Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  ER was especially impressed by Alice Davis, whose work with the AFSC the First Lady considered heroic. Davis had authorized the new privies, and was almost jailed because she had them built on private mine-owned property: She “had not known it was against the law to improve privately owned property.” ER was outraged on Alice Davis’s behalf:

  Breaking rules or even laws saved a good many lives. Every spring and every autumn … there had been an outbreak of typhoid fever; only after several people died would the company doctor appear to inoculate the rest of the population. No efforts were made to eliminate the cause of the disease. The Run in Jere, like all the others that ran down the gullies to the larger, main stream, was the only sewage disposal system that existed. At the bottom of the hill there was a spigot from which everyone drew water. The children played in the stream and the filth was indescribable.

  ER intended to change all that, and worked closely with Alice Davis and her partner Nadia Danilevsky—the women who gave Hick her first tour of the area. College-educated, they were trained nurses and social workers who met during the eight years Alice Davis represented a Friends’ project in Russia after the Revolution.

  ER imagined a rural experiment in living that would be economically self-contained and agriculturally self-sufficient. She believed it was possible, as an experimental aspect of the New Deal, to build a community that promised democracy, dignity, education, work, and culture. All that was needed was a modest governmental contribution and earnest work by the homesteaders—who would themselves create the community and be in control.

  Each home would be on two to five acres, and each family would have a cow, a pig, some chickens, and seed to plant a nutritious and attractive garden. There were plans to establish a manufacturing plant that would provide good work and guarantee economic security. Local crafts and music would be celebrated. People would eventually buy their own homes, reconstitute their lives. ER was committed to this chance to prove that America’s poorest people could, with modest support, create the American dream of community and cooperation.

  FDR completely supported ER’s vision for Arthurdale. Convinced that country living offered more dignity and comfort to poor people than crowded anonymous cities, they both had long believed in creating community projects that would encourage people to remain in the country.

  ER’s own furniture factory at Val-Kill was built in 1925 with the hope that work brought into the declining farming community near Poughkeepsie would reduce rural flight to the frequently false promise of urban employment.

  Their views were in keeping with a “back to the land” movement popular during the 1920s. England and France, Austria and Germany were noted for such experiments. But America had been reluctant to try them—until ER devoted herself to Arthurdale. When she returned from her first visit to Morgantown, she described to her husband the mean conditions mining families endured. FDR declared: They should be out of those caves and tents by Christmas.

  When ER first discussed Arthurdale at her press conference in November, she said homesteading was her husband’s idea: “It’s a plan he has talked about ever since I can remember.” Now, with ER at the helm, “the grand experiment” was under way.

  Housing and community development were only vaguely on the national agenda when ER began her crusade. A Subsistence Homestead Division was part of the National Recovery Act (Section 208, Title II), and M. L. Wilson was named program director. Like the Roosevelts, Milburn Lincoln Wilson promoted a “back to the land” vision of community self-sufficiency. Transportation, electrification, modernization would make contented rural living possible nationwide.

  Initially administered by Harold Ickes’s Department of the Interior, the Subsistence Homestead program created by the National Industrial Recovery Act was granted $25 million for new construction. At ER’s suggestion, Clarence Pickett was appointed Wilson’s assistant, with “special responsibility” for the mining communities. Over time, there were to be fifty-two projects, and Arthurdale was the first, the flagship.

  Wilson worked directly with ER and Pickett and they generally bypassed Ickes. Impatient with Ickes’s methods, with governmental red tape and endless conferences, ER enlisted Louis Howe’s support for immediate action. Together, they proceeded quickly to purchase the historic Arthur property in Preston County, fifteen miles from Morgantown. Once owned by Colonel John Fairfax of Virginia, it had been partly surveyed by his friend George Washington.

  Now told it would take weeks for the necessary surveys, Howe called for an Army plane and achieved a Coast and Geodetic Survey for the topographical map within two days. Richard Arthur, a “gentleman farmer” reduced by hard times and about to lose his property for taxes, originally asked $60,000 for his land and estate, including his twenty-two-room mansion. Howe agreed to pay $45,000 for a total of 1,028 acres. The day after ER’s birthday, 12 October 1933, Ickes publicly announced the Arthurdale project.

  From the beginning, ER cautioned Howe not to be too stingy when it came to the new houses. At the first White House meeting of the project, Howe insisted on small Cape Cod prefabs—usually sold as summer vacation homes—because they could be erected with dispatch. At one point, ER snapped, “Louis, don’t be absurd.” Those houses would be impossible in an Appalachian winter.

  The week before Thanksgiving 1933, ER journeyed to Arthurdale with Howe, M. L. Wilson, Clarence Pickett, Nancy Cook, and Eric Gugler, a New York architect and close friend, who became the project’s chief engineer. The houses had been ordered; the fields were cleared, plowed, and planted; the foundations for the first fifty were ready. ER dined at the mansion, where the homesteaders were temporarily camped, and found them happy to have worked six days a week, arduously and energetically, preparing their homesites.

