Eleanor and Franklin (90 page)

“We were doomed to failure from the start,” Tugwell wrote fifteen years later. The human stock was sound, he felt, but “the environment was hostile to the development of character” and to the development of the commitment and self-discipline necessary to make the communities work.
⁸⁰

The one instrumentality that had helped to reshape attitudes was Elsie Clapp's school at Arthurdale. Yet even this heavily subsidized school, with its progressive methods, made the homesteaders uneasy; they wanted their children to be taught the three R's like the rest of the children in West Virginia. Moreover, Arthurdale's bleak economic prospects worked against the initiative and self-reliance that the progressive curriculum sought to instill. Men without jobs found
it difficult to plan and to keep ambition alive. That was the point made by the educational foundations when Baruch asked them to help finance the school. Without industries, without jobs, they told him, the school could not succeed. “I want to say again that in this I heartily concur,” Baruch wrote to Eleanor.
⁸¹

She went along with Baruch's conclusion, although reluctantly. He had spoken with Elsie Clapp about taking her task force of teachers to another community where the economic prospects might be more conducive to the long-term support of a costly experiment in progressive education, and Eleanor hoped the group might return to Arthurdale if the economic situation there were to become more stable. But without Baruch's moral as well as financial support she did not feel she could insist on going on with the school. She met with Tugwell and his aides to inform them of Baruch's decision and her own concurrence, as well as Elsie Clapp's. She had expected Tugwell to welcome the news since he considered it time the homesteaders tied in with the West Virginia school system, but Tugwell was unhappy, she reported to Baruch, and “rather took my breath away” with the statement that “the morale at Arthurdale and conditions there were ninety per cent better than in any other homestead, entirely due to the school.” Her five-page single-spaced report to Baruch on what she had done about the school situation asked for his approval: “I hope you will feel I have acted wisely and have done what you would have done, for I value your good opinion and cooperation more than I can tell you.”
⁸²
She let him out of his commitment, but she continued to subsidize some of the school salaries. In 1939 her contribution was $2,677.49.

Eleanor went to Arthurdale to tell the homesteaders the decision about the school and explain the importance of carrying on the work “on their own responsibility and to tie themselves in in every possible way with the State, the county and the general neighborhood.” She was not withdrawing her support for Arthurdale, she sought to reassure them. “I stressed to them that I was not in any way lessening my interest and would be there as often as I had been in the past” to work with their own school people.
⁸³

She kept her word by continuing to go to Arthurdale at commencement time to hand out diplomas until her last year in the White House. She also continued to bring friends to Arthurdale and to enlist their help for special projects—such as a library—voted by the homesteaders. In May, 1938, the president yielded to her proddings and made his often deferred visit to Arthurdale, hailing it as an example of
“the awakening of the social conscience of America.” Businessmen who cultivated Eleanor in the hope of obtaining access to the president suddenly realized that she was cultivating
them
in the hopes of getting an industry for Reedsville. Arthurdale struggled along, but at the end of the thirties the weekly reports on unemployment showed that the majority of the homesteaders were still on the government work-relief payroll. The problem of an industry and full employment was finally solved in World War II; when the government began to offer defense manufacturers generous tax incentives and subsidies to expand their plants and facilities, Eleanor, backed by Baruch, pressed the men in charge of the defense program to keep the needs of the homestead communities in mind. Arthurdale's employment problem vanished when the Hoover Aircraft Corporation, attracted by its labor force and railroad facilities and with little risk to itself since the government was underwriting the expansion, leased several of the buildings the government had built in Arthurdale and began operations.
⁸⁴

Arthurdale was a chastening experience. It taught Eleanor that a president's wife who undertakes a specific job in the government faces double jeopardy: she is without real authority yet she is expected to perform miracles. When she does assert leadership it is resented and resisted. And if she does not, officials try to anticipate what she wants done. Tugwell was one of the most strong-minded and independent men in the Roosevelt administration, and yet he had been at a loss as to how to deal with the First Lady. “I had been told that he did not tell me his exact feelings because he felt everything I wanted must be carried out,” Eleanor wrote Baruch.
⁸⁵

