Within twenty-four hours after assuming office, Hopkins organized his staff, disbursed social workers to investigate the neediest situations, ordered state governors to establish state relief organizations, and spent $5 million of his half-billion-dollar budget.
Given such crying need, Hopkins insisted, there was no time to waste. One thousand homes were being foreclosed each month. Millions of real people were starving. There was little to investigate. Relief applicants were not “morally deficient.” They were not responsible for their dreadful plight. Questions of “religion, race or party” were irrelevant.
FERA funds initially paid state relief agencies cash grants for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. While Ickes’s PWA funds moved slowly and involved big projects to get business moving, Hopkins wanted a Civil Works Administration (CWA) to provide immediate work for the relief of people in need. He hated the idea of the dole, and he believed in jobs: real jobs, at real wages.
Since there were no jobs, it was the job of government to create them. Within one month, Hopkins’s new CWA found work for over four million men. When Southern members of Congress protested that the CWA wage level was too high, Hopkins replied: “Some people can’t stand seeing other people make a decent living.”
A reemployment program, CWA was not a “relief” project: There was no means test, just valuable work with decent wages. When General Hugh Johnson told a press conference that CWA wages were higher than NRA codes anticipated, a “perfectly absurd situation,” Hopkins told the next press conference: “We are paying decent subsistence wages, nothing more.”
The sparring administrators met face to face. Johnson wanted to know why Hopkins had not consulted him before he established his wage scales. Hopkins asked: “Why didn’t you consult me before you approved your lousy codes?”
Johnson backed off. From ER’s point of view, there was no contest. Hopkins had the best interests of the people of America uppermost in his mind: His work projects included manual and factory workers, teachers and nurses, artists and writers, professionals and service workers. He was highly regarded by ER, Frances Perkins, and Lillian Wald, and his vision seemed the triumph of their best efforts, finally established as national policy. Work replaced want. Jobs meant dignity. “A new standard of public decency was being set.” Twenty million Americans benefited from federal relief funds during the dreadful winter of 1933–1934.
Inevitably, Hopkins had his detractors. He was high-strung and underweight, his eyes bulged and his energy bubbled. He chain-smoked and drank: endless cups of coffee by day, spirits by night. Disheveled and argumentative, he appeared as unkempt as Louis Howe. He liked to party with the rich and frolic in supper clubs. Divorced from Ethel Gross, a Jewish social worker, he left her and their four children in 1928. In 1929 he married Barbara Duncan, and their daughter, Diana, was born in 1932. His private life attracted gossip columnists.
Although Hopkins accepted sex segregation in employment and never included wage differentials in that large category he called “lousy,” he was the first male administrator to acknowledge that the New Deal neglected women.
FDR’s first hundred days did nothing for an estimated 140,000 homeless women and girls who wandered the streets and railroad sidings of America. Not one program acknowledged the needs of an estimated two to four million unemployed women, former workers in search of jobs. While married women were routinely fired, the plight of single, divorced, and widowed women was ignored.
On 20 April 1933 ER had addressed the annual meeting of New York’s Travelers Aid Society, to portray the misery of thousands of homeless women. Like Meridel Le Sueur, who published a vivid description of their plight in her book Women on the Breadlines, ER understood that women suffered more quietly than men. They did not sell apples-on street corners; they did not beg. They tended to disappear. They stared out the window, went to the library, sat on park benches, hid in the woods. They looked for work, sometimes solicited, and wandered about.
In January 1932, Le Sueur explained that her work was not fiction. “I did not write these stories, I recorded them…. A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics concerning her.”
When Meridel Le Sueur’s first story was published in New Masses, the editor advised women to avoid defeatism and consider “the unemployed councils … of the organized revolutionary movement. Fight for your class, read The Working Woman, join the Communist Party.” ER insisted on a New Deal for Women, to alleviate widespread suffering, as well as to redirect such rapidly growing revolutionary sentiment.
Dismayed by official inaction, ER sponsored a White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women, on 20 November 1933. With Molly Dewson, the First Lady organized and planned the conference in less than a week. Fifty prominent women attended—social workers, clubwomen, private philanthropists, government administrators, and representatives of the WTUL, the Red Cross, the National Consumers League, and the League of Women Voters, among other groups.
ER presided at the November conference, and Harry Hopkins keynoted. He estimated that over 400,000 women required immediate help from FERA or CWA. Only fifty thousand women were actually on relief in the United States. Hopkins promised to increase that “eightfold” within “twenty-five days.” But he needed help. He wanted imaginative advice about available work, tasks suitable for women. FERA projects could not compete with the private sector, and men had decided women could not work outdoors. They were deemed too weak to garden or to rake leaves. Construction projects were closed to women. Besides, women with families could not travel as men could and, ER noted, had to work in their own communities.
Ellen Sullivan Woodward, appointed to head the Women’s Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in September, acknowledged that it was harder to find 500,000 jobs for women than it was to find four million jobs for men.
ER and her circle pointed out that ten to fifteen hours at steamy washtubs doing tons of laundry, as well as birthing and lugging children, created women strong enough to rake leaves.
