Eleanor and Franklin (83 page)

She invoked the Sermon on the Mount in order to persuade people, especially “the old crowd” with which she had grown up, to accept changes that meant higher taxes and fewer luxuries. If the country did just the temporary and expedient things “we will find ourselves again just where we are today, still building a civilization on human suffering.”
¹²
What distinguished such pleas for benevolence and altruism from sentimental exhortation was the psychological understanding behind them. The personal disasters she had surmounted had taught her that although moments of stress and danger could paralyze and destroy, they could also liberate and strengthen. She had turned her father's death into a constructive, sweetening influence in her life. And instead of crushing her, the Lucy Mercer crisis and her husband's
paralysis had become occasions of personal transcendence and growth. In the face of great emotional excitement, wrote William James, “proprieties and their inhibitions snap like cobwebs” and men are given courage to say “Yes” to life's challenges.
¹³
That was how Eleanor had responded to personal disaster; that was how she now responded to the nation's ordeal. It was a time of hardship and distress, but it was also a time when men and women might be more disposed than usual to subordinate selfishness, faction, and private interest to the common cause. Such moments had to be seized before hardness and the old cautions returned and used in order to bring about a basic reconstruction of institutions.

The National Industrial Recovery Act represented the kind of basic reform the nation needed, and Eleanor hoped the NRA codes would be charters of “fair play” among the various elements in the industrial process. But since she was also a realist about the relationship of power to justice, she helped the unions in their drive to organize under Section 7A, and when the codes turned into agreements for administered prices and restricted production she did her utmost to get consumer representation on the code authorities and state recovery boards and to strengthen the consumers' division under Mary Harriman Rumsey. “I wish I could tell you or that
you knew
how much you have helped the whole range of consumer problems and policies,” Mary Rumsey wrote her. Eleanor was equally clear-eyed about another great pillar of the New Deal reconstruction, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It seemed senseless when people were starving and in rags to pay farmers to plow under cotton and slaughter piglets: “While it may be necessary to raise farm prices, I do think some way should be found to take things which are not needed and give them to people who, in any case, will not be able to buy them.”
¹⁴

With seeming naïveté, she asked the AAA administrator over the telephone, “Why do you dump all these pigs into the Mississippi, when there are thousands of people in the country starving?” Before the startled official could reply, she went on, “Why not give the meat away to them?” Her strong objections to the destruction of food in the midst of hunger led to a scheme that anticipated the food-stamp plan. “Surplus farm products are being fed to the hungry instead of being destroyed because she asked a government official a question,” reported Ruby Black in
Editor and Publisher
at the beginning of 1934.
¹⁵
“Of course all the male officials are convinced they would have thought of it themselves,” Ruth Finney later wrote in the Scripps-Howard
newspapers, “but they had not done so up to the time she insisted it was the thing to do.”

Eleanor's greatest hope for bold, innovative moves to bring idle men and idle resources together lay with the Civil Works Administration set up by the president in November, 1933, and charged with the task of putting four million unemployed to work. “I hope that Mr. Hopkins, in his new corporation, will do some of the things which need to be done. He is really a remarkable person and gradually things may work out.”
¹⁶

She approved and defended her husband's program, but there was a radical charge to her advocacy of the New Deal that was absent from his. By the end of 1933 there was some improvement in the economic situation and considerable recovery of confidence. There was “more hope in the air,” Eleanor wrote her friend Florence Willert in England, “in spite of the fight we have on our hands over here just now.”
¹⁷
The fight was being waged by an owning class, which, its nerve restored, was beginning to resist further changes.

Eleanor devoted the opening lecture of her civics course at the New York Junior League to the need for continuing deep-rooted reform. She sought to bring home to the three hundred debutantes and society matrons who crowded the small auditorium the hunger and the cold that Lorena Hickok was reporting from the Dakotas, the desperation in Appalachia. People “simply won't live that way,” she warned. She begged her listeners to make the effort to put themselves into the minds and hearts of the wretched and deprived because if they did so they would not be able to complain about higher taxes and government interference.

