Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  In June 1934, ER, Anna Ickes, Bernard Baruch, M. L. Wilson, and West Virginia Congressman Jennings Randolph officially opened Arthurdale. At a reception at the Arthur mansion, ER spoke to the homesteaders and a gathering of “several thousand” who had come to celebrate the new pioneers:

  I want you to succeed, not only for yourselves, but for what it will mean to people everywhere, North, South, East and West, who are starting similar projects. You are the first, and your success will hearten [them].

  Bernard Baruch’s generosity to Arthurdale was stimulated by his first visit, when he witnessed the spirit of the people. The open warmth and gladness, the pride with which homesteaders presented ER with a basket of their first onions and radishes, moved Baruch: “You should have seen [their] faces. It was really the most remarkable thing I ever saw…. You felt their sense of responsibility.”

  ER announced she would take them home: “My husband adores onions.”

  For several years, ER continued to press her friends to support Arthur-dale. Her girlhood chum Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst had, with her former husband Willard Straight, founded The New Republic. Now she too was engaged in the creation of an experimental school and community in Dartington, England. After her visit to Arthurdale, she wrote ER: “It is magnificent, the way you are directing this big undertaking…. I am going back to England so proud of my country at last.”

  Dorothy Elmhirst agreed to pay for medical services at Arthurdale and contributed to the first public health care unit in nearby Logan County, West Virginia.

  Bernard Baruch consistently supported Arthurdale and virtually underwrote the community’s innovative educational programs, from the nursery school to adult education. He also enlisted his friends the Guggenheims to build dental clinics.

  Baruch contributed an initial sum of $20,000 to build the school, helped pay teachers’ salaries over the years, and in 1934 paid to construct and outfit the fully equipped school gymnasium. ER wrote Hick: “I feel that Mr. Baruch is doing a swell thing in his interest in the homesteads. He’s going to help with all the business end and he’s going to give me the running expenses of the [school] for this year and the necessary equipment besides.”

  With private contributions from ER and Baruch, the school became a center of active creativity for the entire population. It was continually filled by meetings, music, square dances, festivals, craft shows; there were weekly canning, baking, and covered-dish parties.

  For at least three years ER spent most of her own earned income to secure Arthurdale’s success. Throughout the White House years, she deposited her money directly with the AFSC for use in various national and international projects. For 1934 the AFSC accountant reported that $56,000 had been deposited in “the ER Transit Fund,” $36,000 by ER and $20,000 by Baruch. Of this $38,335.35 was expended. Most of the money was spent for teachers’ salaries, school supplies and equipment ($13,000), Nancy Cook’s Handicraft Educational Project ($16,000), Child Relief Health Work in Logan County ($6,000), and college scholarships for girls from Kentucky and West Virginia mining camps.

  In 1935, ER wrote Pickett: “Mr. Baruch has given me ‘carte blanche’ and says that anything which I want I am to do with the money which he has given us, and that he will stand by for another year.” He had contributed another $24,000—used mostly for the school.

  Each Christmas ER sent boxes of presents to Arthurdale, as did tobacco heir Doris Duke. One homesteader recalled that there were always big boxes “of toys and goodies for each family, with their name on it.” Once she received a doll from ER, which she still had fifty years later. Another year “there was a pair of roller skates in each box. What fun that was for the kids….”

  Within a year, Louis Howe’s “lousy” prefabs, rebuilt by Eric Gugler’s team, were followed by more agreeable structures. In December 1934, a group of seventy-five houses were begun, and these were completed in 1935. Finally, a group of forty houses, begun during the summer of 1936, were finished in 1937. After Gugler left to build the White House Executive Office Building, the remaining two groups were designed by architect Stuart Wagner, some of timber, some of stone locally quarried. Some were half timber, half stone. Some were in English Tudor style, others two-story colonials. Most included stone fireplaces. No two Arthurdale homes were the same.

  The homesteaders decided themselves to buy an additional 450-acre dairy and poultry farm, which was run by the community association as a cooperative venture until the war. They also ran a cooperative store.

  The community was intended to be self-sufficient and Baruch lobbied for industrial support with the business community and within the administration. He met with Ickes and other Interior Department representatives to argue that the homesteaders should not be charged more than $3,000 for their homes, whatever the cost overruns.

  ER agreed and had earlier announced to her press conference that the government would absorb the errors made. But she worried about jobs and wrote Oscar Chapman: “Can you tell me when the factory will be started?

  “I get panicky every now and then about these people having work.”

  With Baruch’s help, ER negotiated with Gerard Bayard Swope for General Electric to open a factory to make electric vacuum cleaners, which worked for a short time. But it was insufficient, and nothing was really settled for years. Throughout the long ordeal to get suitable work into Arthurdale, ER monitored every grudging detail.

  She even had to protest some administrators’ decision to charge the homesteaders rent for use of a room in their own community center. “They want to use it for adult education and feel that they probably will not be able to produce anything worth while under two years, therefore, it would not be possible to have any money for rent. They are anxious to find out if this could be remitted for a period of two years….”