Within two months, under Ellen Sullivan Woodward’s direction, more than 300,000 women were employed in various jobs. By January 1934, every state relief administrator was ordered to hire a Women’s Division coordinator to get women of all races and backgrounds into the workforce, in professional, skilled, and unskilled areas. Projects were created in canning and gardening, and in public libraries and schools. Desperately needed social services were provided in private homes and public institutions; in state hospitals and prisons.
The wellborn daughter of Mississippi gentry, Ellen Sullivan Woodward headed the women’s work divisions of various agencies as they were organized, beginning with the Civil Works Administration (CWA).
Skillful and ardent, Woodward was the only woman named to Mississippi’s State Board of Public Welfare when it was created in November 1932, and she coordinated Mississippi for Roosevelt. In May 1933, Ellen Woodward left Mississippi for Washington, never to return.
At first Molly Dewson scoffed at her appointment. Woodward should be rewarded for her campaign efforts, but this job was too challenging for this “bit of southern fluff.” Everyone who knew Woodward disagreed.
From the first, ER supported Ellen Woodward. The First Lady was chief adviser, “first sponsor, first critic, and first official friend.” But for all their work, women’s reemployment was slow, sporadic, inadequate. By 1938, 372,000 women had WPA jobs, but over three million women were still unemployed and almost two million women suffered the insufficiency of part-time work.
Over 25 percent of the women employed by FERA and WPA agencies were professionals: teachers, athletic directors, artists, librarians, nurses, performers, musicians, technicians, administrators. The vast majority were unskilled and were reemployed in domestic services, mattress and bedding projects, surplus cotton projects, and sewing and craft projects that appeared in every region. “In
1936, 56% of all women in the WPA worked in sewing rooms,” which seemed to many the deplorable triumph of sex segregation: Unskilled men were given a shovel, a hammer, or a hoe, but unskilled women had “only the needle.”
Both Woodward and ER were criticized for allowing such discriminatory practices, as well as wage differentials, to prevail. Civil Works Services (CWS), created specifically to provide jobs for white-collar women, paid its workers the prevailing local wage, often as little as the FERA allowable minimum: thirty cents an hour. CWA workers, mostly men, received a dollar an hour.
The effort to employ as many women as possible in the widest range of jobs allowable met the greatest wall of indifference. Nevertheless, many lives were improved by women’s programs. In 1933, 60 percent of all nurses were unemployed. By 1934, CWA employed ten thousand nurses in schools, clinics, and hospitals, constituting 19 percent of professional women employed. FERA librarians delivered “books by packhorse in the Kentucky mountains, by flatboat in the Mississippi Delta, by snowshoe….” Over one thousand libraries were opened in “log cabins, community houses, filling stations, country stores, barber shops.”
Still, women’s projects were continually demeaned. ER and Woodward had few, if any, real supporters among their male allies. Hopkins never endorsed the principle of equal work for equal pay, and despite ER’s efforts, FDR never spoke out in favor of women’s work.
The creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps dramatized women’s struggle. ER was particularly enthusiastic about the CCC. Like FDR, she was thrilled by the concept that offered unemployed urban youth aged eighteen to twenty-five outdoor jobs through a program that combined wholesome education, a new respect for the environment, and country living.
On 31 March, FDR signed the Civilian Conservation Corps into law, with an antidiscrimination clause. Chicago’s Oscar De Priest, the only African-American Member of Congress, had introduced an amendment to the CCC bill: “No discrimination shall be made on account of race, color, or creed….” It was accepted by voice vote. Unfortunately, no provision to include women was considered.
Ultimately, three million men, including 250,000 veterans, planted two billion trees, stocked millions of waterways with fish, and built 52,000 public camp grounds and 123,000 miles of roads. They connected twelve thousand miles of telephone lines, protected grazing lands, drained mosquito-infested marshes, fought fires, battled crop disease, preserved wildlife habitats and historic sites, built hiking and horse trails in the national parks. They were responsible for so many magnificent deeds that Grand Canyon park rangers were asked if that great miracle of nature was a CCC project. According to Barbara Kraft: “At a total cost of $3 billion, the CCC was a bargain for the government and the country.”
ER supported the CCC and helped establish lending libraries and book distribution centers for each camp. But she could not understand why women should be denied access to such a life-enhancing program.
She crusaded for a parallel corps, or a camp program, for needy young women that would combine education, recreation, and work in similarly wholesome surroundings. While FDR recruited 250,000 men, she demanded at least a hundred women in one camp by June. But her activities were scorned. Even in New Deal, circles, the idea of “She She She” camps was ridiculed. Several state relief workers anticipated “serious discipline problems if women were brought together to live.”
Frances Perkins supported ER’s insistence on at least one camp for women, and their efforts resulted in Camp Tera. At first sponsored by New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, it opened on 10 June 1933 on the shores of Lake Tiorati in Bear Mountain State Park.
When ER visited the camp the week after it opened, she was angry to find only thirty women there—when over one thousand had applied within days of its announcement. Hundreds of women had been registered, and ER wanted to know what knots in the red tape prevented them from being there.