Eleanor's patronage of Arthurdale and the subsistence homesteads insured them plenty of publicity and attention, which had its good aspects, especially in helping the underprivileged feel that the government cared about them. Officials tried harder as a result of Eleanor's interest to make the experiment succeed. The public conscience was stirred. Eleanor's visit to the farm homestead project near Memphis was “a great encouragement to the families,” Will Alexander, administrator of the Farm Security Agency, the successor to the Resettlement Administration, wrote her in late 1939, and then added: “Of course, our most discouraged and bewildered group are the families in the Migratory Labor Camps, about whom John Steinbeck wrote in
Grapes of Wrath
. It would mean a great deal to them if you could some time visit one of their Migratory Labor Camps.”

But there were also adverse consequences to the publicity that
attended Eleanor's sponsorship and interest. A pilot program by definition must go through a period of trial and error, of mistakes and failure. Eleanor's presence not only mobilized the administration's friends but attracted its enemies, and critics pounced upon every mistake and magnified it to the limit. In this respect, Arthurdale might have benefited from less publicity.

Then there was the effect of Eleanor's involvement on the homesteaders themselves. Her readiness to help and her belief in the experiment and in the homesteaders gave them courage and was an added incentive to succeed. “I do not believe in discouraging people when there is anything to encourage them about,” she replied to a critic who taxed her with closing her eyes to the problems in one of the settlements; “I think there is a tremendous amount in the psychology of hopefulness,” she wrote Major Walker, one of the top officials of the program, complaining that every time the regional staff people visited the homesteads there was a slump in morale.
⁸⁶
But the homesteaders, as she herself noted on other occasions, were not angels—far from it—and her efforts to be helpful to them made them dependent and too easy on themselves, so much so that on one occasion when the school bus broke down they brought it to the White House garage for repairs. Presidential aide “Pa” Watson stopped that.
⁸⁷
That was an extreme case, but too many homesteaders, Eleanor confessed in 1940, seemed to feel the salvation for all their problems was to turn to the government, and she was disappointed by their unwillingness to shoulder their share of responsibility.
⁸⁸

“How do you get these people to consent to such a program?” she asked David E. Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, when he came to the White House to talk to her about the effect of the TVA on people. Lilienthal, who considered her “a beautiful spirit” but felt that she had a “social worker angle on a world that is tough and bitter and hardly amenable to such tampering with systems,” had long hoped for a chance “to teach her some reality about economics.” He saw his opportunity when she gave a troubled account of the efforts at Arthurdale and Crossville “and how she now saw that bringing in factories from the outside wasn't the right way, even when it could be done; that our way of making something happen out of the materials at hand, and by knowing the particular problems intimately, was much wiser.” When Eleanor repeated her question about how the TVA got people to change their way of doing things, Lilienthal told her of “grass roots methods, and the technique of demonstration and learning by
doing and by example. And being close to the problem because we are a regional, not a Washington outfit.”

“She is a very intelligent person,” Lilienthal noted in his journal, “and she got it, and I think will pass it along to a member of the household who, God save the mark, can stand some education along the same line.”
⁸⁹

But neither the conceptual mistakes of Eleanor Roosevelt and of M. L. Wilson nor the political vulnerability of Tugwell explain why this bold and imaginative attack on rural poverty and urban congestion was in the end liquidated by Congress. It was the firm commitment of the Farm Security Administration to the goal of ending rural poverty that alarmed the conservatives, because it threatened the traditional power structure in agriculture in general but particularly in the South, where many of the FSA benefits flowed to the Negro. And so when the war came, giving the New Deal's enemies the chance to kill off some of its most innovative programs under the pretext of cutting non-defense expenditures, the FSA was included. There were 99 communities at the time of its final liquidation; 10,938 homesteads had been built at a total cost of $108,095,328, or at a unit cost of $9,691, which included the cost of community facilities and management. Arthurdale, with a unit cost of $16,635, had been the most expensive.
⁹⁰

