Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  On 26 June 1935, FDR announced the NYA, by executive order. Unlike other federal agencies and in contrast to social security’s limitations, NYA was inclusive: It promoted fairness in all its programs for women and men and specifically rejected racial discrimination. Black and white workers were paid the same wages and received the same student benefits.

  NYA provided aid to high school, college, and graduate students to continue their education and provided work projects to train out-of-school jobless youth, women and men. NYA’s contributions to struggling students were generous: Over 200,000 high school students were supported “at a maximum of six dollars a month,” 100,000 college students averaged $15 monthly, and 4,600 graduate students earned $25 to $30 monthly.

  There were community and rural youth development, recreational leadership, public service, and research projects under way, for which $20 million had been allocated. Junior employment counselors were stationed at state employment offices in selected cities; a Negro office with Negro counselors was established in North Carolina; one hundred educational camps for five thousand women were planned; forty-five were opened by July.

  In every state, African-Americans were fully represented. More than 120 Negro colleges participated in the student aid program. NYA employed white and black youths, women and men, in the arts and professions, in skilled and unskilled positions, and provided a full range of training programs in resident and non-resident projects.

  ER remained NYA’s “chief adviser, chief publicist, chief investigator.” She worked more closely with NYA than with any other program except Arthurdale and conferred daily with Aubrey Williams, Mary McLeod Bethune, whose Office of Negro Affairs operated out of NYA, and Betty Lindley, who directed young women’s projects. Little happened at NYA without her knowledge and input, and she “was very proud that the right thing was done regardless of political considerations.” Actually, she noted, it was “politically popular and strengthened the administration greatly.”

  Of all ER’s correspondence with administrators, her exchanges with Aubrey Williams were marked by a unique candor and mutual trust. He sent ER federal analyses and state reports, and she sent him blunt policy recommendations:

  If a group in Georgia developed “a clerical project for youth … why can it not be done in every state?…” “Was the Oregon library project accepted or not?”

  NYA strengthened the burgeoning civil rights movement. Williams hired “Negro staff workers” “to insure full participation in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, and elsewhere.”

  ER was particularly interested in the women’s camp program, headed by Hilda Smith. Although NYA was the least discriminating agency, women were still shortchanged. In many communities their very right to work was challenged, and pay differentials endured. ER resented it, and she wrote, broadcast, protested continually.

  She urged Flora Rose and her friends at Cornell to do a survey of “occupations for girls,” which Aubrey Williams agreed to sponsor. She urged Clarence Pickett to work with NYA projects for the “stranded coal areas” and wanted various training schools for girls, including “health and nutrition” schools, to supplement the subsistence homestead movement.

  Ultimately, ER considered NYA a primary weapon in the war to achieve real security—which depended on education, job security, housing, and public health. She involved herself in every innovation, and her activities were appreciated by the workers in the field. Margaret Ordway, who headed a program in North Carolina, wrote ER a long letter of gratitude: “Out here we think of the NYA as your government child. Certainly no member of the alphabet family is more popular. This mountain district comprises seventeen counties,” and Ordway wanted ER to know of their achievements—and their difficulties. NYA had funds for “pay-rolls.” Ordway might employ “every eligible youth in Macon County,” and had 114 enrolled. But in every county every supervisor had the same complaint: They had no tools, no materials, no way to train or teach. Without books, paper, crayons, it was hopeless. Still, “our mountain youth” were not idle:

  We have enclosed springs; piped water to a number of schools; erected drinking fountains; repaired windows …; made passable some side roads to churches and schools. “Hit used to be what we had to tote the corpse, now we kin ride hit right up to the door.”

  Eleven girls and women, living at distant places in the county (all I have found that possess the essential gift), are visiting pre-school children in the remotest coves and on barren mountain sides. They tramp miles and miles carrying their packs of scrapbook materials … and second hand primers…. Some of these tots had never seen a book or heard a rhyme. Suppose we had some real kindergarten materials?

  There were no fabrics for quilting, no wool for knitting. The girls had no skills, and there were no materials to teach them to weave or spin or basket. For each girl in the program, NYA funds were “a temporary blessing but it does nothing toward her bleak future.”

  NYA teachers like Ordway cared profoundly, and there were daily improvements in the quality of life. “When seeking to correct the girls whose appearance is rowdy, I suggest the First lady should be their pattern, and it usually works.” Ordway told one girl: “If you were to see Mrs. Roosevelt you would find that she does not … have gory fingernails, or smear paint on her cheeks.”

  Using the regional compliment, the girl replied, “with the most radiant smile: ‘No, she wouldn’t do nothin’ like THAT, Mis’ Roosevelt is re-al common.’”

  ER passed this letter on to her husband, having penned across the top: “FDR, worth reading. Shall I see what Aubrey can do or is it hopeless?”

  NYA represented a critical turning point in ER’s independent role as First Lady and as her husband’s partner in an increasingly difficult political climate. Robert Sherwood observed that she had become “the keeper of and constant spokesman for her husband’s conscience.” For months she had badgered, cajoled, and grown cold. She initiated and nurtured allies; joined and enhanced political movements. She refused to give up or give in. It was a woman’s way of power. And as conservative opposition to the New Deal intensified, so too did her determination to achieve all that could be achieved—for all the people, including the most needy and still neglected.

