The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (30 page)

Not only his old friends but with various other people my husband had frequent run-ins over the new theory that government had a responsibility to the people. I remember that when Senator Carter Glass insisted that Virginia needed no relief, Franklin suggested that he take a drive with him to see some of the bad spots. The senator never accepted his invitation.

The opening of diplomatic relations with Russia and our relations in this hemisphere were the administration’s first points of attack in our foreign policy, but the major emphasis in those early years was and had to be on questions of domestic policy and our internal economic recovery.

As I look back over the actual measures undertaken in this first year I realize that the one in which my husband took the greatest pleasure was the establishment on April 5, 1933, of the Civilian Conservation Corps camps. The teen-age youngster, the boy finishing high school, the boy who had struggled to get through college, were all at loose ends. There was no organization except the Army that had the tents and other supplies essential for a setup of this kind, which was why part of the program was promptly put under its jurisdiction.

Franklin realized that the boys should be given some other kind of education as well, but it had to be subordinate to the day’s labor required of them. The Civilian Conservation Corps had a triple value: it gave the boys a chance to see different parts of their own country, and to learn to do a good day’s work in the open, which benefited them physically; also it gave them a cash income, part of which went home to their families. This helped the morale both of the boys themselves and of the people at home. The idea was his own contribution to the vast scheme of relief rehabilitation planning.

This was followed on June 16 by the National Recovery Act, with General Hugh Johnson in charge. The basic importance of the NRA was that it made it easier for the industrialist who wanted to do the right thing. The chiseler and the man who was willing to profit by beating down his labor could no longer compete unfairly with the man who wanted to earn a decent profit but to treat his employees fairly. The NRA was declared unconstitutional almost two years later. I thought this was unfortunate, for it seemed a simple way to keep bad employers doing what was right.

The Public Works Administration, which came into being on the same day, made it possible for the government to plan and undertake public works during this period of depression. It helped to take up the slack of unemployment by lending money to the states for projects that they could not finance by themselves.

Five months later, in November, 1933, the Civil Works Administration was set up and in time put four million unemployed to work.

In my travels around the country I saw many things built both by PWA and by CWA. I also saw the results of the work done by CCC. The achievements of these agencies began to dot city and rural areas alike. Soil conservation and forestry work went forward, recreation areas were built, and innumerable bridges, schools, hospitals and sanitation projects were constructed—lasting monuments to the good work done under these agencies. It is true they cost the people of the country vast sums of money, but they did a collective good and left tangible results which are evident today. They pulled the country out of the depression and made it possible for us to fight the greatest and most expensive war in our history.

Perhaps the most far-reaching project was the Tennessee Valley Authority. That was Senator George Norris’ greatest dream and no one who witnessed the development of the Authority will ever forget the fight he put up for something that many people ridiculed. The development had been begun during World War I, but at the end of that war most of the work was stopped. Nothing further was done until my husband, who understood Senator Norris’ vision, supplied the impetus at a time when it could accomplish the maximum results for the country. With the demands of a possible war in mind, Franklin insisted on pushing work on the TVA as rapidly as possible. He believed even then that under certain circumstances war might come soon, and he knew if that happened we would need everything the TVA could make available.

In the campaign of 1932 my husband and I had gone through some of the TVA area, and he had been deeply impressed by the crowds at the stations. They were so poor; their houses were unpainted, their cars were dilapidated, and many grownups as well as children were without shoes or adequate garments. 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 region 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 realize that such changes must come gradually, but I hate to see nothing done. I wish, as my husband always wished, that year by year we might be making a start on the Missouri River and the headwaters of the Mississippi. Such experiments, changing for the better the life of the people, would be a mighty bulwark against attacks on our democracy.

Eighteen
    

The Peaceful Years: 1934-1936

THE YEARS
from 1934 to 1936 seem to me the least anxious of any we spent in the White House. The reforms instituted were beginning to put the country back on a more even keel; good feeling existed generally between capital and labor and between the President and Congress; and in our family life we had gradually managed to adapt our private traditions and habits to the exigencies of the White House.

In the spring of 1934 Franklin suggested that I make a trip to Puerto Rico. General Blanton Winship, governor of the island at that time, was faced with great difficulties. Labor conditions were bad, and there was not enough food for the constantly increasing population. The sugar companies owned large tracts of land and, because the work was seasonal and the wages pitifully small, the workers practically starved in off-seasons. Rexford Tugwell, who was then in the Department of Agriculture, was going down to make a study of what could be done in that field, and my husband thought if I went, too, it might show the people that he was really interested in conditions there.

Following the careful program laid out for me, I visited a number of rural schools, some of which were trying to improve the quality of education offered the children. I also saw the homework done by the women. Factory wages were low and the amount paid for homework was unbelievably small. Little girls sat all during their lunch hour in school embroidering handkerchiefs in order to add a few pennies to the family income.

The conditions in rural homes were unsanitary enough, but in the towns they were even more shocking. I remember going down a street, looking into the houses of factory workers. Most of them consisted of two rooms; the back room had no light, and practically the only light in the front room came through the doorway. There were no screens and, of course, no plumbing or other modern conveniences. Many of the women cooked out of doors on little stoves.

The real slums were actually worse, in the capital city. Huts made of bits of tin and scrap iron and wood picked up after the last hurricane were built out over the water. We walked on duckboards placed precariously over the piling, and the water came up under every house.