She told the story of a man who had gone to jail for stealing food to feed his starving family. He had been a model prisoner and was released for good behavior, yet as he left he swore to the warden he would do the same thing again if necessary. “I wouldn't blame him,” Eleanor commented, and as her audience stirred uneasily she added, “You would be a poor wishy-washy sort of person if you didn't take anything you could when your family was starving.”
¹⁸
The protests flooded in; editorialists and correspondents were horrified that the First Lady should seem to be encouraging lawlessness and violence. “I certainly did not tell the story of the starving man's stealing to feed his family to promote or encourage lawlessness or dishonesty,” she answered one such critic. “I was merely trying to bring home to my audience, which was made up of people who know little of the
suffering of poverty, that people were being driven to desperate ends.” Give a job to the man whose case she cited, and to others like him, she said, and they would be the “most loyal and law abiding citizens.”
¹⁹

“Nothing I said in my talk justifies starting a revolution by violence,” she replied to another critic.

I simply pointed out the historical fact . . . that revolutions do not start until great groups of people are suffering and convinced of the hopelessness of their cause getting a fair hearing. I have always made it a point that we are going through a revolution without violence and I hope it will continue to be so, but certain changes must come and we should be willing to have them come.
²⁰

She directed her appeal to women and young people particularly, because she thought they were less involved with the past than the men and, therefore, freer to consider new ideas and accept drastic change. At Mrs. Meloney's annual
New York Herald Tribune
Forum she called upon youth to become socially militant and to face the fact “that it has to change politics, it has to change business ethics, it has to change the theories of economics and above everything else, it has to change—well, its own weaknesses.” Young people should not be afraid of new ideas and should stick with them “until they have decided whether there is anything in that new idea which is worth while or not.”
²¹

Her praise of a little book,
Prohibiting Poverty
, by Prestonia Mann Martin, the granddaughter of Horace Mann, showed her own readiness to examine the most visionary of blueprints in the search for solutions. The book was in its fourth printing when it came to her attention in the autumn of 1933. Many of its ideas echoed Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward
. At the heart of Mrs. Martin's “National Livelihood Plan” was the concept—taken over from Bellamy—of a Young Workers Corps or industrial army into which all young people of both sexes would be conscripted from the ages of eighteen through twenty-five. This Young Workers Corps—or National Service Corps, as Mrs. Martin also called it—would produce the “seven cardinal necessities” for everyone—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, etc. His eight-year service to the nation finished, the young “Commoner” would become a “Capital,” free “to engage in the pursuit of wealth, fame, power, leisure. . . . He may continue to work or not, as he chooses. His basic livelihood is in any case secure.” The National Livelihood Plan, summarized Mrs. Martin, “is a project whereby collectivism
would be applied to the production of Necessaries while individualism would be reserved for the production and sale of Luxuries and Surpluses for profit.”

It was utopian and simplistic and its implementation would have involved a fantastic degree of regimentation. “Where would I be if I listened to that?” Franklin commented dryly when Eleanor gave it to him to read. Utopias taken literally are easy to caricature, but they must be seen, and that is how Mrs. Roosevelt saw
Prohibiting Poverty
, after an impetuous endorsement that was without qualification—as a stimulant to thought and debate, not as a working blueprint.
Prohibiting Poverty
was a utopia that was drafted by a woman and, therefore, more likely to interest women, Eleanor felt. It dramatically advocated a national purpose that she favored as strongly as the Socialists did, that given America's technological progress, poverty could and should be abolished. She was especially enthusiastic about Mrs. Martin's proposal that the energies of the young, rich as well as poor, girl as well as boy, should be enlisted in the war against want and in the service of the nation.

