It was a $10 million campaign of misinformation and dirty tricks. EPIC telephones were tapped, offices were invaded; mail, stationery, and contributors’ lists were stolen.
As 1934 campaign tensions mounted, ER was subjected to personal abuse… One particularly nasty moment occurred when Minnesota Senator Thomas Schall compared Arthurdale’s furniture cooperative with her Val-Kill furniture factory and derided her as a price-gouging publicity hound: ER’s name, he asserted, was autographed on furniture made in her shop—which cost five times the going rate for similar items.
ER understood during the 1930s that handcrafted work could never compete with factory-made items. Exquisite, individually rendered crafts had become luxuries. If “human resources” mattered, and workers were honored with a living wage, handcrafted goods would never again be “profitable.” Still, she believed in their value—as made-to-order works of art.
She defended Arthurdale’s cooperative fiercely, and her own shop:
I would like to explain that our factory at Val-Kill was started [in 1925] as an experiment to see if one could run a very small factory in a rural community and make it pay and at the same time teach people—boys especially—a trade so that they would not drift out of the country community. … We have never since we began any of us who put the money into the factory, had one cent of interest on our investment.
All handicrafts and garden activities at Arthurdale were continually ridiculed. Every Godlove chair was counted a fiscal loss in time and pay. Every curtain, knitted sweater, woven rug became somehow a debit.
ER could not understand why so many, politicians, including Democrats, who should be eager to invest in America’s future were so niggling, especially since so many millions were spent on research for industrial profit, agricultural profit, and for businesses dependent on military profits. She asked M. L. Wilson to prepare a study of industrial research expenditures, which revealed that by 1925 over $200 million was spent annually for industrial and government research for companies such as American Telegraph and Telephone, General Electric, and Du Pont. ER never understood why human goals were not considered just as worthy. She brought the subject up repeatedly: “We spend a great deal of money every year” to improve “various crops and fruits and vegetables…. It seems to me that the time has arrived when a certain amount of money should be spent on an experimental station for improving social conditions….”
Homesteaders wrote to ER about their mounting concerns and asked her to meet with their club to reconsider the fiscal limitations imposed upon them:
We are to be limited to 30 hours per week at 45 cents per hour which gives us a wage of $54 per month and we will not be able to make very high monthly payments out of this wage on a homestead.
[Consider also] that many jobs in the construction department on this project return a bigger monthly wage, jobs homesteaders could be doing, but which they are not permitted to do. We realize that we are not skilled in many trades but if we had received the cooperation of the construction department we could have by this time become good plumbers, bricklayers, stone masons, blacksmiths, mechanics, painters, electricians, and all the different trades on this job. The value of this would be not only that we could now be earning more, but that we could do many jobs of service in the community in the coming years.
ER and Baruch agreed with the homesteaders. Baruch in particular feared that unless the workers’ community achieved responsibility and long-term employment to “carry themselves,” the experiment was doomed, “no matter how good.” ER considered the entire cost-accounting approach wrong. It was not just a question of housing and security, but education and human restoration. It was a process that would take time, and ER believed the government had a responsibility to support that process. “No community,” she insisted, “should be expected to pay” the costs of what was in part a social “laboratory for the whole country.”
Once Congress rejected government-supported work, ER turned to allies in private industry. Some of her contacts indicated interest, but felt hounded by federal requirements and withdrew.
Most notable was a plan for the National Home Library Foundation to build and operate a printing press at Arthurdale. ER was impressed by the foundation’s goal to get good books into America’s homes at low cost, and was close to many of the writers and progressives on its advisory board—which included Heywood Broun, Bennett Cerf, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Felix Frankfurter, John Haynes Holmes, Frederic Howe, Eva Le Gallienne, Raymond Moley, George Russell (AE), and Hendrik van Loon, among many others.
After months of dickering, Sherman Mittell, the foundation’s president, wrote Leroy Peterson, chief of the Economic Development Section of the Resettlement Administration, that he resented being hounded, and it was best “to forget” the idea. Mittell objected to being treated as a bad security risk, when he had been asked for a favor:
We were originally interested because Mrs. Roosevelt liked the idea. It soon, however, developed into an inquisition, why I don’t know. The information you ask for is available whenever you get down to telling us what’s what….
I leave the whole matter up to her. She has but to ask and we shall carry out her wishes. I don’t want to have any more, scraps with you!
In a series of obnoxious queries, sent 12 August, 16 August, and again on 27 September, Peterson demanded detailed “definite information:” “Yearly production and sale of books.” Names of “sales outlets,” “principal buyers.” Future prospects, inventories and location of inventories, titles, and future titles. What government agency seriously wanting to do business would begin negotiations with an inquisition of unnecessary demands? ER’s allies began to believe the Washington boys were not serious: “There is around a growing acceptance of disaster for [homesteads]. They expect them to fail.”
