Eleanor Roosevelt

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  It promises to be a whiz

  So little else You’ll get

  My dear!

  Serialized in the Ladies’ Home Journal before publication, it was immediately the subject of excitement. Fannie Hurst was ecstatic to hear the Journal’s editors at a luncheon speak exuberantly about ER’s book. Certain that “this will give you a thrill,” she related their conversation: They especially “admired the ‘fine clear prose’ and the ‘simplicity and forthrightness of the narrative.’…”

  ER spent more time with Fannie Hurst, who sent her additional glasses to complete the vividly colored crystal set Howe had so awkwardly accepted the year before. ER wrote: “I can’t tell you how sweet you are and … we will have a liqueur together for tender memory….”

  In some ways This Is My Story was ER’s tribute to Louis Howe. Subsequently, ER noted that Howe was “more or less my agent” until the White House years, and then, “it was Howe who kept encouraging me to write, as he had from the beginning.”

  After he died, she wrote her memoirs to clear her mind, clarify her course, send a letter to her friend of friends. Her book was her major focus for the first six months of the second administration.

  On 26 January 1937, ER brought a special guest to her press conference: Jane Hoey, director of public assistance for the Social Security Board. Hoey outlined the need for stronger social security measures and condemned states that attached punitive restrictions to aid for the needy, dependent children, the aged, and the blind. Based on Elizabethan poor laws, these state laws deprived the needy of all civil rights, including the right to vote, and recipients were obliged to “take a pauper’s oath.” The federal government opposed these requirements and wanted state legislatures to eliminate them immediately. Their elimination reflected only some of the changes ER had in mind, which included passage of a new health security package and a full-employment law.

  Asked about FDR’s comment that “federal hand-outs” were not his goal and represented no “permanent solution,” ER said:

  Perhaps the President did not make himself clear…. He favors federal aid until economic conditions are raised. It has been misinterpreted into meaning that he opposes federal aid to communities too poor to care for their health and education.

  That represented precisely, ER insisted, the “big job for the next decade.” That big job was not only about social security but about prison reform. The first week of February, ER revisited the National Training School for Delinquent Girls, which had so offended her the year before that she protested and invited the girls (aged ten to twenty) to a White House garden party. The school was remodeled and modernized: “The change is so tremendous that I can hardly recognize the place. All the bars are gone, plenty of light and air, everything bright and new and clean….”

  ER agreed with Dostoevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” She urged all citizens to familiarize themselves with public institutions that, as taxpayers, they were responsible for: If one investigated, one might “find something really valuable” to be done. Personally, she wrote:

  The mere sight of the barred windows and doors, the thought of what nights must be with all that closely packed humanity thinking no very happy thoughts, makes me shiver as I go in, and breathe a prayer of gratitude as I come out again into the air and sun, free.

  Also, the WPA was under assault, and ER stepped up her defense. She dismissed mean-minded accusations of “shovel leaning,” and urged the critical to do hard manual labor, or shovel snow themselves, “and then see how you feel. I know because I’ve done it myself.”

  Speaking to a group of Junior Leaguers, ER acknowledged that some people were lazy, that there were employees everywhere who were “no good,” but their children still deserved to eat, and everyone deserved jobs and training. ER repeatedly insisted that the only true anticrime bill was full employment.

  She had never seen a WPA project she “was not really proud of.” And she was particularly proud of WPA arts projects, which she hoped would create permanent institutions for leisure, recreation, and culture in every community:

  I hope also that we will continue to be able to look upon art and artists as one of the factors which can be used to draw nations together…. We need emotional outlets in this country and the more artistic people we develop the better it will be for us as a nation.

  Closest to Hallie Flanagan’s Federal Theatre Project, ER was credited for “saving” the murals project, which was under attack, and she campaigned for the Federal Music Project under Nikolai Sokoloff. Grateful, Sokoloff reported to the First Lady that by 1937 his unit employed almost sixteen thousand musicians in 163 symphony and concert orchestras, fifty-one bands, a composer’s project, fifteen chamber music ensembles, sixty-nine dance orchestras, 146 teacher projects, grand opera and operetta companies, various library, copyist, and soloist projects, and a folk song project in the Kentucky hills.

