Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  In the spring of 1933, FDR turned to the business community and focused on deflation, reduced government spending, and a balanced budget. In this phase of the New Deal he ignored the terrible impact state and municipal budget cuts were having, for example, on education. ER was particularly disheartened by America’s neglect of its most precious resource, the nation’s children. The U.S. commitment to education was paltry, and ER called rural education a total disgrace. Spending cuts in education diminished children’s lives, and she joined New York’s Episcopal bishop William T. Manning in opposing New York’s “staggering and crippling cuts” in public education, including the layoff of eleven thousand teachers.

  Bishop Manning (with whom FDR had worked closely during the 1920s to raise money to build New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine) described the situation in a journal called School: Teacher layoffs resulted in greatly increased class size; evening schools, summer sessions, and continuation and adult education programs were abolished; athletic centers and school gardens were eliminated, repairs and replacements postponed, supplies and equipment reduced. Bishop Manning concluded that it was “not the time to weaken our schools, when the crumbling morale of many homes is only kept from breaking by the hope of opportunity for the children.”

  ER called for relief efforts that would employ teachers in community service. Voluntarily, teachers in New York City, she noted, were feeding hungry children in the schools at their own expense. “I think we should all give them thanks,” but we should also investigate the dimensions of the need throughout the country “and make sure that no child suffers from malnutrition.”

  While FDR initially called for deflationary measures, cost-cutting that would balance the budget, ER called for increased expenditures. Their most public disagreement was clearly presented in competing columns of the Women’s Democratic News. In response to her contrary views, FDR wrote his first and only editorial—to urge popular support for the Economy Act and for still further reductions in local taxes. The Economy Act, he insisted, would save the federal government “25% in its normal cost to the taxpayer.” But federal expenditures were only 35 percent of the nation’s total tax bill. Therefore, “the real meat in the coconut is the expenditures of local government which is over 50%…. The real saving, the big saving must be made in cutting the local governments…. It is the only practical way. It is their responsibility.”

  But that would dry up local spending for education and the public services that people needed most, ER had countered in her column. This was a time to expand government services. The real problem, ER wrote, was to levy taxes from “proper sources,” from “people who are endowed richly with this world’s goods, or such businesses as are making large profits.”

  ER urged more individual and community vigilance concerning “the way banking businesses are run.” “Congressional investigations lately have given many people the feeling that they are a little too much like innocent lambs led to slaughter in the hand of our great financiers.”

  Contrary to FDR’s initial legislation, ER called for a transformation in our “sense of values” so that we can “adequately help other human beings.” She devoted several chapters of her book It’s Up to the Women to those issues that required federal and local investment. Recreation—camping, hiking, sports—was basic to life. “We have been so busy making a living that we have had less time really to live…. I always feel that education should open as many avenues as possible to us so that we may have as many ways of obtaining recreation and enjoyment as possible.”

  Healthy family life required available, affordable health care, and ER called for medical security: Only “the very rich and the very poor” had real access to quality hospital care. For those of “average means” a serious accident or illness was a “calamity” that involved dreadful debts, preventable suffering, avoidable death.

  She wrote that public health began with education, and included the construction of public health clinics, hospitals, and hands-on treatment: nutritional programs and agricultural experimentation to make healthful diets available to all. She called for family planning, now called sex education, for boys as well as girls: “To me it seems that one cannot lay too much emphasis on the necessity for planning family life in order that the health of the family may be kept on a high level.” But it was years before the New Deal addressed education or health.

  FDR at first ignored the fact that schools were closed or closing all over the country because local communities had run out of money as property taxes diminished. In Georgia, where at Warm Springs FDR enjoyed his “second home,” 1,318 schools were shut down, and hundreds of thousands of students were locked out. In Akron, Ohio, schools remained open, as long as teachers agreed to work without pay. Chicago owed its teachers over $28 million; 85 percent of Alabama’s schools were closed. Nationwide, over 100,000 teachers were unemployed.

  Deflation, salary reductions, and cost-cuttings failed to address the magnitude of America’s problem. Yet FDR’s Economy Act was limited to such measures. It reduced all government salaries by 15 percent, and streamlined the federal bureaucracy. By June, dozens of agencies and commissions had been terminated. FDR cut aid to vocational education, agricultural colleges, and the Farm Bureau’s experiment stations and extension programs by 25 percent.

  An amazing document, contradicted by subsequent New Deal programs, the Economy Act represented the enthusiasms of his conservative budget director, Lewis Douglas. The tall, handsome, thirty-nine-year-old rugged individualist cowboy appealed to FDR. For a time this son of a great Arizona copper-mining fortune, whose father founded the Phelps-Dodge Company, was as close to the president as Louis Howe and Raymond Moley. A Social Darwinist darling of Wall Street who “confused the principle of laissez-faire with the Word of God,” Douglas gave FDR legitimacy among fiscal Tories but alarmed New Dealers, who watched in horror as he downsized or eliminated useful scientific, research, census, and survey programs—most of which were restored during the 1940s.

