The 40s: The Story of a Decade (76 page)

· · ·

Mrs. Roosevelt is pessimistic about the prospect of effecting an immediate East-West rapprochement through United Nations councils or by any other method, but her relations with her colleagues from Eastern Europe have been, on the whole, extremely cordial. “A lot of diplomats play that part of the game correctly,” one State Department man has observed, “but in Mrs. R’s case it’s obvious that she does so not only because it’s the proper thing to do but because she has a real sincerity of feeling.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s relations with domestic Communists have of late been less friendly. She is a leading example of an American who has become disillusioned with our Communist Party, not because of the editorial page of the
Journal-American
but through association with its members. She does not try to hide the fact that in past years she often supported organizations in which Communists were prominent, and, before her first appointment to the United Nations, Miss Thompson cheerfully compiled, for the benefit of any federal character investigators who might drop around, a list of all the groups, among the hundreds with which her employer had been involved, that Miss Thompson thought the government might deem subversive. Mrs. Roosevelt cut herself adrift from the
extreme Left three years ago. Shortly before that, she had allowed a youth organization to hold a meeting at the White House. She knew that some of the members present were Communists and she told her guests that she knew it. She added that, in order to let everyone there know who stood where, she would appreciate it if the Communists in the room would rise and identify themselves. Nobody got up. Mrs. Roosevelt regards deception as an unforgivable sin. Not long thereafter, in “My Day,” she said that the members of the Communist Party of the United States “taught the philosophy of the lie” and added that “I happen to believe that anyone has a right to be a Communist, to advocate his beliefs peacefully and accept the consequences. A Communist here will be—quite rightly, it seems to me—under certain disadvantages. He will not be put into positions of leadership. I do not believe that he should be prevented from holding his views and earning a livelihood. But because I have experienced the deception of the American Communists, I will not trust them.” Since then, Mrs. Roosevelt has been wary about permitting her name to be used by any organization. As a result of her experiences, she is perhaps better equipped than most Americans to understand the nature of Communist negotiating tactics. After one particularly harrowing meeting of a United Nations committee, another American, who had never been mixed up with a Communist front in his life, came up to her and, mopping his brow, said, “Well, at least we had
that
argument out today.” “We’ll have it again tomorrow,” she replied placidly, and so they did.

Mrs. Roosevelt does not think that this country’s chances of ultimately attaining peaceful relations with Russia are hopeless. She has become convinced, after many months of reflection on the world situation, that the surest way of attaining them is through economics, and that the two powers might get along better if we were to offer to send an economic mission to the U.S.S.R.—chiefly, to begin with, to help it develop its vast natural resources, some of which the United States, now pressed for many raw materials, could make profitable use of. “I’ve learned that the Politburo admires toughness,” Mrs. Roosevelt said not long ago, “and therefore I would have put on the mission, along with others, the very toughest, best group of industrialists we could get—people like Ernest Weir and Tom Girdler and Alfred Sloan—because theirs has been the kind of success that the Russians appreciate. These men could say to the Russians, ‘Now, look, we didn’t come over here only for your good; we came to get something mutually advantageous.’ If we were to do that,
and it convinced the Russians that we were willing to co-operate with them and didn’t want to monopolize all the economic processes—as I think it might—then maybe we could start moving in a sensible direction.” She has not sounded out the Messrs. Weir, Girdler, and Sloan, but she has presented the idea to a number of our highest government officials, who are presumably mulling it over.

Some of Mrs. Roosevelt’s fellow-citizens think that the best mission this country could send to Russia would be Mrs. Roosevelt herself. She recently returned from a trip to Europe, which she made principally to attend the unveiling of the statue of her husband that the British put up in London. Her itinerary included brief excursions to Belgium, where she spoke to an assembly of women’s clubs; to Switzerland, where she called on a sick friend; and to Holland. She was invited to the Netherlands by Princess Juliana, an old acquaintance, and in her note of acceptance she said that she would be glad to run over to pay her respects to Queen Wilhelmina and the children. The Princess wrote back that she appreciated Mrs. Roosevelt’s interest in the family but that the main reason for the invitation was the belief that the morale of the Dutch people would be immeasurably buoyed up if Mrs. Roosevelt were to appear in person among them. Since the end of the war, nearly all the nations of Europe, including some within the Soviet orbit, have repeatedly asked Mrs. Roosevelt, either formally or informally, to pay them visits, in many cases indicating to her that they regard her as an incomparable morale builder.

Busy as Mrs. Roosevelt was in Switzerland, she did take time out to meet with some Swiss national officials in Berne and some canton officials in Geneva and talk over a few of their problems with them. In Geneva one night, at her instigation, she had a three-hour conversation with the local men in charge of commerce, welfare, agriculture, and labor. She asked them a great many questions and took careful notes on their answers. The Swiss were delighted and flattered by her interest, and told her so. “You know,” she said later to a friend, “for the first time I realized that I can really create good will abroad for the United States.” Her admirers believe that even in Russia she could create good will. When her son Elliott saw Stalin in Moscow, a year and a half ago, the Premier’s first words of greeting indicated that in at least one respect he is not as different from the heads of Western European governments as is commonly thought. “When is your mother coming?” he asked.