At the time Eleanor was in almost daily conference with Harry Hopkins on work projects for the unemployed, especially for women and young people. “It may be possible to try out some of these ideas under the emergency relief,” she wrote an admirer of
Prohibiting Poverty
. “I wish they could lead us to the point where every one would have security, as far as the basic necessities of life are concerned.”
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Izetta Jewel Miller, a Democratic stalwart who had been commissioner of Welfare in Schenectady, asked whether she (Mrs. Miller) could do anything to promote the plan. Eleanor replied:

I am afraid that we are due for some criticism for our work here. In the first place, operation. There is a germ of something along that line in the C.C.C. and in the Federal Relief camps for unattached women and girls that are being started this summer. I always speak about the book because the more people read it the more they will try to think along the lines of development for the young people of this country.

Mrs. Martin asked if her announcement could state that “Mrs. Roosevelt says everyone should read
Prohibiting Poverty
.” Yes, Eleanor replied, “if you will qualify it by saying that I am not sure at the present time that all of the plans could be put into operation immediately,
but I think it has many things that we should be thinking about constantly.”
²³
She pushed the book's thesis as “an informing power of the mind,” not as a dream to be realized in practice.
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Among the Bellamyites who were delighted to discover an ally in the White House was Upton Sinclair, whose own plan, End Poverty in California (EPIC), was then sweeping that state and preparing the way for his race for the governorship. At the heart of the EPIC approach was its insistence on state responsibility for bringing together idle men with idle factories and exchanging their products with those of state-encouraged agricultural colonies. Sinclair and his wife were old friends of Prestonia Mann Martin, and he wrote the First Lady to ask if she would permit them to call upon her.
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“Our friends gather round eagerly to ask what you are like, and more especially, what you think,” he wrote after he and Mrs. Sinclair had visited the White House. He sent her a copy of
End Poverty in California
. “I will probably not be governor,” he added, “but at least I hope to get some new ideas at work in this state.”
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He was soon writing Eleanor again. He had heard from a friend that she was going to announce publicly her interest in his plan to end poverty in California. She pulled back from his effort to embrace her. Her reply, which was prudently marked “Private—not for publication,” stated, “Some of the things which you advocate I am heartily in favor of, others I do not think are entirely practicable, but then what is impracticable today is sometimes practicable tomorrow. I do not feel, however, that I am sufficiently in accord with your entire idea to make any public statement at present.”
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She was the teacher, the moralist, the dreamer, but she was also highly practical. The president carried the responsibility. Her proddings and probings had to be carried on in a way that would not embarrass him politically. When Sinclair, having captured the Democratic primary, turned to Mrs. Roosevelt in his effort to obtain White House support in the election, Roosevelt instructed his wife, “(1) Say nothing and (2) Do Nothing”—and she loyally complied.

There was another sign of her intense practicality—the way she backed up her exhortations to women to take leadership in the fight against war and social injustice with hard-headed political organization. Many women held important positions in the Roosevelt administration, she noted in
It's Up to the Women
, and were, therefore, in a stronger position to shape policy than ever before. The book did not
say what insiders in Washington knew, that at the center of this growing New Deal political sisterhood was Eleanor Roosevelt.

“About the most important letter I ever wrote you!” Molly Dewson scribbled on the margin of a seven-page enclosure she sent Mrs. Roosevelt a few weeks after the Roosevelts arrived in Washington. The letter reported on Molly's talk with James Farley, the postmaster general, about women's patronage. He would make no appointments of women, Farley assured Molly, without consulting Eleanor, so Molly felt safe about the lists she had left with him, which described the jobs the Democratic women wanted in categories of descending urgency. “Imperative recognition” covered the four appointments to the staff of the Democratic National Committee, followed by the names of fourteen women who warranted “Very Important Recognition” and twenty-five for whom jobs were sought under the classification of “Very Desirable Recognition.” Postmasterships and comparable, minor appointments were listed under the heading of “Worthy of Lesser Recognition.”