Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “We had fifty families out there in freezing winter weather sleeping under tents,” Howe later said defensively. “We had to find accommodations for them somehow.”39 The houses were a blunder whatever the excuse. The blunder was compounded when the foundations that had been prepared for them proved to be too large. As a consequence the homesteaders who had hoped to be in their houses by Thanksgiving did not move in until June 7, 1934.

  At Eleanor’s suggestion, Eric Gugler was asked to redesign and reconstruct the houses. The president liked Gugler, she told Wilson and Pickett. “Eric Gugler turned out to be a very excellent person,” said Wilson afterward. “He did a marvellous thing, but he said from the start, ‘When you change plans, it’s going to cost a lot of money.’”40

  Ickes resented Eleanor’s involvement in Arthurdale and was exasperated by her refusal to subordinate human values to cost consciousness, a point on which she was stoutly supported by Wilson and Pickett.41 The debate over the size and design of the homestead houses, and, more generally, the standard of living that should be aimed at in the new settlements was fundamental and prophetic of later controversies over what constituted poverty and the government’s responsibility to end it. Eleanor’s view was that everyone had a right to a decent standard of living.42 Ickes feared that failure to keep the costs down might mean loss of “the popular support that is absolutely essential if we are to carry through the program at all.”43 On the issue of the Arthurdale houses, the president at first sided with his wife. Ickes went to the White House to look at the sketches Gugler had prepared for these houses, and recorded in his diary that they

  were very attractive indeed but the cost of the thing is shocking to me. The President said we could justify the cost, which will run in excess of $10,000 per family, by the fact that it is a model for other homestead projects. My reply to that was to ask what it was a model of, since obviously it wasn’t a model of low-cost housing for people on the very lowest rung of the economic order. . . . I don’t see how we can possibly defend ourselves on this project. It worries me more than anything else in my whole department. The theory was that we would be able to set up families on subsistence homesteads at a family cost from $2,000 to $3,000 and here we have already run above $10,000 per family. I am afraid we are going to come in for a lot of justifiable criticism.44

  The criticism was not long in coming. An article in the anti-administration Saturday Evening Post, “The New Homesteaders,” focused on Louis Howe’s prefabs, how “the camp houses” had been “slowly tortured” into shape and buried “in a meringue of wings, bay windows, fireplaces, porches, terraces and pergolas.” Eight wells had been drilled and abandoned when the architect changed his mind about the location of the houses. Each enameled sink was equipped with a “large size patented grease trap which cost $37.50,” and which the author said was unnecessary. Arthurdale, he wrote, was an example of New Deal bungling and an object lesson in what happens in a planned economy.45

  A newspaper friend sent a batch of clippings prompted by the article to Eleanor in Hyde Park. Rumors about the house had been around a long time, the reporter said; “should we have told you?” Eleanor should be prepared to “explain frankly” when she returned to Washington.46 She had tried to get Howe and Ickes to make a statement that these houses “had not worked out,” she replied, and “that they were being made liveable, and that they would not cost the people moving in any more, as the basis for rent was to be set on the earning power of the community and not on the cost of development. For the first homesteads many things will have to be tried out which could not be paid for by the homesteaders.” The homesteads were a demonstration of community building

  to show what might happen if industry could be decentralized and associated with agriculture and at the same time they are to experiment to find out how much of comfort and pleasure can be put into the lives of people living in this type of community. . . . I think all this should have been said long ago but that again is not my business. . . . I am begging them now to be entirely honest and very explicit. I am afraid I would always be more frank than is considered advisable by many.47

  She was sure to be asked about Arthurdale at her first news conference when she came back to Washington, she advised Ickes, and she was writing out her statement “so that I will be sure to say the things which you all want me to say.”48

