(3 of 4)
> 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 Four years ago she argued that "the war idea is obsolete."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.