The First Lady of Radio (23 page)

Now to turn for a moment to the subject of national defense. Last week I gave you some figures which had come to me about our Army. Today, I have acquired some about our Navy. There are still many men, as you know, who think that the ultimate victory in any world situation goes to those who control the seas. That is where commerce is carried on; that is the lifeline of civilization. And therefore, it is of interest to us that our Navy today is the most powerful in the world. Three hundred and thirty-eight combatant ships are in commission, and 353 more are building. The Navy has 273,315 enlisted men. The Marine Corps has 59,968 men. And with the officer personnel included, this figure will run upward of 350,000 men in all. Every branch of the service is putting
special emphasis today on aviation, and the Navy has 5,000 trained pilots, 3,600 students, and it is estimated that by July 1942, the Navy will have a minimum of 10,000 trained flying naval officers.

The value of having an aviation arm which is attached to the Navy or to the Army lies in the fact that branches of the same service work better together because they are more closely coordinated. This expansion in the Navy has necessitated tremendous expansion in the Bureau of Ordnance. Navy yards and many other allied industries are absorbing almost all available skilled labor, besides demanding certain materials which necessitate giving priority as to delivery of materials for the defense program. Among the men in the Navy, the morale has never been higher. They are not having an easy time of it. Many of them spend weeks at a time patrolling in stormy waters. One of them wrote me about “a trip down the coast in the teeth of a storm which broke over the bridge and carried away some glass. All of us on board are tired, but in fine shape and ready to meet any emergency.” That means hard work, and when people say that this generation of young people have become soft, I feel like saying that it is not the younger generation which is soft. Instead, the older generation is soft for them, now and then.

I received a wire, for instance, from two mothers of boys in the Army the other day bemoaning the fact that their boys had been disappointed at the end of maneuvers by having their promised leaves rescinded on returning to their base camp. I can fully realize that any mother must have been disappointed, and the boys themselves must have been depressed. But we are growing up in the United States, and one of the things we learn as we grow up is to accept disappointments and to learn that the unexpected is part of everyone's existence. On the other hand, it is good to know that so much hospitality has been shown to our young Army men wherever they have gone on maneuvers, and that on the whole their health has been extraordinarily good.

In Washington, DC, we are getting a number of women in different
government departments, all of whom have interesting jobs, but those who at the moment have been attracting the most attention are the two who are working in the War and Navy Departments. Mrs. Hobby, who is a young Texas newspaperwoman, is doing the kind of work which should reassure the families of the boys who are in camps or on maneuvers. The other one, Mrs. Lewis, does publicity for the Navy. Mrs. Hobby is telling families what happens to their boys while they are playing at what may someday prove to be a very grim and real game.

And speaking of things which are real and grim, I must say that the fires which have occurred in Cleveland, Ohio, and in Fall River, Massachusetts, lately—and which have destroyed so many materials destined for defense in this country or abroad—are most discouraging. Where there is a question of possible sabotage, it is quite evident that the FBI must be given every opportunity to find out what individuals or groups of people are responsible. Where it is a question of neglect in the observation of certain very important rules, I think public opinion should rise up and insist that such things must not occur. We resent losing materials which we are making sacrifices to produce when they are on their way across the ocean. How much more should we resent the loss of materials which occur through lack of care in the observation of fire protection rules?

This has been a pretty serious talk tonight, so I'd like to close with one word of real cheer, especially for the American housewife. Dr. M. Harris, who is directing the work of the Textile Foundation, says we are going to have wool processed in such a way that it will be just as warm as it ever was, but it will not shrink in the laundry. And the moths will not find it so enjoyable. This is good news to all of us who have been accustomed to having our woolens shrink and to find moths have riddled them when we take them out of storage in the fall.

27.

“Propaganda”

Over Our Coffee Cups
, presented by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau

October 26, 1941

ER: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. There is an extraordinary difference between the broadcasts sent out by the German government and the attitude taken by the commanders of German ships. The German High Command knows quite well what these German ships actually do. And yet they take the trouble to tell their people that the American reports of the sinkings should be regarded with “the deepest skepticism.” And they state that several American reports, which are as true today as the day they were made, have been proved untrue. And because of that they cast doubt on the report of German sinkings of any American ships. This savors somewhat of the attitude of fooling one's self, and of telling people only what they would like to hear.

All the news that comes out of Germany today, whether it is private and confidential, or whether it is sent out to the world, seems to be a
mixture of wishful thinking on the one hand, and on the other, an attempt to terrify the world by showing how utterly without mercy or regard for human life is the German führer. How, otherwise, can we explain the reports of sending numberless Jewish people from Berlin and other cities, at an hour's notice, packed like cattle into trains, with their destination either Poland or some part of occupied Russia? For the life of one German officer, fifty French people are shot. And the punishment for acts of rebellion against German rule in any country becomes more severe every day. The man who orders these cruelties stood before the tomb of Napoleon, so the story runs, and as he turned away, remarked, “Napoleon failed in conquering the world, but I will succeed.” I often wonder whether he had ever read a Russian folk story, which has to do with Napoleon's attempted conquest of Russia.

