Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Now Perkins was secretary of labor and she appointed fiery, red-haired labor orator and former milliner Rose Schneiderman the only woman member on the National Recovery Administration’s Labor Advisory Board. President of the WTUL, an expert on wages, hours, and industrial working conditions, Schneiderman was expected to submit ideal codes for those industries where women predominated. Schneiderman called her years in Washington “the most exhilarating and inspiring of my life.”

  They were also years of anguish. After her first month in office she denounced the NRA’s imposition of lower minimum wages for women and demanded a single wage scale for men and women. ER, the National Consumers League, the National League of Women Voters, and the National Woman’s Party joined her protest. It was one of the few times business and professional women who championed the Equal Rights Amendment joined hands with working women and their social feminist allies.

  But their unity on behalf of a single wage scale was ignored. The act appeared with a “joker” clause: “When females do SUBSTANTIALLY the same work as males they shall receive the same pay.” By 1935, pay differentials ranged from five to twenty-five cents an hour in over one-quarter of all codes—especially in businesses that employed large numbers of women. Despite all protests to Hugh Johnson and FDR, wage discrimination prevailed. Moreover, discriminatory NRA codes locked industrial practice into government policy.

  Feminists compared NRA provisions with the plight of women in Italy and Germany: “Women are being forced back to the laundry tubs in Fascist Europe. Women are being paid lower wages than men under more than 100 of the NRA codes in effect in the United States today.”

  Although ER and such social feminists as Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, and Rose Schneiderman argued for projective legislation for women workers and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1920s, ER believed in equal pay for equal work. She now publicly deplored wage scales that classed adult women with young boys and professional women with unskilled men, and that set minimum wages for women at half the wage rates for men, often in the same industry and at the same tasks.

  She demanded a single minimum wage standard for NRA codes and repeatedly insisted that the New Deal should mean a “square deal for women”: “There may be some special reason why they are doing these things at this time, and in any case I have no right to interfere, but I… hope that any such discrepencies may be only temporary….” But pay differentials were permanent, and ER continued to speak out against them.

  Schneiderman’s efforts on behalf of African-American women were also blocked. Her only success was in the NRA code for the handkerchief industry, where she persuaded manufacturers to remove their ban on hiring black women for skilled positions. But she was unable to prevent a line in the laundry code that permitted employers to pay black women less than half the salary of white women, and she was unable to prevent the exclusion of domestic workers from all NRA consideration. Despite her protests, and ER’s efforts to have domestic work valued as any other employment, they were denied NRA benefits.

  Nevertheless, working women and men in various industries considered the NRA a great leap forward, and white women benefited especially by those codes that included mandatory minimum hourly wages and maximum-hour provisions. Moreover, Section 7A promised to end company unions and potentially encouraged labor’s right to bargain collectively without restraint or coercion.

  On 3 July 1933, Schneiderman wrote ER:

  I had a most thrilling time at the hearings on the cotton textile code where I sat in as a member of the Labor Advisory Board. The code, though not an ideal one, will go far toward making life and work for the tens of thousands of textile workers more humane and secure. The fact that children under sixteen will now be outlawed from the industry will not only help make room for adult men and women but will also set a standard for other industries. General Johnson is a peach….

  For ER the NRA was only a first step. “It was up to the women” to end “sweatshop conditions” and buy only from merchants who sold Blue Eagle merchandise. She called for individual vigilance and consumer boycotts, and urged women to recognize that every act was a political act. Since women did almost 90 percent of all buying, how they spent their money profoundly influenced life for labor, industry, and agriculture. All personal decisions mattered. No woman should buy a dress or a pair of gloves made “under sweatshop conditions.” “No matter what we can afford to buy, we cannot afford to buy at the expense of the health and strength of our fellow human beings.”

  An invigorated consumer movement was spearheaded by her friend Mary Harriman Rumsey, who was appointed director of the NRA’s Consumers’ Advisory Board in June 1933. Barnard graduate, key founder of the Junior League in 1901 (which ER joined as a charter member), and renowned horsewoman, the independent activist daughter of railroad financier E. H. Harriman was an imaginative crusader. Her father’s generation emphasized competition, she told a reporter; his “was a building age.” “Today the need is not for a competitive but for a cooperative economic system.” Personally, Mary Harriman Rumsey created cooperative business ventures as well as community councils and neighborhood organizations.

  Influenced by the works of Irish poet, mystic, and reformer George Russell (AE), she proclaimed consumers by right the third and equal partner in a cooperative commonwealth of business and labor. An ardent New Dealer, Mary Harriman Rumsey encouraged her younger brother Averell to leave his business interests, the excitement of Meadowbrook and his polo ponies, and join her in Washington, where all the “real excitement” was, she assured him, to be found.

  ER supported every consumer and labor effort as the NRA developed. On Friday, 13 October 1933, two days after her forty-ninth birthday, ER was given a bouquet of red roses and the first labeled NRA garment, made under the Coat and Suit Code. Hailing a “new era” for labor, ER received Blue Eagle label 000001 and her daughter Anna received label 000002. As ER accepted her gifts, a new silver-fox-collared black cashmere-and-worsted coat, from the shop workers, she said that the code meant fair wages, decent hours, sanitary conditions, and regular work. It ended “the disadvantage of seasonal unemployment,” and it ended the sweatshop.

