Eleanor and Franklin (85 page)

Among the many letters she received when she entered the White House was one from a young woman, Bertha Brodsky, who, in wishing her and the president well, added apologetically that she found it difficult to write because her back was crooked and she had to walk “bent sideways.” Eleanor immediately replied with words of encouragement, her whole being alive with pity and sympathy. She sent the letter to the doctor in charge at the Orthopedic Hospital in New York, asking whether a free bed could not be found for Bertha. It was, and when Eleanor came to New York she visited the young woman, who was almost entirely encased in a plaster cast, although her eyes and mouth showed “a determined cheerfulness.” The girl came from a very poor Jewish family, her father eking out an existence with a small paper route, and before the visit ended it was as if Bertha had become one of Eleanor's children. She visited her faithfully and sent flowers regularly. There was a package at Christmas, and flowers were sent to Bertha's mother at Passover. When Bertha was released from the hospital, Eleanor called Pauline Newman of the Women's Trade Union League, who found a job for her. She also helped Bertha's brother find a job, and when Bertha acquired a serious boyfriend she brought him to Eleanor to have her look him over. Eleanor attended Bertha's wedding, counseled her in moments of early marital strain, and was godmother to her child. “Dear Messenger of God,” Bertha addressed her.

Her relationship with Bertha was not untypical. She yearned for situations that imposed duties. She responded to every appeal for help, indeed, sought to anticipate them. To friends who felt that she ought to save her energies for more important things, Eleanor replied that “whatever comes your way is yours to handle.” Sometimes she was duped, but that was a risk she was prepared to take, and she even refused to condemn those who were not wholly honest with her. “I
do not attempt to judge others by my standards,” she said,
⁴⁵
and she refused to dwell on injury.

Speaking of the Saint Theresas of this world, William James wrote at the beginning of the century:

The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. Yet they are the impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animators of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy. . . . If things are ever to move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk of it.
⁴⁶

To many New Dealers Eleanor seemed innocent on the subject of economics, and to the Marxists she appeared to be a sentimentalist about the struggle for power, yet long after the ideologists of the New Freedom and the New Nationalism, the Technocrats and the Bellamyites, the Socialists and the Communists retired or were driven from the battlefield, she would still be striding toward some further frontier of the struggle to liberate mankind's potentialities.

37.
MRS. ROOSEVELT'S “BABY”— ARTHURDALE

“I
F YOU WANT TO SEE JUST HOW BAD THINGS ARE
,” C
LARENCE
Pickett, the executive secretary of the Quaker social-action organization the American Friends Service Committee, advised Lorena Hickok, “go down to the southwestern part of the state [Pennsylvania] and into West Virginia.” Hickok had checked in with Pickett before setting out on her travels as confidential agent for Harry Hopkins to report to him and to Eleanor on poverty in the United States.
¹

Pickett did not exaggerate the distress in Appalachia. Hickok's vivid communications from the coal towns registered incredulity that Americans could sink to such levels of degradation and hopelessness. No coal was being mined. Some of the miners had not worked for eight years. Human beings shuffled around like ghosts, and a miasmic silence hung over grimy company houses that clung to mountainsides along polluted gullies.

The only circumstance of hope that Hickok found was the work of the Quakers and the Agricultural Extension Service of the state university. They had persuaded some of the miners to launch a program of self-help: subsistence gardens had been dug into the unyielding hillsides; a furniture-making cooperative was thriving; the women were sewing and making clothes out of materials sent by the Red Cross; and, added Hickok, all of it “has done marvels for their morale.”
²

Nothing galvanized Eleanor into action more quickly than afflicted human beings in whom some spark of aspiration and hope still glowed. She was coming down, she informed Hickok, to see what the Friends were doing and hear what they had to propose. Pickett sent her a map “which will help you find Crown Mine, 14 miles south of Morgantown,” and on August 18 Eleanor arrived, driving alone. That day and the next the Quaker workers took a tall woman whom they did not identify, wearing a dark blue skirt, white blouse, and a white ribbon around her hair, to see the most hopeful families and the most defeated
ones. She listened to the miners' wives and took their babies on her lap. She went into the hovels alongside of Scotts Run, one of the worst slums in the county, where mine tipples rusted and the gully that was used for cooking and washing water also ran with sewage. The men, black-listed because of strikes, had been so long out of work that not even the Quakers could stir them out of their “sit and spit” listlessness.

What point was there in hating “our poor Communists,” the two Quaker workers in the area, Alice Davis and Nadia Danilevsky, said to Eleanor when Hickok expressed her loathing for the Communists.
³
Their organizers were having as difficult a time as the Quakers in getting the beaten-down miners to stand up for their rights. Eleanor listened carefully and took notes. These two women had done relief work in Russia after the Revolution, an experience that had disenchanted them with Communism; they knew what revolution had done to Russia and did not want it for the United States. That gave special authority to their plea for help from Washington.

