The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Passing of a Public Conscience Eleanor Roosevelt was a conscience forever active on the public's behalf. We are used to thinking of her as...
...Roosevelt almost always proved the great compromiser and the devout and successful democrat...
...Mere political success was never her aim...
...Previously she had attended political conventions as a friendly onlooker...
...Despite her lack of training as a writer, Mrs...
...But if she had received the conventional American education, who knows, she might have been turned out to be another Jane Addams rather than an important political figure...
...Even in her great fight against certain leaders of Tammany Hall, she fought hard and used every device that promised success, but managed to alienate as few people as possible...
...Roosevelt had a sure sense for what was important, and she quietly kept pursuing it...
...When the Republican Administration came in and put an end to these international responsibilities, without a moment's pause she threw her enormous energy into the American Association for the United Nations...
...Roosevelt was mistress of the White House for 12 years, longer than any other woman...
...Yet any educational theorist looking over her early endowments and training would have allotted her only a minimum chance of achieving so distinguished and useful a career...
...She discussed world affairs with great statesmen and military leaders...
...Mrs...
...I once sat in the audience as Mrs...
...Roosevelt addressed 800 high school students on the future of the United Nations...
...The most astonishing of all Mrs...
...Now she became one of the most expert of professionals...
...And in all this there was never a suggestion of inferiority or timidity...
...Even the author herself on various occasions agreed that she was skillful at neither speaking nor writing...
...Her most conspicuous characteristic was her evenly balanced temperament...
...I often saw her in operation in the United Nations, in the American Association for the United Nations and in the Americans for Democratic Action...
...In all of these environments she was sometimes forced to deal with various factions or groups with ideas and purposes quite different from her own...
...it was a gift of nature...
...One great advantage she did have: Mrs...
...Without trying she became an authority on international affairs...
...To the end, she spread her faith in international peace and American social improvement...
...Both in political party meetings and in the unofficial organizations in which she participated, she functioned as a conscientious citizen devoted to the public welfare...
...Yet, at the beginning practically everyone agreed that this journalistic experiment would be a failure...
...When Westbrook Pegler poked ill-natured fun at them, the most loyal of liberals had to acknowledge that he had a point...
...She spoke often of the responsibilities which limited her other public activities during those eventful years, years when the fate of the world seemed dependent on discussions which regularly took place around her dinner table...
...She just put down enough easy-going remarks to fill the required space -and that was that...
...It was natural for the liberated official lady to symbolize these changes by entitling one of her books On My Own...
...It was her business to receive the kings, the generals, the statesmen, to make them feel at home, to see that the White House was a reasonably happy and efficiently run place...
...It was real...
...It was the stuff that life was made of...
...When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, Eleanor, in an important respect, became free to be herself, to play her own part, and a new chapter in her public life began...
...Then her father and mother died in her youth, and Eleanor was passed about among her upper-class relatives...
...Her people came of one of the old American trading families and lived in a manner commensurate with their wealth and status...
...And when she made her two zigzag journeys about the world it was simple and pleasant for her to return the visits of foreign statesmen and dignitaries she had known earlier...
...Soon it was picked up by 48 others, and was reaching an audience of four-and-a-half million readers...
...We are used to thinking of her as completely at home among the great...
...She did not, apparently, care whether the readers liked her stuff or not...
...Though the youthful Eleanor had many of the advantages which are usually accounted helpful in getting through life, her existence as a child seems to have been comparatively barren and unhappy...
...She had everything which wealth could give, but lacked many of the privileges enjoyed by the humblest child...
...In addition to all her other activities, writing a newspaper column day after day, year after year, and from all over the world, was a really miraculous achievement...
...Through this friendship the eager, young American girl was introduced to life in Great Britain and on the Continent...
...Roosevelt with any sense of proportion-mainly because her own life was such a model of proportion...
...Her readers quickly recognized its authenticity...
...Though she was approaching her 70th year, there was no reduction in her ingenuity and enthusiasm...
...Roosevelt developed a marvelous control of basic English...
...It is probably because of growing up under these conditions that she developed some of her political ideas and her interest in international affairs...
...It had nothing to do with her education or personal philosophy...
...Her first few columns were so ordinary and undistinguished that everyone assumed that the idea would soon be given up...
...Roosevelt's activities was her column, My Day...
...It was a revealing experience, listening to her rich and sure voice giving them basic facts in basic language...
...Smart guys could make fun, but Mrs...
...Mrs...
...While there she did so well and took life so seriously that she became an intimate of the headmistress, who, by good fortune, was an intelligent French woman...
...Though she had the instincts of a statesman, she was under the necessity of holding herself in...
...Though onlookers sometimes fancied that they could see the impulses of the aristocrat showing through the carefully rehearsed manners of the common woman, in the end Mrs...
...Still, there never was another column like it, and there never will be...
...All of the friendships which she had cemented as a hostess made it easy for her to spread her influence...
...When it started in 1936, the column appeared in 20 papers...
...It is difficult to write about Mrs...
...Thus, though she never had the educational advantages of the typical American girl, she did gain an understanding of life which went well beyond the ordinary...
...President Truman, with a sure instinct, soon named her as a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, and a little later she accepted a position as a member of the Human Rights Commission...
...Hardly anyone else had more to say about Democratic party candidates and platforms...
...When she looked at you with her level gaze, you felt things suddenly falling into place...
...As a youngster, she habitually thought of herself as awkward and untalented...
...Her plain little messages were aimed at the common people-and they usually hit their mark...
...Roosevelt received the chief part of her education in an English boarding school...
...Its purpose, obviously, was to gain political influence in the wider sense...
...They felt that they were getting authentic information, and from the ultimate source...
...Down to the very last years, in fact, Eleanor Roosevelt traveled, spoke, wrote, and offered her counsel...
...She was brought up among those who naturally took for granted that they belonged to the ruling class...
...It was often remarked that in her speech and manners Eleanor Roosevelt was very English...
...Everyone of those young people leaned forward to drink in each of those plain and simple words...
...Roosevelt never seemed even to try to make her compositions interesting or exciting...
...She served hot dogs to kings and queens...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 24
