Nothing to Fear

by Adam Cohen

  The inspiration for the Civilian Conservation Corps, as the program would soon be renamed, was Roosevelt’s own life. He had acquired a love of the land growing up in the rustic world of Hyde Park. “The Boss was an ardent tree lover,” his secretary, Grace Tully, recalled. “When reports of bad storms in the vicinity of Dutchess County reached him, his first thought was ‘I wonder what it did to the trees.’ ” When the Depression first hit, during Roosevelt’s governorship, he and his state conservation commissioner, Henry Morgenthau, had put ten thousand New Yorkers to work on reforestation projects. When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president, Roosevelt already had something much larger in mind. In his July 2 address to the convention, he had spoken of a plan to convert millions of acres of marginal and unused land into timberland by reforestation. This plan could, he declared, provide jobs for one million men.29

  The Civilian Conservation Corps had many things to recommend it. The CCC would provide jobs for many young people who had few other prospects of finding work. Roosevelt envisioned that the workers would send much of their earnings home, helping their parents and siblings survive the hard times. Along with these financial benefits, the CCC would instill a sense of purpose in young Americans, many of whom had been adrift since the start of the Depression. Roosevelt would later say that one of its primary purposes was to “build up character in the coming generation.” At the same time as it brought relief to the participants, the CCC would help rescue the nation’s forests and national parks. Unrestricted timber harvesting had reduced the virgin forest from 800,000 acres to just 100,000, and the plight of forests and parks was being made worse by severe soil erosion. Water and wind were removing six billion tons of soil a year. With money tight, the government had not been able to do much to reverse the damage. The genius of the CCC was, as one study of the program observed, that it “brought together two wasted resources, the young men and the land, in an attempt to save both.”30

  For Roosevelt, the CCC had another distinct advantage—it was public works on the cheap. Young, unmarried men, the group the program was intended to help, would be willing to work for low wages, especially when their room and board were being provided. Roosevelt proposed salaries of just one dollar a day. The corps’s other expenses would be equally modest. It cost far less to clear paths and preserve topsoil than it would to build the bridges, dams, and school buildings that Perkins, Wagner, and other progressives were calling for. Roosevelt, who was still actively promoting government economy, declared that because of its limited focus the CCC could be run for some time with the relief funds that had already been allocated by the Hoover administration, with “no additional burden on the Treasury.”31

  When Roosevelt introduced the CCC to his Cabinet and top aides, the response was largely enthusiastic. The main holdout was the ever-practical Perkins, who considered it a “pipe dream.” It was not clear to her how Roosevelt intended to get people off breadlines and out to forests, or what he expected them to do when they got there. She envisioned unemployed people from New York City marching up to the Adirondacks and getting lost. Roosevelt’s quick sketch of the plan did not get into any of this. “It was characteristic of him,” Perkins would later say, “that he conceived the project, boldly rushed it through, and happily left it to others to worry about the details.” Even if the logistics were worked out, Perkins was troubled by the dollar-a-day wage, and she knew labor unions would also be. It was fine “so far as reforestation is concerned,” she told Moley, since that would be a program of limited scope, involving work that was not currently being done by anyone. If the dollar-a-day wage were applied to public works more broadly, she warned, it would pull down private-sector salaries, which would have a disastrous impact on working men and women. Most of all, Perkins wanted to make sure that Roosevelt’s pet project did not interfere with her own goal of creating a large-scale public works program that would provide jobs with real salaries to millions of unemployed people.32

  Roosevelt wanted to move quickly. He asked Moley to circulate a memo to the Cabinet members who would be most involved in launching the CCC—Perkins, Dern, Wallace, and Ickes. The memo, which went out on Tuesday, March 14, asked the four of them to consider themselves “an informal committee of the Cabinet to coordinate the plans.” With that invitation, Perkins, Dern, Wallace, and Ickes decided to push for something more ambitious. The next day, they drew up their own memo urging Roosevelt to establish three programs. The first was the CCC as Roosevelt had described it, though they urged that it be expressly limited to forestry and soil erosion work. The second was a general relief program, along the lines of the Hopkins-Hodson plan, which would provide money to the states to dispense to the unemployed. “The details of such a Bill,” the memo said, “are practically agreed upon between Senators Wagner, Costigan, La Follette and Secretary Perkins.” Finally, the four Cabinet members urged Roosevelt to back the sort of public works program Perkins and others had been lobbying for. It should be, the memo said, “a large practical, labor producing program of public works under the control of a Board which can allocate them in such a manner as to drain the largest pools of unemployment in the country.”33