  When the houses finally arrived in December, the homesteaders worked even harder putting them up in harsh cold weather. But once ten were up, Gugler stopped the work. They were a “fiasco.” They failed to fit the foundations, plumbing lines had to be ripped out and new pipes installed, furnace units had to be relocated, virtually everything had to be redone. They were unacceptably small (ten by forty feet), flimsy, uninsulated, designed exclusively for summer use.

  Louis Howe had stubbornly stuck to his initial ideas, and they represented nothing ER had in mind. They also caused endless derision in the conservative press; and cost overruns.

  ER insisted that each new home include indoor plumbing, modern conveniences. Harold Ickes, long associated with Jane Addams and not notably mean-spirited, was outraged. ER and her friends were spending money “like drunken sailors.” While over 80 percent of rural America had no modern conveniences, why should the rural poor have indoor privies? If everything ER suggested occurred, how would one be able to tell the rich from the poor? Actually, ER maintained, in matters of such simple dignity and decency one should not be able to tell the rich from the poor.

  ER was perplexed by the grudging attitude that prevailed within her husband’s own administration. She blamed Ickes, and considered him a callous bureaucrat. Unknown to ER, her husband agreed with Ickes.

  In March 1934, the secretary of the interior complained to FDR that “the cost of the thing is shocking to me,” and was astounded by the president’s defense: We “could justify the cost, which will run in excess of $10,000 per family, by the fact that it is a model.” Ickes asked “what it was a model of, since obviously it wasn’t a model of low-cost housing for people on the very lowest rung of the economic order…. It worries me more than anything else in my whole Department.”

  FDR replied: “My Missus, unlike most women, hasn’t any sense about money at all.” And neither did Howe, asserted the president.

  Subsequently, when Ickes complained yet again and told FDR he considered Arthurdale acceptable as “a demonstration of what could be done … for people with considerable incomes,” but not for “people in the lowest income classes,” Ickes noted that the president agreed, and he confided to his journal:

 
; I am very fond of Mrs. Roosevelt. She has a fine social sense and is utterly unselfish, but as the President has said to me on one or two occasions, she wants to build these homesteads on a scale that we can’t afford because the people for whom they are intended cannot afford such houses. The President’s idea is to build an adequate house and not even put in plumbing fixtures, leaving that sort of thing to be done later by the homesteader as he can afford them. He remarked yesterday that he had not yet dared say this to [Mrs. Roosevelt,] who wanted to build houses with all modern improvements.

  Evidently, Ickes never told the First Lady her husband agreed with him, and FDR never confronted his wife about their differences.

  Ultimately, the houses were built according to her specifications—with every modern convenience and decent amenity. There were bathtubs in bathrooms, enamel sinks and flush toilets. Sunshine passed through glass windows in every room; there were glass-enclosed sunporches, and rain porches. There were root cellars, smokehouses, barns; orchards and grape vines; apple trees and peach trees; laurel and rhododendron planted around each home.

  However modest the first homes built, to the people of Scott’s Run they were luxurious. There was central steam heat with a radiator in every room— even the bathroom. There were pantries, cutting boards, birchwood cabinets. All the electric fixtures were copper made at the forge. Everything engendered a sense of pride: pine or oak parquet floors; wood paneling beautifully crafted; “deep big closets”; built-in bookcases. There were electrical appliances, and refrigerators—which had been initially “forgotten,” until Howe noticed and said ER would be disappointed and hurt: She had personally shopped for and selected the refrigerators. There were cement foundations, and coal rooms for the coal-burning furnace; there was a concrete laundry tub in the cellar, in a room with a window.

  By June 1934, the first fifty houses were ready. ER and Nancy Cook personally presided over the interior needs of each house. ER had Cook appointed to the staff of the Subsistence Homestead Division “as a specialist.” Cook worked with the craftsmen who studied with Bud Godlove and made the area’s famous Godlove chair of native hickory and walnut. Temporarily, she administered the furniture and woodworking projects manufactured by the Mountaineer Craftsmen’s Cooperative Association.

  Supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the popular crafts were exhibited and sold nationally by AFSC representatives. The association also did metalwork in pewter, copper, and iron; weaving and knitting. Cooperative craftsmen trained the homesteaders, and together they made all cabinets and cupboards and every piece of furniture for Arthurdale.*

  In addition to tables and chairs, houses were furnished with one double bed, four single beds, occasional double-decker beds, two chests of drawers, and cribs if requested. Women employed by the Civil Works Administration made curtains, sheets, and pillowcases. Each home was also “supplied with blankets, quilts, bedspreads, twelve towels, and rag rugs.” Expected to cost $2,000, ultimately each house cost over $8,000.

  For ER, Arthurdale represented a future of dignity for every family. This was how people in America had a right to live. She was annoyed by petty accounting, mean-spirited trimming. This was an experiment in human development and community building.

  The homesteaders would “all remain on public relief until the factory is opened and the first crops are harvested; but when a family makes its first payment the title to the land will pass to the individual homesteader. In twenty or thirty years the individual will own it free and clear of debt.”

  Arthurdale became identified with ER the way Warm Springs, Georgia, was associated with FDR: She confronted all the problems of creating a model community on raw land with the same verve her husband had devoted to his healing center. She fought critics and detractors who hurled endless assaults upon her judgment and vision. Determined to create proper homes for an estimated 125 families, a new school system, a health network, a new way of life, she returned again and again to oversee the work, to supervise every detail.