Action followed swiftly upon Eleanor's return to Washington. The little girl with the bad eyes should be sent to a hospital at her expense, she wrote Alice Davis. The CCC boy did not have t.b., as his parents had feared, but leg ulcers, and was now recovered. At a White House dinner she had told the story of the little boy who had clung to a pet white rabbit which his sister said they were going to eat, and William Bullitt had promised to send her a check for $100 in the hopes that it could keep the bunny alive.
⁴

But these small acts of kindness did not touch the basic question of policy—what should be done with the thousands of miners who would never find work again in the mines, who were, in effect, stranded communities? The Quakers and the Extension Service workers in Morgantown thought they would have to be resettled in an area where they could make a living or, at the very least, grow their own food and begin to recover their self-respect. To the president, to whom Eleanor reported her findings, this seemed to be exactly the sort of situation the new Subsistence Homestead Program was designed to meet. The program had been authorized by the National Recovery Act, an omnibus bill which included a revolving fund of $25 million to set up “subsistence homesteads” with a view to achieving a better rural-urban balance.
⁵

Urbanization and rural decay were old preoccupations of both the Roosevelts. “The bigger the city, the less thought of man,” Eleanor had heard Franklin tell the students of North Carolina A. & M. back
in 1913. A Jeffersonian faith in the virtues of a yeomanry had been a sympathetic theme in their friendship with Franklin K. Lane, who at the end of the war had urged a federal program to help returning soldiers acquire subsistence farms near their places of work—a form of soldiers' settlements. Eleanor's sponsorship of the Val-Kill industries was based on the theory she shared with her husband that men and women would stay on the farm if interesting and remunerative winter work could be found for them. Like her husband, she thought rural life superior to urban. Cities were absorbing and stimulating because of “the variety of human existence” to be found in them, she had written in 1930, “but I would rather live where trees and flowers and space and quiet give me peace.”
⁶
As governor, her husband had advocated the development of rural-industrial communities, and the creative surge of his first hundred days as president gave him his chance to push his back-to-the-land ideas.

“I really would like to get one more bill,” Roosevelt wrote Senator George Norris, “which would allow us to spend $25 million this year to put 25,000 families on farms at an average cost of $1,000 per family. It can be done. Also we would get most of the money back in due time. Will you talk this over with some of our fellow dreamers on the Hill?”
⁷

He got his $25 million but there had been no discussion of the provision either in committee or on the floor of Congress. Ickes, who was given the Subsistence Homestead appropriation to administer, did not know what was intended. The housing people had their eye on the money, but Roosevelt knew what he wanted. He saw it as the beginning of a program under which in time a million families might be resettled into planned communities. The government would buy the land, build the houses, acquire the livestock and farm machinery, bring in roads, water, and utilities. The homesteaders would have thirty years in which to pay.
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It was her husband's idea, Eleanor said of Arthurdale, as the first new community came to be called; “It's a plan he has talked about ever since I can remember.” When she told him what the Friends thought needed to be done for the stranded miners, he decided this was the place to launch the homestead program.
⁹

“The President thought you would be interested in knowing what is being done in the State University at Fairmont, West Virginia,” Eleanor wrote Ickes after her talk with Franklin. The Extension Service people were doing “splendid work” in preparing the miners to go back to the farms:

The President thought this might be a good place to start and that perhaps it would be a good idea to send some one down to get more detailed information than I have. The conditions there are appalling, but the spirit and morale are good, and the people are doing everything they can to help themselves—whole families are weaving, making simple furniture, etc.
¹⁰

Howe already had spoken to him, Ickes informed Eleanor; he (Ickes) had immediately dispatched two men to Morgantown, “and we are expecting an early report. It all sounds very interesting indeed and if the conditions are favorable we hope to go ahead at once with a subsistence project there.”
¹¹

At the president's request, Ickes appointed M. L. Wilson, farmer-philosopher and former professor of agricultural economics, to head the Subsistence Homestead Division. “I'm interested in this and Mrs. Roosevelt's tremendously interested in it, and I think M. L. Wilson is the best man to take it over,” the president had said.
¹²

Wilson had scarcely settled his family in Washington when he and his wife were invited to the White House. What does one wear to dinner with the president? he amiably inquired at Garfinckel's, Washington's leading department store. Nor did he know what he would do with his car if he arrived at the White House in it. So he and Mrs. Wilson drove to within a few blocks of the president's house, parked and took a taxi the remaining way. Once inside such anxieties vanished before the thoughtfulness of the Roosevelts as hosts. The talk, moreover, was heady, the company congenial. The other guests were Frances Perkins, the Henry Wallaces, General Hugh Johnson, Admiral Byrd, the Leonard Elmhirsts, Louis Howe, and Nancy Cook. Most of the talk was about West Virginia and the possibility of resettling the miners. But it was more than that. New vistas of human betterment cast their spell over the evening. The real bond between the Roosevelts and Wilson was the dream they shared that the resettlement program could show the way to a new type of civilization for America. Rural sage, president, First Lady, Louis Howe, and the Elmhirsts, who were engaged in their own experiment in rural revitalization on a 2,000-acre medieval manor in Devon, England, exchanged ideas and hopes on the reshaping of village communities in order to serve the growth of a new type of socially minded individual.
¹³

Dorothy Elmhirst, like Eleanor, had belonged to New York society
when it was Society. She was the youngest child of William C. Whitney, financier and secretary of the Navy in Cleveland's first cabinet. Like Eleanor she had attended a Roser class which had met in her father's Fifth Avenue mansion, and also like Eleanor she had broken free from her environment and upbringing to become a woman of broad sympathies and unorthodox ideas. She and her husband Willard Straight had founded the
New Republic
. After his death she had married Leonard Elmhirst and with him had purchased Dartington in Devonshire, where they were trying out some of his ideas on how to halt the drift away from the countryside. In order to raise the standard of living they had introduced light industries and built housing, and they had encouraged the development of arts and crafts as a part of rural life and everyday amenity. Leonard Elmhirst, a student of medieval history, embellished his description of Dartington with references to the manorial system, where there had been security, a sense of belonging and rootedness, and, to a considerable degree, self-sufficiency. Everyone was fascinated. The Dartington concept was not too far from Wilson's “community idea.”