  She decided to write a series of articles during her summer vacation to address issues she wanted moved to the front of her husband’s agenda. While FDR held Congress in session during Washington’s steamiest summer months to deal with social security, a new banking bill to extend the Federal Reserve Bank’s authority, and a controversial “soak the rich” tax law that increased inheritance and corporation taxes, ER left Washington for New York, and then Campobello.*

  For ER, Campobello was always more than that Canadian island just across a narrow riptide from Maine’s easternmost town of Lubec. At Campobello, weather was always memorable. Fond of quoting her mother-in-law’s adage “All weather is good weather,” ER was actually thrilled by stormy turbulence. For ER Campobello was the place where the power and endurance of love, friendship, commitment, overcame the pain of betrayal and fear.

  At Campobello, ER and Louis Howe forged their permanent partnership on FDR’s behalf in 1921; After FDR contracted polio, ER bested her mother-in-law who wanted her son to retire to Hyde Park as a country squire.

  Now her first confidant and only intimate bridge to Franklin was often bedridden. All winter, Louis Howe had been close to death, in an oxygen tent, sometimes in a coma. Despite his advanced emphysema compounded by pneumonia, he rallied in March, and in June seemed on the road to renewed political activity. ER felt free to leave him for the first time all year, content to be back at Campobello to ponder the future—in a place filled with encouraging memory.

  ER’s guests might deplore endless days enveloped in fog and frost-filled summer nights, but with Tommy she churned out dozens of pages each day. The sprawling house was filled with guests and staff; and ER had a splendid time.

  In addition to her workin
g team, Tommy, Earl Miller, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman, there were visits with Molly Dewson and Polly Porter in Castine, Maine. Rose Schneiderman, Jo Coffin, Helen Keller, and the Clarence Picketts, with several relief workers, spent their holiday at Campo, including “a Miss May from Kentucky and a young girl Mary [Davis] has taken in the whole summer. Quite a household, isn’t it?”

  Characteristically, ER wrote Hick: “Oh, I wish you were here. I ache for you when things are so lovely but you wouldn’t be happy so let’s just hope it will be equally lovely whenever we are together later on.”

  Content herself, ER was dismayed that Hick was again disgruntled with her work. She had helped Hick secure her WPA job, because she dreaded Hick’s idea of going to Europe or Asia as an international correspondent, and apologized:

  I realize that it would be easier for you to go where new sights and duties offered distraction. I blame myself much for putting you through all this and offering you so little when I hoped to really help. You need not fear however that my love is less or that your suffering will alter my feelings it just makes me very sorry.

  But ER was now the journalist, and at Campo she wrote two syndicated newspaper articles, a long piece on women in politics not yet placed, and a column for Cosmopolitan. ER did not pause to consider how Hick might feel—even as she discouraged Hick’s hopes to resume her own career.

  ER’s days were also filled with robust physical diversions. She walked Tommy and Nan along the rocky precipices above the shoreline: They “are stiff and wary but we are sticking to it daily!” She took the tiller and sailed herself; and although “Marion has had the curse, tomorrow we are going to start playing tennis.” ER was interested that Earl played tennis “naturally, although he knew nothing in fact of the game.” And she had time to read: Louis MacLeod’s “The Divine Adventure,” an Irish allegory, which was charming; and Elizabeth of Russia, which “I enjoyed.” ER and her company read aloud Rebel Saints, a book of radical Quaker history, which “proved so interesting we didn’t go to bed till 10:30, which is very dissipated for us!”

  Hick replied to ER’s notion of a “quiet” and “tranquil” summer with her own fantasy:

  It was nice to think that you wished I were there. You’re probably right, though when you say I’d not be very happy. I’d probably feel like a fifth wheel. Well—never mind, darling! The time will come when it won’t matter to me that there are so many others who have priority rights to your interest and affection. Then I daresay we’ll be one nice big happy family (!?). You must admit, though … it’s sometimes rather tough to be the most recent of the people who have any claims on you! I have no seniority rating at all! I am so very much ah outsider. But when the time comes when I don’t care so much—or at least not in the way I care now—it will be easier. Anyway, I’m glad you’re up there & enjoying it. And we’ll have our time together later on.

  ER “had to laugh! No dear, we won’t ever be a happy family party here! We might spend a night or even a weekend in close proximity now and then but never more, somebody’s feelings would be hurt and I’m too old to live under a strain. You and I will always want to have some time alone together….”

  Politically, Hick was disturbed by the economic situation throughout the Northeast and confused by her interviews with certain work relief administrators:

  Saw Mr. Herzog, the WPA man, this afternoon. He’s certainly hard boiled enough. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. But it does strike me that we’re slightly inconsistent in our attitudes toward—and treatment of—the unemployed.