  For ER, Arthurdale represented a “program of long time rehabilitation.” While occasionally “charity may be necessary, our aim should be to get people back to a point where they can look after themselves. I have never felt that people should be grateful for charity. They should rightfully be resentful and so should we, at the circumstances which make charity a necessity.” She was pleased to work with the AFSC on resettlement projects, because they represented her commitment to build up “people’s own initiative and security.” She saw Arthurdale as part of an ongoing experiment in the creation of “a new kind of community.”

  Communities of this type presuppose that the people living in them are going to be interested in the welfare of the whole community and that they are going to be successful in bringing about certain changes in human nature…. [which will make people] less selfish and more willing to share their security with those around them….

  From the beginning, in August 1933, when ER first witnessed the mixed population of Scott’s Run she had expected that Arthurdale would reflect the mixed population of the region.

  The miners had represented many ancestries. According to a 1920 census, 60 percent of the population were foreign-born, 93 percent of whom were “southern or eastern European,” Austrian, Bohemian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Greek, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian predominating. There were also Canadians, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. “Native” whites and blacks were almost equally divided, representing 20 percent each.

  ER had been the nominal chair of the committee to select Arthurdale’s families, to serve with Quaker and University of West Virginia social workers who knew the area’s people. But she did not meet with the committee, which set up an elaborate screening process.

  It became clear as soon as the first fifty families were chosen that the experiment would be restricted to white Christian “native” Americans. ER was displeased, because she felt Arthurdale’s function as a “laboratory” depended on a random and diverse population. She said it was unwise “to hand pick the tenants because again I feel that it must be an experiment in ordinary life and an ordinary community contains people of every type of ability and character.” The goal, she insisted, was to investigate the means to “bring out the best that was in any community” and to achieve “the highest level to which the family with an ordinary income can aspire.”

  But the committee insisted upon “congenial” residents. Every applicant was carefully scrutinized. There was an eight-page questionnaire, and intense interviews. “Moral character,” “intelligence, perseverence and foresight,” basic skills, demonstrated ambition, farm experience were prerequisites for consideration. Interviewers were to check physique, education, neatness, posture, agility, literacy, church affiliation, fraternal orders, garden club membership, debts, attitudes, defects. Although communists were not referred to, they were presumably unwelcome. Interviewers were to ask searching questions:

  What particular farm jobs do you best like to do?

  What particular farm jobs do you most dislike?

  What games do you like to play with others?

  [How] do you like best to spend your idle hours?

  How much education would you like your children to get?

  Indicate proper planting distance for rows of: beets/corn/potatoes/cabbage/tomatoes/snap beans Do you observe any rules in planting determined by the phases of the moon?

  Specific questions were asked about the care and feeding of poultry, cows, hogs, and horses.

  Among the first fifty families chosen, “native West Virginians” of northern European heritage predominated.* There had been protest meetings in nearby Reedsville against including blacks and foreign-born applicants, and they were excluded.

  ER did not approve, and requested that the next group of applicants be diverse. The residents resisted, and the Homesteaders Club announced that Arthurdale was to be a “haven for whites only.” On 11 February 1934, the First Lady asked th
em to reconsider, and to vote on the issuer—which they agreed to do.

  On 16 February, Claude Hitchcock, secretary of the Homesteaders Club, reported to ER that “after due deliberation by a fully attended meeting of the Club, we are not inclined to recede from our former position in regard to colored homesteaders on this Project.”

  The homesteaders enumerated their reasons:

  1. The community in which we are located is thoroughly opposed to Negroes as residents, and we feel that we should not risk the loss of the respect we have gained in the community by admitting Negroes.

  2. The admission of Negroes would necessitate the establishment of separate schools and churches, as our State laws forbid both races to attend the same schools.

  3. Without prejudice to the race, and with the feeling that all races should have equal opportunity, we believe that those who are clamoring for admission are not Negroes, but are of mixed blood and far inferior to the real Negroes who refuse to mix with the white race.

  Regretting that our views do not fully coincide with your own in this matter, and yet, bound in conscience to take this stand and hoping that our wishes may be respected, we beg to remain, Yours respectfully….

  Dismayed, ER sent Clarence Pickett the correspondence, and he replied: “I have read the enclosed…. I am not quite sure that we have yet exhausted that subject.” But it was over. ER believed in majority rule and democracy was throughout so much of America restricted to whites. She accepted the homesteaders’ wishes, and recommended the creation of another homestead for black miners in Monongalia County.*

  Arthurdale was just the beginning: A model project was planned in Monmouth County, New Jersey, “for two hundred families of Jewish needle workers from nearby crowded manufacturing cities. A factory is to be built for their use. …” Subsequently called Roosevelt, it would also have acreage for “co-operative agriculture to serve solely” the homesteaders. Subsistence farming would thereby, ER concluded, solve many difficulties of people “throughout our country who are now suffering from unemployment or … the poor standards of living imposed on them by slums and congested areas.”