Memories of The Great and The Good (6 page)

M
y first memory of President Roosevelt in the flesh was at the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Harvard College, a weeklong celebration in September 1936. Roosevelt was to be the main speaker in the closing ceremony. But the whole affair was such a dazzling circus of exhibitions (manuscripts, antiquities), symphony concerts, torchlight parades, fireworks—all staged for the first and surely last convention of world scholarship—that it was enough to obliterate in retrospect the sharp memory of all the participants—all except one. It was my first reporting assignment for a newspaper, for anybody, and it was a daunting initiation.

Over seven hundred eminent scholars from forty-two foreign universities had been invited on terms that can be said to be uniquely demanding if not outrageously rude: that they should turn in to the president of Harvard the results of original—and hitherto unpublished—research carried out during the previous two years. Most of these papers were so specialized, so beyond the intellectual range of the reporters present, that we simply had to note and take on trust the vital importance of Professor Millikan's cosmic ray researches, the excursions of Sir Arthur Eddington into the interior of the stars, Dr. Howard Northrop's meditations on the formation of enzymes. The uncomprehending majority of reporters present were left to grab a one-day sensation out of the discovery of Dr. Friedrich Bergius of Heidelberg of how to convert wood into carbohydrates. It offered a startling piece on the grim prospect of a besieged nation at war being adequately fed on sawdust.

When the final day came, the delegates discovered that President Conant was about to confront them with something not at all entertaining and far more challenging than anything they had seen all week (perhaps, for some of them, all their lifetime). It was to hear four famous men, two from democracies, two from totalitarian regimes, express themselves on an idea: the idea of Freedom.

The most eminent living anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, was the first to speak for our side: “Our present civilization is passing through a very severe, perhaps a crucial, stage of maladjustment. The abuse of legal and administrative power; the inability to create lasting conditions of peace; the recrudescence of aggressive militarism” (no mention of passive militarism!); “the torpor of true religion and the assumption of religious garb by doctrines of racial or national superiority or the gospel of Marx … it is our duty to insist on the necessity for freedom.” This was all impressively high-toned but once the echoes of its eloquence had faded, much of it was seen to be begging the question. “The inability to create lasting conditions of peace” is not a twentieth-century failing: it was demonstrated so long ago as 1307 by the brave Pierre Dubois, legal adviser to the king of France, and the organizer of the first league of nations. And to whom shall we present our “insistence” on “the necessity of freedom”? Adolf Hitler? Neville Chamberlain?

In response came two scholars of world renown, from Rome and Tokyo. Dr. Corrado Gini, professor of sociology at the University of Rome, didn't even begin to dispute “the necessity for freedom”; plainly, to him, it was a naive delusion of people who had no historical perspective. To every nation, he granted, “there must be an appropriate” alternation of “tension and relaxation of authority.” While admitting the “wisdom” of some liberal eras, he yet believed that “Italy today requires a Fascism.” So there!

There was even less hope of a workable formula for compromise between tense and relaxed authority from the great Masaharu Anesaki, professor of religion in the University of Tokyo. The very notion of freedom, he casually implied, is irrelevant to the spiritual well-being of a nation. He simply saw “the modern civilization of the West as a power working for its own destruction … a power civilization impotent to overcome, and unfit to be totally absorbed in, the” presumably superior “spiritual heritage of the East.”

At last, or next to the last, came the man whom this theme had obsessed for the past two years. The president of Harvard himself: James B. Conant. Not physically a heroic figure, a small, thin, bespectacled clerky type, not unlike a comic strip stereotype of a “professor.” But he was the man who had stood up against the Massachusetts legislature and its urge to enforce a loyalty oath on teachers throughout the state, and on this last day, he was the most impressive figure. Now his lean voice pierced through the rising wind and the restless audience: “In the name of Harvard,” he proclaimed, “one essential condition for the continuance of a national culture:
absolute
freedom of discussion,
absolutely
unmolested inquiry.”

