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.65 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.66
She wanted to be helpful to Tugwell in his role as Resettlement administrator, but she considered Arthurdale her special responsibility. She fought stubbornly for what she considered to be the interests of the homesteaders, for she knew that Tugwell was basically wary of the back-to-the-land concept of resettling the unemployed and of industrial decentralization. In fact, he would have been happier if Roosevelt had not placed the Subsistence Homestead Division, which already was under fierce attack, in the Resettlement Administration.
Tugwell considered resettlement realistic as a way of moving farmers off exhausted soil but not as a remedy for industrial unemployment or urban congestion. People go to employment, not employment to people, he had stated, as if it were an iron law of economics; and if industries could be persuaded to decentralize, the new communities which formed around them would become company towns. Nor did he believe urban growth could be halted. But Eleanor refused to accept as inevitable what she felt ought to be resisted, even if the man she was opposing was as brilliant as Tugwell. She was, Tugwell wrote in The Democratic Roosevelt, “naive about many things—after all, she had a very defective education.”
So although they were confederates, they had reservations about each other. He consulted her on the staff for the Resettlement Administration; she was enthusiastic about his plans for a Special Skills Division to instruct and encourage the settlers in the arts and crafts. She sent him an article on Arthurdale she had written for Liberty, which she wanted him to review. “This is a very moving little story,” he commented. No, he had no objections to publication, but even if he had, they might have been difficult to offer since her note also said, “Franklin has seen this.” She also urged him to expedite decisions on Arthurdale’s requests for school-construction materials, which had been sitting “for ages on a desk in Washington.” “I hope you will be patient with us for a month or two,” he entreated her.67
Like Eleanor, Tugwell believed that these new communities should set a pattern for a new America and that the managers of the homesteads, therefore, had social and educational responsibilities, not simply economic and engineering ones. He convened a conference at Buck Hills Falls to assess these responsibilities. How could these communities be vitalized, Tugwell asked the group, which included anthropologists and psychiatrists as well as rural planners and managers. “A community does not consist of houses, and it does not consist of houses and schools and roads and water systems and sewers either. There is something else to a community besides that. We are trying to find out what it is if we can, and, if we can bring it into being, to make it come alive.”68
The homesteaders were long-time casualties of the Depression, said Eleanor, who followed Tugwell onto the platform. They were not going to recover all of a sudden; they had lost their initiative and had suffered certain physical changes which had affected their mental and spiritual ability to face the world: “It is not purely a housing problem. You cannot build houses and tell people to go and live in them. They must be taught to live. Therefore this is a resettlement problem.”69
Tugwell’s emphasis on the social aspects of community building pleased Eleanor, who hoped there would soon be another conference on the same theme and that it would be held at Reedsville, which was, after all, supposed to be the demonstration center. She thought Arthurdale had come to life as a community and that it had done so because of Elsie Clapp’s remarkable work with the school and the nursery. Baruch agreed with her. Whatever the cost of the school, he said, “the money has been well spent because it has demonstrated what can be done especially in the way of salvaging and redeeming old and young people. What has been done there can be duplicated in other places.”70
Arthurdale had achieved the sense of community for which Tugwell was groping, and Eleanor hoped that that spirit would not be a casualty of the reorganization. She liked the plan which Tugwell had told her about at Buck Hills to form community corporations which would lease the land and houses from the government and in turn give long-term leases to the individual homesteaders. Outright sale of the houses, Tugwell feared, might expose the colonists to speculators and make land-use planning and corporate commercial farming more difficult. But Eleanor foresaw difficulties at Arthurdale, where the homesteaders had been led to believe that ownership of their homes would be vested with them individually, not with the community, and that the costs would be based on what they could pay. “I am afraid I am complicating your life very much,” she wrote Tugwell apologetically after Buck Hills, “and I do not mean to do that but I thought I ought to tell you that I had told Franklin about it as I think he will be discussing it with you.”71
Her readiness to go over Tugwell’s head to the president did complicate the administrator’s life and, carried away by the First Lady’s patronage, the homesteaders also bypassed Resettlement Administration channels, and were even condescending to the administrator. “There is one thing I want to suggest to you,” Eleanor cautioned Elsie Clapp,
namely, Mr. Tugwell has the complete responsibility and when we are with him, I think you should make it a point to make him feel that we recognize his responsibility and do not even suggest that I do anything except stand ready to help in an unofficial way on educational and health questions. If you can, try to make him realize that while you feel identified with the people, and that they do seem to be your own, that you also fully realize the main responsibility is his and that they are “his people” and not “my people.”72
It was sensible advice, but her own willingness to defer to Tugwell’s “complete responsibility” was less than wholehearted. Limited funds compelled the Resettlement Administration to reduce the wages of the homesteaders who were employed on community construction projects, and the cuts were devastating the homesteaders, a frantic Elsie Clapp told Eleanor. “I quite realize that what has been done is necessary,” Eleanor in turn wrote Tugwell, “but I think it ought to have been done in each of the homesteads not by a mere notice, but by some one who really understood the reason and who could put it to the people.” If there was to be a wage reduction, she went on, there would have to be a corresponding reduction in the payments ma
de by the homesteaders on their homes. “I can imagine that your problems are so many that what may happen to the people in one homestead does not loom very large, but after all this is the first and the one most criticized and under the public eye. I hope you will not think me an interfering old hen.”73 Despite the disarming final sentence, she did not relax her pressure on Tugwell. The homesteaders sent her a petition, underscoring the injustice of wage reductions without corresponding reductions in what they had to pay. She sent it straight to the president, telling him, as she informed Elsie Clapp, that “my feeling was that in the effort to be efficient from the economic standpoint, I thought perhaps the division was forgetting the important human element, and that I hoped he would keep in mind the fact that I wanted him to go down and get a picture of the human side of himself.”74
Eleanor felt a responsibility to the homesteaders, to whom the government had made commitments, many of them through her. Sympathetic as she was with Tugwell’s efforts to rethink the government’s homesteading policy, she felt a new approach must take those commitments into account. “The opportunity to interpret thinking that lies behind some of the projects has not been easy with the present administration,” the normally patient Pickett complained to her.75 Yet she was alive to Tugwell’s problems. When Elsie, in her zeal for the homesteaders, charged into Washington to get action on an Arthurdale payroll which had been delayed because of Treasury funding problems, Eleanor rebuked her. “The fact that you visited the Treasury caused three people to telephone Mr. Tugwell to find out if you were speaking with authority for him. As you know this would annoy a man who feels that his Administration must begin to function.” It would be wiser for Elsie to keep out of the administrative side, she suggested, and if problems did arise to go through regular channels or through her.76 She urged both Pickett and Elsie to be patient. Tugwell was “tired,” as were many of the men who since March 4, 1933, had been working to the limit of their energies. She sensed, moreover, that Tugwell was “quite overcome to find that the old administration had worked out none of the fundamental problems.”
