As regular HPWA readers know, I have created a maxim for the
St Theo's Day celebrations: "Nobody can make you feel inferior without
your consent." I felt that this was a perfect motto for Hospital Porters'
Pride and Dignity, the spirit of St Theo itself. The statement was coined by
somebody called Eleanor Roosevelt and at the time I included it I did not know
who that person was. Since then I have found out. She was a First Lady of the United
States , a title which means the wife of a US
President, like the incumbent Melania Trump. Her husband was the thirty-second
and longest served ever US
President, Franklin D Roosevelt. The role of the First Lady carries no official
political office, but it is invariably one of charity work and non-partisan activism.
Eleanor Roosevelt became what is today known as a "goodwill
ambassador". She worked hard to improve the lives of workers left jobless
and poor by the Great Depression and was one of the pioneers in the quest for
civil rights for black people. She was also heavily influenced by the first
wave feminist Marie Souvestre who had been her schoolteacher. She was rumoured
to have had homosexual relationships with a number of famous women, including the
aviator Amelia Earhart and the journalist Lorena Hickok. (To be fair, her own
husband was reportedly doing the same thing with women, as presidents often do;
so what's good for the goose is good for the gander, you might say.) Her
support for leftwing causes drew the ire of many American conservatives, such
as J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. As to be expected in the mid-20th century,
Eleanor Roosevelt was accused of being a communist agent. This video is
particularly condemnatory: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Cum7gEyObVoT/.
During the 1940's and 50's the United
States of America was struck down by an
hysterical fear of "communists!". That word had a very different
colloquial use to that of today. It didn't necessarily mean an orthodox
Marxist; it could be applied to anybody who was not a table-thumping redneck.
With retrospect, it turns out that there was some justification for that fear.
The Venona project was a counterintelligence operation by the Signal
Intelligence Service, later the NSA, that exposed the Cambridge
spies; Blunt, Burgess, MacLean and Philby along with the espionage ring within
the Manhattan project to develop
the nuclear bomb. Yet that was just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority
of Venona intercepts were never deciphered. The agents who sent and received
them were never caught. Some may still be alive today and walking free. Even
the man whose very name was coined for institutional paranoid suspicion,
Senator Joseph McCarthy, has been absolved somewhat, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wljpYZ8wejA.
Yet none of these facts legitimize the depths and extremes of the
"anti-communist!" obsession of that era. It was even suggested that
Superman's red cape was actually a red flag in disguise. A number of films
emerged at the time which capture that terrified mania. They are almost funny
when viewed through modern eyes, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KWHDNPdoCg,
and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8zhmCjV71w,
and: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4alzh3.
The only excuse I can think of was that this was the early Cold War and the
threat of nuclear holocaust had just emerged; something so horrific that it
caused mass insanity among the population in a way that those born under the
shadow of the bomb could never comprehend. A number of cinema actors, writers
and directors were subpoenaed by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
Most refused to testify and were found in contempt. The "Hollywood
Ten" as they were called were blacklisted from America 's
famous movie industry. These included some household names such as Arthur
Miller, Humphrey Bogart and Lionel Stander. This film is a good history of the
subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ-dKru9RWM.
Could Eleanor Roosevelt have been falsely accused of being a Soviet agent
because of her leftist biases? Maybe. Was she wrong to be concerned about the
legitimate iniquities of the era she lived in? I don't have a problem with
civil rights; in fact I regularly defend them for all people. I would not
tolerate black people being forced to sit at the back of buses and women not
being allowed to buy houses, or any other similar injustices. I have no
opinions at all regarding other people's private lives. What I object to is that
the civil rights movement has been warped into a mockery of itself through cultural
Marxism, for example see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/11/sjw-ufo.html.
However, Eleanor Roosevelt was a keen supporter of the United Nations which, as
G Edward Griffin has correctly pointed out, is an embryonic one-world
government, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwPy7oSs6Yc.
In fact she was the United States '
first ever ambassador to the UN. She was the powerhouse behind the American
Youth Congress and National Youth Administration which were definitely
infiltrated by socialist tendencies supporting the USSR ,
such as the Young Communist League. I don't have an answer to this conundrum;
I've only just started investigating who Eleanor Roosevelt really was. We can't
ask her because she died in 1962. Really, for the purposes of St Theo's Day,
does it matter who she was? I am quite willing to repeat quotes of wisdom from
many people who I consider deplorable. Winston Churchill was another
one-worlder, but he said something truly enlightening, and during my Larry
Warren research project I reproduced it in this post without a qualm: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/02/is-larry-warren-fraud-part-6.html.
I am also a big fan of the author China Miéville, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-city-and-city-by-china-mieville.html,
and he is a raving socialist. In fact, far from being an undercover agent he
wears it on his sleeve. Eleanor Roosevelt's quote: "Nobody can make you
feel inferior without your consent." is one that resonates with my
hospital portering experience enormously, regardless of the character of the
one who said it; therefore I will continue to use it in HPWA publications and
the St Theo's Day posters.
See here for more
background: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/01/spies-of-london-part-1.html.
