Report to Mothers

For once, energetic Eleanor Roosevelt, in San Francisco last week after her 23,000-mile voyage to Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific battle stations, looked tired. Reporters found her thin. They missed her usual warmhearted gusto. Lines of weariness were traced on her face, netting her friendly blue eyes in a delicate web of fatigue. They were eyes that had seen much—perhaps too much for one who, along with her several other distinctions, is a mother with four sons in uniform.

No other U.S. mother had seen so much of the panorama of the war, had been closer to the sweat and boredom, the suffering. Eleanor Roosevelt had ridden in jeeps, reviewed troops, rubbed elbows with some more of the world’s great, had seen places under enemy attack. But it was of the men she had seen and talked with that she wanted to tell. As one mother speaking to other mothers she reported on her trip to the far-off places of the Pacific. Highlights of her report:

> Most important thing in the lives of men away from home is mail. Its arrival caused more excitement than she did, she said. “But it must be that the folks at home are writing that they can’t get things to eat, or telling about transportation difficulties. The boys seemed so concerned over conditions back in the U.S. One after another they asked me, ‘How are things at home?'”

>Men in the services are thinking hard about their future. “They asked me, not ‘What are we going to get in the way of a bonus?’ but ‘Will we have a chance for more education?’ and ‘Will we have jobs?’ “

>U.S. fighting men have strong feelings about strikes. “They ask you to explain. They say, ‘Why is this? We don’t understand. We need this stuff to fight with, to defend our lives with.’ I don’t think I saw a boy who justified any strike,, but their approach was always reasonable. They are the most reasonable people I have ever met.”

> The younger generation is worthy of respect. “We have heard that its members were soft. Golly, if that generation is soft, I don’t know what it is going to be when it gets tough.”

>Mothers do not always know what is best. “Mothers have complained and asked me why their boys were being made to sit in the swamps of Louisiana as part of their Army training. I know now. It was done so those boys might save their own lives later on.”

Flying from San Francisco to New York, Eleanor Roosevelt revealed, at journey’s end, that she had been asked by her husband to see as many U.S. fighting men as possible, to find out how things were going with them. Franklin Roosevelt, and the U.S., could thank her for a job well done.