Eleanor and Franklin (88 page)

I am very fond of Mrs. Roosevelt. She has a fine social sense and is utterly unselfish, but as the President has said to me on one or two occasions, she wants to build these homesteads on a scale that we can't afford because the people for whom they are intended cannot afford such houses. The President's idea is to build an adequate house and not even put in plumbing fixtures, leaving that sort of thing to be done later by the homesteader as he can afford them. He remarked yesterday that he had not yet dared say this to the people (undoubtedly meaning Mrs. Roosevelt) who wanted the houses built with all modern improvements.

Roosevelt may have considered his wife extravagant, although within the family she was noted for frugality, or he may have been easing the blow to Ickes at the expense of his wife, for the president shrank from hurting people's feelings and many men have directed resentment away from themselves with the protest that they could not do anything with their wives. Whatever Ickes's impressions of the president's views on plumbing, Roosevelt told Tugwell and Dr. Will Alexander, when they took over the Resettlement Administration,
the successor agency to the Subsistence Homestead Division: “These people ought to have plumbing. There's no reason why these country people shouldn't have plumbing. So put in plumbing. Put in bathrooms.” But try as the Resettlement people did to get plumbing “within an economic budget,” they never managed it. “It was always something that they couldn't pay for,” Alexander recalled. On one occasion Tugwell went over to the White House to inform “the Boss” that “if he has his plumbing, he's got to let us subsidize it.” Tugwell was gone all morning. His aides, all agog and sure that great matters of state must have been under discussion, demanded to know what had kept him when he returned. He had explained to the Boss their difficulty with fitting bathrooms into a house that the homesteaders would be able to pay for “and he [Roosevelt] got to drawing privies.” The presidential anteroom was crowded with ambassadors, bankers, politicians, and the president had spent the morning drawing privies, Tugwell reported. Privies it was in the end. Resettlement became the Farm Security Administration in 1937, and the new agency eliminated indoor plumbing from the houses built in the South.
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Most of the Arthurdale houses, however, had already been built, and all had bathrooms. The cost issue there was how much the government should charge the homesteaders for the houses and how much should be considered government subsidy. Mrs. Roosevelt asked Baruch to examine the figures and give her a businessman's judgment. “You have told me to treat this as if it were my own matter,” Baruch agreed, “and I propose to follow out your request until you tell me not to.”
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She was grateful to Baruch for his help, and their relationship in the course of their work for Arthurdale had blossomed into friendship. There was, no doubt, an element of calculation on both sides, but also there was genuine affection. Baruch, before Chicago, had been one of the leaders of the stop-Roosevelt drive and while he had sought to make up for his mistake by the generosity of his campaign contributions, it was Roosevelt's policy to give him the feeling he was an insider while in fact keeping him at arm's length. When Baruch came to Hyde Park after the Chicago convention it had been Eleanor who drove him around, and increasingly it was Eleanor and Louis through whom he maintained access to Roosevelt. Eleanor had known Baruch in a distant way when he had served Woodrow Wilson. At that time she had been cool toward him both because he was Jewish and because he was a Wall Street speculator, but she was a different woman now and had come to appreciate his acumen in business and public affairs. He
was ready to give advice, and she welcomed it. She knew she tended to be too trusting, to be carried away by her hopes, too inclined to believe that will alone could defeat economic realities. “I want you to be hardboiled, for it is a kind of ‘hardboiledness' which is helpful,” she had entreated him in a letter of thanks for agreeing to underwrite most of the costs of the experimental school at Arthurdale.
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The tall, spare figure had become a familiar presence in her sitting room.