  Although ER despised Douglas’s methods, his cabinet presence gave her an ironic gift. To serve, Douglas resigned as Arizona’s only representative to Congress. His decision enabled ER’s closest girlhood friend, Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway, to join the Roosevelts in Washington. Elected in a landslide victory as Member of Congress at large, she served her 450,000 constituents (over 140,000 of whom were on relief) with vigor.

  A warm and generous hostess, and a successful rancher, hotelier, and businesswoman, Isabella Greenway was devoted to the welfare of all Arizonans and successfully championed New Deal projects for her state. Unlike Douglas, she fought for the interests of workers and labor groups.

  Greenway brought a welcome flamboyance to ER’s circle. She cherished their biweekly “air our minds” luncheons, which featured good cheer and candid conversation with Frances Perkins, Mary Harriman Rumsey, and another of ER’s girlhood companions, Elisabeth Cameron Lindsay, daughter of Henry Adams’s friend Elizabeth Cameron. Married to Sir Ronald Lindsay, Britain’s ambassador, ER appreciated Lady Lindsay’s “keen,” occasionally “wicked,” sense of humor. “We looked at things from more or less the same point of view.”

  Of her core political group, nobody was closer to ER than Isabella Greenway. A woman of spontaneity and action, she was on a plane within thirty minutes when ER called her during the campaign to visit in California. When she arrived, ER asked about her baggage. She had her toothbrush in her briefcase, and knew she could depend on ER for a change of clothing and everything else.

  Their first collaboration, begun even before Greenway was sworn in, was to protest FDR’s Economy Act. While ER emphasized the cuts which affected women, Greenway condemned veterans’ reductions. The founder of the Arizona Hut, a woodcraft factory to employ convalescent veterans, Greenway was outraged by the cuts which harmed them. She agreed with Louisiana Senator Huey Long: “Talk of balancing the budget! Let them balance the budget by scraping off a little of the profiteers’ profits from the
war.”

  ER was particularly outraged by the administration’s decision to fire federally employed wives. Between 1929 and 1933 it had become customary for married women to be the first fired. Several states passed laws to fire and ban married schoolteachers, university professors, and hospital workers, regardless of their family situation or need. According to The New York Times, the First Lady insisted vehemently that it was a “very bad and very foolish thing” to establish marital status as a standard for dismissal. Why should hardworking, competent women whose work was useful be idled to offset other costs, or balance the budget?

  ER also rejected FDR’s idea that government workers were earning more than they needed. While he made a grand gesture of returning to the Treasury 15 percent of his own first salary check “as a symbol” of what government workers and others might do, ER declared that government salaries “in most cases are so small as to be hardly enough to support more than two persons, and certainly not enough on which to educate and rear a family.”

  Despite his wife’s opposition, and an ever-growing storm of protest, FDR refused to address the hated marital status clause. Within two years, thousands of women were dismissed. Many had worked for over fifteen years, and they lost all right “to reappointment and to the pension, toward which they had been contributing.” According to the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, “nine out of ten of those discharged were in real need of their jobs.” Home mortgages were foreclosed; life savings were lost. The formerly working wives of Army and Navy personnel were now on relief. Some couples chose divorce to retain their family income; some men who earned less than their wives resigned instead. It was a bitter rule, and ER and her allies repeatedly spoke out against it.

  It was astounding and unprecedented for a First Lady to protest her husband’s legislation. But on this issue ER did so in many forums, in print and on the air, none more publicly than in It’s Up to the Women, where her chapter “Women and Jobs” caused the most enduring controversy.

  ER believed absolutely that individual happiness for women, married or single, required work outside the home. Without that, she insisted, there was no personal or economic independence.

  ER specifically rejected the ancient tradition that “a woman’s place was in the home. She must marry, and if she did not marry, she had no work in the world.” The dreaded image of the spinster aunt, forced to become the family servant in exchange for food and lodging, might now be erased. The modern woman was a working woman, who wanted to be “able to do something which expresses her own personality even though she may be a wife and mother.” ER refused to see a conflict between “a woman’s career and a woman’s home.”

  “A woman, just like a man, may have a great gift for some particular thing. That does not mean that she must give up the joy of marrying and having a home and children.” In fact, she warned, “Mr. Man” might awake one morning “to find that you have a wife in your home who is an automaton—no longer a fulfilled and happy personality.”

  ER’s political philosophy represented the radical end of New Deal thinking. It embraced the needs of unorganized workers, the marginalized, and dispossessed: landless and migrant farm workers in the Southwest; sharecroppers in the Southeast; urban “slum” dwellers; domestic workers; uprooted and unemployed industrial workers—women and men. It would be years before the New Deal addressed their needs, but ER was among the first to put them on the national agenda.

  By publishing It’s Up to the Women in November 1933, ER sought to go beyond the established network of women activists and reach out to all women in America to join her in a crusade for change and decency. The White House had never before been used as a platform from which the First Lady expressed dissenting political ideas.

