Introduction

Shortly after taking over as the new editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1938, Lawrence Lee began sending letters to authors he hoped would help him advance the journal’s “new effort at liberalism.” High on Lee’s list of potential contributors were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Their son, Franklin, Jr., had entered the Law School at the University of Virginia in Fall 1937, and Lee hoped that he might capitalize on that connection. That Eleanor Roosevelt contributed to VQR at all is a testament to Lee’s relentless pursuit as an editor; that the essay she eventually contributed has so endured is a testament to Roosevelt’s skill as a writer.

On July 11, Lee sent his first letter to the White House, inviting Eleanor Roosevelt to contribute to his first issue, forthcoming in January 1939, adding: “We can think of no one more able to present the necessity for woman to be liberal in her thought and daring in her action at this time. Will you aid us in our effort to liberalize the view of our audience by writing such an essay?” To Lee's obvious delight, George T. Bye, Roosevelt’s literary agent responded by cable on July 19: “Mrs. Roosevelt is pretty much tied up at the moment but she feels so kindly disposed toward your publication that she is willing to write a short article. Will you be content with that for the moment?” Lee wrote the next day seizing upon the offer and informing Bye that he would need the essay by November 1, in order to meet the print deadline.

Thus began what must have been months of nail-biting for Lee. Without any further word on the essay, he wrote on September 16 to suggest potential topics ranging from “America’s foreign policy in relation to Europe and South America” to “the necessity for thinking Americans to recover from their fear of courageous thinking and action.” The letter went unanswered. When nearly three weeks had passed, Lee wrote to Bye again to remind him that “we need all manuscripts in this office by November 1st.” On October 12, Bye cabled back that “Mrs. Roosevelt will be glad to do at least one editorial for you. I recall that it was to be on liberalism. Please let me know again the type of piece you want, length and any new limitation of the scope of the article.”

By now, time was running short. Lee responded that, “What we felt we had been agreed upon was an essay of about 3,500 words by Mrs. Roosevelt. We had suggested an aspect of liberalism today.” When this letter was not answered, Lee again wrote directly to Roosevelt on October 27, pressing, “This to us is a most urgent question, because we have in several respects built our Winter issue around your essay.” Later that day Bye responded by telegram: “Mrs. Roosevelt says she is horrified at the idea of doing thirty-five hundred words. A thousand words is about her limit for an opinion article; but she is going to do her best.” Again, silence followed.

Lee’s absolute deadline, November 19, was now imminent. On November 7, Lee wired Bye: “Closing issue next few days. May we have decision on Mrs. Roosevelt’s material by wire when we may expect it and how long it will be.” When again no reply came, Lee must have begun to despair that the marquee opener for his first issue was slipping away from him. On November 10, he again wired Bye: “We have reached our deadline. May we please have the article promised by you. Our apologies for pressing but it is essential that we know at once and receive article at this time.”

At last, on November 12, Bye wired back: “Cannot send article until middle or end next week if you want to omit this issue and use it later it will be agreeable to Mrs Roosevelt.” Lee was no about to let this opportunity pass. His handwritten note at the bottom of the telegram, sent for immediate reply reads: “Thanks. Holding space for article until November 19.” As it happened, Lee would not have to wait the full week. On November 17, Bye wires: “I am delighted to send you Mrs. Roosevelt’s article. It runs to 1900 words, and I think it will please you very much.”

The next day, when the essay arrived, Lee wrote a hasty and enthusiastic acceptance: “Thank you very much for sending on Mrs. Roosevelt’s article. We are very pleased with it, and it will be of great service to ideals which I believe Mrs. Roosevelt and we of the Quarterly cherish at this troubled period.” By now, he told Bye, the production schedule had been so delayed that it might not be possible to send along galley proofs before publishing the issue. However, in December, Lee did send proofs and Roosevelt, by way of Bye, responded that “It is O.K.” The original manuscript of Roosevelt's essay is no longer among the manuscripts in the VQR archive; however, Eleanor Roosevelt's personal carbon remains in the Speech and Article File, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. Through arrangement with the Roosevelt Library, her copy appears at the bottom of this page.