Even so general a plea was about to receive a practical test from fifteen thousand Harvard men who had passed around the Yard. The coming main speaker would soon stand there and require tolerance and silence from an audience to possibly fifty percent of whom his views were monstrous and heretical.

That left, however, fifty percent who never went to Harvard, townspeople who had spent weeks scrambling for a ticket to the Yard and this famous occasion. They were beginning to thrash their arms against the cold and crane their heads to catch the first glimpse of the star turn, when the gray sky blackened and a sudden billow of wind from the east brought on a torrent of rain and drove everybody indoors. Not quite everybody. Probably less than a third of the expectant crowd could jam into the Sanders Theatre, and it took time till they were packed to the windowsills. The thousands who couldn't make it stayed huddled outdoors, their drenched ears cocked for the hero. Inside, at last, the old ex-president Lowell fairly bellowed into the microphone: “Gentlemen, the president of the United States!” There were many old Harvard men quite prepared to boo or hiss. They were sufficiently well-bred, however, to sit on their hands. But no dissenting gesture short of a gunshot could have arrested the roar that for five clocked minutes rocked the theater and thundered out of the loudspeakers of a continent.

Through this sustained din, he came on slowly as the platform guests parted for him: leaning on an arm, the other hand clutching a cane, walking very slowly and straight-legged. “Seems,” remarked one young student without guile or second thought, “to have trouble walking.”

It was an artless remark but it was a taproot for me into the one visual memory of that day that remains indelible. For I have to confess that all the foregoing reportage and Roosevelt's lilting but unremarkable speech hoping “Harvard and America” would “stand for the freedom of the human mind” spring not from my memory but from a rescued photostat of my dispatch (September 20, 1936) to the London
Observer
.

Well before the final ceremony I had gone to the Yard expecting to flash my press credentials and be led down to the press rows by some marshal or usherette. But the main entrance was jammed with a dense, jostling crowd. I knew the Yard well (I had been at Harvard, after all, for a whole year) and I remembered a side entrance round a long curving wall. It was there all right, an open iron gate leading into a small yard not much larger than a capacious alley. Opposite the entrance gate was a door, which led through to the Yard. But I had barely walked into the alley when there was the sudden swishing of a large automobile, a squawk of brakes and a rapid patter of footsteps running toward me. They belonged to a young bareheaded man in a suit who had one hand stuck in his right coat pocket. He was what I was to come to know well: a Secret Service man. He stopped me, pushed me, gently I must say, against a side wall and wondered what I was doing there. I showed him my credentials and was plainly so scared and innocent of all foul designs that I said I surely would stay un-moving against the wall until “the president has gone up to the Yard and we're out of here.” The president! I had hardly time to pronounce the tremendous word than my man darted across the alley, opened the car door, and from the other side appeared two other men (during the Second War, it would always be one Secret Service man, one marine, and Elliott, Roosevelt's eldest son). They together made several swift and inexplicable passes, like jugglers, toward someone inside the car, and on a count (of three, I suppose) one cried “Now” and they lifted and held aloft a massive human figure crumpled into a squatting position, since one man had his arm crooked under the figure's knees, and the other under his upper back. It was Franklin Roosevelt, as inert as a sack of potatoes. His head could move and did so as he acknowledged the motions of the third man, who had dived into the car and emerged with a cane and a hat. Roosevelt was then deposited on the ground, his back straightened, the cane was put into his right hand, the hat stuck on his head. With a tug or two from his helpers, he braced himself, linked arms with one man and limped stiff-legged toward the side entrance door and onto—I learned later—one of the ramps that were built in any public place with steps he was due to visit.

