National Affairs: Sons and War

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You don't just sit at meals and look at each other.

And that, Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out at her White House Press conference last week, goes for a President and his wife as well as for other folks. To women reporters curious over the fact that Mrs. Roosevelt's newspaper column, My Day, has a way of beating the President to the punch, this toasty retort was explanation enough. To others concerned over her increasing truculence along the Neutrality Front and its influence on U. S. women hell-bent for peace, it explained more fully why Eleanor Roosevelt, who four years ago said, "The war idea is obsolete," had last fortnight written, "Are we going to think only of our skins and our own pockets?"

Even without this revealing hint of what the Roosevelts talk about at table, last week's conference would have been newsworthy. It brought out 1) that Eleanor Roosevelt intends to be inveigled into no wasp-waist corsets this fall; 2) that the delicate White House problem of arranging diplomatic functions this season has been given over to the State Department. The President last week, for reasons of policy (see p. 11), kept an extremely circumspect silence, and Eleanor Roosevelt had to make news enough for two. She did it by expanding, under polite questioning, on her skins-and-pockets essay of the week before.

"It always gives me a horrible sinking feeling," she said, "when people come up to me and say 'Let them stew in their own juice; it isn't our war because we can't help suffering when all the rest of the world is suffering. We can't go scot-free. For people who think they can give one a terrible feeling of lack of real appreciation of the responsibility that lies on us, as one great nation at peace today, to be thinking seriously of what we can do to alleviate suffering for civilian populations and to bring about a state of mind which will make it possible to help achieve an ultimate peace that won't sow seeds for the same kind of thing in the future."

Three of her sons, she revealed, are already lined up with the U. S. fighting forces—Jimmy is a Marine lieutenant colonel; Franklin Jr. an R.O.T.C.-trained second lieutenant in the Army; and John a Marine lieutenant, inducted into the service at birth during the World War, while his father was Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Although she used fighting words last week, Eleanor Roosevelt used to be considered a pacifist. Last February, during the Isolationist storm over Franklin Roosevelt's sanction of warplane sales to France, she began to edge out of her corner. "Germany," she wrote, "is geared to produce a thousand planes a month; France to produce one hundred planes a month. . . . Do our sympathies lie with the other democracies, or do they lie with the totalitarian states?"

When Hitler marched, Columnist Roosevelt came out swinging.

Sept. 2: "It is hard to see how he can sleep at night and think of the people in many nations whom he may send to their deaths."

Sept. 6: "It seems as though the sun could hardly shine upon a world where one man is able to speed civilization downward."