Mary McLeod Bethune’s first visit to the White House became a legendary Washington story. As she walked up the long front lawn to the main entrance, a gardener called to her: “Hey there, Auntie, where y’all think you’re going?” Mrs. Bethune walked over to the gardener, looked directly and long into his face, and said slowly, wryly: “I don’t recognize you. Which one of my sister’s children are you?”
The early years of the New Deal were filled with little victories in a long and painful struggle. Beyond the big defeats, there were daily moments of pettiness, insults, little racial scratches that left open sores for later generations to heal. The magnitude of the challenge was revealed in a series of FERA reports Hick sent ER during her first two-month Southern tour.
A poor girl from Wisconsin, Hick had never been exposed to life in the heart of America’s Southland. She had no Southern friends, white or black, and had never thought about slavery or peonage, or what daily suffering under a system of routine brutality might be like.
For Hick, a loose cannon politically, the rural South was an unparalleled odyssey of discovery, and self-discovery. Basically a populist committed to the underprivileged, Hick abhorred chiselers and cheats, hated snobs, and despised communists. Her sense of “the people” was largely limited to white Christian people. She had never thought about it much, but Hick identified with, and rambled on in, the language of white supremacy.
But bigotry and race violence were headline news in 1934. In Germany, Jews were never more than 1 percent of the population, and numbered less than 500,000 people throughout the entire country, but in the United States, African-Americans were over 10 percent of the population, and numbered over twenty million people, concentrated in small areas. There were entire cities, villages, rural areas in the “Black Belt” where Negroes were the vast majority of the population. If they had been allowed the benefits of full citizenship, they would have had influence, respect, power. But the poll tax, violence and threats of violence, the peculiar American habit of lynching—a depraved system that hid behind the rhetoric of “states’ rights” and committed atrocities veiled under white sheets of Christian piety—defined a region swamped by cruelty and state terrorism.
When in 1934 the U.S. government recognized the existence of rural poverty as a national problem, most people who voted, and all the vested interests, opposed spending money on the rural poor. The cotton South and corporate North, agriculture and industry, opposed every dollar spent to rehabilitate or relocate America’s rural poor. They did not vote, and they did not count.
Hick toured the South to assess the New Deal’s first efforts to confront this bitter situation. A reporter with a keen eye for detail, she struggled to understand local customs. She was shocked by her first encounters with the mores of the Deep South, and her first instinct was to blame, the victim. It took her almost a month to penetrate the tissue of lies and courtesy that camouflaged a quagmire of racial contempt, raw greed, and hatred.
In Savannah, she identified with the white opposition to the Civil Works Administration. In October 1933, Harry Hopkins wanted to put four million people to work immediately, at their own jobs—white-collar and professional workers, teachers, librarians, artists, entertainers; blue-collar and industrial workers, construction workers, miners, factory workers; lumberjacks and fishermen. He intended to pay close to the prevailing wage. FDR agreed; ER was enthusiastic about the grand scheme.
The CWA differed from FERA, which depended on local administrators whose attitudes varied widely from state to state. FERA was a state-operated relief agency, partly financed by the federal government. CWA was controlled and financed by the federal government. It was the most controversial New Deal agency to date, and in less than a year it achieved an amazing amount: 40,000 schools were built or improved; 469 airports were built; 255,000 miles of road were built or improved; 50,000 teachers were employed in adult education classes or rural schools; 3,700 playgrounds and athletic fields were built or improved. Of the 4,264,000 reemployed, 3,000 were writers and artists, a group that heralded the Federal Arts Program.
The CWA hired singers to bring grand opera to the Ozarks; musicians to give symphony concerts throughout the country; theater groups to perform in areas long denied any entertainment. Hopkins never understood why “great art” should be confined “to a few people.” “If it is good for 20,000 people, it will be good for 20,000,000.”