ER refused to let Arthurdale fail and turned repeatedly to Bernard Baruch. A deep friendship was forged as they worked together. ER grew to depend on Baruch and to trust his considerate judgment. Consistently, Baruch protected the First Lady. Even when they disagreed, he sought to defend and promote her interests. When a shirt manufacturer agreed to open a factory on a trial basis, Baruch wrote ER:
I do not think you ought to be a party to starting anything in Arthurdale which does not offer those things you stand for—the right for collective bargaining, minimum wages and maximum hours….
I shall be available to you or anyone you suggest, when the contract is being made.
The Phillips-Jones Corporation, which made Van Deusen shirts, met all the requirements: It did not employ child labor, it established an eight-hour day with a minimum wage of $13 a week, and the plants’ workers were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Baruch was satisfied, the Resettlement Administration was pleased, and after a further conference with Baruch, the deal was done.
ER increasingly relied on Baruch’s judgment and generosity. On one occasion she wrote him:
The enclosed is from a colored girl [Margaret Inniss of New York City] whose work came to my attention several years ago.
If I check on the work that she is doing now and find it good, would you be willing to pay the rent for a year? My own money is all pledged.
Always an educator, ER was particularly interested in schools—which she considered the center of the entire experiment in community building. From the beginning, she worked closely with Elsie Ripley Clapp, who served as principal of the schools and director of community affairs.
A pioneering progressive educator with degrees from Vassar and Columbia, Clapp had worked with John Dewey and had previously taught at private schools in New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Kentucky.
At Arthurdale, from nursery school, which began with toddlers of two, to adult education classes, girls and boys—women and men—were equal, and treated with respect. They learned history, geography, botany, by living, reading, and doing: They wrote and performed plays; crafted violins, guitars, and drums;
hiked and studied rocks and soils. Girls took shop, and boys took cooking; and they all crafted amazing things: telephones, radios, costumes, pottery. There was an evening school with classes in child care, electricity, typewriting, accounting. There was no truancy at Arthurdale, and the entire family went to school.
Initially, ER and Elsie Clapp believed that through progressive education Arthurdale might light the way to an entirely new way of being:
Men and women will finally learn how to live happily and securely together. … They will develop in an economy of peace and plenty rather than competition and want.
But the community wanted to be taught like other communities in the region, and it retreated from Clapp’s innovations. By 1936, she moved on and the schools she created were turned over to the West Virginia school system. Some parents were disappointed, others relieved.
ER presided over the transition. On 12 July 1936, while Bernard Baruch was in a German spa seeking a cure for his gout, ER sent him five typed pages to explain her determination to “carry on the health work,” and support the ”nursery school…. I feel with the new families coming in, the health care and the nursery school are two vital things….” She met with Rex Tugwell, who supported her efforts, and she returned to Arthurdale to explain to the Homesteaders the changes under way:
They will run their own baby clinic, they can run their own music festivals, their athletics and many of the recreational activities through the Homesteaders Club….
I hope that you will feel I have acted wisely and have done what you would have done …
_________
To the end of her life, ER visited Arthurdale regularly and felt a deep personal regard for the members of the community, who had changed so much from their broken-down years at Scott’s Run and had caused so much change to seem nationally possible.
She was particularly moved by a visit to a homestead where a woman had just had a baby and her two other children were four and six. ER worried that she would have a difficult holiday season. But the woman assured her, “This will be a wonderful Christmas.” Before they had nothing; and the children were too weak to cry. Until Arthurdale, “all we had for Christmas dinner was some raw carrots for them to chew on. This year they will each have a toy and we have a chicken, one of our own, that we are going to eat. It will be wonderful.”
ER concluded:
I don’t know whether you think that is worth half a million dollars. But I do. The homestead projects were attacked in Congress, for the most part by men who had never seen for themselves the plight of the miners or what we were trying to do for them…. I have always felt that many human beings who might have cost us thousands of dollars in tuberculosis sanitariums, insane asylums, and jails were restored to usefulness and given confidence in themselves.
For sixty years, pundits and politicians judged Arthurdale a failure. But the homesteaders’ descendants are still living on the land; their children and their children’s children still enjoy the bright pleasant homes that have withstood all those bitter mountain winters, with temperatures twenty, thirty, forty degrees below zero, in warmth and comfort. For the people, Arthurdale was marvelous, and they called it “utopia.”
ER had believed in it, fought for it, caused it to happen. From the point of view of the people of the community, everything about it worked: The school and sense of community endured, the residents flourished, and they continued to believe their own experiences might be, should be, put to future use. At their sixtieth anniversary celebration in 1994, they designed sweatshirts that read: “Arthurdale / The Dream Lives On.”
Today, every family tells virtually the same story: We worked together, we danced together, and we learned together. Almost all the children went to college. They became teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, accountants, librarians. Miraculously, all the boys who volunteered for war returned home. And everyone remembers every time ER visited, to encourage them, to sit with them on their porches, to dance (and to call the square dance), to give the Commencement address, to help develop their school programs, to bring a child a present.