  Arthurdale also drew the fire of the Communists. While conservatives complained that the government was subsidizing a life of middle-class affluence, the Communists attacked the homestead as a design “for permanent poverty.” Harold Ware, the Communist party’s agricultural expert, collaborated on an article for Harper’s in which he not only made fun, in a heavy-handed way, of Howe’s truckloads of ready-made summer houses, but laboriously uncovered fascist implications in the homestead movement. If the West Virginia projects were a pattern for anything, they were “a pattern for the decentralization of poverty” and the establishment of “a state of serfdom.” Ware supported this last charge with a reference to the thirty years that the homesteaders had in which to pay for the houses.49

  “Of course, the Reedsville project is just one big headache and has been from the beginning,” Ickes grumbled in his diary. There was Howe’s initial mistake. “And then Mrs. Roosevelt took the Reedsville project under her protecting wing with the result that we have been spending money down there like drunken sailors—money that we can never hope to get out of the project. This project has been attacked in a number of articles and magazines and newspapers, and we are distinctly on the defensive about it.”50

  Ickes thought the president was swinging around to his views on cost: “As the President remarked to me: ‘My Missus, unlike most women, hasn’t any sense about money at all.’ He added with respect to Louis Howe that Louie didn’t know anything about money, being as he is an old newspaperman, although he did pay tribute to Louis’s political sagacity.”51 Two days after Ickes made this entry the voters overwhelmingly endorsed the New Deal in the 1934 congressional elections. Buoyed up by this unprecedented vote of confidence, Roosevelt was determined to push forward with his program, including a massive expansion of the subsistence homestead movement. He had also decided to take the program away from Ickes. The day after the president told Ickes he was considering turning over the Subsistence Homestead Division together with a rural-housing program to Harry Hopkins, Ickes wrote in his diary, “I won’t be at all put out if I lose Subsistence Homesteads. It has been nothing but a headache from the beginning.”52 But he continued to grumble about Eleanor’s role in the affair.

  I am very fond of Mrs. Roosevelt. She has a fine social sense and is utterly unselfish, but as the President has said to me on one or two occasions, she wants to build these homesteads on a scale that we can’t afford because the people for whom they are intended cannot afford such houses. The President’s idea is to build an adequate house and not even put in plumbing fixtures, leaving that sort of thing to be done later by the homesteader as he can afford them. He remarked yesterday that he had not yet dared say this to the people (undoubtedly meaning Mrs. Roosevelt) who wanted the houses built with all modern improvements.

  Roosevelt may have considered his wife extravagant, although within the family she was noted for frugality, or he may have been easing the blow to Ickes at the expense of his wife, for the president shrank from hurting people’s feelings and many men have directed resentment away from themselves with the protest that they could not do anything with their wives. Whatever Ickes’s impressions of the president’s views on plumbing, Roosevelt told Tugwell and Dr. Will Alexander, when they took over the Resettlement Administration, the successor agency to the Subsistence Homestead Division: “These people ought to have plumbing. There’s no reason why these country people shouldn’t have plumbing. So put in plumbing. Put in bathrooms.” But try as the Resettlement people did to get plumbing “within an economic budget,” they never managed it. “It was always something that they couldn’t pay for,” Alexander
recalled. On one occasion Tugwell went over to the White House to inform “the Boss” that “if he has his plumbing, he’s got to let us subsidize it.” Tugwell was gone all morning. His aides, all agog and sure that great matters of state must have been under discussion, demanded to know what had kept him when he returned. He had explained to the Boss their difficulty with fitting bathrooms into a house that the homesteaders would be able to pay for “and he [Roosevelt] got to drawing privies.” The presidential anteroom was crowded with ambassadors, bankers, politicians, and the president had spent the morning drawing privies, Tugwell reported. Privies it was in the end. Resettlement became the Farm Security Administration in 1937, and the new agency eliminated indoor plumbing from the houses built in the South.53

  Most of the Arthurdale houses, however, had already been built, and all had bathrooms. The cost issue there was how much the government should charge the homesteaders for the houses and how much should be considered government subsidy. Mrs. Roosevelt asked Baruch to examine the figures and give her a businessman’s judgment. “You have told me to treat this as if it were my own matter,” Baruch agreed, “and I propose to follow out your request until you tell me not to.”54

