Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Bowen marveled at her serenity: “I went into her room and said, ‘Jane, the ambulance will be here in an hour.’” She replied: “‘That’s all right, for that will give me the time to finish this book I am reading.’” Jane Addams “was never known to be afraid of anything….”

  Jane Addams’s obituary in The New York Times was detailed and generous: Known as the “greatest woman in the world,” the “mother of social service,” she also pioneered the activist peace movement.

  For ER, who on 2 May had called her a “pioneer who still pioneered,” Jane Addams’s important legacy carried a new urgency—which was dramatized by the placement of her front-page obituary. In the next column The New York Times headlined Hitler’s Reichstag speech on European affairs: In “a defiant and uncompromising speech,” Hitler had announced German rearmament, the draft, and his intention to “achieve territorial revisions.” All treaty agreements were ended, although Hitler asserted territorial changes would occur “only through peaceful understanding”—which was the only phrase of his speech “received in silence.”

  * ER’s message was penned on an NAACP broadside that reproduced a 4 May editorial from The Des Moines Register sent to every senator, “Irony, Politics and The Negro” quoted FDR’s 1932 campaign promise: Wherever the desperation of “the socially underprivileged” cannot be addressed by the states, “‘it becomes the positive duty of the federal government to step in to help.’” It concluded: “The silence of this same speaker boomed from the White House during debate on the Costigan-Wagner bill…. When the next mob dances in the light of flames about a stake in the south, that declaration of high duty and intent will be a ghostly wisp of smoke, drifting off toward the heavens.”

  *Dr. Townsend called for the retirement of everyone over sixty; each retired person would receive a monthly pension of $200, paid for by a sales tax, to be spent each month, which would provide security and keep the economy pumped up. Many thought a Long-Townsend third party loomed for 1936.

  *The low number of income tax returns reflects the very limited taxation system which prevailed until after World War II, when taxation was extended to cover virtually every income.

  *Most of Europe had some form of social security before World War I. Pioneered in Bismarck’s Germany (1870), it was achieved quickly in Austria (1881), Norway (1894), Finland (1895), Britain (1897), and France, Italy, and Denmark (1898).

  14: The Victories of Summer, 1935

  ER returned from the coal mine in Ohio to a Washington in turmoil. Tensions mounted as opponents pressed the Supreme Court on the legality of the New Deal, and on 22 May FDR vetoed the veterans’ bonus bill. It had passed by a large majority with liberal support, including ER’s friends Caroline O’Day and Isabella Greenway. An issue since 1931, it had engendered two veterans’ bonus marches—one repelled by Hoover, the other mollified by ER’s visit. The issue would not go away, and seemed to ER’s circle a matter of simple justice. Why not give the promised bonus now—to veterans who had risked life and limb and remained virtually everywhere marginal and underemployed? In her maiden speech to Congress in 1934, Greenway spoke on its behalf, and now she led the effort to override FDR’s veto.

  FDR appeared personally, before Congress and broadcast his veto message. He condemned the Patman Bonus Bill as discriminatory, inflationary, and fiscally unsound. The effort to override passed the House, 322 to 98, but fell short of the needed two-thirds vote in the Senate.

  ER stayed out of the dispute between her friends and her husband, but was relieved by FDR’s appearance before Congress, which served another purpose: His determined, vital manner announced that he had resumed his leadership role. According to Time, his sulky “winter peeve” was over.

  Then on 27 May 1935, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that the federal government had the right to protect the people economically and socially. In three unanimous decisions, it challenged executive authority and congressional legislation to enlarge administrative activities.

  In the Humphreys case, FDR had “exceeded” his authority by removing William E. Humphreys, a belligerent Republican opponent, from his position on the Federal Trade Commission. This seemed a gratuitous slap at the president, since in a 1926 case the Court had ruled the executive had such removal power; FDR was astounded by the unanimous decision.

  Then the Frazier-Lemke Amendment to the National Bankruptcy Act, which sought to protect farmers from mortgage foreclosures, was declared unconstitutional as a violation of “due process.” Justice Brandeis opined that foreclosures were in the public interest of “eminent domain” and must be protected.

  Finally, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the fountainhead of New Deal activity, was toppled in the famous Schecter, or “sick chicken,” case.

  In Brooklyn, four Schecter brothers were found guilty on nineteen counts of filing false reports, ignoring wage, hour, and health inspection regulations, and selling chickens unfit for human consumption—all in violation of NRA’s Live Poultry Code. The Supreme Court denied the federal government’s right to regulate, since the chickens were not involved in interstate commerce. This decision ended the administration’s right to set up codes regulating child labor, hours and wages, safety and sanitation conditions, and it doomed Section 7A, which encouraged labor unions. For all the cooperation between industry, government, and labor in the creation of these codes, NIRA was declared an Unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive.

  The Court’s charges of overcentralization, of excessive and illegitimate power, were a blow to the entire premise of the New Deal. Most states had been relieved to have the national government take over some responsibility for the care of the poor and unemployed. The South, anxious to preserve its race traditions of peonage and discrimination, hailed the decision as a triumph of states’ rights.

