ORACLE

(See Cover)

People who believe that U. S. foreign policy is determined at the State Department or in full-dress hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, kept their eyes last week on Washington. People who believe that the mass attitudes of the U. S. are really controlling, looked instead at forces which help shape those attitudes.

On Good Friday morning, a gracious, energetic, long-legged lady swept into an office on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue to finger two swatches of sheer blue woolen cloth and exclaim to a cackling bevy of fashion reporters: "Isn't it nice that we chose shades which look so well together!"

Strangely enough these words had fundamental relation to U. S. foreign policy. For the long-legged lady was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt and the swatches were materials for dresses, presented by the wool-raisers of Britain and the U. S., which Mrs. Roosevelt and Britain's Queen Elizabeth will wear if they meet as scheduled in the U. S. in June. Mrs. Roosevelt's patient swatch-fingering was an innocent little act cooked up by the U. S. wool-growers' publicists. (Commodore Robert B. Irving of the Queen Mary acted as special courier to take Her Majesty's material to London.) Mrs. Roosevelt put statesmanlike point upon the act by saying: "We [herself and Queen Elizabeth] are both glad to emphasize the value of good wool in the trade of both countries."

What both ladies emphasized besides wool's trade value was that the Queen's country stood at the forefront of, and Mrs. Roosevelt's country stood at the brink of joining, a mobilization of what Mrs. Roosevelt's indomitable uncle, Roosevelt I, would have called the forces of Righteousness. Week by week, day by day, other forces were operating in a way which might prevent the two ladies meeting in June and divert both their countries' wool production away from ladies' dresses and into socks, sweaters, breeches, belly-bands for soldiers.

Should affairs come to that pass, the interest of Mrs. Roosevelt's people in Queen Elizabeth's people would be critical if not decisive in world history. Mrs. Roosevelt, just back from a transcontinental lecture tour punctuated by stops in a score of States and the birth of a new grandson ("Little John" Boettiger) in Seattle, had seen and been seen by people all the way from peon pecan-shellers to her son Jimmy's boss, Samuel Goldwyn. On this trip, she said, she had encountered less Isolationist sentiment than ever before. Said she: "There are still people who think that we can cut ourselves off from the rest of the world, but more people are less secure in this belief."

If Mrs. Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth do meet, one will be looking at the world's most symbolically important lady, the other at the world's foremost female political force. Britain's Queen, whoever she may be, will remain superlative so long as the British Commonwealth retains throne & crown. The present First Lady of the U. S., on the other hand, is superlative in her own personal right. She is also a woman of unequaled influence in the world, but unlike Cleopatra, the great Elizabeth, Pompadour, or Catherine of Russia, her power is not that of a ruler. She is the wife of a ruler but her power comes from her influence not on him but on public opinion. It is a self-made influence, and save for a modest counterpart in modern China, unique for any woman to hold. Yet it rests upon thousands of small activities, none of which greatly exceeds in dramatic content Eleanor Roosevelt's dramatic swatch-fingering of last week.

Six years ago the tall, restless character who moved into the White House with Franklin Roosevelt was viewed by large portions of the U. S. public with some some degree of derision if not alarm. They caricatured her, joked about her, called her "Eleanor Everywhere." They couldn't believe that any one woman could sincerely embrace the multiplicity of interests which she added to being a wife, mother and White House hostess.

Today enough people have met Mrs. Roosevelt, talked with her at close range, checked up on her, to accept her for what she is: the prodigious niece of prodigious, ubiquitous, omnivorous Roosevelt I. Everything she says, everything she does, is genuinely and transparently motivated. Sophisticates who used to scoff, now listen to her her. They read with measurable respect her books, magazine articles, daily column. And as her hold on her audience has grown, so have her skill and temerity in touching subjects on which six, even three, years ago she would have ventured only polite platitudes. In three years the distribution of her column "My Day" has increased from 20 newspapers to 68, with 4,500,000 total circulation.

She used to write in safe, rounded phrases, using plenty of "howevers," noting exceptions, admitting alternatives, offering consolations. She was gracious but wary in expressing her urge to get-something-done-about everything from social justice to the rape of Ethiopia. She made sallies like, "It's a great life if you never get tired," and described her family's Sunday evening scrambled egg feasts.

Today she still gives her readers a candid, cheery running account of her life's incredibly varied minutiae. She reports plays, pictures, people seen, babies patted, books read, weather experienced, letters received, etc. But in the past six months she has also "come out" unqualifiedly on a wide variety of controversial issues. As the ruling topic of her thoughts, the scrambled world has succeeded her family's Sunday evening scrambled egg feasts. She has plumped for:

> Soil erosion control as an "investment."

> An end to "this rift in Labor."

> Wages & Hours for farm labor and domestic servants.

> Tom Mooney's freedom.

> Negro Marian Anderson against the D. A. R.

> Her husband's trick explanation about how the national debt (public plus private) has not grown since 1929.

> Bigger WPA appropriations.