  Pioneering feminist scholar Mary Ritter Beard praised the book and celebrated “Mrs. Roosevelt as Guide and Philosopher” in the New York Herald Tribune: “For more than a century the Great White Father in the White House has been instructing his people in right conduct…. And during all those years the First Lady of the Land has remained in the background…. But now the Great White Mother emerges as a personality in her own right and starts an independent course of instruction on her own account.”

  It’s Up to the Women lacked the verve and spice of ER’s feminist articles published during the 1920s, and it was filled with homilies, home remedies, maternal advice. But for all the platitudes and evasions, ER’s goal was subversive. As First Lady she meant to reach every woman in America: It was up to them to take charge, to organize and agitate on behalf of social progress. She challenged women to think for themselves; to consider their own lives; to take the battle for modernity into their own homes. ER criticized privileged Women of her own class and culture who continued to live in luxury without a care for the world about them. She urged them to volunteer; to get out and about; to be satisfied with less material opulence. She addressed poor women of the cities, who always had to work outside the home to keep their families from starvation and who, without leisure or comfort of any kind, managed to feed and clothe their children and struggled to provide education.

  ER addressed poor country women, who bore the additional burden of loneliness. One farm woman told her, “I haven’t been outside my yard in nine months except to take the children to the doctor.” There was “less opportunity on isolated farms to learn from each other and you will often find the farmer sending all the milk to town and feeding his children on condensed milk, sending the vegetables to the market or grocer and keeping none for the children.”

  In country and city, domestic workers suffered most. Domestic workers were generally disregarded and abused because of their “foreign” birth or African-American ancestry. Their pay was insignificant; their family and leisure needs were discounted. ER called on all women to consider the important work actually done by women in domestic service and to upgrade household work to “the plane of any other professional or industrial occupation.”

  ER’s goal was long-range: to create a grassroots movement, led and informed by women, that would create a groundswell of support for the more essential changes New Deal rhetoric promised. FDR’s goal was immediate: to achieve the possible from his political opponents. Their own needs dire, they momentarily supported government intervention.

  The third bill introduced during FDR’s deflationary binge was the low-alcohol content 3.2 Beer and Wine Act, a first step back from Prohibition. The sale of liquor would create a new source of taxable revenue, and the bill served as something of a diversion during the tense Senate debate over the Economy Act.

  On 7 April 1933 “light” spirits were again sold legally throughout America. Although many expected the First Lady to condemn the legalization of liquor, ER was relieved. Prohibition never worked, and she deplored the bootleggers and gangsters it spawned. Like most Americans, ER considered it a welcome change, which helped transform the nation’s mood.

  However much America’s spirits lifted, FDR himself acknowledged that his first three laws were not “constructive.” They did nothing really to change the economy’s direction. Nevertheless, they represented a useful political strategy: His deflationary, business-building steps ensured him the support of congressional conservatives, who were, at first, too grateful to oppose him. By April he changed course and pursued public works, unemployment relief, mortgage relief, and farm parity and began to transform government-business relations in America.

  Several New Deal ideas sailed through, including the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established to refinance mortgages and lend money to homeowners. Other acts were enormous, confusing, controversial. ER was particularly thrilled by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)—which ER singled out for celebration in It’s Up to the Women.

  Workers in the past, ER wrote, had too little influence and made no decisions. The needy and the people most involved were never consulted. She believed NIRA was to ch
ange that. Through the National Recovery Administration (NRA) it sought to revive business by creating councils of business leaders, consumers, and workers; they would collectively introduce decent codes of industrial behavior.

  She championed the new agency in every way, and she titled the last chapter of her book “Women and the NRA.” NRA codes set wages and conditions of work industry by industry. The NRA’s Blue Eagle became the first and most dramatic symbol of the New Deal, under the flamboyant administration of General Hugh Johnson. He had worked with Bernard Baruch during World War I in the War Industries Board, which served as the NRA’s model.

  The NRA championed “industrial self-government” and promised dramatic reforms, including occupational health and safety standards, unionism, and such workers’ demands as minimum wages and maximum hours.

  Conservatives considered Section 7A, which encouraged unionism, NIRA’s most radical feature. It also established the Public Works Administration (PWA), which was to be administered by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.

  On 17 May 1933, FDR asked for $3.3 billion in PWA funds to construct roads, bridges, and other federal projects. It was America’s first peacetime public works project, and FDR said that “history would probably record it as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”

  For ER, Rose Schneiderman, Frances Perkins, and all their friends in the Consumers League and Women’s Trade Union League, the NRA seemed the achievement of their lifelong goals. Perkins and Schneiderman had campaigned for industrial codes ever since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, when 146 women perished. That tragedy resulted in New York’s Factory Investigating Commission (FIC), which hired Perkins, Schneiderman, Mary Dreier, and Pauline Newman. In 1915, their work was supported by Al Smith and Robert Wagner, then New York legislators, and resulted in New York State’s first Industrial Code. Perkins was the only woman appointed to New York’s Industrial Commission in 1919, and FDR appointed her New York’s industrial commissioner in 1928.