  ER regretted the decision that shot the Blue Eagle down. NRA had “seemed a simple way to keep bad employers doing what was right.” She thought FDR would be devastated and told Marion Dickerman, who was at the White House that night, that she “dreaded” dinner. They were astonished to find him in a jolly mood, even more “zestful and buoyant” than usual, eager to renew the good fight.

  On 31 May, FDR told his press conference that the Supreme Court sought to return America “to the horse and buggy definition of interstate commerce.” He compared the Schecter case to the Dred Scott case in its grave implications. Since the Dred Scott case (1857) declared a slave not human but chattel property and helped engender the Civil War, it was a remarkable statement.

  FDR asked: Did the U.S. government have the right to “control any national economic problem,” or were America’s most important issues in the separate hands of each state? Since virtually all commerce was now in some way interstate commerce, from sick chickens to raw materials to manufactured goods, all industrial and labor decisions impacted on everybody in every state. This was no time to abandon a nationally coherent recovery program.

  The Supreme Court’s challenge invigorated FDR. The only way to combat the Court’s reactionary sentiment was to press Congress on pending legislation to advance the New Deal, and go beyond industry-dominated NRA codes. Until that moment, FDR had ignored Senator Wagner’s national labor relations bill, which guaranteed independent unionism, collective bargaining, a balance of power between industry and labor, protected by a National Labor Relations Board.

  The Wagner Bill, supported by progressives, was opposed by Southern leaders. FDR had opposed it in 1934, and as recently as 15 May had told reporters he gave it no “thought one way or the other.” Now he called for its immediate passage. It had already passed the Senate, 63–12; it passed the House in June by voice vote; and FDR signed the National Labor Relations Act on 5 July 1935.

  American workers began to organize as never before—democratically, militantly, multiracially. It was what ER and the Women’s Trade Union League had long hoped to see. In fact,
as soon as NIRA was struck down, Rose Schneiderman, Maude Swartz, and Pauline Newman consulted with Robert Wagner. They had worked together ever since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911, when they all served on New York’s Factory Investigation Commission. Now they lobbied for a clause against the discrimination of women workers (which was finally included in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act).

  The women’s labor movement was refortified by the Wagner Act, and its passage revived several long-delayed WTUL initiatives. In Virginia, for example, as early as 1914 Lucy Randolph Mason became industrial secretary of Richmond’s YWCA to campaign for decent labor standards and workers’ compensation laws. For twenty years she combated “the lack of social control in the development of southern industry.” In 1931, the Southern Council on Women and Children in Industry hired Mason to campaign for hour and wage benefits for women and for a ban on child labor throughout the Southern textile industry. In 1932, when she replaced Florence Kelley as director of the National Consumers League, she moved to New York. But shortly after the Wagner bill passed, she decided to return to the Southern labor struggle.

  The great-great-granddaughter of George Mason, who signed the Declaration of Independence and wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights, daughter and granddaughter of Episcopal ministers, radical “Miss Lucy” became a force in the multiracial union movement battling for a new South. She was fifty-five, white-haired, and widely recognized as a Southern lady: “When Miss Lucy entered a union meeting, the men instinctively got to their feet.” While Lucy Randolph Mason organized Southern textile workers and was “roving ambassador” for the CIO, she became one of ER’s key advisers on urgent labor and race issues, civil rights, and civil liberties.

  Also in May 1935, an excited Harry Hopkins escorted his Grinnell College friend Hallie Flanagan to a White House garden party to meet ER. The White House lawn was festive with hundreds of strolling guests, the Marine Band, and tables filled with refreshments and flowers. Uninvited, Flanagan was staggered by Hopkins’s presumptions, but “learned that the busiest woman in the U.S. was never too occupied to give attention and understanding” to problems she considered important. And the idea of a national theater seemed to ER very important. Just returned from a European tour of government theaters, the director of Vassar College’s Experimental Theatre was already known to the First Lady. She urged Flanagan to wait in the Blue Room, and they could meet after the party.

  Flanagan waited a long time, “looking out on the broad white marble hallway with its stretch of red velvet carpet, its palms, and crystal chandeliers.” Eventually, she was escorted to ER’s “apartment, where she sat at her desk, looking as fresh and rested as if she had not just shaken the hands of some five hundred guests” in the mid-May sun.

  ER asked specific questions about the costs and details of Vassar productions, and was interested in classical, experimental, modern plays. She wanted America to “consider the theater, as it was considered abroad, a part of education.” She surprised Flanagan when she referred to “our heritage of Puritanism in its relation to the stage,” which rendered the theater the “last of the arts to be accepted.” With ER’s enthusiasm and Flanagan’s commitment, the new Federal Theatre became the core of WPA’s most exciting arts projects.