The story runs thus: Napoleon, because he had no pity, could cry out “Bonapart-ay, Bonapart-ay,” and the soldiers he had killed would rise up to fight for him. One day, however, he saw a young Russian lying wounded, and the young soldier said, as Napoleon went by, “Tell me one thing, Napoleander: why did you kill me?” And because the young Russian was not really a young peasant soldier but the archangel Ivan, the words he spoke haunted Napoleon. And though he pulled out his pistol and shot the soldier through the head, the words still seemed to follow him, repeated by all the young dead men who lay upon the ground around him. Napoleon could not sleep in his tent at night. And when the battle came the next day, his heart had become soft and for the first time, he felt pity. On calling for the dead soldiers to come to the rescue, he found they had deserted him because the human emotion of pity had destroyed his power over them, so Napoleon and his army were routed. No man can count forever on being so completely dominated by his dream of power that God will not enter into his soul and make him feel pity. The day will come for the führer, as surely as it came for Napoleon.

Here at home, our defense effort goes on apace. We read daily that new ships slide down the ways. New airplanes are turned out. And now the president has sent out a call to civilians to do their defense duty. He has proclaimed the time from November 11 to November 16 as Defense Week. November 11 is Armistice Day, and ordinarily we hold services thanking God for the peace that came on this day, and praying that war will never come to us again. This year, in addition to our usual services and the decoration of the graves of the dead who fought in the last war, we will use the day as a reminder that liberty is always worth preserving. And that defense, for us, means the preservation of the liberty we have, and the continuation of our efforts to improve democracy at home, and to make it possible for the rest of the world to enjoy the same freedom that we enjoy.

The civilian defense to which the president calls us is concerned with a great many sides of the life of our communities. Today we are still primarily thinking about the rise in the cost of living, which is being felt more and more in every community. The low-income groups suffer the most, for the percentage spent on foods grows greater. In other words, the smaller your income, the greater is the percent spent on food. Prices keep going up, and yet the House hearings on the Emergency Price Control Bill have been carried on in a leisurely fashion during the better part of three months.

In a war economy, a nation has to divert a great part of its resources and manpower from the making of peacetime goods to the making of instruments for war or defense—planes, tanks, guns, battleships, et cetera. We pay for this vast defense effort, partly out of taxes, but to a greater degree, the government borrows. There is plenty of work and wages and profits in the hands of the people, but the amount that people can buy is limited by the fact that production is largely in defense materials, which the people cannot use in their daily lives. So they compete with their wages to purchase those civilian goods produced only by non-defense
workers, which means that prices shoot up, unless the government institutes some kind of price control. In ordinary times, when the price of an article starts to rise, manufacturers produce it in greater quantity, and the price comes down. But in a crisis like this, prices start rising on all sides. There cannot be greater quantities produced because industry's working practically at capacity on defense.

More plants cannot be built nor more machinery produced, because the materials needed to do this are used in the production of defense articles. So instead of stimulating more production, as might have happened in peacetime, speculation and hoarding begin, which results in taking supplies off the market, and prices go up. Workers attain higher wages. These wages are reflected in higher manufacturing costs. And make the article bought by the people more costly and the vicious spiral in prices and rising wages has begun.

We are still in the opening stages of the spiral in this country, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the cost of living on a national average has risen about 10 percent since the war started in 1939. Most of this increase has taken place in the last few months. Wholesale prices have risen over 22 percent. You wonder why this sharp rise in the wholesale price hasn't been reflected in the prices we pay in retail stores. That is partly due to the fact that the retailers have been selling off their stocks and haven't had to replenish yet. When they do, in the course of the next few months, this cost will be reflected in retail prices, unless some adjustments are made in the near future.

There are various ways of trying to check inflation. You can try to remove from people what excess money
they
have by taxation or by urging them to buy defense bonds. This latter suggestion of course will be of value in the future, because that money will be available for expenditure to stimulate private spending to start industry functioning on a peacetime production basis again. We can limit the amount and the terms on installment credit. But this method never seems to go far enough, and
the method of volunteer cooperation to place ceilings on certain goods produced by industry and trade does not seem either to completely control inflationary tendencies. So it would look as though the only thing that remains to be done is to pass some kind of legislation which will fix the ceiling for prices in an effort to be fair to buyers and sellers both. There is naturally an appeal made when prices are controlled to control wages. But it seems unfair on the whole to put human labor and commodities in the same category. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution makes many people doubt whether doing so might not be in certain instances classed as involuntary bondage.

It would seem to be better, perhaps, to protect the worker from the rising cost of living, not only through control of the price of foodstuffs, but through some kind of rent control. And then appeal to his democratic patriotism for a voluntary stabilizing agreement arrived at by the machinery instituted for collective bargaining.

I have wanted for a long time to find a real instance where people bothered to lie to prove their own ideas. And lo and behold a letter has just come to me from the Pacific coast which gives me my proof. My correspondent says that in practically every city he visited, stories had been told to the effect that the largest Jewish-owned department stores had discharged many American workers in order to provide jobs for Jewish refugees. No story could tend to create disunity more rapidly. And it
is not
true. It might be the time for a seasonal lay-off, or any one of a number of reasons might make a drop in employment temporarily necessary. The Germans circulate a story like this to create a dislike of the Jews. I sometimes wonder if it would not be well to organize a committee called American Unity to explain that creating rifts between various groups is not the way to promote goodwill, because sometimes it acts as a boomerang.

28.

“Isolationists”

Over Our Coffee Cups
, presented by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau

November 16, 1941

GEORGE HICKS: The Pan-American Coffee Bureau, representing seven Good Neighbor coffee-growing nations, presents to you American families your Sunday-evening visit with Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the past week Mrs. Roosevelt made another of her famous flying trips, this time into Ohio and Michigan. Two great states in the heart of America's glorious Middlewest. What sentiment did Mrs. Roosevelt find there about the present crisis in our international affairs? What are her answers to the Middlewestern isolationists? This evening, Mrs. Roosevelt has graciously consented to tell us.