Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (94 page)

Patterson tried putting words in Eleanor’s mouth. The First Lady was “a complete extrovert, of course.”

Eleanor refused to be drawn. She took control of the interview without another word. “She just glanced up over her knitting needles, with those clever grey eyes of hers,” Patterson recounted. For her readers’ benefit, Patterson concluded, “Mrs. Roosevelt has solved the problem of living better than any woman I have ever known.”

Louis Howe rooted her on. “Eleanor, if you want to be president in 1940, tell me now so I can start getting things ready,” he said, only half jokingly. She didn’t want to be president, but she did want to do some of the things she thought a president ought to do. She read Lorena Hickok’s reports from West Virginia and nearly wept at the tribulations of the poor folks there. She urged Franklin to include money for a homesteading experiment designed to make unemployed coal miners and their families self-sufficient. Franklin needed little urging, having thought and talked of such things since the mid-1920s. He arranged for $25 million to be added to the outlay for relief to get the experiment started. The federal government would purchase land for a small number of villages, where it would build houses and barns and workshops in which the inhabitants would pursue a life balanced between farm and city, between the old and the new. They would grow crops to eat and sell and would manufacture furniture and other light products to use and sell.

Richard Arthur’s farm, near Morgantown, West Virginia, became the site of Arthurdale, one of the first of the experimental communities. Eleanor provided the energy to effect the conversion; Louis Howe pulled the levers of government to make her energy most efficient. The task was considerable, as the government had never engaged in the like and no one knew where the authority resided.

Howe claimed the authority, speaking in the name of the president, and the project moved forward in fits and starts. Howe had no experience building homes, and in his hurry he managed to order pre-built structures that didn’t fit the foundations that had been poured for them. They lacked insulation and were unsuited to winter in the West Virginia mountains. Eleanor wanted the homes to be examples of modern convenience, but making them so threatened to break the project’s budget. “The cost of the thing is shocking,” Harold Ickes wrote. Roosevelt had put the Arthurdale project in the Interior Department, and Ickes had to contend with both Eleanor and Howe. “It worries me more than anything else in my whole Department,” he moaned.

Eleanor considered the cost overruns a forgivable flaw in a noble experiment. She knew perfectly well that the entire budget of the Subsistence Homestead Program, as the administrative parent of Arthurdale was called, was less than Harry Hopkins spent in a slow week. She was consequently pleased when Franklin transferred the program from Ickes’s bailiwick to Hopkins’s. And she contended that if the concept of modern homesteading could be proven to work in principle, the costs would come down with repetition.

The economic costs, that is. The political costs remained high. The opponents of the New Deal castigated Arthurdale as a communist plot, akin to the collectivization campaign then under way in the Soviet Union. Coal companies looked askance at anything that diminished their workforce. Firms that produced items that competed with Arthurdale’s current or prospective output complained of the government subsidies the Arthurdale shops received.

Eleanor ignored the carping and carried on. But she couldn’t ignore the excessive costs. She invested many thousands of dollars of her own money into the project and dunned friends to invest as well. “Mr. Baruch has given me ‘carte blanche,’” she wrote with pleasure after receiving a check from Bernard Baruch, “and says that anything which I want I am to do with the money which he has given us, and that he will stand by for another year.”

In time Arthurdale emerged as a vibrantly attractive community. More than a hundred permanent houses of various designs replaced Louis Howe’s prefabrications. The community farm produced vegetables, fruit, eggs, chickens, and milk. Like the community store, it was organized as a cooperative, with residents pooling their labor and sharing the revenues. A community school instructed children who otherwise would have terminated their education years earlier. Practical arts supplemented book learning. “Over in the school shop you will find a surveying transit that the high school boys made, including the drawing of the leveling glass, and there is a telephone set made by the girls,” a visitor in the spring of 1935 explained. “There are radio sets and amplifier, a testing meter reclaimed from the junk pile and put in order after two weeks’ work, and other apparatus all made by the shop students.”

L
OUIS
H
OWE NEVER
saw it. By the beginning of 1935 he had become so weak he couldn’t leave his bedroom. An oxygen tent helped him breathe, but it couldn’t cure him of the tobacco habit that exacerbated his symptoms. His condition grew so dire that his daughter, visiting her father at the White House in March, telegraphed home: “No hope beyond twenty-four hours.” But Howe wasn’t ready to let go. He woke up and demanded, “Why in hell doesn’t somebody give me a cigarette?” His wife, Grace, who had long since learned to live without her husband, joined the death watch at the White House. In August he had to be moved to the Naval Hospital. Roosevelt ordered a special telephone line installed so Howe could remain in contact. The president visited regularly; he and his oldest adviser laid plans for the 1936 campaign.

In flashes Howe could be his old self. “As he talked, with dry twists of humor, the hospital atmosphere faded quite away,” a reporter allowed into his room explained. “Howe, in pajamas gaily striped, made it clear that there was the busy office of the President’s Number One Secretary.” He ordered newspapers and other sources of political intelligence brought to his bed; he drew organization charts, sketched political pamphlets, suggested topics for campaign speeches.