Most arresting was her extemporaneous speech challenging the entire U. S. economic system (TIME, March 6). Excerpt: "I believe in the Social Security Act . . . in the National Youth Administration, never as a fundamental answer. . . . These are stopgaps. We bought ourselves time to think. . . . There is no use kidding ourselves. We have got to face this problem. . . . This goes down to the roots of whether civilization goes on or civilization dies."

If that is a far cry from Mrs. Harding, Mrs. Coolidge and Mrs. Hoover, in the forum of foreign relations Mrs. Roosevelt has been even more vocal. She openly:

> Sided against Franco in Spain.

> Lamented Czecho-Slovakia's lost freedom.

> Wrote scathingly about Hitler and Goebbels.

> Retorted to Herbert Hoover in defense of her husband's Stop-Hitler policy.

All these expressions doubtless echoed the sentiments of most of Mrs. Roosevelt's audience, which (judging by her mail) is 75% feminine. Her writings are important not so much for fortifying those sentiments, as inclining an already sympathetic democracy to side more strongly with its sisters. More important is the degree of action with which Mrs. Roosevelt would back up her sympathies, the amount of martial iron she instills into her women's blood.

Mrs. Roosevelt is no warmonger. For years she has talked and worked for peace. Four years ago she argued that "the war idea is obsolete." Three years ago she still hoped Hitler would work out his destiny through the League. A year ago she expressed the hopeful wish that some day there would not be armies, but just a world police force. But by last February she had to conclude that "moral rearmament," as proposed by the Oxford Movement, for example, would not be enough. "I mean," she wrote, "that, much as we may dislike to do it, it may be necessary to use the forces of this world in the hope of keeping civilization going until spiritual forces gain sufficient strength everywhere to make an acceptance of disarmament possible. . . ."

She vigorously opposes the war referendum amendment proposed by Indiana's Representative Ludlow. She further says: "I wonder whether we have decided to hide behind neutrality? It is safe, perhaps, but I am not sure that it is always right to be safe."

In short, Mrs. Roosevelt, oracle to millions of housewives, would bring them face to face with Right and Wrong as a world issue. "Not to do so," she says, "would be, for me, not to live, but to have a sort of oyster-like existence." If nothing else will preserve Right, she would approve war.

Few weeks ago, one of Mussolini's newspapers complained: "Mrs. Roosevelt writes too much . . . is a bad influence." From Italy's viewpoint, she surely is, for she cultivates vast areas of political soil plowed and sowed by her husband. Yet in saying, "I have taken no part in politics since Franklin's election" she is not wholly inaccurate. She operates quite apart from the President, behind and beneath what is commonly called "politics." Stories that she influences his policies and appointments are as untrue as stories that he tries to edit her conduct. She is a one-woman show in herself, requiring the full-time services of three able assistants to stage everything she feels she must.

Mrs. James M. Helm, an old friend who was with the first Mrs. Wilson at the White House, is her social secretary: arranges formal functions, seating lists, invitations, decorations. The King & Queen's visit will crown her career.

Mrs. Henry Nesbitt, a Hyde Park neighbor who became proficient at catering, is the White Housekeeper: orders meals for the President (he loves game, sea food), the boys (steaks, chops), exotic visitors (an Abyssinian Coptic who ate no flesh was a problem), hires & fires servants (for economy the Roosevelts cut the Hoovers' 32 down to 23). Already she has drafted tentative menus for Their Majesties: for lunch, sweetbreads; for dinner, capon.

Bearer of the lecturing, traveling, interviewing, letter-writing and literary brunt is Miss Malvina ("Tommy") Thompson. She has been Mrs. Roosevelt's private secretary for 17 years. A sagacious, worldly-wise grass widow (until her 1938 divorce, Mrs. Scheider), Miss Thompson declares that never has she known Mrs. Roosevelt to do or say anything insincere. She thinks her ability to do and say so much results from Eleanor Roosevelt's being what is really meant by the word Christian.

Untrammeled life-long health (except for six babies and an attack of typhoid) is superadded to Eleanor Roosevelt's other capacities. She is out of bed at dawn's crack, doing setting-up exercises, swimming, or riding her old mare Dot. She eats like an ostrich: anything, everything. After breakfast she answers mail, dictates her column, which has not once been tardy through fault of hers. A somewhat shrill yet mellow chortle is the tune of her whole day. (She has been taking voice lessons to improve on the radio.)

Since developing from a painfully shy, homely gosling and an inhibited, inferior-feeling wife and daughter-in-law, into a self-confident swan of a woman with the nation for her pond, she has learned to sail through life with serenity. In the rarefied top stratum of official existence, where one can see anything, learn anything, go anywhere, get almost anything done, she wastes no chance to compensate for long years of being (by her own account) a cloistered nobody.

A lady Democrat asked her last month: "What do you consider the greatest dangers to democracy? Do you think propaganda, exaggeration and misrepresentation. . . ?"

Extrovert Eleanor Roosevelt replied: "The greatest dangers to democracy seem to me to be apathy, a lack of personal responsibility and ability to look courageously at the world. . . ."

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