  Roosevelt agreed with the first two recommendations, the CCC and a relief program, but he was still not persuaded about large-scale public works. Wall Street was telling him that if the government spent billions on public works, it would cause the bottom to fall out of the bond market and destroy the government’s ability to borrow. Douglas was making the same arguments from within the administration, and Moley was largely staying out of the dispute. On March 15, the same day the four Cabinet members were in Ickes’s office drawing up their memo on relief, Roosevelt held his third press conference. He talked enthusiastically about the CCC. There would be at least 200,000 people in the national forests alone, Roosevelt said, working on reforestation and creating “fire breaks,” swaths of empty land that would confine any forest fires that broke out to a limited area. When he was asked if he also planned to support “a vast public works program,” Roosevelt was evasive. There were “quite a lot” of people who favored an “all-inclusive” public works bill, he said, but he was not sure if he would support one, or restrict public works to “putting people immediately to work on natural resources.”34

  With that question up in the air, Roosevelt asked Moley to call in Perkins, La Follette, Costigan, and Wagner to meet with him the following day. On March 16, the group once again made the case to Roosevelt for large-scale public works, separate from the CCC. Moley could not attend the meeting because it fell on a Thursday, the day he returned to New York to teach. He was sorry not to have been able to attend and “see these people operate,” he later said. The meeting turned out to be a turning point in the administration’s response to the Depression. “They must have been persuasive,” Moley said later, “because when the meeting broke up F.D.R., who distrusted public works profoundly, had agreed to mention them in his message on relief.” The following day, at the fourth press conference of his presidency, Roosevelt told reporters that he expected to introduce a “larger relief program,” and that it would “probably include public works.”35

  On March 21, Perkins held her first press conference. Her office asked newspapers to send news reporters, not feature writers. Although she was the first woman Cabinet member, Perkins did not want to be treated “as a feminine feature,” The Chicago Tribune noted. “She hopes her history will say it with facts, not flowers.” At the appointed hour, reporters, many of them women, crowded into her office. Perkins talked about closing down Section 24 and answered questions about employment statistics and other substantive labor matters. She ended the conference by saying she had to go to the White House. “I always make it a rule to be on time at a Cabinet meeting,” she said, “for I am not going to let the men members point to the woman as the late one.” Perkins’s debut performance before the capital press corps got good reviews. The Washington Post reported that “this little woman, still smalle
r back of the wide mahogany desk,” demonstrated a “firm grip.”36

  It was not easy for Perkins to banter with reporters. Unlike Roosevelt, who genuinely enjoyed spending time with the press, Perkins could not help thinking of them as the enemy. “One of the worst things that Roosevelt did, was to introduce the press into the affairs of government,” she insisted. Perkins was offended by reporters’ unending questions. “What business of theirs is it where you’re going for Thanksgiving?” she complained. She especially resented intrusions into her family life. She was irate that during her first few days as secretary of labor The New York Times had run an article about Susanna’s Irish terrier, Balto, running away that included the family’s home address, 1239 Madison Avenue. Perkins’s biggest fear remained that the press would turn Paul Wilson and his condition into a national news story. As it happened, they never asked about him. Perkins suspected Eleanor Roosevelt had taken the women reporters aside to explain the situation and asked them to spread the word. The press kept the secret so well that most Americans were under the impression that “Miss Perkins” had never married.37

  Perkins also disliked how the press covered her professional life. She found Washington reporters more cynical and sensationalistic than the ones she had dealt with in New York. They were constantly asking her what her “angle” was, she complained. Perkins issued press releases that focused on important matters—“not what I think of John L. Lewis’s last outburst,” she said. “That’s not the news. The news is the government’s inquiry into the wages and hours of the coal mining industry.” Many of the press questions struck her as no-win. “They would say, ‘Have you consulted Secretary Ickes about this?’ ” she said. “If you say ‘No,’ then Ickes is offended because they say, ‘Perkins refuses to consult with other Cabinet officers.’ If you say ‘Yes,’ then they’ve got to know just what you said, what he said, why he said that, and then they’ve got to go ask him what he said, what he meant.” Many of the younger reporters struck Perkins as having a “Marxian outlook” that skewed their questions. When they asked about her support for unemployment insurance, she complained, they would say, “ ‘I suppose, Madam Secretary, that that will be a way of preventing revolution, won’t it?’ Well, now, what if you say, ‘Yes.’ That means ‘PERKINS EXPECTS REVOLUTION’ will be the headline.”38

  Perkins continued holding press conferences, but they were not like Roosevelt’s amiable gatherings. One major difference was that she did not provide the reporters with chairs. “I’ve learned that the best thing to do is to keep them standing,” she said. “They don’t stay so long.” She made no effort to win reporters over by gossiping with them off the record. Perkins’s stern approach did not win her any friends. “With newspaper reporters,” a magazine profile observed, “she tries to be cordial, but only succeeds in being cold and distant.” The chilly relations that Perkins had with the press corps at the start of her tenure in Washington would last her entire career. Years later, on a trip to St. Louis, a photographer took her picture despite her pleas not to. Perkins asked if she could look at his camera. When he handed it to her, she dropped it on the ground, stomped on it, and said, “that takes care of the picture.” Perkins’s prickly treatment of reporters caused her to receive some of the worst press of any member of the administration. “Of all the game in the Roosevelt preserve,” one magazine declared, “Secretary of Labor Perkins has been the most frequently chased and the most savagely harried.” She refused to let it bother her—or to let down her guard. “I’ll let history judge my record,” she said, “not the newspaper boys.”39

