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 neighbor
hood 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
HAD THE CENSUS TAKER IN 1932 ASKED ELEANOR ROOSEVELT 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.”
Simmons paid her handsomely. “I think you are entirely right that no one is worth $500 a minute,” she replied candidly to an irate citizen. “Certainly I never dreamed for a minute I was!” Her fees, it was noted, placed her in the same class as the highest-paid radio personalities of the time such as Ed Wynn.4
Her broadcasts were sufficiently popular to bring her another sponsor as soon as the Simmons series ended, this one the American typewriter industry, for whom she did six fifteen-minute talks on child education. These were subsequently issued as a pamphlet. Her 1935 sponsor was Selby Shoes who, for sixteen fifteen-minute talks, paid her $72,000, all of it sent directly to the AFSC. An article in Radio Guide praised her as a radio performer. Coached by studio technicians, who were enchanted with her because she was not a prima donna, she began to learn everything about radio delivery—timing, modulation, spacing—and by 1939 she was dubbed the “First Lady of Radio” by WNBC:
Her microphone manners are exemplary. . . . She listens to suggestions from production men and cooperates in any plan to improve the reception of a broadcast. She arrives in time for rehearsals and accepts direction with no more ado than if she were an obscure personality. . . . She is not averse to a little showmanship here and there, but eschews tricks. Her voice is well-pitched and she speaks softly. . . . It is not an accident that Mrs. Roosevelt’s radio voice is studied by students of speech.5
In 1936 Betty Lindley, the wife of Ernest Lindley and long a personal friend, became her radio agent and negotiated a contract with Pond’s for thirteen talks at $3,000 apiece. Of this amount $200 was set aside for studio expenses, $300 went to Mrs. Lindley, and the remainder to the AFSC to cover the budget of the Arthurdale school; “after that it seems to me that the school should be taken over by the state.”6 She suffered a few mishaps as a radio performer. In her final broadcast for Pond’s there were a “few terrible seconds” when a page disappeared from her script. If she had been following her own train of thought instead of a script as she was required to do, she could have handled it without a break, she said. As it was it took her “a second or two” to collect her thoughts.7 What made her an outstanding radio performer was not so much her mastery of technique as her constant awareness of her unseen audience. She tried consciously to envision the women who were listening to her under conditions of the greatest diversity—on lonely ranches, in mountain cabins, in tenements—and to remember that they were weighing her words against their own experience. She made her listeners’ interests and problems her own and tried out of her own experience to say meaningful things simply and concretely.
Her ability to identify with her listeners, to illustrate her thesis with homely stories, and to advance her point of view with such kindness and courtesy that even the most violent adversaries were stilled was even more evident in her lectures and speeches, where she was not bound by a script. Her custom, when she addressed live audiences, was to speak from a single page of notes. “Have something to say, say it and sit down,” she advised students of public speaking, as Louis had advised her. “At first write out the beginning and the end of a speech. Use notes and think out a speech, but never write it down.”8 She did not like to speak if she did not have something affirmative to say. Often as the chairman introduced her she prayed for Divine guidance to say something that might be helpful to the people in front of her. Like Gandhi, Schweitzer, and other semi-religious figures with whom she later would be grouped, she was always the teacher. Everything she said was infused with moral purpose and affirmed the supremacy of love and truth.
Her speeches generally contained a challenge, but it was issued with such graciousness and modesty that few took offense. “Be conciliatory, never antagonistic, toward your audience,” she advised, “or it may disagree with you, no matter what you say.” Before the DAR convention she championed progressive methods in education, a campaign to eradicate illiteracy, and the “grand” adult-education work of the Relief Administration, and her tradition-bound audience listened attentively. She even poked gentle fun at a superpatriot’s proposal to restrict the right to change laws to people of old stock (she and the president between them had only one ancestor who arrived later than colonial days, she noted, “so if anyone would have a right on that peculiar status, we would still qualify”), and ended with a plea for patriotism that “will mean living for the interests of everyone in our country and the world at large, rather than simply preparing to die for our country.”9 Novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote that she had “fairly bounded into the air with joy” because she had never dreamed that someone in authority could say right out what Eleanor had said to the DAR.10
A few weeks later she spoke extemporaneously at a federal prison for delinquent girls and women in Alderson, West Virginia. Her speech was Lincolnesque in its simplicity and feeling. She had been moved by the way the girls had sung the spirituals, she began, and then quoted the 121st Psalm: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” That was the keynote of Alderson, she noted, set as it was in the mountains and run by a progressive penologist, Dr. Mary Harris, to help those who were there over the rough spots. That was also what gover
nment in general was now trying to do—“help the people it governs” over the rough spots. There was a new concept of social justice and government abroad in the land. “The fundamental change is just this, that instead of each person being out for himself for what he can get for himself . . . people must think . . . of the people around them” and ask of any action not only “what will be the effect . . . on me, but what will be the effect on those around me?” She then told of a recent visit to Puerto Rico and of a little rural school there that had been started by an obscure, humble individual but which was transforming the whole approach to rural education. “So when you get a chance to push something that is new and that helps the life of the people around you to be better, just remember what I have told you about Puerto Rico and help it along.” Then she went into her own philosophy of life:
It is a wonderful thing to keep your mind always full of something that is worth while doing. If you can get hold of something that you feel is going to help the people around you, you’ll find that you’re so busy trying to add one more thing to it that you won’t have time to be sorry for yourself or to wonder what you’re going to do with your spare time. . . . If I get sorry for myself, I’m no good to anybody else. It is just the best tonic I know, to get so interested in everybody that you want to see them happy always, and somehow or other you’ll find that you haven’t time for any of the things that filled your mind, that kept you from being a really useful person in the community that you were living in.11
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