FIRST LADY ELEANOR ROOSEVELT felt betrayed. In the late 1930s, she had put the prestige of the White House behind the American Student Union (ASU), a coalition that included liberal, socialist, and communist groups. She had seen in the left-liberal coalition a youthful constituency broadly in support of her husband’s New Deal policies and one that could carry on his legacy. The ASU and its sister organization, the American Youth Congress, shared a commitment to racial equality, labor rights, and peace. Despite the presence of communist students, Roosevelt defended the coalition against charges of subversion. When in December 1939 the ASU general secretary, Joseph Lash—a socialist rather than a communist—was summoned to testify before the congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities, she had signaled her support by sitting behind the witness table, knitting quietly. After the hearing, she had invited Lash, who became her close friend and eventual biographer, and other leaders to the White House. Sometimes she had dipped into her own purse to finance their activities. On one occasion, she had confronted several young leaders and asked whether they belonged to the Communist Party, and they had denied any affiliation. She later learned they had lied to her.1
It wasn’t only that the students had lied to her that made Eleanor Roosevelt feel the sting of betrayal. A single event in 1939 had revealed the influence of the Soviet Union in the ASU coalition and shattered liberals’ faith in it. Once committed to fighting the fascists in Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy, the ASU suddenly switched its position.
On August 23, 1939, Stalinist Russia had stunned the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, and communists around the world, heretofore opposed to Adolf Hitler, had thrown their support behind it. At an ASU meeting in December, delegates, who had defended Russia’s invasion of Finland on November 30, implicitly supported the pact. In the United States, socialists like Lash and New Deal liberals like Roosevelt watched in horror as their coalition partners justified Stalin’s deal with the devil. The twin blows—that Stalin could ally himself with Hitler and that Moscow’s foreign policy could dictate the agenda of a U.S. student organization—tore the left-liberal coalition apart.2 The consequences of the pact ripped through labor, civic, religious, and youth coalitions as liberals searched for evidence of Moscow-directed communist influence.
According to Lash, after Roosevelt’s experiences with popular front organizations, she refused to work in coalition with communists; they were untrustworthy partners. She argued that Party allegiance, when kept secret, made communists resistant to persuasion, one of the essential elements of democracy. But as late as 1941 the First Lady made it clear that she distinguished between tolerance for ideas—she would debate any proposition—and secrecy. “I don’t care if a young person is a Communist—if he’s frank about it,” she told PM’s Weekly.3 Not every liberal displayed such broad-mindedness, and hers would diminish as her experience with communist deception grew. By 1949, she was openly opposed to negotiating or compromising with communists.4
The Stalin-Hitler Pact became a cautionary tale that defined a generation of liberals. “It was 1939, not 1946 or 1947,” concluded one historian, “that marked the inauguration of the ideological cold war between those who still saw the communist movement as an integral part of the American progressive tradition and those whose hostility to the communists was fundamental and implacable.”5 Not all liberals took a firm position against communism this early, but those who did were the precursors to a bitter fight within the Democratic Party, a battle that gradually forced out left-wing activists and drove Communist Party members underground.
The emergence of a liberal anticommunist doctrine between 1939 and 1946 reshaped the American political landscape. It caused Democratic president Harry S. Truman to fire his secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, formerly Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, for advocating cooperation with the Soviet Union. It created a generation of leaders dedicated to purging communist influence in liberal organizations. It swelled the ranks of Cold Warriors willing to combat the Soviet Union by any means necessary. It put nongovernmental organizations in the service of U.S. national security objectives, and would find its fullest expression during the presidency of John F. Kennedy—ironically, since prominent liberals, including Eleanor Roosevelt, were none too sure of his political bona fides. When, later, a younger generation of liberals judged their elders harshly for elevating ends over means and compromising civil liberties, and accused them of betraying democracy—the very thing they had sought to protect—liberal anticommunist defenders responded that fighting evil sometimes required a tempering of idealism. They justified their actions by invoking patriotism, placing loyalty to the United States above more democratic values.
Had Eleanor Roosevelt been a more traditional First Lady, we might not have so clear a picture of how she and other veterans of 1930s student politics wrestled with the Stalin-Hitler Pact, of their sense of betrayal, or of how they subsequently sought to marry their liberal ideals to a hard-nosed anticommunism. But Roosevelt was an activist. In 1940, she joined the U.S. Committee of the International Student Service, a group of like-minded educators and New Deal colleagues, to mobilize American youth, and ensure that the American Student Union experience was not repeated. And in 1941, she offered her family’s thirty-one-room summer cottage on Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, to train a new generation on the danger of communist tactics. The record of this group’s actions, available in rarely perused archives, reveals important continuities with postwar developments that are usually ignored, if for no other reason than the tendency to divide history into distinct eras.