After the issue appeared in January, Roosevelt invited Lee to the Council of Young Southerners dinner in Annapolis, Maryland, on Wednesday, February 8, 1939. Lee met briefly with Roosevelt on “Virginia Quarterly Review matters” before the dinner then went to the event as part of Mrs. Roosevelt’s party. It must have been quite a cap to Lee’s months of worrying the issue into production. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Lee needn’t have fretted over Roosevelt’s contribution. In addition to her lead essay, that issue contained Robert Frost’s “The Silken Tent,” two of Paul Valéry’s first publications in English, and Sean O’Faolain’s tribute essay to William Butler Yeats, “Æ and W. B.” By the end of the year, he had also published Thomas Wolfe’s “A Western Journey” and Wallace Stegner’s “Conductivity in Fiction.”

On June 10, 1940, President Roosevelt and the First Lady came to Charlottesville, where FDR spoke at the commencement ceremony for his son’s law class. As fate would have it, that same morning Mussolini announced his alignment with Hitler and ordered the invasion of France. In place of his prepared address, the President instead delivered his famous “Stab in the Back” speech. Eleanor Roosevelt herself would later write that “Franklin’s address was not just a commencement address, it was a speech to the nation on an event that brought us one step nearer to total war.” These events also set us down a path that Eleanor Roosevelt had foreseen at the end of her essay “Keepers of Democracy,” when she looked ahead to a time when we would have to be “willing to sacrifice all that we have from the material standpoint in order that freedom and democracy may not perish from this earth.”

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KEEPERS OF DEMOCRACY

by Eleanor Roosevelt

Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1939: 1-5.

Recently a radio broadcast was given, based on a story written by H. G. Wells some years ago, called "War of the Worlds." For the purpose of dramatization it was placed in the United States with the names of regions and people who would naturally be involved if such a thing were to happen today. The basic idea was not changed; these invaders were supernatural beings from another planet who straddled the skyway and dealt in death rays, but it was dramatically done with many realistic touches.

I do not wish to enter into a discussion here as to whether the broadcasting company should do dramatizations of this type, nor do I wish to cast aspersions on people who may not have read the original book. But the results of this broadcast were the best illustration of the state of mind in which we as a nation find ourselves today. A sane people, living in an atmosphere of fearlessness, does not suddenly become hysterical at the threat of invasion, even from more credible sources, let alone by the Martians from another planet, but we have allowed ourselves to be fed on propaganda which has created a fear complex. For the past few years, nearly all of our organizations and many individuals have said something about the necessity for fighting dangerous and subversive elements in our midst.

If you are in the South someone tells you solemnly that all the members of the Committee of Industrial Organization are Communists, or that the Negroes are all Communists. This last statement derives from the fact that, being for the most part unskilled labor, Negroes are more apt to be organized by the Committee for Industrial Organization. In another part of the country someone tells you solemnly that the schools of the country are menaced because they are all under the influence of Jewish teachers and that the Jews, forsooth, are all Communists. And so it goes, until finally you realize that people have reached a point where anything which will save them from Communism is a godsend; and if Fascism or Nazism promises more security than our own democracy we may even turn to them.

It is all as bewildering as our growing hysterical over the invasion of the Martians! Somehow or other I have a feeling that our forefathers, who left their women and children in the wildernesses while they traveled weary miles to buy supplies, and who knew they were leaving them to meet Indians if need be, and to defend themselves as best they could, would expect us to meet present-day dangers with more courage than we seem to have. It is not only physical courage which we need, the kind of physical courage which in the face of danger can at least control the outward evidences of fear. It is moral courage as well, the courage which can make up its mind whether it thinks something is right or wrong, make a material or personal sacrifice if necessary, and take the consequences which may come.

I shall always remember someone, it may have been Theodore Roosevelt, saying in my hearing when I was young that when you were afraid to do a thing, that was the time to go and do it. Every time we shirk making up our minds or standing up for a cause in which we believe, we weaken our character and our ability to be fearless. There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which springs from fear. Sometimes it is a religious intolerance, sometimes it is a racial intolerance, but all intolerance grows from the same roots. I can best illustrate this fear by telling you that a short time ago someone told me in all seriousness that the American Youth Congress was a Communist organization and that the World Youth Congress was Communist controlled. This person really believed that the young people who were members of these organizations were attempting to overthrow by force the governments of the countries in which they belonged.