  On March 21, the same day as Perkins’s press conference, Roosevelt sent his Civilian Conservation Corps bill to Congress. In his congressional message, Roosevelt was far more open to large-scale public works than he had been before his meeting with Perkins, La Follette, Costigan, and Wagner. He adopted the formulation that the memo from Perkins, Dern, Wallace, and Ickes had urged on him. He declared relief programs to be “essential to our recovery program.” To carry out a “direct attack” on the problem, he said, would require three kinds of legislation. The first would enroll workers in “such public employment as can be quickly started.” The second would be “grants to the States for relief work.” Finally, he told Congress, there should be “a broad public works labor-creating program.”40

  The work program that could be “quickly started” was the CCC. In the version of the CCC bill that he sent to Congress, he included the proviso that Perkins and other Cabinet members had called for in their memo—that the forest jobs the program created should not interfere with “normal employment.” Roosevelt told Congress that the program—which would be supervised by the departments of Labor, Agriculture, War, and Interior—could put as many as 250,000 unemployed men to work as early as the summer. The CCC would be doing much-needed work, including “forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control and similar projects.” The benefits, he argued, would be more than just financial. The CCC would, he said, help eliminate “the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability.”41

  The second program in Roosevelt’s triad of relief, “grants to the States for relief work,” would provide the unemployed with money for food, clothing, and other material needs. The Hopkins-Hodson plan that Perkins had brought to Roosevelt would be the blueprint for the legislation to accomplish this.42

  The third relief program, large-scale public works, was the most noteworthy. Roosevelt was now officially a convert to the cause. There were several bills floating around on Capitol Hill, including the ones introduced by Wagner, La Follette, and Costigan, but Roosevelt wanted to come up with his own plan. In the message, he was spare with details, saying only that he would “make recommendations to the Congress presently.” For Perkins and her fellow progressives, what mattered was that Roosevelt had gone on the record with his support of the basic idea.43

  For now, Roosevelt was only asking Congress to approve the CCC. The CCC bill was generally well received by Congress. Most members were pleased finally to have the chance to vote for a law that would create jobs for the unemployed. But as Perkins predicted, organized labor was firmly opposed. The president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, A. F. Whitney, argued that the bill’s dollar-a-day salary “would place government’s endorsement upon poverty at a bare subsistence level.” William Green of the American Federation of Labor objected not only to the salary, but to the army’s role in supervising CCC workers. “We cannot believe that the time has come,” Green said, “when the United States should supply relief through the creation of a form of compulsory military service.”44

  The administration mobilized to defend its bill. The day after it was introduced, Roosevelt invited leading members of the Senate and House to the White House for an evening briefing. With Perkins, Wallace, Dern, and Ickes on hand, Roosevelt made his case for the CCC and answered questions about the bill. By the time the meeting adjourned, most of the congressional guests had been won over. William P. Connery, Jr., of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Labor Committee, was a notable holdout. The staunchly proworker Connery, whose district included the factory towns of Lynn and Lawrence, insisted that he could not support a program that created jobs that paid so little.45

  The following day, March 23, Perkins, wearing a black dress and a tricorn hat, testified before Congress. She firmly turned back organized labor’s objections. The CCC, she told a joint session of the House and Senate Labor Committees, was not an employment program, but a relief measure “to provide honest occupation to self-respecting Americans who have been forced to panhandling and similar practices.” Perkins rejected Connery’s claim that the CCC wage was comparable to “sweatshop work,” arguing that since the men would be given food, shelter, and clothing, it was substantially more generous than sweatshops offered. When a California congressman objected that it was unfair to force men to leave their families for a year to earn a dollar a day, Perkins joked, “It might be the best thing that
could happen” for some families, to applause and laughter from the galleries. Speaking more seriously, she said there was nothing “more destructive of the family than prolonged unemployment, where a man has to sit around the house and brood, and his only occupation is to go twice a week and get his basket or dole.” 46

  In her first appearance before Congress as a Cabinet member, Perkins “made such a favorable impression,” Time magazine reported, “that many a hostile vote was won over to the White House plan.” Although she had shown herself to be articulate and well versed in the facts, Perkins was still regarded by many in Congress as a curiosity. A female reporter, Ruby Black, told her that after her testimony several congressmen sat in the cloakroom talking about it while they smoked cigars. “She did awful well,” one congressman said. “But I’d hate to be married to her.” Perkins and Black laughed over it. “You know, Ruby, it never occurred to me when I went up there that perhaps I could get a husband,” Perkins said. “How unfortunate I didn’t think of it!” Her reaction showed how unruffled she was by her encounters with sexism—and how secretive she was about the fact that she was already married.47