  ER’s correspondence concerning Arthurdale was a running record of governmental complexity. She wrote regularly to dozens of officials in charge of various aspects of the project. On Arthurdale, she ran a parallel administration. She was concerned with personnel matters, broad policy issues, and she too considered every penny.

  Several days after ER’s letter to Chapman, FDR told Ickes he intended to remove the “Subsistence Homesteads Division and rural housing” from his domain and transfer them to Harry Hopkins. Ickes was relieved. ER too was relieved, and grateful that a stumbling block had been removed.

  ER never doubted the Tightness of Arthurdale, and considered it a success from every human point of view. The day after the first families moved in, she walked across the “newly planted grass to a small white painted house.” It was one of the four-room houses, and on the living-room walls, “brilliant colored posters” had been tacked up, “and a prize for drawing which was framed together with some black and white sketches. It was evident that here was someone who liked to draw and so I asked her if she had had any teaching, and she answered, ‘Never a lesson, but I liked to draw all my life.’” Her three little girls—six, eight, and ten—stood by her, and when ER marveled that all had been “settled quickly” and rendered “spick and span,” she replied: “But I had to, because next week I must have more time for the garden.”

  ER wrote that there were those who believed “that a woman who has lived in two rooms without any windows, may not really be able to appreciate the four-room house.” There were also those who argued that miners would only use bathtubs to store coal. But in each home ER saw individuals of value, with much to contribute, and they all wanted the opportunity to be clean, to shower and bathe.

  In every home she entered, people told her virtually the same story: “We woke up one morning in hell, and went to bed the next night in heaven.” It was that sudden, that complete. And for ER, it had nothing to do with charity.

  Although ER regarded Arthurdale as an alternative to a “people’s revolution,” or “at least a people’s party patterned after some of the previous parties born of bad economic conditions,” many considered the rehabilitati
on and resettlement of destitute mining families unacceptable radicalism.

  For all ER’s enthusiasm, FDR’s support, and the homesteaders’ commitment, Arthurdale was relentlessly attacked. From the beginning, every indoor faucet, every shrub and tree was scrutinized and ridiculed in the press and vilified by an astounding array of hooters who opposed New Deal planning and called it socialism, communism.

  Conservatives deplored the very idea of national economic planning and condemned federally subsidized work brought into an area previously plagued by unionists. Every effort to bring in work was blocked. By 1934 the Red Scare, seemingly suspended during FDR’s first hundred days, was again under way to derail or diminish every suggestion actually to improve conditions.

  For some, the New Deal had now become a “communist plot,” led by ER and epitomized by Arthurdale. Gary, Indiana, school superintendent William A. Wirt claimed that ER was part of the communist “brain trust” that sought to weaken America: She headed a conspiracy to destroy West Virginia’s tax and rent base by removing two hundred families to the new “communistic project.”

  The First Lady was amused by his charges: “I hardly think it would be found that people on relief were paying much, if any, rent.” Furthermore, “I do not understand how he considers it Communistic to give people a chance to earn their own livings and to buy their own houses. It is a fact that the Government will provide the initial capital, but I hope that many private enterprises will do it … throughout the country in the future.”

  Arthurdale’s abiding value, she concluded, was to suggest “to industry … that by decentralizing and moving out of large cities it may make it possible for great numbers of people to have more in their lives….”

  A startling spectrum of politicians and industrialists opposed ER’s crusade. The Post Office Department originally agreed to open a plant to manufacture mailboxes and post office furniture. Then Congress defunded it. The war against Arthurdale’s solvency was led by Democrats who deplored government competition with private business. Louis Ludlow represented a district in Indianapolis where a “Keyless Lock” factory employed hundreds of people. He claimed a similar one subsidized by the government would destroy profits, create destitution, introduce “state socialism,” and ruin America. Funding for the factory was rejected 274-111. Congress had been “deluged” by protests from manufacturers and trade associations. Arthurdale, forever linked with socialism, was not meant to survive.

  On 31 January 1934, Upton Sinclair telegrammed ER:

  Front page editorial in Los Angeles Examiner denounces your plan to have unemployed manufacture furniture in West Virginia factory using government relief funds. Examiner supports action of Congress forbidding United States Post Office to purchase furniture from this factory. Three hundred EPIC Clubs pledged to end poverty in California … are prepared to go to bat with reactionaries on this issue….

  Both ER and Upton Sinclair were stunned by the virulence of the Red Scare as it reemerged in 1934. In June and July, as ER presided over the opening of Arthurdale and then traveled through West Virginia and into the Tennessee Valley, the beauty of the region—the majestic mountains and tranquil valleys—which framed the crudest poverty, seemed bitterly ironic. Now, as they struggled to improve the human condition and were confronted by such extreme opposition, ER exclaimed: “Man is vile but nature is glorious!”

  As she drove those roads, ER longed for Hick—especially when the sunset was splendid or the moonlight extraordinary: “I think of you so much, and always wish you could enjoy everything nice with me!”

  They would not be together until August. In the meantime, Hick was embarked on her own investigation of conditions in California’s Imperial Valley, where the Red Scare was in full bloom: “This valley is the damnedest place I ever saw—except Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. There is the same suspicion and bitterness all through the place. An unreasoning, blind fear of ‘Communist agitators.’ If you don’t agree with them, you are a Communist.”