There was one slum which clung precariously to the side of a cliff. Here goats and other animals lived under the houses. Again, there was no sanitation, and typhoid was common. If it had not been for the climate and the diet of rice and beans bought from the United States, there probably would have been a great deal of rickets. Tuberculosis took a heavy toll. Every year more and more children were born, which made the question of population a matter for serious thought.

From Puerto Rico we went to the Virgin Islands where, bad though some of the conditions were, they seemed slightly better than in Puerto Rico. Efforts were being made there as well as in Puerto Rico to put up some new houses, but the people had to be taught how to use them. They did not know how to live decently even under better physical conditions, because the circumstances under which they had been forced to live had made cleanliness almost impossible.

On my return I begged my husband to send down some labor people and industrialists to look over the situation. Some of my friends have since gone there to develop new industries and I think several small industries are going successfully. When Mr. Tugwell later became governor of Puerto Rico, he tried to carry out many of the ideas he had thought, on his first trip, might help, but the islands still remain a difficult problem and one which the United States is far from having solved satisfactorily.

In the summer of 1934 my husband decided to make a trip through the Caribbean and the Panama Canal and out to Hawaii, taking with him our two youngest sons, Franklin Junior and John. The newspapermen traveled on a separate ship, visiting Franklin every now and then. I remember his telling me with gleeful chuckles that he had had to provide the newspapermen with the historical background of most of the places where they stopped. Once they reached Hawaii, he and the boys had a wonderful time. He enjoyed meeting the native Queen and eating poi, which few members of the party really liked.

In the winter of 1936 Louis Howe finally moved from the White House to the hospital. We kept telling him and ourselves that he was going to improve and come back again, but suddenly word came that he had died. It was one of the greatest losses that my husband sustained. He was to have others and all were hard to bear, because in public life you can have no private time for sorrow. Duties must be performed and your own feelings must be suppressed. Louis’s death deprived my husband of a close relationship and the satisfaction of having someone near to whom he could talk frankly, whose advice he might not always follow but whose presence was stimulating.

Louis Howe’s death left a great gap in my husband’s life. I have always felt that if Louis had lived the number of people drawn closely but briefly into the working and social orbits of Franklin’s life would have been fewer. For one reason and another, no one quite filled the void which unconsciously he was seeking to fill, and each one in turn disappeared from the scene, occasionally with bitterness which I understood but always regretted. There are not many men whose personal ambition is to accomplish things for someone else, and it was some time before a friendship with Harry Hopkins, somewhat different but similar in certain ways, again brought Franklin some of the satisfaction he had known with Louis.

What worries we had in those two years from 1934 to 1936 were largely such personal ones as this. In fact, we approached the campaign of 1936 with a feeling that the country was getting back on its feet. I did no formal work in that campaign, though I visited the campaign headquarters and went with Franklin on some of his trips. To tell the truth, I never felt it was good taste to go out and electioneer for my husband, so in none of the campaigns did I take any particular part in the political activities unless I was specially asked to for some specific reason.

When the returns came in on election night, Maine and Vermont were found to be still in the Republican fold. My husband said with a wicked twinkle in his eye: “I knew I should have gone to Maine and Vermont, but Jim wouldn’t let me.”

There was no uncertainty or waiting for the returns this election. As usual we were at Hyde Park, where the dining room on election night was always turned into what seemed to me the nearest thing to a newspaper office. The machines on which news came in were set up in a little room off the dining room. Franklin himself had telephones, long dispatches were handed to him by relays of people, and everybody made out averages. I was expected to show interest in the returns, but also to be with his mother in the library to help entertain the guests and keep them out of the dining room, except for a few favored individuals. The newspaper people would come and be given refreshments, and finally, when the returns came in, the people of the village of Hyde Park would have a torchlight parade and come to greet my husband. We would go out on the porch and listen to a few words from him, usually shivering in the cold.

When we went back to Washington in 1936, Franklin was received with great acclaim, and his second term of office began auspiciously. He had carried with him a big Democrat majority in the Congress, and the party members felt so secure that they began to believe they could do anything they wanted. That is a bad attitude for any group to adopt, particularly when responsible for the smooth running of a country that has only just become stabilized after a great depression.

Throughout all those early years in Washington, one of Franklin’s major interests was in changing the bad feeling that existed between us and our Latin-American neighbors. After the November elections he made a personal effort to implement this policy by attending the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, held in Buenos Aires, in 1936. He was deeply touched by the evident enthusiasm that his trip created and particularly happy that he seemed able to inaugurate the good feeling that he so greatly desired to see grow.

This trip and all other trips that had diplomatic significance were planned in consultation with Secretary Hull and the State Department. Sumner Welles, Franklin’s able undersecretary of state, was not only particularly well informed about South American affairs but also very much in sympathy with what Franklin was trying to do in Latin America, and he supported the Good Neighbor policy wholeheartedly. Franklin found him an excellent coworker and counted on him for help with detailed background information. I think, however, that Franklin’s own good will toward the governments and people of these countries was an important aid to the State Department in making our policy effective.

On the way home Franklin stopped in Uruguay. He always liked to tell the story of his greeting by the President of that country. When they met, he assured Franklin that he need not worry about anything happening to
him
, but since he, the President of Uruguay, had been threatened, Franklin must not be surprised if there were some shots. However, the President of the United States would not be the target. My husband got into the car and drove around, but in telling about it afterwards he said he could not help wondering if he might not get hit by mistake, even though he was not the target. However, no one was shot that day.