discuss and answer the following question:
The government deficit today is $3,000,000,000 a year. Such a deficit obviously cannot go on forever—expenditures $9,000,000,000, receipts from taxes $6,000,000,000.
We could very easily and usefully spend another billion dollars a year on aids to and improvement of education.
We could very easily and usefully spend another billion dollars a year in better health facilities throughout the country, and especially in the South and rural sections.
We could very easily use another billion dollars a year in soil protection and flood prevention.
We could very easily use another billion dollars a year in old age security and youth training.
We could very easily use another billion dollars a year in slum clearance and better housing.
That would mean a budget of $14,000,000,000 a year against tax receipts of $6,000,000,000.
How can the $3,000,000,000 a year, present deficit, or the $8,000,000,000 a year, new deficit, if such projects are carried out, be financed?
F. D. R.
Yet less than a month after this memo to his wife, which was dated January 16, 1939, and which reflected Roosevelt’s unhappiness with deficit spending, he urged his son James, who had gone to work for Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood, to consider doing an educational film based on An Economic Program for American Democracy. Although this little book by seven economists from Harvard and Tufts embodied a Keynesian approach to full employment, the president considered it a “swell” expression of the economic philosophy of his administration. The seesawing in his mind reflected the pulling and shoving of the various factions and viewpoints in the administration.46
Eleanor helped her young friends in the Youth Congress—for friends she now began to consider them—to understand her husband’s difficulties with Congress and that if they wanted change the place to work was with public opinion in the districts from which the congressmen hailed, but she never sought to silence the young people with the question “Where is the money going to come from?” And, in encouraging her husband to talk with the representatives of the youth organizations and to read their pronouncements, she was trying to educate him just as she herself was being educated. Her own ability to entertain new ideas was illustrated in an exchange with a reporter over Hitler’s claim to have ended unemployment. Totalitarian countries did not class people who worked for the government as unemployed, she replied, whereas in this country persons on the rolls of the WPA, the CCC, the NYA were classified as unemployed even though they were doing useful work, beneficial to the public. In this respect, she thought there was something to be said for the approach of the totalitarian countries.47
In the congressional onslaught on relief and public works in the spring of 1939, the NYA was the only relief agency to have its funds increased to $100 million. “Many people have told me,” Williams wrote her, “that we could have gotten the whole $123,000,000, if Mr. Rayburn had not made his motion but had allowed the thing to go ahead to a vote on the Collins Amendment.” It was symptomatic of the change in the American Youth Congress that it no longer called for enactment of the American Youth Act, but had urged its constituent groups to write Congress and ask $250 million for the NYA. The president, moreover, had been converted to making the NYA a permanent agency. He separated it from the WPA and transferred it, along with the CCC and the Office of Education, to the newly established Federal Security Agency.48
Eleanor was still not satisfied that the CCC camps had the right kind of leadership and educational program. She learned of a report made by a group headed by Dr. Will Alexander that, in his words, “just took the lid off of the CCC camps.” She did not think Franklin had seen it, she told Alexander; “they probably kept it from him.” Or if he had seen it, “I don’t think he got the implications of it.” She asked Alexander to get a few of the educational advisers in the camps and bring them to dinner at the White House: “This is something Franklin’s got to face.”
Alexander located four college-trained men who he thought would make a good impression and gave them a little preliminary coaching. “You’ve got to look him right in the eye and tell him this. Mrs. Roosevelt wants you to, and when she wants you to do anything, it’s perfectly safe. She’s doing this, I’m not.” The president sensed something was up and he began to filibuster, but Eleanor broke in; he should either talk to the young men or listen to them. Alexander thought his young men were “very convincing” and saw the president “begin to perspire.” Before dinner was over Eleanor had one boy after another sit next to the president.49
In point of fact the battle was won, partly because Franklin had been persuaded that the camps should be under civilian administration and partly because with the outbreak of the war the Army was calling up reserve officers. “I am enclosing a copy of the memorandum which I am asking the President to sign tonight,” Hopkins wrote Eleanor. “Alexander says this will do the business.” The memorandum was addressed to Paul V. McNutt, the head of the Federal Security Agency, and suggested a special training agency to prepare new leadership for the CCC to replace the reserve officers being drained off by the armed forces.50
The danger of a jobless, alienated generation of young people was by no means over. “One third of the unemployed workers in the nation are young people fifteen to twenty-four years of age,” the American Youth Commission reported as the war broke out. “The rate of unemployment is higher among youth between twenty and twenty-four than in any other age group and highest of all for young people between fifteen and twenty who are out of school and seeking work.” But in the NYA and CCC and the Office of Education—if the latter could get more inspired leadershi
p‡—the tools were beginning to be available for a comprehensive attack on the problems of jobs and education for young people. They were not sufficient. When a Republican speaker at a Youth Congress dinner attacked the youth program of the government with the statement that “American youth does not want to be mollycoddled. . . . It sees no future in government agencies, in which it merely graduates from NYA to CCC and from CCC to WPA,” Eleanor replied that she believed in the NYA, as she did in Social Security and other New Deal measures. “But never as fundamental answers, simply as something which has given us hope, which has given us perhaps a suggestion which might be followed by communities everywhere. . . . We have bought ourselves time in which to think, that is what we have done.”52
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