  We start out, in 1933, by working ourselves up into a sort of frenzy of sympathy for them. We do everything we can to make the acceptance of relief “respectable.” We put in a CWA program with wages away above those paid in private industry.

  And now, in the state of New York in 1935, we turn ’em over to a man like [Lester] Herzog, who seems to think, rightly or wrongly, that they are bums and chiselers, goes at his job with this attitude.

  “By God, we’ll quit coddling these babies and get ’em off relief!”

  Hick was especially incensed about Herzog’s plans for women:

  [He thought they] ought to be working as domestics. God damn it—I just wish some of these people who think all unemployed women ought to be delighted to hire themselves out as maids or scrubwomen had to take a whack at it themselves. Believe me, Madame, I’ve been a servant—a maid-of-all-work, a slavey in a boarding house! I know what it’s like. People make me sick….

  ER and Ellen Woodward struggled to diversify women’s work, and Woodward wrote ER that by October more than sixty thousand women were “actually at work on WPA projects” in thirty-four states. There had been notable successes regarding training and reemployment in private industry, and new programs included bookkeepers in New York City, public health nurses in Mississippi, and library projects throughout the country.

  During 1935 there were almost one thousand library projects in forty-two states, which employed ten thousand women in work relief. Books were cleaned, fumigated, mended, rebound; newspapers were clipped for research projects, scrapbooks, displays; library books were classified, catalogued, indexed; books were transcribed into braille using blind workers; professional librarians ran countless reading and community programs.

  In Leslie County, Kentucky, women on horseback carried books into remote areas accessible only to packhorses. One group of the “Packhorse Library Project” comprised four women with books in their saddlebags who began the day at “Hell-for Startin Creek,” then followed “a tortuous, twisting stream with a rocky bed and brush-tangled banks” to “Devil’s Jump Branch,” where they separated, each following a different tributary to reach fifty-seven mountain communities.

  But for all the exciting and innovative projects in libraries, museums, laboratories, recreation centers, and schools, more than 50 percent of women at work in the WPA were still in sewing rooms, and a great many worked as domestics. During much of 1935, Woodward’s letters to ER concerned their shared enthusiasm for “training courses for household workers.” By 1936 there were training programs “for every branch of household service” in twenty-one states, with more than 7,600 women enrolled.

  ER sought economic justice for women in WPA, and Woodward wrote: “For the first time in the history of industry, women were accepted on an equal basis with men.” WPA employed married, widowed, and single women with dependents, as well as single “unattached women” without dependents.

  Virtually all unemployed nurses were employed on WPA public health projects, resulting in a massive public health crusade. Thousands were immunized against diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid. Antituberculosis campaigns were generated, and schools and camps for tubercular children created; treatment for long-ignored regional scourges of pellagra, malaria, hookworm became commonplace. Child care and maternity clinics mushroomed; first aid, hygiene, and home care instruction proliferated.

  Sewing rooms, which were so offensive to Hick and others, were surprisingly diverse places that frequently included nursery schools, staffed by “a teacher, a registered nurse, a nutritionist, and a janitor.” Everything manufactured, from clothing, to dolls and toys, to household supplies, was “released to needy people or institutions.” Regional handicrafts were encouraged: “the patch-work quilts of the Carolinas; the leather works of New Mexico and Arizona; the spinning of raw wool in Missouri; the weaving of blankets in Kansas; the knitting of Siwash Socks [a traditional Indian pattern, dyed with the juice of native trees] in Tennessee.” Moreover, the sewing rooms “gave unskilled women workers … a chance to hold up their heads and earn a fair week’s wage,” wrote one former critic who visited a New York State sewing project.

  At the end of July, ER sent Hick her just-completed article “Can a Woman Be Elected President” for comment:

  I hope it will interest you, I put a lot of work in it but I know it is controversial and will cause violent differences of opinion. Marion, for instance disagrees with a lot of it!
Tommy didn’t think I’d handle it in this way and is interested but I don’t think is entirely in agreement either!

  Although her closest friends were disappointed, ER insisted on publishing her long turgid article, which concluded that women were not yet ready to run for high political office. The essay was stimulated by negative publicity heaped upon ER after several June graduation addresses. ER had been criticized for her views and unseemly ambitions, and several Republican papers suggested her presidential aspirations were linked to FDR’s fragile health.

  In response, ER wrote a rhapsody to the kind of man a president needed to be, and used the opportunity to warn, even scold, women in politics. Sometime between suffrage and the Depression, women stopped marching for women. They seemed to ER no longer sufficiently interested in public affairs to demonstrate on behalf of their own needs or to advance social policy. They joined fascist and communist movements which were making deep inroads; but women who had once stood up for social justice as a group seemed now to ER uninformed and disorganized, their interests diffused and unfocused.

  If women were, “as a rule,” somewhat “more sensitive” than men, it was partly because they had had to adjust to their environment more completely. “It has been their job to live with men as peacefully and as pleasantly as possible and to bring up children and help them to adjust to their environment.” Women had “not been physically dominant, therefore they have used their wits to make life more pleasant and agreeable, and to achieve their own ends with as little friction as possible.”