“These projects represent something new,” President Roosevelt said in his Arthurdale address, “and because we in America had little or no experience along these lines, there were some failures—not a complete failure in the case of any given project, but partial failures due to bad guesses on economic subjects like new industries or lack of markets.” But there were lessons to be learned from this “bold government venture,” lessons that would save “a hundred times their cost in dollars.”
⁹¹

But the lessons were not learned. Instead of a planned approach to the related problems of the flight from the farms, urban congestion, and industrial decentralization, the outcome was left to the unchecked operation of social and economic forces that ultimately produced the crisis of the cities.

When Eleanor Roosevelt appraised the Arthurdale experience in the second volume of her autobiography, she acknowledged that money had been spent wastefully and that the financial returns to the government had not been satisfactory, but in extenuation she pointed to the human beings saved: “Oh, yes, the human values were most rewarding,” she stoutly maintained.
⁹²

Her defensiveness was a tribute to the hold that the free-enterprise
ethic had regained in the postwar era. “Sell it off—regardless” was the attitude of the National Housing Agency, which fell heir to Arthurdale.
⁹³
The final cost to the government of liquidating Arthurdale's 165 houses, hillside inn, forge, weaving room, furniture-display room, and 57,250 square feet of factory space in 1946 was in the neighborhood of two million dollars. To Americans of the 70s, accustomed to the expenditure of billions on space and weapons research and hundreds of millions on health research, this will scarcely seem like heedless extravagance.

If experiments like Arthurdale were not justified, Eleanor wrote to a critic in 1934, then “we must go along the beaten path and be contented [
sic
] with the same type of living which has driven people out of rural districts in the past and into the cities where they have become equally unhappy under present industrial conditions.”
⁹⁴

Unhappily, what in 1934 was a defense of a New Deal program turns out three decades later to have been accurate prediction.

38.
PUBLICIST FOR THE NEW DEAL—COLUMNIST AND LECTURER

H
AD THE CENSUS TAKER IN
1932
ASKED
E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT
her job or profession, she would have said “teacher.” But when she moved to the White House she had to give up professional teaching. Was there anything, she asked herself, that she could do professionally which would reflect her own knowledge and experience and not be entirely the result “of somebody else's work and position? . . . I turned naturally to speaking and writing.”
¹

In 1934 she resumed the sponsored radio talks that she had given up when her husband had become president. People, especially women, were interested in her views. Speaking to them gave Eleanor a sense of fulfillment, and the largest audiences were those to be reached over the radio networks. Moreover, she wanted the money, chiefly for Arthurdale, and she decided to risk the criticism that she knew would come and see if she could ride it out. She would not touch the money from those talks herself, she explained to the press; her fees would be paid directly to the American Friends Service Committee to be disbursed at her direction. This announcement muted most of the criticism that had caused her to give up commercial radio in 1933, but not all of it. Her first sponsor was the Simmons Mattress Company, and the other mattress manufacturers, alarmed lest the nation flock to the Simmons product, protested to President Roosevelt that it did not seem fair for the First Lady to use her prestige to assist some single manufacturer. The president sent the protest to his wife. “Ask the President if he wishes to answer?” Eleanor queried. Howe advised against it. “I agree with Louis,” wrote Steve Early, and a notification finally came back: “No ans. F.D.R.”
²
A few weeks later, however, when a small manufacturer objected directly to her, she did defend herself by asking if she should not write for a single magazine because it would be unfair
to its competitors, or buy from a favorite dress designer. “The principle involved in my broadcasting for a particular firm holds true in everything I do.”
³
It was a debater's answer, and the criticism never wholly abated; but she was willing to accept it, and so, evidently, was Franklin. Her definitive reason was, “I could not help the various things in which I am interested if I did not earn the money which makes it possible.”