Eleanor and Franklin (118 page)

“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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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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?
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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?”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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