  She was grateful to Baruch for his help, and their relationship in the course of their work for Arthurdale had blossomed into friendship. There was, no doubt, an element of calculation on both sides, but also there was genuine affection. Baruch, before Chicago, had been one of the leaders of the stop-Roosevelt drive and while he had sought to make up for his mistake by the generosity of his campaign contributions, it was Roosevelt’s policy to give him the feeling he was an insider while in fact keeping him at arm’s length. When Baruch came to Hyde Park after the Chicago convention it had been Eleanor who drove him around, and increasingly it was Eleanor and Louis through whom he maintained access to Roosevelt. Eleanor had known Baruch in a distant way when he had served Woodrow Wilson. At that time she had been cool toward him both because he was Jewish and because he was a Wall Street speculator, but she was a different woman now and had come to appreciate his acumen in business and public affairs. He was ready to give advice, and she welcomed it. She knew she tended to be too trusting, to be carried away by her hopes, too inclined to believe that will alone could defeat economic realities. “I want you to be hardboiled, for it is a kind of ‘hardboiledness’ which is helpful,” she had entreated him in a letter of thanks for agreeing to underwrite most of the costs of the experimental school at Arthurdale.55 The tall, spare figure had become a familiar presence in her sitting room.

  After a little trouble in getting what he called the “rock bottom figures,” Baruch concluded that of the $1,597,707 that had been budgeted for Arthurdale, $1,037,000 would have to be charge-off to the government. To ask the homesteaders to pay more than $3,000, he thought, would place unbearable burdens upon them.56 A million-dollar charge-off to the government did not seem lavish to him. The excess of actual costs over estimates was “not much larger relatively than a great many business and engineering precedents in other pioneering. . . . You are to be congratulated on your implacable insistence on accurate figures revealing the truth.” And Eleanor could quote him if she wished.57 She herself assembled statistics on the millions private industry spent on research; if such outlays were justified to develop new ways of manufacturing, the government was justified in putting “a little money into experimenting in new methods of living,” she wrote. (These figures were included in a defense of Arthurdale which she did not publish because Ickes’s man Pynchon thought that further publicity would only add fuel to the controversy.)

  Risks had to be taken; one could not wait around for perfect solutions. “We do not think for a moment that we are doing anything more than experimenting,” she wrote Florence Willert. “We know a lot of things have got to be thought through, but also think it is better to do something than to sit by with folded hands.”58

  The contrasting reports that came to her at the end of 1934 from Arthurdale and nearby Jere vindicated government action on the basis of plans and concepts that everyone realized would have to be revised not once but often. The Communists were making considerable headway among the Jere miners, reported Alice Davis, the Quaker relief worker who had first shown her around Scotts Run and who was now county welfare commissioner, and it seemed to her “just a race against time—whether we can get them into decent living conditions and decent ways of thinking before they are led to violence.” The local unemployed organized by the Communists had marched on the Welfare Board and threatened to throw Alice and her caseworker into the river. “Of course, we laughed and said we furnished everything for stringing ourselves up but the rope, and they’d have to get together and make that themselves—but their faces were all twisted with hate and if they had had a little smarter leadership and a little more practice they would have put us in the river.” She might be working with the Communists herself, she added: “If you and Mr. Roosevelt had not come to lead the people, I think many of us might have been thinking differently.”59 Eleanor put that letter into Franklin’s bedside basket.

  A few weeks later a wholly different report from West Virginia went into the president’s basket, and Eleanor also sent a copy of it to Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who at dinner at the White House had been fascinated by her account of the efforts of the resettled miners, so like those of the Palestine settlers, to make a new life for themselves. This report was from Elsie Clapp, the progressive educator whom Eleanor had brought in as principal of the school in Arthurdale. It was about Christmas in Reedsville.