Undoubtedly, in the World Youth Congress there were young Communists, just as there are a group of young Communists and a group of young Socialists in the American Youth Congress, but this does not mean that either of these bodies is Communist controlled. It simply means that they conform to the pattern of society, which at all times has groups thinking over a wide range, from what we call extreme left to extreme right. The general movement of civilization, however, goes on in accordance with the thinking of the majority of the people, and that was exactly what happened in both the American Youth Congress and the World Youth Congress.

The resolutions finally passed by both bodies were rather sane and calm, perhaps a trifle idealistic and certainly very optimistic. There were amendments offered for discussion, and voted down, which many people might have considered radical; but since there is radical thinking among both young and old, it seems to me wiser to discuss and vote down an idea than to ignore it. By so doing we know in which direction the real trend of thought is growing. If we take the attitude that youth, even youth when it belongs to the Communist party, cannot be met on the basis of equal consideration and a willingness to listen, then we are again beginning to allow our fears of this particular group to overwhelm us and we are losing the opportunity to make our experience available and useful to the next generation.

I do not believe that oppression anywhere or injustice which is tolerated by the people of any country toward any group in that country is a healthy influence. I feel that unless we learn to live together as individuals and as groups, and to find ways of settling our difficulties without showing fear of each other and resorting to force, we cannot hope to see our democracy successful. It is an indisputable fact that democracy cannot survive where force and not law is the ultimate court of appeal. Every time we permit force to enter into a situation between employer and employee we have weakened the power of democracy and the confidence which a democratic people must have in their ability to make laws to meet the conditions under which they live, and, when necessary, to change those laws with due political process according to the will of the majority of the people.

When we permit religious prejudice to gain headway in our midst, when we allow one group of people to look down upon another, then we may for a short time bring hardship on some particular group of people, but the real hardship and the real wrong is done to democracy and to our nation as a whole. We are then breeding people who cannot live under a democratic form of government but must be controlled by force. We have but to look out into the world to see how easy it is to become stultified, to accept without protest wrongs done to others, and to shift the burden of decision and of responsibility for any action onto some vague thing called a government or some individual called a leader.

It is true today that democracies are in danger because there are forces opposed to their way of thinking abroad in the world; but more than democracies are at stake. When force becomes so necessary that practically all nations decide that they must engage in a race which will make them able to back up what they have to say with arms and will thus oblige the rest of the world to listen to them, then we face an ultimate Armageddon, unless at the same time an effort to find some other solution is never abandoned.

We in this country may look at it more calmly than the rest of the world, for we can pay for force over a longer period of time; and for a while at least our people will not suffer as much as some of the other nations of the world, but the building up of physical forces is an interminable race. Do you see where it will end unless some strong movement for an ultimate change is afoot?

Someone may say: "But we need only to go on until the men who at present have power in the world and who believe in force are gone." But when in the past has there been a time when such men did not exist? If our civilization is to survive and democracies are to live, then the people of the world as a whole must be stronger than such leaders. That is the way of democracy, that is the only way to a rule of law and order as opposed to a rule of force.

We can read the history of civilization, its ups and its down as they have occurred under the rule of force. Underlying that history is the story of each individual's fears. It seems to me a challenge to women in this period of our civilization to foster democracy and to refuse to fall a prey to fear. Only our young people still seem to have some strength and hope, and apparently we are afraid to give them a helping hand.

Someone said to me the other day that, acknowledging all the weaknesses of human nature, one must still believe in the basic good of humanity or fall into cynicism and the philosophy of old Omar Khayyam. I do still believe that there is within most of us a basic desire to live uprightly and kindly with our neighbors, but I also feel that we are at present in the grip of a wave of fear which threatens to overcome us. I think we need a rude awakening, to make us exert all the strength we have to face facts as they are in our country and in the world, and to make us willing to sacrifice all that we have from the material standpoint in order that freedom and democracy may not perish from this earth.