The group Eleanor Roosevelt joined had ambitious goals: to restructure the American student movement, train a new generation of leaders, and form a national student organization free of communist influence. Had they succeeded—and they nearly did—America might have emerged from World War II with a strong national union of students. Despite organizational failures, the legacy of the Roosevelt group influenced the founding of the postwar U.S. National Student Association, shaped its relationship with the government, and, most important, determined its first international activities.
The U.S. Committee was an affiliate of the International Student Service (ISS), based in Geneva. Formed in 1920 after World War I to mobilize relief to students, the ISS was largely Protestant but prided itself on religious ecumenism, including in its membership both Catholic and Jewish groups. Fiercely nonpartisan, the ISS worked with war refugees regardless of country, combatant status, or political affiliation. In the United States, ISS committee members included prominent college presidents (from Smith, Hunter, and Brooklyn Colleges, the New School for Social Research, and Rockefeller Institute) and prestigious professors, dubbed by a younger board member “the Heavyweights of Education.”6 But the inclusion of the word student in the organization’s name is misleading. Adults in Geneva and the United States ran the ISS, a practice common in the first half of the twentieth century, when few student-controlled organizations existed.
The fear that communists might fill the organizational vacuum left by the collapse over the next year of the American Student Union gave urgency to the U.S. agenda. In September 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt and committee member Archibald MacLeish, a poet and the Librarian of Congress, headlined a major conference on students and the future of democracy at International House near Columbia University in New York. The conference, attended by more than three hundred students from ninety-two colleges, marked the public launch of a campaign to revamp the American student movement.7
During the conference, longtime U.S. ISS Committee board member Clyde Eagleton, an expert in international law at Columbia, approached Joseph Lash, and asked whether Lash would be interested in staffing the committee. Lash had evolved politically from a socialist skeptical of the New Deal to an ardent Roosevelt supporter, and now was working for the president’s reelection. After some consideration (and the offer of a munificent salary of $4,000), Lash accepted.8
That Lash was thirty-two years old and had no student status and few ties to American campuses apparently concerned no one. With his popular-front experience, he was ideally suited to spot and combat communist tactics, an overriding objective of the U.S. Committee. Lash suggested that the Committee also hire his socialist colleague from ASU days, Molly Yard (known to a later generation of feminists as the head of the National Organization for Women). Paradoxically, the fact that Lash and Yard had socialist backgrounds fueled charges in the United States that the ISS had turned pink if not red; the public rarely understood the deep antagonism between communists and socialists and more often equated the two.9
Eleanor Roosevelt’s address to the conference drew a derisive response from Time magazine, whose editors described the First Lady as a “friend & guardian of the Communist-riven American Youth Congress,” who had taken “time off from early Christmas shopping to help launch another youth movement.” Time patronizingly dismissed the conference as “an attempt to wean youth from passing angry resolutions to sober discussion.”10
Although written in flippant Time-ese, the article accurately captured the U.S. Committee’s aversion to the protest tactics that had characterized the 1930s. In 1940, mass mobilizations, demonstrations, and campus strikes carried worrisome echoes of Nazi youth rallies. The Committee soon abandoned large conferences as too difficult to control, a view solidified by a postmortem of the September event and Lash’s contention that his former colleagues had tried to take it over.11
The ISS sought instead to screen, select, and train students who had the backing of campus bigwigs: presidents, provosts, and deans. This top-down approach, prevalent until the 1960s, created a subtle conservative bias in picking leaders. The students’ need to acquire the imprimatur of powerful elites meant striving to please those in authority, tempering rebellious tendencies, and staying within prescribed boundaries. During the formative stages of the NSA-CIA relationship, such habits of deference, especially among undergraduates, helped camouflage CIA interest.