  Fully aware of Flanagan’s radical vision, the First Lady became her chief adviser, defender, and most prominent booster. Pert, red-haired, dynamic, fiery Flanagan was controversial from the beginning. Her commitment to relevant theater, political drama, and mixed-media productions was nationally known years before she was appointed to the WPA. In 1931, Can You Hear Their Voices, for example, was hailed by the New York Times critic as “a play in which propaganda did not defeat drama.” But make no mistake—“it was all propaganda—scaring, biting, smashing propaganda.” And in the end a prison-bound father sends his sons off to communists to help “make a better world.”*

  With the directors of other WPA arts projects—Henry Alsberg, who planned a series of travel guides for every state; Nikolai Sokoloff who envisioned symphony orchestras in every community; Holger Cahill, who wanted to create community art centers in every neighborhood—Flanagan, and ER, thrilled to the possibilities of “a new people’s art,” with community theaters in every locale. The hills and hollows, valleys and deltas of America would be transformed by a shared popular culture.

  Appointed on 27 August 1935, by 1936 Hallie Flanagan wrote ER that there were “3,654 theatrical people with 3,654 theatre temperaments, not only at work, but at peace.”

  ER encouraged Flanagan’s goals of children’s theaters, Negro, Yiddish, Spanish theaters, mixed ensembles, traditional and university theaters, straight revivals, classics done experimentally, regional theaters, touring companies, and dance, vaudeville, and marionette units. Plays were mounted quickly in all major cities that first year.

  In Chicago, several vaudeville units played in parks, and two large theater companies offered a series of plays. A large vaudeville unit, including “a complete circus” of more than seventy performers, toured Boston. “50,000 persons weekly” attended Massachusetts theaters. The Negro Theatre in Harlem produced an “untitled play” by Zora Neale Hurston, Macbeth, and St. Louis Woman, by Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, directed by John Housman.

  There were theaters in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, including the Popular Price Theatre, which boasted Lillian Wald’s original theater team: Helen Arthur, business manager, and her partner director Agnes Morgan, along with Aline Bernstein and other notables who ran the Henry Street Settlement’s Neighborhood Playhouse.

  Soon the Federal Theatre Project employed 5,644 “professional theatre people, including actors, directors, designers, stage-hands … with many being added daily.” Supported by Elmer Rice and Harry Hopkins, Flanagan wanted especially to produce adult, relevant, uncensored theater—which might also “throw a spotlight” on conditions of despair, on rootless rural poverty and “ramshackle tenements and unite an audience that something must be done.”

  ER relished Flanagan’s political determination and quick wit; but Flanagan did not entertain everyone. When asked, for example, “Would you produce a play written by a Communist?” she replied: “If it was a good play, we would produce one written by a Republican.”

  After her long angry winter, ER won several victories—highlighted by the creation of the National Youth Administration, which represented a great personal triumph. Since 1933, ER had decried the neglect of youth, the discriminatory practices of the CCC, and the lack of training, jobs, and alternative education for young people suffering in every state. With schools everywhere in crisis, young women and men were just dumped into the stagnant economy without hope—entirely marginal to New Deal programs. Even WPA employment was limited to workers over twenty-four. ER had called repeatedly for a national youth program.

  She spoke of a “stranded generation,” compounded by the totally neglected factor of 200,000 “wandering women,” who averaged twenty years old. ER asked Frances Perkins to investigate new programs for young women and suggested an alternative to CCC camps in “plant nurseries.” But the secretary of labor dismissed the idea as seasonal and useless. ER then suggested “internships in public services”—libraries, government agencies, education departments, health centers.

  She agitated for a specific youth program for over a year, and wanted it to include rural and urban youth, women and men. She held conferences with Education Commissioner John Studebaker, with WPA administrators Aubrey Williams (a Birmingham, Alabama, social worker and outspoken rebel son of the Confederacy) and Harry Hopkins. In June 1934, Studebaker called a national youth conference to address the calamity that faced almost four million “out of school employables,” aged eighteen to twenty-three, who had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Studebaker wanted a youth division established in his department. Every time ER brought up the idea with FDR she was rebuffed.

  Finally, in June 1935, Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams met again with ER. This time, ER ret
urned to FDR determined to have the plight of America’s youth addressed. All winter her suggestions, her concerns, her daily proddings had been discarded.

  Hick continued to worry that ER would leave FDR; for months she feared fireworks. But ER only grew colder. And the White House became during the winter of 1935 an exceedingly frosty place. ER might have thought she was subtle, might have believed her husband failed to notice her prolonged silences, might even have imagined her blue tones of cold invisible. But he knew them as well as anyone. He had witnessed those icicles that might at any moment dart from behind her eyes, and linger unspoken as she pressed her lips. They were familiar, and dramatic—though he might choose to ignore them.

  Now, in the summer of a bruising and disappointing year, her persistence was rewarded. As social security legislation continued its agonized trek through Congress, FDR accepted his wife’s suggestion. In her memoir, ER described the conversation that launched the National Youth Administration, one of the New Deal’s most useful agencies:

  I waited until my usual time for discussing questions with him and went into his room just before he went to sleep. I described the whole idea … and then told him of the fears that Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams had…. He looked at me and said: “Do they think it is right to do this?” I said they thought it might be a great help to the young people, but they did not want him to forget that it might be unwise politically. They felt that a great many people who were worried by the fact that Germany had regimented its youth might feel we were trying to do the same thing…. Then Franklin said: “If it is the right thing to do for the young people, then it should be done. I guess we can stand the criticism, and I doubt if our youth can be regimented….