Every group was involved; 4,464 Indians were hired to repair their own homes on Indian reservations; another thousand were hired to excavate prehistoric Indian mounds for the Smithsonian Institution.
The CWA was widely condemned as wasteful and un-American. But only in the South was it actually despised—especially for the high wages paid on a nondiscriminatory basis. And Hick at first agreed with the white planters and business leaders who opposed those wages. Although she recognized their “racial prejudice,” their “unconscious fear of Negroes,” their fear that CWA funds would attract still more blacks to Savannah, she seemed at first even to sympathize with the economic roots of their opposition: Decent CWA salaries cut in on their traditional profits, based on their traditional labor customs—peonage, or virtual slavery.
Eventually, Hick criticized the South’s economic aristocracy. But her first report out of Savannah featured pages of vivid, ugly dehumanizing rhetoric, followed by her conclusion:
For these people to be getting $12 a week—at least twice as much as common labor has ever been paid down here—is an awfully bitter pill for Savannah people to swallow…. What makes it tougher … is that while these illiterate creatures, whom they regard as animals, are getting more money than they ever had in their lives before, hundreds of white working-men are unable to get CWA jobs, and their families are hungry….
Even people in our own show down here seem to think we are paying the Negroes too much. It spoils them….
By the following week, Hick had a new perspective. She had met Georgia’s FERA director, Gay Shepperson, “a grand human … and one of the most interesting women I ever met in my whole life.” Shepperson had squired Hick around and helped her see beyond the whitewashed manners of Georgia’s rulership. Now she understood that there was no labor shortage. On the contrary, over 200,000 women and men had enrolled for employment, and remained unemployed. Of that figure, CWA and PWA, with all their cooperative programs with private farmers and industrialists, had been able to place only 18,012: “What there is is a darned serious SURPLUS of farm labor in this state. And that’s why the farmers get labor for almost nothing.”
Hick then met other people, decent angry white citizens who wanted to see change in rural Georgia. One “prominent citizen,” who wanted to be sure he would not be quoted, Mr. McConnell, assured her that there were “thousands and thousands of Niggers in this state living in slavery just as real as it ever was before the Civil War…. A farmer considers every Nigger living in a house—or the worst kind of shack you ever saw—on his place employed, whether he is paying him anything or not….”
Another source took Hick into turpentine country to call on a producer who had a reputation for “a very hot temper.”
I wish I could make you see the place—away off in the woods, miles from everywhere, years away from civilization itself. A few unpainted, tumbledown shacks. A turpentine still. All hidden away in the pines, cut off from all the world by trees and swamp.
In the course of our conversation, our host, who was complaining that his Negroes were dissatisfied because other Negroes, working for CWA, were getting $9 and $12 a week, remarked most of his men were “good Niggers” but that he occasionally had some trouble. And, with a grin, he held out his fist. There were several bruises on it…. As we drove away, the man who took me out there, said:
“You have seen Simon Legree. That fellow has killed a couple of Niggers in his camps.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
I got no answer.
The CWA administrator and the federal reemployment direc
tor in this country were telling me this afternoon about farmers … who take advantage of the fact that their sharecroppers cannot read or write, with the result that in many cases, at the end of the season, the sharecropper doesn’t get a thing, and there isn’t anything he can do about it. He just works for a shell of a house, a few sticks of wood to burn, a few grits and a little pork, that’s all.
Now all this, they point out, is due largely to one thing only—a surplus of labor in these rural areas. Blacks and Whites, who are hardly more than beasts.
Hick concluded that most of the labor force should be relocated and resettled into the kind of community that Arthurdale represented: “It seems fairly obvious that the only way out is to remove from the labor market enough poof Whites and Blacks so that members of both races who are left will have some sort of chance….”
Hick emphasized the need for education and health care. Illiteracy flourished; schools were “a mess.” Teachers were undereducated and rarely paid. Entire towns had one teacher, generally a young girl who had not completed high school. Hundreds of children had no clothes to attend school. Children could not read: “Why, some of them can barely talk!” Pellagra and tuberculosis were epidemic. “God, they’re a wretched lot!” The people were called “lazy,” and everywhere those who had too much blamed those who had nothing for their sorry state.