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, a trauma with two strokelets: the first registering the name—the president of the United States! The second, that he was a cripple. The president of the United States was a paraplegic!! It is something everybody in the world knows now though our not knowing it is disbelieved by succeeding generations who have seen the Roosevelt family's home movies and documentaries based on, no less, the whole history of his affliction. Yet if, at almost any time during the twelve years of Roosevelt's presidency, you had put the bare question (“Did you know that the president is a cripple?”) I'm pretty sure that most of the population would have said something like, “I heard he had poliomyelitis at one time.” But since the first fatal attack in 1921, he was never filmed for movie theater newsreels (there was, of course, no television throughout his lifetime) or ever photographed by news reporters in his wheelchair. This taboo was observed for twenty-five years—even by the press chains, like Hearst's, that hated him—throughout his governorship of New York State and throughout the four terms of his presidency. It is, I should think, a unique example of voluntary restraint. The result of it was to confirm triumphantly the psychologist's old discovery that the thing
seen
very soon obliterates the thing heard or read. That explained why the vast majority of the American population never thought of Roosevelt as a cripple. What, for a quarter century, was impressed on everyone's senses was the powerful upper body, the bull neck, the strong hands clasping the lectern, the handsome head tossing the spoken emphases, the happy squire waving to everybody from an open car, the perpetual optimist and Savior of America in the darkest days. So, though most people could accept the reminder, if ever it came up, that the president was paralyzed, it was a truth buried deep at the back of the mind.

As for the taboo that kept it there, a taboo that was faithfully observed by the national press for over twelve years, it is inconceivable that today it would be maintained for a week or a day. Some British tabloid would be sure to offer a fortune to the first to break it.

The sharpness of this memory obviously prejudiced me in his favor when, in the spring of 1937,1 came as a news correspondent to Washington fresh from England, to report on the man who by then was a beacon to the peoples of the European countries that had not lost their liberties to Hitler on the rampage or foaming Mussolini or the man of steel (Stalin) in the Kremlin. In England, which I knew best, the old still lived with the memories of the enormous slaughter on the Western Front, and the young found little inspiration in a Tory government on the defensive moving backward, one step at a time, before Hitler's oncoming shadow. To many of the idealistic young, though, there was a rousing alternative to stomping Fascism and defensive Toryism. The public face of Communism in the Soviet Union had been so brightly painted by an older generation of early believers—Shaw and Lady Astor and the Webbs among them—and the private terror by which the system worked was so well disguised or disbelieved that “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability” seems a positively Christian doctrine.

But for the undifferentiated mass of still-free, self-governing Europeans, there was yet another exhilarating choice, and, across the Atlantic, Franklin Roosevelt was the heroic cast of it. To a Europe bereft of notable leaders who were not tyrants, here was a man who, defying the current totalitarian models and denouncing them, was reinvigorating the largest democracy by democratic means and with the enthusiastic consent of the mass of his people. What Europeans didn't know, or didn't care, was that Roosevelt had been able to exert a power usually prohibited by law to leaders in a democracy. He had demanded in his first inaugural speech powers beyond the restraints of the Constitution “if the normal balance of Executive and Legislative authority” did not prove “wholly adequate”; then “I shall ask the Congress for broad Executive power … as great as the power that would be given me if we were, in fact, invaded by a foreign foe.” As he spoke those alarming words, he was already exercising extraordinary executive power: he had closed all the nation's banks, and
he
would decide which ones were to survive and which would go under. And the Congress, as fearful as the rest of the country of widespread civil disorder, gladly gave him the dictatorial powers he wanted, and America took its first fling at National Socialism. It was not at the time recognized as such. With a cheering smile, an open checkbook, and a logo (a blue eagle symbolizing the NRA—the National Recovery Administration), Roosevelt appropriated the lawmaking power, suspended the antitrust laws and set up what amounted to government by trade association. Employers were required to bind themselves to a code that fixed prices and wages and labor practices for about seven hundred industries, from the steel makers to the humblest commercial theatre. (I saved for many years the NRA code as it applied to all burlesque companies, solemnly setting the maximum wage for first banana, second banana, star stripper and so on.)