At the time, it seemed possible that a group of elite (mostly) men without strong ties to American students could achieve the Committee’s sweeping goals. Roosevelt, who often hosted meetings in her 65th Street home in New York City, wrote the foreword to a widely circulated pamphlet outlining the omnibus ISS program in the United States, which included conferences, seminars, a Washington office, a newspaper, and leadership training institutes. The Committee also looked ahead to a postwar world and the international role American students could play in it, even though in 1940 the United States had not even entered World War II.12
Key to the ISS agenda was a six-week leadership institute, first held in the summer of 1941 at the Roosevelts’ summer home in Campobello. The U.S. Committee took care in its choice of students, enlisting the anthropologist Margaret Mead to devise a two-page questionnaire to screen applicants.13 Once the list was winnowed, finalists underwent personal interviews. They were asked to elaborate on statements such as “The course of history is fixed and it is beyond the power of any individual to change it” and “The last generation got us into this mess, and we can’t do anything about it,” as well as more provocative questions like “Are there appeasers in the State Department?” Thirty out of eighty students made the cut, many of them from East Coast colleges.14 The ISS provided scholarships to those who couldn’t afford the room and board.
Getting to Campobello took almost as much commitment as meeting the goals of the Committee. Located near the Maine-Canada border, the isolated island was accessible only by ferry (once the fog had lifted), following a long journey by bus, train, or car. In July 1941, Roosevelt drove herself from New York, being careful to go slowly, as she noted in her “My Day” syndicated newspaper column, because her mother-in-law was along.15 Despite its natural beauty, Campobello lacked modern amenities like electricity and indoor toilets. Former Smith College president William Allan Neilson, then seventy-two, endured these hardships for the entire session, surely a measure of his devotion to the enterprise.
Many prominent New Dealers ferried out to Campobello Island that summer. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter lectured on the role of law in civilized society. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau schooled the students in international finance. Other guests included Roosevelt stalwarts such as White House adviser Lauchlin Currie and Archibald MacLeish. Students also heard from Louis Fischer, a journalist who later wrote a seminal essay about his years covering the Russian Revolution and living in the Soviet Union.16 The listeners included his son George Fischer, a future founder of the U.S. National Student Association and perhaps the only American student who was once a member of the Soviet Young Pioneers.17 Other academics who made the trek included U.S. ISS Committee members Clyde Eagleton and Austrian émigré Walter Kotschnig, from Smith, who stepped off the ferry too soon and splashed down, suitcase and all, in the Bay of Fundy.18
But the curriculum consisted of more than lectures. The second half of the course, “The Student as Student,” distilled the lessons of the American Student Union. The Campobello students held mock conventions in order to develop skills for combating such communist tactics as noisy floor demonstrations and microphone grabs. Lash schooled the younger students on why communists, often the minority in organizations, wielded disproportionate influence: communist cadres were indefatigable, came to meetings early, stayed late, and never lost focus. He argued the need for liberal cadres, “capable of coping with the ‘professional revolutionists’ who staffed the communist-inspired and -directed groups in the United States.”19
The students hammered out principles to guide a new national student organization: its membership base must be comprised of student governments, not national groups like the YMCA that might have chapters on campus. It must focus on “student” (that is, educational) issues and avoid politics and ideology. It must be structured regionally to dilute the influence of big cities that produced left-wing agitators. After days of discussion, George Fischer and Louis Harris (of the University of North Carolina, the future pioneering pollster), among others, turned the discussion into a written statement of principles. After the war, the new U.S. National Student Association would adopt these principles of nonpartisanship, student government affiliation, a focus on student issues, and a regional structure.
The thorniest question for the Campobello students was whether to ban communists from their future organizations. It was an issue, Lash later wrote, that “the group never fully came to terms with.”20 Exclusionary provisions flew in the face of the liberal commitment to civil liberties. Shifting alliances also affected the debate. A few weeks earlier, the Nazis had violated the nonaggression pact by invading the Soviet Union, and Stalin’s allegiance had shifted once again. While the reversal brought about a new level of disgust for American communists who followed Moscow’s changing line, the Soviet Union was now an official U.S. ally, which tended to undercut the rationale for a ban.