ER learned a lot about respect and trust from her years working for Arthurdale. She also learned valuable lessons about the limits of influence and the conflicts of power. Ultimately, she concluded:
Nothing we learn in this world is ever wasted and … practically nothing we do ever stands by itself. If it is good, it will serve some good purpose in the future. If it is evil, it may haunt and handicap our efforts in unimagined ways.
There was, concerning Arthurdale, one “evil,” one issue that haunted ER, which she struggled to redress. In the process of building a model community, ER confronted the subject of race, the profound contradictions of America’s peculiar barriers to democracy. She understood the range of bigotry from violent tradition to the determined silences of contempt, casual disregard, and honest confusion. She was surprised and dismayed when the residents of Scott’s Run, who had worked together and unionized together, picketed and demonstrated to keep Arthurdale white.
Her plea for an end to discrimination failed. Arthurdale propelled the issue of race to the top of ER’s agenda.
*The Arthurdale branch of the Mountaineer Craftsmen’s Cooperative, which employed women and men, was a thriving concern. By 1936, it sold $43,000 worth of furniture—although the community’s detractors added hourly labor costs, and complained that crafts always resulted in vast “losses.”
*The first fifty families were selected from a pool of over six hundred applicants. Two hundred black families also applied, as ER had encouraged them to. It is unclear if there were any Jews among the miners of Scott’s Run, but there was an area called Jew Hill. According to a Monongalia County social worker’s survey during the 1920s, Jew Hill was a “settlement of twelve houses occupied by sixteen families” where six outhouses were shared by all the residents. Without hygienic waste disposal, the same “economic devastation” and “social chaos” existed in Jew Hill as in nearby “North American Hill.”
*Although plans for fifteen Negro homesteads were proposed, and a tract of 350 acres in Monongalia County was optioned, it was allowed to expire. Despite many discussions, no homestead for needy black miners was built. Aberdeen Gardens, outside Newport News, Virginia, was America’s only significant black homestead. Opened in November 1936, the site had 158 homes on 440 acres. Modest and pleasant, they were brick Colonial Revival homes, with indoor plumbing, amenities, warmth, and dignity.
9: The Quest for Racial Justice
Agitation against the inclusion of Negro homesteaders in West Virginia galvanized ER. Since blacks and whites lived and worked, suffered and struggled, side by side along Scott’s Run and in the mines, ER was unprepared for the fierce opposition to the creation of a racially mixed model community. At that time ER decided to confront society’s acceptance of segregation and long-neglected race policies.
ER called a White House meeting with Clarence Pickett and notable Negro leaders. After dinner on 26 January 1934, Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University; John Hope, president of Atlanta University; Robert R. Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute; Charles S. Johnson, chair of social sciences at Fisk University; Charles C. Spaulding, president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company; and Walter White of the NAACP met with the First Lady until after midnight—when FDR was wheeled in to greet his wife’s guests.
Clarence Pickett recalled that the conversation was “unrestrained.” For over four hours, the New Deal’s failure to address urgent nationwide race problems was fully explored. According to Pickett, ER’s determination to embark upon the long road ahead “set before all of us a new standard for understanding and cooperation in the field of race.”
That White House meeting heralded a new moment in civil rights politics. Never before had black leaders been invited to discuss unemployment, lynching, unequal expenditures to educate children, the failure to provide housing, sanitation, running water. ER promised to make every ef
fort to ensure black participation in all federal work and relief programs. She would fight for equal education funding and opportunity. ER assured the leaders that her door was always open, her heart with them.
ER’s policy represented a new formation in America’s racial geometry. Walter White and the NAACP had access to the White House, and a friend in residence. She circumvented the hostile and careless among FDR’s team and cultivated those who shared her vision: Harry Hopkins and his assistant Aubrey Williams at FERA particularly; Will Alexander and Rex Tugwell; Harold Ickes and various members of his racially diverse staff. From that meeting forward, ER regularly sent instructions, details, letters, suggestions to them, and expected a response. Over the years she relied increasingly on Aubrey Williams. Born in Alabama, Williams was a former social worker. Proud to call himself a “Southern Rebel,” he was entirely dedicated to racial change.
ER asked Hopkins to pay special attention to the plight of America’s most neglected people: “I wonder if you will watch the colored situation quite closely and let me know from time to time how things are going.” In various capacities, as Hopkins’s assistant at the Civil Works Administration (1933–35) and the Works Progress Administration (1936–38), Williams took on that task, and with ER and others attempted to right the wrongs.
ER was aware of the enormous challenge before her. Civil rights had never before been accorded national consideration, and now she introduced a commitment to action in a tense and divided administration.
The week before the meeting with national black leaders, ER flew down to Atlanta to meet Hick, and then they drove to Warm Springs. She had carefully prepared for their weekend reunion of 20–22 January and reserved one of the private cottages built in the woods for “three quiet evenings and breakfasts and I don’t know if you realize how nice that sounds to me!”
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 23