  When the millinery industry became NRA, ER attended an even more emotional ceremony. Using a gold thimble presented to her by Sarah Leichter of the Millinery Workers Union, the First Lady sewed the first label into her new dark-brimmed straw hat with white quills. ER was joined on the platform by New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who said: “Any industry that cannot pay a living wage is not worth saving.”

  ER’s commitment to the NRA extended to her own small craft shop at Val-Kill, and to house servants: “One has no more right to expect sweat-shop hours and wages in one’s own home than in a factory.”

  But the NRA was fatally flawed. Some considered it an industrialist’s blessing. With no provision for price controls, manufacturers passed along increased wages to consumers. There was no government authority behind the NRA beyond its moral maxim: “We Do Our Part.” And it was voluntary. There were mine owners, farm owners, countless companies without competition, with no need to join.

  ER understood that the NRA was a limited first step. But she wanted it to succeed. After all, the War Industries Board had worked in wartime, and she hoped industrialists would be inspired by Hugh Johnson’s enthusiastic leadership.

  But Johnson’s public style was wild and unpredictable. He was overworked, drank too much, offended too many. A missionary for capitalist self-control, he agreed to such labor demands as maximum hours and minimum wages, supported public works and full employment. Conservatives considered him a maniac: prolabor, pro-union. Radicals called him the Mussolini of the New Deal: a crusader for trusts, government-protected cartels. NRA’s road was to be very bumpy.

  ER worked to promote New Deal ideas that urged a truly mixed and planned economy. She championed public works and nationally owned industries and utilities to secure the income needed to pay for social services. If util
ities were government-owned, rural America might be electrified, and everybody would have running water, indoor plumbing, access to public transportation. Utility profits could pay for a national health care program and for public education through high school. Depression conditions generated such dreams, and they seemed entirely feasible.

  The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was the first and last such experiment. TVA was a vast scheme that would electrify and develop one of the nation’s poorest regions—the seven states of the Tennessee River basin: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky. With this massive public works program, full employment would occur; poverty would disappear; the area’s scourge of malaria, tuberculosis, pellagra would subside.

  ER and FDR were united on every aspect of TVA, and she applauded his bold vision, which included local control, support for local crafts and culture, “and everything else” required for “a well-rounded civilization.” Inevitably, controversy surrounded TVA. It was an amazing experiment in “public ownership” for an area almost the size of England, with a population of two million people.

  Senator George Norris asked FDR how he would respond to all the charges of socialism, communism, fascism, and how he would define “the political philosophy behind TVA.” FDR answered: “I’ll tell them it’s neither fish nor fowl. But whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”

  ER visited TVA often and considered it a model for the future: During the campaign of 1932 “my husband and I had gone through some of this TVA area” and were “deeply impressed by the great crowds,” their hopefulness, and their poverty.

  Scarcely eight years later, after the housing and educational and agricultural experiments had had time to take effect, I went through the same area, and a more prosperous area would have been hard to find. I have always wished that those who oppose authorities to create similar benefits in the valleys of other great rivers could have seen the contrast as I saw it. I realise that such changes must come gradually, but I hate to see nothing done….

  Unlike TVA, ER considered the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), a human disaster. It benefited only large farm owners and never “trickled down” to farm workers. The AAA raised farmers’ prices, and promised farm owners parity with industrial prices. To ensure higher prices (farm parity), scarcity had to be created: The enormous annual surplus of produce—wheat, milk and milk products, tobacco, livestock, cotton—had to be eliminated. To achieve scarcity, Henry Wallace introduced a “federal allotment” plan, whereby the government would pay farmers to reduce their crop acreage. Payments would be supported by a processor’s tax. In other words, not the farmer but the middleman would pay: Taxes on containers, boxes, and bottles were added to consumers prices.

  Wallace’s scheme was a disaster for the South, where plantation owners discharged and evicted their tenant farmers and sharecroppers once they were paid not to grow their usual harvest of rice, cotton, or tobacco. While the Farm Credit Administration relieved the farm mortgage crisis for farm owners and Wallace’s allotment program guaranteed new profits to the largest landowners, the poorest and most devastated were now uprooted and torn from the land.

  It led to unbearable misery and quickened the “great migration” from the rural South. To alleviate the most bitter consequences of AAA, more radical New Deal efforts were required, including the creation of the Farm Resettlement Administration of 1935—which ER heralded and championed from the beginning.

  ER was appalled by the extraordinary waste involved in the AAA’s first efforts to create scarcity: Over ten million acres of cotton were destroyed; over 300 million bushels of wheat and countless acres of corn were wasted; over six million pigs were slaughtered; over a quarter billion pounds of meat were buried or processed into fertilizer.