Lash struggled with an alternative to outright bans. Since fascists and communists were investing substantial resources in young people, he returned to the idea of cadres, who would be “just as committed and dedicated to liberal principles as the Communists were to Soviet doctrine.”21 A few students questioned the wisdom of such fervor. Lash remembered an objection from Alice Kahn of Smith College: “I think a crusading spirit is incompatible with the democratic temper which is one of open-mindedness and tolerance of conflicting views. Democracy cannot strive for singleness of purpose. Its essence is diversity.”22
Few students shared Kahn’s skepticism, however, and the phrase heard frequently at Campobello, “a fighting faith for democracy,” became a liberal rallying cry after the war, popularized by the New Deal stalwart Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in his The Vital Center.23 After the summer institute ended, Time took note of the students’ new political enthusiasms: “Last week they packed up and whooped off home, full of schemes to give their contemporaries a ‘fighting faith.’” The article depicted the students as youngsters on a frolic. “Trainees … put salt in the sugar bowl, sucked lollipops handed out by Mrs. Roosevelt, satirized their lecturers in songs, played tennis, danced, picknicked.”24
While the Campobello debates offer an important glimpse into the development of liberal anticommunism, and its dilemmas, the course had other themes as well, including the importance of international cooperation. Most U.S. ISS Committee members were passionate Wilsonians, advocates of Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a peaceful world and supporters of the League of Nations. Eminent sponsors of the committee, such as the diplomats James Shotwell and Quincy Wright, had witnessed the signing of the Versailles Treaty after World War I that created the League. It was axiomatic among Committee members that America’s failure to join the League of Nations had resulted in the League’s weakness and failure to prevent a new war; they were determined that history not be repeated after World War II.25
Individual Committee members had already begun to work for a replacement to the League before the United States entered the war. Their ideas for postwar international cooperation gave them a further stake in the next generation. Since extreme nationalism, in their view, led to war, young people needed to be schooled in the virtue of ceding a little national sovereignty to world organizations in return for world peace.
Most ISS educators believed equally, as MacLeish would put it in his opening sentence to the preamble of the 1945 UNESCO constitution, that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” Cultural exchange programs to build friendship across national boundaries, for example, were seen as a cornerstone to cooperation. While cynics might dismiss international cultural exchange as harmless hands-across-the-sea altruism, the U.S. ISS Committee understood its ideological promise. Projecting a positive view of American democracy overseas could counter the lure (and falsehoods) of communism. This blend of liberalism, anticommunism, and internationalism infused the U.S. Committee’s agenda for American students, as it would animate the future U.S. National Student Association.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered the war, and most members of the U.S. ISS Committee joined the Roosevelt war effort. Over the next few years, these educator-activists forged new relations: between the private sector and government, between the nation’s campuses and the military, between intelligence and diplomatic agendas. The national mobilization was unprecedented and had lasting consequences. It created institutions and informal networks that later eased the transition from hot to cold war.
Committee member Arnold Wolfers, for example, a Swiss émigré and Yale professor of international relations, served as an adviser to the new civilian intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This relationship anticipated his postwar career as a prolific campus recruiter for the CIA. Kotschnig, George Shuster, and Harry D. Gideonse, presidents, respectively of Smith, Hunter, and Brooklyn Colleges, were advisers on postwar exchange programs for the tiny new Division of Cultural Relations in the State Department.26 Others headed new civic organizations in support of the war, some of which had covert ties to the federal government; their success later suggested models for concealing government involvement.
Wartime objectives reshaped the immediate U.S. Committee agenda. After two years of intensive work between 1940 and 1942, including the establishment of a Washington office, the launch of a student newspaper, Threshold, and plans for a new national student organization, the U.S. ISS Committee eagerly accepted backing from the Roosevelt administration for an international student conference. Kotschnig wrote a friend, “I don’t think I am giving away a secret by stating that Mr. Roosevelt will use this Assembly as a sounding board for an appeal to the youth of the world.”27 It seemed logical and consistent with ISS objectives to cultivate generational solidarity across national boundaries; no one foresaw that this decision would shatter the Committee or that entanglement with government objectives might offer as potent a cautionary tale to student organizations as the Stalin-Hitler Pact.