The next day The New York Times headlined ”RECRUITING SPEEDED FOR WOMEN’S CAMP.” “‘Red Tape’ Is Denied.” ”MRS. ROOSEVELT HOPEFUL.” New York’s State Conservation Department and the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration promised to expedite the number of women for admission to the camp, which had a capacity of 360. Sixty-five women would be admitted by the end of the week. The delay was explained by the necessity for “thorough investigations of each applicant.” The women “must be without resources” and from age eighteen to thirty-five. ER denounced the requirements, and the age level was raised to forty. But nothing was done to alleviate the means test.
ER worked personally to improve the unfair situation for women. Camp Tera at first had no radio, and the women wanted music. ER donated a radio, and over time contributed books and various amenities. To create camp programs for women that would be educational, appealing, healthful, and stimulating, she worked with Hilda Worthington Smith, chair of the New Deal’s worker education project that was part of FERA’s Emergency Education Program (EEP).
Created during the summer of 1933 by Harry Hopkins, EEP was intended to reduce adult illiteracy and provide a vast range of continuing educational opportunities for adults. “Illiterates are dangerous to a democracy … easy prey to propaganda and exploitation,” declared Hopkins. However patronizing EEP’s statement of intent, it offered cultural and vocational education state by state and benefited millions of adults, including farm workers and sharecroppers, isolated mountain and urban youth, women and men. By 1937, 200,000 adults a year were enrolled in over twenty thousand classes, learning everything they wanted to learn: arithmetic, electrical wiring, ballroom dancing, Shakespeare, hygiene, and zoology.
The worker education program was one of the smallest components of EEP, but Hilda Smith infused it with energy and imagination throughout the thirty-five state programs she administered. As Bryn Mawr’s dean, Smith had helped found the vital Bryn Mawr Summer School for Working Women in 1921, which annually provided one hundred industrial workers with scholarship assistance to attend college classes in literature, history, speech, hygiene, economics, astronomy, creative movement, and other “liberal subjects.” ER and the WTUL supported this pioneering effort to provide working women “with complete freedom from economic anxiety and domestic care” while they studied. ER hailed Smith’s goals to combine leadership training and academic skills to widen women’s “influence in the industrial world and help in the coming social reconstruction.”
During ER’s November 1933 conference, Hilda Smith persuaded Hopkins to accept her idea of a nationwide program of residential worker schools and camps for jobless women. But little was achieved until ER called another conference on 30 April 1934: the White House Conference on Camps for Unemployed Women. Attended by seventy-five women and men, that conference resulted in a definite “plan of action.” By 1936, ninety camps served over five thousand women; eventually 8,500 women benefited from some resident camp experience.
The educational camps varied region by region and reflected cultural differences. There was a camp on a Negro college campus for Arkansas sharecroppers’ daughters, a camp in New Jersey for Eastern professional women, a college camp for Ozark mountain women, and a camp for Indian women of North Dakota who had never before left their reservations.
ER was disappointed in the judgment of relief administrators who refused to allow women “outside” work and prohibited them from reforestation and environmental projects. She remained bitter about discrimination in salaries and all benefits. Whereas young CCC men received a “wage” of one dollar a day, camp women received “an allowance” of fifty cents a week. Whereas men were generally recruited for a year, women were entitled to only two or three months in a camp program. Although the camps were not racially segregated, 90 percent of the campers were white; and arrangements to include widows and young married women with children were discussed but never materialized.
Whatever the limitations, campers were enthusiastic. Pauli Murray, who subsequently became an attorney, educator, minister, poet, civil
rights activist, and one of ER’s first African-American friends, believed Camp Jane Addams saved her life. A recent Hunter College graduate, she was unemployed and barely scraping by on the economic margins of Depression America. Exhausted and overwonked, she was sent to the camp by her physician, Dr. Mae Chinn, because she was suffering from malnutrition and pleurisy. According to Pauli Murray:
The camp was ideal for building up run-down bodies and renewing jaded spirits…. We slept in winterized barracks, two women in each room…. A staff of young, well-trained counselors planned a wide variety of recreational pursuits—dramatics, arts and crafts, hiking along marked trails, rowing, and, when winter set in, sledding, skiing and ice skating. The outdoor life gave me a tremendous appetite; I got over my cough and began to gain weight.
ER was never quite satisfied by the camp programs. She was displeased that the Army ran the men’s camps in military style, and she regretted that more extensive opportunities were not offered for women. She wanted to see a more broadly defined program of two-year voluntary service and education that might create a national youth corps of women and men who would devote some time to the land and some time to the creation of schools, settlement houses, and health centers, and build the beginnings of an experiment in real utopian planning throughout America.
ER dedicated some part of every day to the achievement of the great promises introduced during the first hundred days, and she encouraged everybody to join her. She said in December 1933, “Peace time can be as exhilarating to the daredevil as war time. There is nothing more exciting than building a new social order.”
*A Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1938, but it was meaningless. Tugwell called “the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Bill,” the Wheeler-Lea Act of 1938, “disgraceful.” There were “no standards, no grades, no penalties for fraud, no restriction on patent medicines of however dangerous a nature.” Congress had “truckled to every shabby interest.” The issue was shelved until environmentalists persuaded Richard Nixon to reintroduce the issue.
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