  Such joy. I wish you could have seen it. The toys you gave reached every boy, girl, child, baby. And, best of all, out of their abundance, the homesteaders on their own initiative made up several Christmas boxes for some people near us who are very poor and miserable. . . . We cut our tree, brought it in and decked it. We gathered our Christmas greens from the woods. . . . Christmas Eve at seven-thirty we gathered in the Assembly Hall. Carols which the children acted out orally, the old Bible story, presented by everyone. . . . The whole Christmas drew the community together . . . I was needed only to help. It was theirs entirely.

  Eleanor set great store by the school. It would be up to the school, she had told Elsie Clapp when she interviewed her for the job of principal, not only to educate the children but to reawaken hope in the homesteaders, show them how to live more satisfying lives, indeed, to breathe life into this new community. The assignment did not faze Miss Clapp, a protégé of John Dewey who had been applying progressive education principles to rural education at the Ballard Memorial School in Kentucky. But she would need to bring in teachers with special training and get the advice of the best educators in the country, she told Eleanor, who agreed to both conditions and said she would find the money to employ qualified teachers. Eleanor also helped to establish a National Advisory Committee that included John Dewey, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Dean William Russell. Jessie Stanton, the director of the Bank Street Nursery School in New York, set up the nursery school in Arthurdale, the first in the entire area. “If I can teach these mothers,” Miss Clapp told Eleanor, “that cold pancakes and coffee aren’t good for babies, my two-year-olds will be much healthier.” The curriculum was adapted to the special needs of the community, the learning experiences organized around life problems that the community faced. Under Elsie Clapp’s leadership, the school became the center of almost every community activity. She fostered a regional cultural movement, and a summer music festival that she and the homesteaders inaugurated featured “Jig-Dancing,” “Ballad Singing,” “Mouth-Harping,” a “Fiddlers’ Contest,” and a “Square Dancing Contest” in which Eleanor was a participant.60

  An expensive experimental school did not seem a legitimate charge upon the government, so Eleanor raised most of the operating expenses from private sources. Baruch was the most generous, beginning his contributions with a check for $22,000, a response, he wrote, to Eleanor’s “rare combination of intelligence and great heart.”61 I
n order to be able to contribute herself, Eleanor resumed commercially sponsored radio broadcasts, the proceeds of which went to the American Friends Service Committee to be earmarked for the purposes she indicated. In the autumn of 1934 she received $18,000 for six 15-minute broadcasts of which $6,000 went for the salary of Elsie Clapp, another $6,000 to establish the handicraft center at Arthurdale under the direction of Nancy Cook, and the remaining $6,000 for health work.62

  At times she seemed to be almost a commuter between Washington and Reedsville. When she was asked whether it was not a burden to travel to Arthurdale so often, she cut the questioner short with the reply that she enjoyed the company of the homesteaders. She liked them. She knew the names of the children, kept track of their ailments and their achievements. She chatted with their mothers about canning recipes and joined in the Virginia reel with their fathers. She had a “folksy and homelike way with the homesteaders,” Wilson recalled, “as though she had always lived in the community and had just come back from having gone for a couple of weeks.”

  She had tried repeatedly to get Ickes to visit the project while the homesteads were still under his jurisdiction and wrote him that Baruch had come away “tremendously impressed” after his first visit, so much so that he was going “to help us to make it into the kind of experiment which we would all like to see.” She hoped that the secretary would plan to go down, “for I feel that after all the trouble and anxiety that this project has caused you, you will get a sense of satisfaction from meeting the people and seeing how well it is turning out.”63 Ickes had promised he would go with her in August, but the visit never took place.

  Although Ickes professed relief over the transfer of the homesteads to Tugwell, the shift rankled him. He became harshly critical of Eleanor, whom at times he even suspected of being part of a cabal to oust him from the cabinet. At the state dinner for the cabinet given by the president and Mrs. Roosevelt at the end of 1934, little pleased him: the menu hardly constituted a “Lucullan” repast, he disliked the domestic wines Eleanor insisted upon serving, and “the champagne was undrinkable.” By January, 1935, he had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Roosevelt did not do her husband any good with her active involvement in public affairs. He began to cultivate Missy.64