The more Hick saw the more she realized that she had accepted a pack of lies, the meanest lies imaginable—and told to her by folks who called themselves Democrats.
Hick was now outraged: “I just can’t describe to you some of the things I’ve seen and heard down here these last few days. I shall never forget them—never as long as I live….”
ER’s responses to Hick’s first letters concerning the South were restrained. Although she frequently disagreed, she was initially patient with Hick’s passionate bigoted outbursts. In the letters that have survived, ER encouraged her to reread the life of John Brown and suggested she look harder and deeper into the causes and context of all that she saw.
ER gave Hick little lessons on the complexities of dignity. Even people on CWA wages had a right to “grumble.” “People are never satisfied Hick dear, when things are done for them…. They like doing for themselves.” “Human beings are poor things. Think how much discipline we need ourselves & don’t get too discouraged.”
By the time Hick reached Florida, she was incensed. Where only a month before she had attacked unionists and agitators, she now wrote Harry Hopkins:
Now I’ll tell you right off the bat for being mean-spirited, selfish, and irresponsible, I think Florida citrus growers have got the world licked….
Two weeks before Christmas the whole citrus industry just closed down for the holidays and turned everybody loose—without money or jobs. No wonder there’s an “outlaw union” in the citrus belt and a strike….
Hick’s letters from Florida caused ER to recall her earlier years there during FDR’s first battles with polio. A painful time of recovery and fear, they were combined with the permanent arrival of Missy and his jolly houseboat companions, and for ER endless months of loneliness and confusion. She had never wanted to return to that place again. But Hick’s vivid descriptions of its natural wonders—flame-colored vines “covered with masses of brilliant orange flowers,” camellias and lavender, orange and grapefruit trees “simply loaded down with fruit,” the brilliant sky and warm waters—caused ER to reconsider: “I might like it with you, it may just be that I knew it best in my stormy years and the associations are not so pleasant.”
Throughout the winter and spring of 1934, ER ended her days thinking of Hick. Their relationship deepened through letters of longing ER wrote in the quiet of the night, shortly before dawn when her day was done and the household slept. “Gee, what wouldn’t I give to talk to you … to hear your voice now…. It is all the little things … the feel of your hair, your gestures. These are the things I think about.”
While Hick toured the South, ER’s days were full. There were guests all winter. Some stayed for days, others for weeks. There were lunches with Frances Perkins, long visits with Lady Lindsay, trips with Elinor Morgenthau, Earl Miller, and Nancy Cook, and an increasingly frail and demanding Louis Howe: “Quite a household when everyone has trays. Louis is in his room still all the time.” And son John had to have his appendix removed. ER stayed with him, which eliminated her plan to meet Hick in Charleston, South Carolina. There were endless meetings on Arthurdale, and she struggled to keep the alley bill moving through Congress.
On 30 January, ER worked hard to make FDR’s birthday galas successful. She attended three charity balls, and with Louis Howe (who rallied for the occasion) made FDR’s traditional frolic with his closest political friends, members of his “Cuff Links Club,” spectacular. In response to all those anti-New Dealers who attacked FDR as monarch, emperor, dictator, they celebrated “Dear Caesar.” ER designed the costumes, decorations, and favors. With Louis Howe she wrote new lyrics to old hymns, skits, and “two stunts” of her own.
FDR was resplendent in purple tunic, adorned with a crown of laurel. Louis Howe headed the Praetorian Guard, with cloak and plumed helmet. The appealingly garlanded vestal virgins included Missy, Tommy, daughter Anna, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman. ER was a thoroughly entertaining Delphic oracle, and, she wrote Hick, I “evidently answered to their satisfaction, at least they seemed amused!”
