Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  But how did one purchase a farm as the agent of the government? “There were endless rules,” Pickett discovered, “about purchasing land, letting contracts, and the circumstances under which local people might or might not be employed.”18 Had the limitations been respected Pickett doubted the four settlements for the stranded miners would ever have been built. Howe set them an example in cutting through bureaucracy and red tape. The president, Mrs. Roosevelt, and he were all agreed that the Arthur estate should be purchased, Howe told Wilson. He wanted it appraised and he wanted an architect to go down and draw up plans for a community house, and he wanted this done in “two days.” He also wanted a topographical map—he wasn’t sure what for, but the president said they should get one made immediately.

  The Treasury Department, after a phone call from Howe, provided the architect. Interior sent down the appraisers, but the topographical map engendered a minor crisis. The Land Office, “full of old people,” was “flabbergasted” by Wilson’s request and referred him to the Army. Burlew, a long-time Interior official who knew everything about the department, finally dug up two civil engineers in the Reclamation Service. It would take them thirty days to make a map, they reported to Wilson from Reedsville. “Where did you get them?” an indignant Howe wanted to know. Wilson said Burlew had provided them. “Who the hell is this man Burlew?” Howe flung out at him. Wilson explained that he had been around Interior a long time and was very knowledgeable. “Rabbit,” Howe said, turning to his secretary, “get me E. K. Burlew in the Interior Department.” When Burlew came to the phone, Howe introduced himself and said coldly, “I don’t care how they do it or what they do to it, I want that map in a week,” and then hung up. Howe then asked Wilson if he was in a position to buy the farm after it was appraised. Did he have a disbursing officer? “No, we haven’t got anything yet—just Clarence Pickett and I and about three or four stenographers.”

  “You’d better get somebody who can pay some money pretty quickly because we’re going to buy that farm,” Howe said, bringing the interview to an end.

  “What kind of an unreasonable man is Howe?” Burlew complained to Wilson, careful, nonetheless, to fulfill Howe’s order. With the assistance of personnel from the Coast and Geodetic Survey and an Army plane, the map was provided within two days. Howe’s face lit up when Wilson brought it in. “You go back and buy that place right away.”19

  On October 13 Ickes announced the purchase of the Arthur estate and said that 200 families would be resettled on this first project. Bushrod Grimes, a native of the area and the Extension Service worker in charge of the subsistence garden program in the county, was appointed manager of Arthurdale. (The new settlement was also called Reedsville, the town to which it was closest.)

  “Yesterday Mr. Grimes took a group of men out to work at Arthurdale,” Alice Davis reported to Eleanor. “I can’t tell you what a delight it is to us that this plan has gone through. We had been looking toward it for such a long time with no real hope of substantial support, that we can hardly believe it when it happens. . . . None of us can ever tell you how grateful we are for what you have done for the community.”20

  All Eleanor’s executive ability, her doggedness, and her influence were now placed at the disposal of the fledgling project, for she firmly believed that what was done in a single community might show the way to a nation. She saw Arthurdale as a laboratory for all the new communities. She wanted it to have the most advanced educational system, a model public-health service, producer and consumer cooperatives, and a program of handicrafts and music that would preserve the folk culture of Appalachia. This was a job Franklin had given her to do. Arthurdale was her “baby” and she interested herself in every detail—the selection of the homesteaders, the choice of a principal for the school, the initiation of a children’s clinic. She shopped for refrigerators and inspected plumbing fixtures. Pickett took her to see a self-help group, the Mountaineer Craftsmen’s Cooperative Association, which produced attractive maple furniture, including the Godlove chair. That led to a decision to transfer the Association, which was operating out of a junk shop in Morgantown, to Arthurdale and to equip the new homesteads with its products.21