MARCH 26, 1949 (ON SIDNEY FRANKLIN)

T
he best bullfighters in the world have come, traditionally, from Spain or Mexico. The old Spanish province of Andalusia has contributed more bulls and more bullfighters to the bull ring than all the rest of Spain. Manolete, probably history’s top-ranking matador, who, at the age of thirty, was fatally gored in the summer of 1947, was an Andalusian. Carlos Arruza, who retired last year, at twenty-eight, with a two-million-dollar fortune and the reputation of fighting closer to the bull than any other matador had ever done, was born in Mexico, of Spanish-born parents. Belmonte, an Andalusian, and Joselito, a Spanish gypsy, were the leading figures in what is known in bullfight countries as the Golden Age of Bullfighting, which ended with Belmonte’s retirement to breed bulls, in 1921, a year after Joselito’s death in the arena. The only Mexican who ranked close to Belmonte and Joselito in their time was Rodolfo Gaona, an Indian, who, in 1925, retired a millionaire with large real-estate interests in Mexico City. Some years ago a Chinese bullfighter named Wong, who wore a natural pigtail, turned up in Mexico as El Torero Chino, and a Peruvian lady bullfighter, Conchita Cintrón, is active today. Only one citizen of the United States has ever been recognized as a full-fledged matador. He is Sidney Franklin, who was born and raised in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

Franklin, who is now forty-five, estimates that he has killed two thousand bulls so far. Last winter, in Mexico, he killed thirteen. He is planning to go to Spain this summer to kill as many bulls as he can get contracts to fight, although he is much older than the usual bullfighter is
at his peak. “Age has nothing to do with art,” he says. “It’s all a matter of what’s in your mind.” He hopes someday to introduce bullfighting to this country, and, if he succeeds, expects it to become more popular than baseball. Ernest Hemingway, who became an authority on bullfighting, as well as on Franklin, while preparing to write
Death in the Afternoon
, maintains that to take to bullfighting a country must have an interest in the breeding of fighting bulls and an interest in death, both of which Hemingway feels are lacking in the United States. “Death, shmeath, so long as I keep healthy,” Franklin says. When aficionados, or bullfight fans, charge that Americans born north of the border are incapable of the passion necessary for bullfighting, Franklin replies passionately that coldness in the presence of danger is the loftiest aspect of his art. “If you’ve got guts, you can do anything,” he says. “Anglo-Saxons can become the greatest bullfighters, the greatest ballet dancers, the greatest anything.” When, in 1929, Franklin made his Spanish début, in Seville, the aficionados were impressed by the coldness of his art. “Franklin is neither an improviser nor an accident nor a joker,” wrote the bullfight critic for
La Unión
, a Seville newspaper. “He is a born bullfighter, with plenty of ambition, which he has had since birth, and for the bulls he has an ultimate quality—serene valor. Coldness, borrowed from the English, if you please.… He parries and holds back with a serene magnificence that grandly masks the danger, and he doesn’t lose his head before the fierce onslaughts of the enemy.” “Franklin fought as though born in Spain; the others fought as though born in Chicago,” another critic observed a year later, in comparing Franklin’s manner of dispatching two bulls with the work of the Spanish matadors who appeared on the same bill in a Madrid bull ring. One day early in his career, Franklin killed the two bulls that had been allotted to him, then, taking the place of two other matadors, who had been gored, killed four more. This set off such an emotional chain reaction in the ring that another bullfighter dropped dead of excitement. Today, many aficionados, both Spanish and Mexican, disparage Franklin’s artistry. “Manolete made you feel inside like crying, but Franklin does not engrave anything on your soul,” a Spanish aficionado of thirty years’ standing complained not long ago. “Franklin has no class,” another Spaniard has said. “He is to a matador of Spanish blood what a Mexican baseball player is to Ba-bee Ruth.” “I am A Number One,” Franklin says. “I am the best in the business, bar none.”

Franklin was nineteen when he saw his first bullfight. He was in Mexico, having recently run away from home after a quarrel with his
father. As he recalls this particular bullfight, he was bored. In Brooklyn, he had belonged, as a charter member, to the
Eagle
’s Aunt Jean’s Humane Club and to the old New York
Globe
’s Bedtime Stories Club, which devoted itself to the glorification of Peter Rabbit. “At that time, the life to me of both man and beast was the most precious thing on this planet,” he says. “I failed to grasp the point.” The following year, he fought his first bull—a twelve-hundred-pound, four-year-old beast with horns a foot and a half long—and was on his way to becoming a professional. In the quarter of a century since then, Franklin has come to feel that the act of dominating and killing a bull is the most important and satisfying act a human being can perform. “It gives me a feeling of sensual well-being,” he has said. “It’s so deep it catches my breath. It fills me so completely I tingle all over. It’s something I want to do morning, noon, and night. It’s something food can’t give me. It’s something rest can’t give me. It’s something money can’t buy.” He is certain that bullfighting is the noblest and most rewarding of all pursuits. He often delivers eloquent discourses on his art to men who are more interested in power, money, love, sex, marriage, dollar diplomacy, atomic energy, animal breeding, religion, Marxism, capitalism, or the Marshall Plan. When his listener has been reduced to acquiescence, or at least bewilderment, Franklin will smile tolerantly and give him a pat on the back. “It’s all a matter of first things first,” he will say. “I was destined to taste the first, and the best, on the list of walks of life.” The triumph of man over bull is not just the first walk on Franklin’s own list; it is the only one. There are no other walks to clutter him up. “I was destined to shine,” he adds. “It was a matter of noblesse oblige.”