On September 2, 1942, three hundred delegates from fifty-six countries convened at American University in Washington—an unprecedented wartime event, when travel, especially foreign travel, was difficult. Some delegates represented occupied countries like France and Poland; others appeared in military uniform. Some were already working directly with the War Department: an Italian refugee, Bruno Luzzatto, for example, helped the U.S military identify bombing targets. Joseph Lash took pride in including the Soviet delegation. He believed it undercut his old enemies in ASU by demonstrating that a nonpartisan group could have friendly relations with the Soviet Union without marching in ideological lockstep.28
The Soviets stole the show by sending Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a trained sniper with more than three hundred kills under her belt, to address the assembly. In a gesture toward the new U.S.-Soviet alliance, Eleanor Roosevelt entertained Pavlichenko at the White House. The First Lady met individually with other foreign delegations, even driving the four British representatives one night to see the Lincoln Memorial, which she judged more impressive when illuminated.29
The second day of the conference, delegates trooped into a large auditorium in the Commerce Building to hear a radio address by President Roosevelt, which was also piped abroad to thirty-two countries in seven languages. “But now,” the president told the assembly, “the world knows that the Nazis, the Fascists and Militarists of Japan have nothing to offer to youth—except death.” He flattered them as the postwar face of the United Nations. (Throughout the war, President Roosevelt deliberately referred to U.S. allies as “the United Nations.” According to Lash one of FDR’s major objectives was to build support for a postwar institution of the same name.) The delegates from the “twenty-nine United Nations … represent, in spirit at least, the younger generation of many other nations who, though they are not now actively at war on our side, are with us heart and soul in aspiration for a secure and peaceful world.” The president told them that, as students, they had a right to speak for themselves.30
When Campobello graduate Louis Harris strode across the stage on behalf of the United States delegation to sign the Credo of Youth, which read, “We affirm our united determination to fight on to the complete rout of fascism,” the assembly erupted with applause and shouts of “Forward to Victory, Forward to Victory.”31 The lengthy credo emphasized unity of purpose on the battlefield and for peace. In 1942, this powerful rallying cry of unity served U.S aims. The Office of Wartime Information (founded by Archibald MacLeish) packaged material from the conference, including Roosevelt’s speech, and beamed it by short-wave radio into occupied territories. Individual delegates gave radio interviews to reach similar audiences. The Youth Credo was printed on tiny cards and distributed overseas via underground networks. Louise Morley, a young aide to Eleanor Roosevelt, took a six-week leave of absence and with funding received from the Office of War Information went to London to foster solidarity between British and American students.32
Initially, it seemed that the American delegation, led by Lash, Trude Pratt, Molly Yard, Louis Harris, and others, had succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. The conference established a new International Assembly of Students, and, despite some grumbling from foreign delegates, the United States won the right to host the first postwar conference.33 The president of the Harvard Student Council, Thomas Matters, was elected interim chair and offered the council’s assistance in planning a future conference.34
Just when success seemed at hand, with American students positioned to play major international leadership roles after the war, the U.S. ISS Committee fractured over political differences, personality conflicts, and its relationship to Geneva.35 Some of the long-time committee members had grown increasingly fearful of Lash’s passion for politics, which conflicted with the nonpartisan orientation of the ISS in Geneva. In turn, Lash and other staff resented their lack of autonomy and had supported resolutions at the assembly that defied the ISS policy on political positions. They had supported India’s independence from Great Britain, a controversial move that threatened relationships with both ISS Geneva and the ISS committee in England. Clyde Eagleton feared they were headed for a rift that could destroy the U.S. ISS Committee and be fatal to their overall purpose, for, as he told his colleagues, “If they [students] are not under our guidance, they may fall into left-wing hands.”36
The conflict erupted just as long-delayed plans for a new national student organization were coming to fruition. A constitutional convention to establish a United States Student Assembly was planned for spring, its name chosen to signify a relationship with the new International Student Assembly. After months of stalemate, on January 13, 1943, the acting director of the U.S. ISS Committee staff, Trude Pratt (who later married Joseph Lash), submitted her resignation. A few weeks later, the staff declared their independence as officers of the freestanding United States Student Assembly (USSA). Eleanor Roosevelt backed Lash, Pratt, and the other activist Campobello liberals who chafed at the insistence on neutrality.37
A few Committee members tried to keep in with both camps to guard against communist infiltration, the one issue that united all members. Harry D. Gideonse, one of the committee’s most ardent anticommunists, drafted the new USSA constitution, which explicitly excluded communist (as well as fascist) members.38 George Shuster and Clyde Eagleton agreed to serve as advisers. In May 1943, the United States Student Assembly held a constitutional convention. A letterhead was quickly printed that reinforced the connection between the USSA and the International Student Assembly. With so many men mobilized and overseas—Lash himself was in the army—women took over the leadership. Campobello-trained Mary Louise Munts won the presidency.
The major benefactors of the U.S. ISS Committee, who were committed to ISS nonpartisanship and wary of student autonomy, retaliated by withdrawing financial support. A handful of prominent women had supported the ISS agenda through personal donations and fund-raising, among them Dorothy Hearst Paley, wife of the CBS chief and philanthropist William Paley, and Adele Levy, daughter of Julius Rosenwald, the founder of Sears Roebuck and one of the wealthiest men in the country.39
Absent financial resources and with the defection of prominent educators, the USSA floundered. In 1943, Munts suspended activities for the duration of the war, mindful, she said later, of the fate of the American Student Union. “It was Molly [Yard]’s tutelage about these events, together with that of my Swarthmore mentors, that made me so wary of a repeat performance.”40
The conflict ended the U.S. ISS Committee as constituted. A handful of members, including Wolfers, Kotschnig, Gideonse, and Shuster, continued to meet. In February 1943, they had incorporated as the Student Service of America, Inc. (SSA), with Gideonse as general secretary.41 This nomenclature caused no end of confusion with Geneva, especially since the U.S. ISS Committee sponsored a fundraising arm with a similar name, the World Student Service Fund.42
Unknown to all but a few elites, the smaller group of educators who formed the SSA were in discreet but not secret coordination with officials from the U.S. State Department. With the SSA, they crafted the nucleus of an international program that would later be adopted by the National Student Association.43 It is not an exaggeration to argue that the NSA’s international program predated the organization’s formation.