  Eleanor hired some of the staff. “This is just a note,” she informed M. L. Wilson, “to tell you that I have taken on Nancy Cook and Eric Gugler as the advisory experts on the housing end of the West Virginia project.” She had promised them expenses “plus whatever they deem their duties worth not in excess of $30 a day, which I understand is the pay for experts.”22 Guests came to the White House, heard the story of Scotts Run, and departed as recruits in a New Deal crusade. “It is magnificent, the way you are directing this big undertaking,” wrote Dorothy Elmhirst, whose fund had agreed to finance a small clinic and hospital. “My dear, I am going back to England so proud of my country at last.”23

  By November 7 the first contingent of 25 miners and their families had moved from the coal-camp shacks to Arthurdale, temporarily quartered in the old Arthur mansion. Nine days later another 11 families followed. They would help to put up the fifty prefabricated houses that Louis Howe had ordered. There was even talk that some homesteaders would be eating Thanksgiving dinner in their own houses.

  Henry Goddard Leach wrote Eleanor asking if she would do an article for the Forum about the “model mining village.” Arthurdale was not a mining village, she corrected Leach. “It is for miners transplanted to a farming district with an industry planted there to give them a cash crop.”24 The key to Arthurdale’s economic soundness—whether the transplanted miners would be able to make a living and also pay the government back the $1.5 million it had advanced to the project—was the establishment of an industry. In October the Public Works Administration allocated $525,000 to the Post Office Department in order to erect a furniture factory in Arthurdale where items of post-office equipment would be produced. The proposal seemed to pinch a neuralgic nerve in the body politic, and by January Congress was resounding with protests from the defenders of free enterprise. The factory would “wipe out private industry,” Representative Taber warned. “Just a proposition to further the socialistic programs already launched by the administration,” agreed his Republican colleague, Representative Foss of Massachusetts. Republican ideological protests were given point by more down-to-earth anxieties voiced by Democrats. The proposal would work an injustice on unemployed furniture workers “in my state and in every state which has a furniture factory,” objected a North Carolina congressman. Representative Ludlow of Indiana whose district was the home of the Keyless Lock Company which manufactured locks for post-office boxes, went to see Louis Howe. The Arthurdale factory would take away business from it and throw men out of work, he complained, and he was sure that when Mrs. Roosevelt learned that the furniture-factory plan would cause distress and unemployment in Indianapolis she would gladly consider some alternative proposal to create employment in West Virginia. Howe sought to reassure Ludlow by telling him that the items to be manufactured at Arthurdale would not be competitive with those on which the Keyless Lock Company was a bidder.

  Howe thought he had pacified Ludlow, but a House rider on a Treasury appropriation bill, January 26, 1934, introduced by Ludlow, prohibited the expenditure of Post Office funds for equipment manufactured at Arthurdale. “Three hundred EPIC Clubs pledged to end poverty in California by putting unemployed at productive labor are prepared to go to bat with reactionaries on this issue,” Upton Sinclair wired from California. Eleanor sought to restrain Sinclair, because support from the former Socialist would only confirm congressional fears that a factory in Reedsville was a plunge into Socialism. “The chance for a government factory is still possible,” she informed him. “I think a great deal has been made of this prematurely.”25

  The project would not harm industry, Ickes told a news conference. “It will be used as a yardstick to determine if the government has been paying too much for post office equipment, and thereby may hang a tale and may be the reason why some are
opposing it.”26 Despite administration assurances, the House at the end of February reaffirmed its prohibition, brushing aside an impassioned plea for the project by its newest member, Eleanor’s old friend Isabella Greenway, now a congresswoman from Arizona. Blocked in the House, the administration turned to the Senate, where Kenneth McKellar, the chairman of the Committee on Post Offices, was sympathetic.27