When Baruch went to Reedsville to try to sort out the problems there that urgently called for decision he went alone because Eleanor thought the settlers might say things to him they would be reluctant to say in front of her. Baruch’s survey had a wider application than Arthurdale. While some of its problems were unique, the more basic difficulties were characteristic of many of the new communities. A decision had to be made soon, he informed Eleanor, about how Arthurdale was to be governed. Would it be local or would it continue to be run from Washington? In any event, he wrote, “there must be some method of getting quicker decisions than there is now.” Those in charge at Arthurdale, when Baruch finally got them to speak frankly, complained sharply of “their inability to get decisions or to cut the red tape, even in getting materials.” The size of the community had to be settled; there would soon be 125 houses—should the government still aim for 200 as originally planned? Not if the people in them could not get work, Baruch felt, and he was highly pessimistic on that point. All the problems stemmed from that fact. The homesteads, he advised, should be sold at a price low enough to give the homesteader the chance to own them eventually, but the carrying charges could not be twenty dollars a month; a figure of $100 a year would be more realistic, especially in Arthurdale, where the possibilities of self-support had been further diminished by the belated discovery that its soil was not suitable for commercial crops.
It would be impossible to carry out the plan for a rural-industrial community as originally envisaged, Baruch advised Eleanor, but she must not feel that the effort had been wholly a wasted one. Arthurdale had demonstrated that there could be “human rehabilitation” after long periods of unemployment. Elsie Clapp’s school had been particularly helpful in that connection, but there, too, they had to ask themselves whether the heavy private subsidies should continue or whether it was not time to normalize the school’s relationship to the county and state educational system. “If we will learn not to put people where they cannot earn enough to care for themselves, whatever the cost, it will be cheap,” Baruch concluded.77
It would take the war to show that the government was able, when the will was there, to direct industry to move to where people were, but Eleanor, while she abandoned neither the effort to get an industry for Arthurdale nor a vision of rural-industrial communes that would provide an escape from both urbanism and rural decay, was intellectually too insecure to press her own philosophy in the face of the practical judgments of a Baruch or the theoretical convictions of a Tugwell: “I think it is fairly well proved,” she wrote a few months before a defense manufacturer began to operate in Arthurdale, “that even if industry is going to decentralize at all, it has to locate first and then the community grows around it.”
Tugwell’s emphasis as Resettlement administrator was on land reform. His program sought “to take poor people off poor land and resettle them where good land, good organization and good advice might rehabilitate them.” In addition he promoted the brilliant concept of the “greenbelt towns,” garden communities built in wooded areas adjacent to industrial centers, with low-cost housing as their cores.
Eleanor supported both programs, as did the president, but the mood of the country and especially of Congress was becoming hostile to the whole idea of planned communities. Although Tugwell contemplated sixty “greenbelt” projects, only three were built because they were attacked so savagely. And in the 1936 campaign, when the Republicans made the Resettlement Administration an issue, Tugwell noted that “we had no defenders and were told to keep quiet ourselves.”
The environment had become unfriendly to social planning and experimentation, and this reinforced the individualistic and competitive attitudes of the settlers within the communities whom Eleanor, Tugwell, and Dr. Alexander had hoped to imbue with the community idea. It was difficult to build new communities with old minds. For years the miners had felt themselves to be social and economic outcasts, and now their deepest wish was not to be something special but to be like other Americans. “I realized when we began,” Eleanor told the Women’s National Democratic Club,
that there must be an educational program when you take people from an area where they had been living for some time under impossible conditions, but I had no conception what the problem was. I understand it a good deal better than I did three years ago. . . . When these people were moved, they had to learn to stand on their own feet and make their own decisions, and sometimes they didn’t quite know what was expected of them . . . nobody understood why these people didn’t take hold. There is always grave danger in anything that is experimental. One must not do too much for people, but one must help them to do for themselves.78
The homesteaders had been encouraged to start cooperatives at Arthurdale and other settlements, but this, too, called for education. “They wanted cows tied to their back fences,” Eleanor later said. “They trusted nobody, not even themselves. They had an eye out all the time to see who was going to cheat them next.”79
“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 wan
t 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
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