Prior to the conflict, program discussions with the State Department had been under way.44 The U.S. ISS Committee had obtained funds for a small program to assist European student refugees. The SSA kept the grant, with Kotschnig arguing, “It could serve as the nucleus around which other programs can be built up.”45 The projects devised under the Student Service of America designation lacked, in terminology common to wartime planners, an instrument to administer them. It was a phenomenon unique to the war years, albeit a common one, which upended the traditional order of creating an organization before adopting a program.
In the short term, the U.S. ISS Committee debacle proved fateful. Americans lost the initiative they had seized in 1940, and the International Student Assembly died a quiet death. The United States Student Assembly was revived in 1945 but remained weak; in 1947, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Lash, and other prominent liberals gave it a new identity as the student chapter (Students for Democratic Action) of the newly founded Americans for Democratic Action, which had anticommunism as a central tenet. For these liberals, the debate over whether to cooperate with communists at home or abroad had long been settled.
The full cost of the conflict became apparent before the war’s end. On January 1, 1945, the London-based World Youth Council, formed in November 1943, invited hundreds of youth groups from more than sixty countries to a World Youth Conference in London. The invitation renewed fears in government, diplomatic, and educational circles that young communists would fill organizational vacuums in the United States and abroad. Diplomatic cables from England fed these fears. The American Embassy in London warned the State Department that the conference was being organized by “politically-minded young adults and not by the recognized educational and character building groups.”46
Soviet watchers grew further alarmed when they learned that the New York–based American Youth for a Free World would choose the American delegation. This patriotic-sounding organization was closely aligned with the former Young Communist League, which itself had changed its name to American Youth for Democracy. Diplomats and professional youth leaders on both sides of the Atlantic faced the same dilemma the Campobello students had failed to resolve: in 1945, the continuing alliance with the Soviet Union made it difficult to openly attack groups friendly to it, regardless of what they called themselves.
In the spring of 1945, Roosevelt liberals in the State Department made one last attempt to create a noncommunist national student association in the United States. The plan, as conveyed to Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, involved the founding of eight separate regional organizations that could later unite. Graham, who served as an adviser to the then-moribund USSA and moved in ISS circles, agreed to host the first meeting. The resulting Conference of Southern Students was under way on the North Carolina campus when on April 13 news arrived of President Roosevelt’s fatal heart attack at his Warm Springs retreat in Georgia. The end of the Roosevelt administration prevented further regional conferences, although two officers of the new organization would reappear as founders of the National Student Association.47
In November 1945, just as anticommunists feared, the London conference culminated in the new World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). The pageantry and emotion at the Royal Albert Hall created a powerful bond among those present. As delegations carried their national flags down the aisle, spectators hung over the crowded balconies to see which friends had survived the war. Moments of joy alternated with tears as the names of martyrs were read aloud. The ceremony gave calls for unity and peace a ghostly specificity.48
Those who followed Moscow politics pointed to the simultaneous creation of several other federations—the World Federation of Trade Unions (October) and the World Federation of Democratic Women (November)—as evidence that the Soviet Union was again building popular fronts and disguising its hand. When Czech and British leaders announced a World Student Congress during the summer of 1946 in Prague, students appeared to be next on Moscow’s agenda.
In 1946, the specter of a resurgent American Student Union seemed closer, not farther away, than it had when Eleanor Roosevelt and prominent educators acted to fill the vacuum in student activism left by its demise. The prospect of a communist-led World Student Congress mobilized powerful forces in the United States. These included one of the Kremlin’s oldest and most implacable foes—the Catholic Church. The ensuing alliance between anticommunist liberal student leaders and doctrinaire Catholics, uneasy at first, provided a powerful check on those who had not yet joined the anticommunist chorus. Catholics brought to the alliance their own set of relationships with several agencies of the U.S. government, among them the FBI, equally determined to prevent communist infiltration into American student and youth organizations.