  Ruby Black wrote in Editor and Publisher that the First Lady “raised un-shirted Hell.” But the First Lady denied it. Despite the fact that Black’s source was one of ER’s “best friends,” Lorena Hickok, ER insisted that she made only one telephone call—and simply asked: Why do you destroy all this cotton when there are so many people shivering with cold? Why do you waste these pigs when thousands of people are starving?

  That a decent and democratic nation caused such destruction without any distribution plan while Americans were ragged and hungry seemed to ER barbaric. Her complaints led to the creation of the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, which enabled Harry Hopkins’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration to purchase farm surpluses and donate them directly to relief agencies. Later, the national food stamp program was created to enable poor consumers to purchase food surpluses in ordinary store transactions.

  Although ER was annoyed with Hick for leaking a confidence, the women of the press were angry that ER was not credited for her achievement. In a column syndicated by Scripps-Howard, Ruth Finney wrote: “Of course all the male officials are convinced they would have thought of it themselves, but they had not done so up to the time she insisted it was the thing to do.”

  ER never forgave the secretary of agriculture. Her contempt for Wallace’s initial activities and long disregard for the cruel conditions that confronted landless farm workers lingered. However liberal Wallace’s views actually became, ER distrusted his judgment and was impatient with his statistical and scholarly approach to economic and human problems.

  ER never relied upon Wallace as she pursued farm resettlement and the effort to create sustainable communities, which absorbed most of her personal time during the 1930s. She worked instead with Wallace’s assistant secretary of agriculture, Rex Tugwell, who for a time was one of her primary allies. Handsome, erudite Columbia University professor of government, Rex-ford Guy Tugwell was known as FDR’s most radical adviser. Called the Lenin of the New Deal, he was considered by FDR’s opponents unacceptably Red, and by ER’s friends unfortunately arrogant. He considered himself a genuine conservative determined to save capitalism through democratic planning and control.

  Tugwell observed that mass production in advanced industrial societies guaranteed “permanent plenty” alongside widespread unemployment and poverty. He explained the Depression in terms of capitalism’s short-sighted refusal to distribute the economy’s inevitable surpluses. The problem was compounded by America’s high isolationist tariff policies, which hobbled the export market. Like ER, Tugwell argued that society had a responsibility to achieve security for all its citizens through consumer protection, public works, and the creation of sustainable communities. Consequently, during the first years of the New Deal, ER was one of Tugwell’s most abiding defenders. Their critics considered their views revolutionary and un-American.

  Most controversial was Tugwell’s consumer protection activities. He arranged an exhibit the press called Tugwell’s “Chamber of Horrors” to dramatize the dangers consumers faced every day. He was amazed and bitter that his photographs of women disfigured, occasionally blinded, because they used various hair dyes, eyelash dyes, and dangerous chemicals for cosmetics failed to arouse a public outcry.

  In March he issued an administrative order to lower the “maximum allowable” chemical spray residue (pesticide) on fruits and vegetables. Growers, especially apple producers, and politicians protested.

  They howled even louder on 6 June 1933, when ER’s old Sheppard-Towner ally, Senator Royal Copeland, introduced a new pure food and drug bill with a provision for precise labeling information for produce and canned goods. Industrialists went on a rampage: Tugwell sought to destroy confidence in American business.

  Press attacks on Tugwell were unrelenting. Within the administration, he grew more isolated, and the consumer movement was increasingly ignored. Initially, FDR was pleased to be identified with an effort to upgrade Theodore Roosevelt’s 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and he encouraged Tugwell. After FDR turned away from the controversy, ER persisted—as did Molly Dewson and Frances Perkins. ER spoke out: Women want to know what they are buying. What is hiding in tha
t closed can? What are women putting on their skin? What are they feeding their children?

  To ER’s dismay, the press assaults rendered Tugwell’s “charter of honesty and fair dealing” a complicated, marginal issue, easy to mock and dismiss. Leading food and drug lobbyists defended the “sacred right” to advertise as a fundamental freedom.

  Subsequently, journalists acknowledged that they ignored or distorted the controversy “because of their publishers’ intense opposition.” Most publishers refused to “print such unmistakable news as Mrs. Roosevelt’s endorsement of the bill.”* Tugwell’s consumer efforts came to naught, and the entire project was downgraded.

  During the first years of the New Deal, ER’s most dependable ally was Harry Hopkins. Only Louis Howe among FDR’s extended staff was closer to ER.

  Harry Lloyd Hopkins, a New York settlement house worker associated with Lillian Wald, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and graduated from Grinnell College in 1912. During the Depression he conceived of a relief project that involved instant jobs for New York City’s unemployed in parks and public facilities. As governor, FDR was impressed with Hopkins’s effort and established New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) in 1931, which Hopkins chaired.

  On 21 March 1933, FDR announced his decision “to launch the biggest relief program in history.” Based on the work done in New York by Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins and enhanced by the vision of Senators Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, and Edward Costigan, the Emergency Relief Act created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) to grant $500 million in aid to state and local governments.

  It promised direct relief as well as the reemployment of millions of needy Americans. Hopkins’s agency quickly became the most vital pillar of New Deal hope.