  As administration pressure continued, so did the attacks. Dr. William A. Wirt, the Gary, Indiana, school superintendent, was enlivening the Capital with his exposé of an alleged conspiracy by “brain trusters” to foster a revolution with Roosevelt cast in the role of an American Kerensky, and he cited the Reedsville project to prove his point. It was a “communistic” plot to subvert the economy of Morgantown, West Virginia, he charged, for in resettling the miners at Reedsville they would be lost to Morgantown’s rent and tax rolls. None of them had paid any rent or taxes for years, Eleanor noted, nor could she understand how it was communistic “to give people a chance to earn their own livings and buy their houses.” In the Senate, Thomas D. Schall, the blind senator from Minnesota, came to Dr. Wirt’s defense. Not only was Mrs. Roosevelt spending $25 million of the taxpayers’ money on this “West Virginia commune,” but she was profiteering on her own furniture factory in Val-Kill, charging fivefold the average price for its wares because she was the wife of the president. She intended to answer him at her news conference, Eleanor notified the senator, but before she did she wanted to tell him what she intended to say and give him a chance to retract. Would he come to the White House? He made an appointment but did not appear. The Reedsville factory would produce post-office boxes, not furniture, she subsequently told the press. It would be a yardstick operation and cost only a fraction of the $25 million. As for the Val-Kill furniture factory, it had always shown a deficit, and not one of the four investors ever received a salary or even traveling expenses.28

  Bernard M. Baruch, whom Eleanor had begun to interest in Arthurdale, was delighted with her “beautiful handling of Senator Schall,”29 and she invited him to see Arthurdale for himself. On June 7, 1934, when the first homesteaders were formally installed in their newly built houses, he and Mrs. Ickes went along. The hardheaded Baruch was moved. “I can never get out of my mind the faces of those people I saw the day we went to Reedsville,” he wrote six months later. Baruch carried great weight on the Hill, where a considerable number of senators and representatives were beneficiaries of his largesse, but even Baruch’s sympathetic interest in Arthurdale did not change House sentiment about the factory. In mid-June the proposal to have the government finance a factory was finally killed. “We are now busy figuring out, as we decided that it was better to drop the effort of putting through a post-office factory for fear of having a great deal of ‘hot-air’ in Congress and another attack on Reedsville written into the record, what shall be the industry down there,” Eleanor wrote Baruch.30

  The defeat of the government factory was a major setback. The efforts to get an industry for Arthurdale were further hampered by the rulings of Comptroller General McCarl, who refused to allow government funds to be used to subsidize private industry on the projects. McCarl is “not only a Republican,” fumed Ickes, “but . . . a reactionary Republican.”31 At Baruch’s suggestion, Eleanor spoke with Gerard Swope of General Electric, who was a supporter of the resettlement idea. For a brief period a subsidiary of General Electric operated a vacuum-cleaner assembly plant in Arthurdale but closed it down for a lack of orders. Throughout the thirties Eleanor tried to get an industry for Arthurdale. Businessmen who wanted entrée to the White House would raise her hopes with big schemes and promises, and one even established a branch of a shirt factory, but at no time during the decade was more than a third of Arthurdale’s labor force employed by private industry. As the prospect of employment faded, the problem of how the homesteaders were to pay for their homes and achieve a decent standard of living became less soluble. It produced a series of clashes between Eleanor and Ickes.

  The prime question was: if the government were creating a new community in which a factory it would build and the farmlands it would purchase would set the levels of livelihood, what should those levels be? Eleanor thought that Arthurdale—indeed, the $25 million set aside for the whole resettlement division—should be used as seed money to show what could be done through social and economic planning to create a better life for people. If the objective was to place “as many people as possible in as cheap houses as possible, then I think the 25 millions had much better be turned over to the relief administration,” she stated. This was also Pickett’s view. “It was only secondarily a relief measure,” he said; “primarily it was thought of as the beginning of a decentralization program for workers in industry. It was hoped it might find wide application. The picture was of millions of workers living in small homesteads with some two or three acres of land for gardening.”32 If this was utopianism, then even the Chamber of Commerce shared it, because after a visit to the new community its president, Henry I. Harriman, endorsed Arthurdale and the program of the resettlement division as “fundamental and far-reaching” in that it would show the way “to the necessary decentralization of industry” and “the relief of mass congestion in the cities.”33