  Hick was astounded by the intensity of California’s “Red-baiting” crusade, which targeted all reform and unleashed a vicious smear campaign against Upton Sinclair.

  The famed “muckraking” author, whose novel The Jungle (1906) engendered America’s first Pure Food and Drug Act, was a renowned visionary who wrote King Coal (1917), Oil! (1927), and The Profits of Religion (1918), among many other works. In 1933 he upset his socialist allies by becoming a Democrat and creating a new movement, End Poverty in California (EPIC), heralded by his immediately successful seventy-page book I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future.

  With one-fourth of the state on relief, or in desperate need (1.5 million people), there was every reason to believe the former socialist—who now named FDR his political leader—would be victorious, and breathe bolder life into the New Deal. But FDR was wary of political contamination by grassroots radicals, and struggled to ignore Sinclair. Nevertheless, ER invited him for tea at the White House in November 1933.

  Charming, “boyish,” and intense, Upton Sinclair appealed to ER, and they had much in common. Both were children of affluent and prestigious families; both their lives had been marked by an alcoholic, troubled father. Born in Baltimore to Southern aristocrats, Sinclair lived in poverty with his abandoned mother, except when he was sent down home to his rich relatives. As a child he asked his mother why some children were so poor and others so rich: “How can that be fair?” Like ER, as an adult he identified with outsiders, with people in trouble and need. Although there is no record of their conversation, he sent her his book—which she read.

  His call for economic democracy matched many of her own convictions. But the president ordered ER more than once to “1) Say Nothing and 2) Do Nothing” regarding Upton Sinclair, and ER wrote him a letter to explain why she could endorse neither his book nor his candidacy. Marked “Private—not for Publication,” her letter was not quite an apology:

  I have read your book and I have given it to my husband to read. Some of the things which you advocate I am heartily in favor of, others I do not think are entirely practical, but then what is impractical today is sometimes practical tomorrow. I do not feel, however, that I am sufficiently in accord with your entire idea to make any public statement at present.

  Sinclair’s landslide victory in California’s Democratic primary on 28 August 1934 astonished pundits and politicians throughout the country. He received more votes than his six opponents combined.

  Some of FDR’s advisers were disturbed by the president’s persistent silence. Both Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace publicly supported Upton Sinclair. Wallace declared his goals similar to “our present plan of subsistence home-steading.” That, of course, was what the newly formed Liberty Leaguers who fought Arthurdale were afraid of.

  Sinclair spoke of production for use, not production for profit. As governor, Upton Sinclair promised to rent California’s idle farms and factories. The owners would be saved from debt and bankruptcy; the reemployed workers would own what they produced.

  If EPIC was communism, declared Sinclair, “President Roosevelt’s policies are also communism.”

  Sinclair’s challenge was met with frantic opposition. FDR remained silent in the face of mounting pressure from the right, while a most amazing political creature was formed out of twisted words and propaganda: California’s anticommunist crusade of 1934 introduced the all-media fright campaign.

  For ER and the advocates of Arthurdale, it served as portent and warning. The anticommunist crusaders of California vividly illuminated the context for America’s determined opposition to sustainable community, and all New Deal efforts really to provide decent, democratic, and humane alternatives to grinding poverty and neglect.

  Hick’s reports detailed the situation: The reactionary press was buttressed by “Vigilantes,” who raided “Communist” headquarters. In San Francisco “they herded together and jailed a lot of poor devils who weren’t Communists
at all.” For days, screaming headlines promised to rid “the state of Communists” and create “a peacetime death penalty for treason—i.e., ‘Communism.’” Nobody was safe: Democrats were the primary targets.

  According to Hick, except for Scripps-Howard, most of the newspapers in the area were anti-administration.

  The Chamber of Commerce crowd have been doing the most effective work. They are putting on a little under-cover campaign of their own. It’s a whispering affair. They don’t say much about the President. It’s aimed mostly at Mrs. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Rex Tugwell, and … “the rest of the New Dealers.” Mrs. Roosevelt especially is supposed to have strong Communistic sympathies and a tremendous and very bad influence on the President….

  Hollywood’s brutal war against EPIC was played without rules, no holds barred. In one faked newsreel, trains chugged rapidly into California from all over the country, filled with “hoboes” and “bums” of all ages—dangerous, impoverished, and deadly—attracted by Upton Sinclair’s promises of jobs and security. Now, Californians were warned, they would devour the state’s remaining funds, and everybody would be impoverished. Besides, the studios would close and move to Florida. So would the citrus growers, so would the realtors, and of course the oil companies and utilities. California would become a ghost state if Republican Frank Merriam was not reelected.

  Other films were made in which all EPIC supporters were gangsters, supported by ugly foreigners in dirty trench coats with beards, bombs, and accents. The maker of one “newsreel” boasted, “We hired the scum of the streets” to march through the cities with “Vote for Upton Sinclair” signs, and worried that the whole game could backfire if it lasted too long and all the people hired began to talk.