The snows of February rendered ER particularly romantic: A blizzard stalled Washington traffic, but ER was determined to drive to Williamsburg, which was very lovely “but very slippery.” The day was beautiful “and I kept thinking about you. I love you dear one and I have wanted you all day.”
On 4 February, ER and Hick had a long telephone conversation and discussed various possibilities for their future together. ER was philosophical:
Dear, I often feel rebellious too and yet I know we get more joy when we are together than we would have if we lived apart in the same city and could only meet for short periods now and then. Someday perhaps fate will be kind and let us arrange a life more to our liking. For the time being we are lucky to have what we have. Dearest, we are happy together and strong relationships have to grow deep roots, we’re growing them now, partly because we are separated, the foliage and the flowers will come, somehow, I’m sure of it.
ER was convinced that it would “all work out somehow.” “Darling nothing is important except that I love you….”
ER considered Hick’s reports from the South vastly improved toward the end of her tour: “How I enjoy your mind: Its grasp of problems is so interesting and you do get so much out of people.” Hick now believed CWA was an acceptable emergency measure. But the problems were long-term, permanent actually. The issue was not emergency relief, or even federally funded jobs, but rehabilitation and real development. And that required, Hick wrote, an expanded farm resettlement program—with meaningful educational programs, job training, gardening, and husbandry. An entirely new conception of life and community needed to be created.
By 14 February, Hick understood the politics of the Southern landscape:
The truth is the rural South never has progressed beyond slave labor. The whole system has been built up on labor that could be obtained for nothing or next to nothing….
During the depression, the paternalistic landlord … was darned glad to have us take over the job. But now, finding that CWA has taken up some of this labor surplus… he is panicky, realizes that he may have to make better terms….
Southern opposition to CWA intensified, and FDR was surrounded by conservative economic advisers who argued that if the government got into the business of full employment and real security, it would be paying the bills forever.
In that bitter climate, ER worked with no public support from FDR for the alley bill. While it passed the Senate and languished in the House, ER took the month of March to go with Hick to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. ER arranged the trip to coincide with Hick’s fortieth
birthday on 7 March.
Unfortunately, Time magazine announced that fact in its 19 February 1934 feature article on relief, which was rather a friendly defense of CWA. Then, as an aside, and curled in a Timese smirk, there was a description of Hopkins’s chief field investigator, Miss Lorena Hickok:
She is a rotund lady with a husky voice, a peremptory manner, baggy clothes. In her day one of the country’s best female newshawks, she was assigned to Albany to cover the New York Executive Mansion where she became fast friends with Mrs. Roosevelt. Since then she has gone around a lot with the First Lady, up to New Brunswick and down to Warm Springs. Last July Mr. Hopkins, who is a great admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt, hired Miss Hickok and now she travels all over the country using her nose for news to report on relief conditions. Last week when it was announced that Mrs. Roosevelt planned to visit Puerto Rico in March it became known that Miss Hickok would also go along to look into Mr. Hopkins’ relief work there.
Hick felt personally attacked. She wrote Hopkins’s secretary, Kathryn Godwin:
I suppose I am “a rotund lady with a husky voice” and “baggy clothes,” but I honestly don’t believe my manner is “peremptory.” And I bitterly resent the implication that I got this job solely because I was a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt. I love Mrs. Roosevelt dearly—she is the best friend I have in the world—but sometimes I do wish, for my own sake, that she were Mrs. Joe Doaks of Oelwein, Iowa! I’m a bit sick, too, because it got out that I’m going to Puerto Rico with her. I had hoped it wouldn’t—that I could sort of slide in, as part of the background, that she would get all the publicity, and that I could go fairly quietly about my business. Oh well—I’ll do my best….
ER tried to console Hick: “But why can’t we do everything together? I always wish for you when things are good, and if they are bad you are the best companion I know.” She encouraged Hick to focus only on their impending time together, “and then I’ll hold you in my arms….”
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 25