But before the campaign was well under way, he realized he wouldn’t see its end. “Franklin is on his own now,” he said. He died on April 18, 1936.

Roosevelt ordered a state funeral for his friend. He and Eleanor accompanied the body to Fall River, where, amid the rotten snow and bare branches of the Massachusetts April, they laid Louis Howe to rest.

J
OHN
L. L
EWIS
considered himself as responsible as anyone else for Roosevelt’s overwhelming reelection victory. The mine workers’ chief had thrown the manpower and money of the union behind Roosevelt, contributing half a million dollars and thousands of volunteers who walked the working-class neighborhoods of America’s industrial cities urging the residents to get to the polls and mark their ballots for Roosevelt and the Democrats.

Lewis, in supporting Roosevelt, was registering thanks for past favors and soliciting future ones. With the judicial overthrow of the NRA, the guarantees to labor of section 7a evaporated. In their place Congress had approved the Wagner Act, which reaffirmed labor’s right to organize and established the National Labor Relations Board to secure that right. The NLRB would oversee workplace elections for union representation, levy penalties for unfair labor practices, and intercede between management and labor when bargaining broke down. Roosevelt could claim little credit for the act, which rightly went to his old colleague from the New York senate, Robert Wagner, but he happily endorsed its aims. “By assuring the employees the right of collective bargaining it fosters the development of the employment contract on a sound and equitable basis,” the president said. “By preventing practices which tend to destroy the independence of labor, it seeks, for every worker within its scope, that freedom of choice and action which is justly his.”

But the Wagner Act provided merely the framework for organizing labor; labor itself had to do the heavy lifting. Lewis took the lead, after an acrimonious split between his United Mine Workers and the American Federation of Labor. For decades the AFL had represented the aristocracy of labor, the skilled workers who were difficult to replace and therefore easy to organize. Unskilled workers remained largely unorganized. Lewis had made a start organizing the unskilled of the mining industry, and he hoped to extend his success to other industries. When the AFL leadership refused to sanction his strategy, he led a walkout—punching a recalcitrant AFL man on the way to the door.

Lewis’s new group, the Committee for Industrial Organization (soon to become the Congress for Industrial Organization), targeted two industries—steel and autos—above all. The steel industry had been the graveyard of industrial organization since the infamous Homestead strike of 1892; a sequel in 1919 confirmed the dubious distinction. The U.S. Steel Corporation earned its nickname, Big Steel, by employing over 200,000 men and producing more steel than the second-largest steel-producing
country
in the world (Germany). Smaller by comparison—but still larger than most national steel industries—were the handful of firms collectively called Little Steel.

Despite their size and power, Lewis had reason to believe Big and Little Steel were vulnerable. The modest revival of the economy since 1933 had caused the companies to rehire workers, increase production, and anticipate profits for the first time in years. If Lewis and the CIO—working through a subsidiary called the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, or SWOC—could crimp the supply of workers, they could threaten production and jeopardize profits. The companies would be forced to accept the principle of industrial unionism.

Similar reasoning inspired efforts to organize the automobile industry. The oligopoly of Detroit’s Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—was even more complete than that of Big and Little Steel. The automakers had been equally tenacious in resisting broad-gauged unionization. Ford Motor was especially ruthless in spying on, beating up, and blacklisting any workers who dared to spread the union word on company grounds. Wives of autoworkers frightened their children into good behavior by saying that Harry Bennett, Ford’s head union buster, would come after them if they didn’t behave.

For this reason efforts to organize autos were shrouded in secrecy until a fateful afternoon in late December 1936. On that day the United Auto Workers seized General Motors’ Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. Their technique was simple: they sat down in place and locked the doors. The tactic was shrewd: Fisher One contained the dies on which a large portion of GM’s car bodies were fashioned. By stopping work there and by preventing the company’s men from entering the plant, the UAW put its hand around the throat of GM production.

The sit-down strike suffered from the minor flaw of being illegal. The workers were trespassers, and naturally the company appealed to the Michigan authorities to remove them. Ten years earlier, or twenty or thirty or forty, those authorities almost certainly would have complied. But the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, was a liberal Democrat, a friend of Franklin Roosevelt, and an ally of organized labor. “I’m not going down in history as Bloody Murphy!” he responded to those demanding he bring in the National Guard. “If I send those soldiers right in on the men, there’d be no telling how many would be killed.”

In previous strikes when state officials had hesitated to protect company property, management had taken its case to Washington, where Republican presidents—and such conservative Democrats as Grover Cleveland—had ordered the dispatch of federal troops. But Roosevelt refused to intervene. “What law are they breaking?” the president asked rhetorically of Frances Perkins. “The law of trespass, and that is about the only law that could be invoked. And what do you do when a man trespasses on your property? Sure, you order him off…. But shooting it out and killing a lot of people because they have violated the law of trespass somehow offends me. I just don’t see it as the answer. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”