After a little trouble in getting what he called the “rock bottom figures,” Baruch concluded that of the $1,597,707 that had been budgeted for Arthurdale, $1,037,000 would have to be charge-off to the government. To ask the homesteaders to pay more than $3,000, he thought, would place unbearable burdens upon them.
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A million-dollar charge-off to the government did not seem lavish to him. The excess of actual costs over estimates was “not much larger relatively than a great many business and engineering precedents in other pioneering. . . . You are to be congratulated on your implacable insistence on accurate figures revealing the truth.” And Eleanor could quote him if she wished.
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She herself assembled statistics on the millions private industry spent on research; if such outlays were justified to develop new ways of manufacturing, the government was justified in putting “a little money into experimenting in new methods of living,” she wrote. (These figures were included in a defense of Arthurdale which she did not publish because Ickes's man Pynchon thought that further publicity would only add fuel to the controversy.)

Risks had to be taken; one could not wait around for perfect solutions. “We do not think for a moment that we are doing anything more than experimenting,” she wrote Florence Willert. “We know a lot of things have got to be thought through, but also think it is better to do something than to sit by with folded hands.”
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The contrasting reports that came to her at the end of 1934 from Arthurdale and nearby Jere vindicated government action on the basis of plans and concepts that everyone realized would have to be revised not once but often. The Communists were making considerable headway among the Jere miners, reported Alice Davis, the Quaker relief worker who had first shown her around Scotts Run and who was now county welfare commissioner, and it seemed to her “just a race against time—whether we can get them into decent living conditions and decent ways of thinking before they are led to violence.” The local unemployed organized by the Communists had marched on the Welfare Board and threatened to throw Alice and her caseworker into the
river. “Of course, we laughed and said we furnished everything for stringing ourselves up but the rope, and they'd have to get together and make that themselves—but their faces were all twisted with hate and if they had had a little smarter leadership and a little more practice they
would
have put us in the river.” She might be working with the Communists herself, she added: “If you and Mr. Roosevelt had not come to lead the people, I think many of us might have been thinking differently.”
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Eleanor put that letter into Franklin's bedside basket.

A few weeks later a wholly different report from West Virginia went into the president's basket, and Eleanor also sent a copy of it to Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who at dinner at the White House had been fascinated by her account of the efforts of the resettled miners, so like those of the Palestine settlers, to make a new life for themselves. This report was from Elsie Clapp, the progressive educator whom Eleanor had brought in as principal of the school in Arthurdale. It was about Christmas in Reedsville.

Such joy. I wish you could have seen it. The toys you gave reached every boy, girl, child, baby. And, best of all, out of their abundance, the homesteaders on their own initiative made up several Christmas boxes for some people near us who are very poor and miserable. . . . We cut our tree, brought it in and decked it. We gathered our Christmas greens from the woods. . . . Christmas Eve at seven-thirty we gathered in the Assembly Hall. Carols which the children acted out orally, the old Bible story, presented by everyone. . . . The whole Christmas drew the community together . . . I was needed only to help. It was theirs entirely.

Eleanor set great store by the school. It would be up to the school, she had told Elsie Clapp when she interviewed her for the job of principal, not only to educate the children but to reawaken hope in the homesteaders, show them how to live more satisfying lives, indeed, to breathe life into this new community. The assignment did not faze Miss Clapp, a protégé of John Dewey who had been applying progressive education principles to rural education at the Ballard Memorial School in Kentucky. But she would need to bring in teachers with special training and get the advice of the best educators in the country, she told Eleanor, who agreed to both conditions and said she would find the money to employ qualified teachers. Eleanor also helped to establish a National Advisory Committee that included John Dewey
, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and Dean William Russell. Jessie Stanton, the director of the Bank Street Nursery School in New York, set up the nursery school in Arthurdale, the first in the entire area. “If I can teach these mothers,” Miss Clapp told Eleanor, “that cold pancakes and coffee aren't good for babies, my two-year-olds will be much healthier.” The curriculum was adapted to the special needs of the community, the learning experiences organized around life problems that the community faced. Under Elsie Clapp's leadership, the school became the center of almost every community activity. She fostered a regional cultural movement, and a summer music festival that she and the homesteaders inaugurated featured “Jig-Dancing,” “Ballad Singing,” “Mouth-Harping,” a “Fiddlers' Contest,” and a “Square Dancing Contest” in which Eleanor was a participant.
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An expensive experimental school did not seem a legitimate charge upon the government, so Eleanor raised most of the operating expenses from private sources. Baruch was the most generous, beginning his contributions with a check for $22,000, a response, he wrote, to Eleanor's “rare combination of intelligence and great heart.”
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In order to be able to contribute herself, Eleanor resumed commercially sponsored radio broadcasts, the proceeds of which went to the American Friends Service Committee to be earmarked for the purposes she indicated. In the autumn of 1934 she received $18,000 for six 15-minute broadcasts of which $6,000 went for the salary of Elsie Clapp, another $6,000 to establish the handicraft center at Arthurdale under the direction of Nancy Cook, and the remaining $6,000 for health work.
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At times she seemed to be almost a commuter between Washington and Reedsville. When she was asked whether it was not a burden to travel to Arthurdale so often, she cut the questioner short with the reply that she enjoyed the company of the homesteaders. She liked them. She knew the names of the children, kept track of their ailments and their achievements. She chatted with their mothers about canning recipes and joined in the Virginia reel with their fathers. She had a “folksy and homelike way with the homesteaders,” Wilson recalled, “as though she had always lived in the community and had just come back from having gone for a couple of weeks.”