  In deciding what industry should be brought to Arthurdale, Eleanor wrote Baruch, at a time when she and Wilson thought they would have some choice in the matter, the important thing was “that a family shall have a sufficient means of livelihood and the assurance of an ability to pay their expenses covering a standard which we hope to establish as something to shoot at in all rural industrial communities.”34 That standard, she felt, should include indoor bathrooms, a new type of rural school that would be the center of community life, and an innovative rural health program. Shown four alternative budgets for the homesteads by Ickes, she chose the most costly. She and Howe fought for refrigerators. Charles F. Pynchon, a Chicago building contractor whom Ickes, distrustful of Wilson, named to manage the Homestead Division in a businesslike way, omitted refrigerators from the Arthurdale plans. Everyone owned an icebox, he assumed, and the homesteaders could bring along their old ones. But few of the miners had them, Pynchon was told, when a furious Howe upbraided him for the omission: “I know Mrs. Roosevelt will be shocked because she has been looking over and picking out refrigerators for some time.” Howe was in charge of the “Electrical Committee” reviewing Arthurdale’s electrical requirements, the same letter said, and did not understand why he was never consulted. “I think I will have to request the firing of the man in charge of electrical matters as the President is particularly anxious that the electrical part is done under my supervision and in close contact with me.”35

  At times Ickes seemed to agree with Mrs. Roosevelt that resettlement should be a pioneering division within the government and that Arthurdale should be the demonstration project. He had heralded the purchase of the Arthur estate as the beginning of an experiment that would show “the way to a new life for many others.”36 But he was a suspicious administrator who liked to keep a tight control over every reach of his domain, and Wilson’s direct access to the White House vexed him. His office planted a secretary on the unsuspecting Wilson who notified Burlew whenever Wilson was called to the White House. Obsessed by the fear of graft, Ickes insisted that the homestead communities be administered by Washington. Wilson, a Jeffersonian, wanted them to be self-governing, the responsibility local. So did Eleanor. “She was a great community person,” Wilson observed, “and she believed that since these units were small, since they were experimental, there must be a maximum amount of local interest and local initiative in them.” In the spring of 1934 Ickes overrode Wilson and federalized the fifty projects that had been announced, whereupon Wilson resigned and returned to Agriculture as assistant secretary.37

  The first fifty projects were of three types—experimental farm colonies, homestead-garden colonies located within commuting distance of some type of industrial employment, and four settl
ements for stranded miners in Appalachia. Of these Arthurdale alone escaped the secretary’s executive clutch.

  “I am becoming worried about the Reedsville, West Virginia project,” he wrote in his diary, December 2, 1933.

  I am afraid that we are due for some criticism for our work there. In the first place, we undertook it too hastily. Colonel Howe, in a rash moment, told the President that we would start work within three weeks. . . . The result has been that we have rushed ahead pell-mell. I am afraid that we are spending more money than we have a right to spend. Another thing that bothers me is that Colonel Howe, with I think the approval of Mrs. Roosevelt, wanted us to enter into a contract for some 60 or 75 knockdown houses. I understand that these houses are only about ten feet wide and I am afraid that they will look a good deal like a joke.

  Howe’s prefabs became an albatross around Arthurdale’s neck. He had ordered the fifty Cape Cod houses at a cost of $1,000 apiece over the telephone. Eleanor had tried unsuccessfully to argue him out of doing so, and when she visited Arthurdale she went straight for the first of the prefabs which had been put up. Pickett reported to Wilson her great disappointment. “She said she should have stopped Louis Howe from ordering those houses. She was afraid they would turn out to be just exactly what they were when she saw them.” Their size was less a problem than their flimsiness, designed as they were for Cape Cod summers, not Appalachia winters.38