She had tried repeatedly to get Ickes to visit the project while the homesteads were still under his jurisdiction and wrote him that Baruch had come away “tremendously impressed” after his first visit, so much so that he was going “to help us to make it into the kind of experiment which we would all like to see.” She hoped that the
secretary would plan to go down, “for I feel that after all the trouble and anxiety that this project has caused you, you will get a sense of satisfaction from meeting the people and seeing how well it is turning out.”
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Ickes had promised he would go with her in August, but the visit never took place.

Although Ickes professed relief over the transfer of the homesteads to Tugwell, the shift rankled him. He became harshly critical of Eleanor, whom at times he even suspected of being part of a cabal to oust him from the cabinet. At the state dinner for the cabinet given by the president and Mrs. Roosevelt at the end of 1934, little pleased him: the menu hardly constituted a “Lucullan” repast, he disliked the domestic wines Eleanor insisted upon serving, and “the champagne was undrinkable.” By January, 1935, he had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Roosevelt did not do her husband any good with her active involvement in public affairs. He began to cultivate Missy.
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Eleanor Roosevelt did present a problem to a strong, self-centered administrator like Ickes. He was never quite certain whether she was acting on the president's behalf or on her own. Nor was the president beyond taking advantage of the ambiguity.

Rexford G. Tugwell, who inherited the Subsistence Homestead Division from Ickes when, in May, 1935, Roosevelt combined it with the rural rehabilitation program of Hopkins's FERA and the soil-reclamation activities of the AAA, was also baffled by his relationship as Resettlement administrator to the First Lady, even though they were on terms of genuine cordiality. In December, 1933, when Tugwell was assistant secretary of agriculture, she had, at his urging, visited the department's National Research Center near College Park, Maryland, where Tugwell thought the nearby submarginal land could be turned into a garden city. A man of superior intelligence, more detached about his ambitions than Ickes, Tugwell admired the First Lady's relationship to government. She had rallied to his support when the food and drug interests fell upon him because of his sponsorship of an effective food and drug bill. The conservative press dug up a poem he had written as an undergraduate and quoted the line “I shall roll up my sleeves—make America over!” to prove his subversive intent, which had only strengthened Eleanor's admiration for him. They had enjoyed each other's company when they found themselves on the same plane bound for Puerto Rico, an historic visit prolific in New Deal benefits for this hitherto neglected island dependency.
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They were good enough friends so that when she invited him for dinner or
to Hyde Park he brought along his assistant, Miss Grace Falke, whom he later married, and when he delivered a speech at Dartmouth on the New Deal, Eleanor felt able to admonish him on the foolhardiness of his title, “Wine, Women and the New Deal.” “Your sense of humor has led you into a trap, I am afraid,” she wrote, envisaging a deluge of WCTU protests.
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