  After June Rhodes told Hick that ER looked unusually exhausted, Hick proposed an alternative to travel for their upcoming vacation. Hick wanted ER “to retire” with her for a week of peace in “the little house at the Danas.”

  Hick wanted ER to be with her in Long Island during her first spring vacation there. But the Danas planned to return to Nevada by April, and if they knew ER planned to visit, they might stay. Hick did not want to share their time together:

  They would pester us to death. Nor would I want Tommy or anyone else around. I’m very fond of Tommy—honestly—but I’ve decided that, while I can have a perfectly good time with either of you alone, I do not particularly enjoy being with you together. I suppose the reason is that when you are together you can never forget for more than fifteen minutes at a time your darned jobs. That shuts me out, and I get bored and miserable.

  Also Hick worried that it might turn out as other times together in New York and Washington had, “when I was taking a vacation supposedly with you, but with you not actually taking one.” In that case, she would “infinitely rather go on the trip.”

  The “little house” was little only by the baronial standards of the neighborhood. A bright, comfortable, sun-filled home, it was a two-story dwelling with several bedrooms, a small library, a sitting room, cozy fireplaces, and several rooms to spare. There was an upstairs deck and a downstairs porch. Part of a close community, it became Hick’s home and refuge for almost twenty years. A short walk from the bay, nestled deep in the woods, surrounded by wildlife and nature, it was a serene space, and she felt at the moment content.

  Hick’s World’s Fair boss, former state senator Joseph Baldwin, asked if she would work with him in the future. Baldwin intended to run for Congress “and would like to have me for his ‘Mrs. Moskowitz.’… No, darling, I didn’t laugh in his face.” Actually, Hick was pleased: Belle Moskowitz, Al Smith’s chief adviser and administrator, had been one powerful woman.

  ER warned Hick: “Don’t be anybody’s Mrs. Moskowitz.” The work was grueling, and anonymous, “and your temperament would find it hard!”

  That week they spent an especially lovely evening together, and Hick wrote: “Darling, when one has one’s emotions fairly well under control, life can be diverting, can’t it?”

  Politically, life was astir. ER had a long talk with Anna Louise Strong, who had just returned from Spain and Russia. ER had sent her a “warm welcome-home letter” and invited her for lunch. She wrote Hick that Strong had “told me interesting things” about the Spanish People’s Front, the Soviet trials, “and who has softened towards us a bit!”

  Strong’s goal during their meeting was to convince ER that the United States should be supporting the Spanish Loyalists. She seemed to Strong “appreciative but noncommittal.” ER brought their conversation to FDR, who remained adamantly committed to his policy of embargo and noninvolvement.

  While the future of democracy, communism, and fascism exploded in Spain’s civil war, America seemed in peril of taking the same path. Immediately after t
he inauguration, lawful strikes and innovative sit-down strikes were opposed by bloody strike-breaking episodes that challenged the future of democratic unionism promised by the Wagner Act and reinforced by FDR’s oratory.

  In February, ER received several letters demanding military action against strikers. She wrote Hick about a woman who wanted the sit-down strikers evicted “in the name of sacred private property rights—and if the militia can’t do it the U.S. Army should be used! I ask you!”

  ER supported the union movement and was revolted by the industrial violence resorted to each time unions tried to organize, beginning with the Southern and New England textile strikes of 1934. After 1920 when she joined the Women’s Trade Union League, she remained convinced that nothing would change until workers organized for their own protection and economic needs.

  ER’s emphatic support for labor unions was demonstrated by her own membership in the American Newspaper Guild, which she joined when she became a United Features Syndicate columnist. In December 1936, the Newspaper Guild voted to leave the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and join the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a move ER publicly endorsed. Subsequently, she invited CIO leaders to a White House Conference on Youth, and pointed out that there were many more young people in the CIO than in the AFL.

  Initiated by star reporter Heywood Broun in 1933, the Newspaper Guild was an aggressive union often damned as communist. ER was the first First Lady actually to join a labor union, although she told her press conference on 5 January 1937 that she would not join a picket line or strike, “at least in the immediate future.” But she was proud to be a member of the Guild, which, she said, “had done perfectly splendid things.” For ER the union “principle is sound and right.”

  Throughout the 1930s, ER was loyal to the Guild, and to Broun, who adored the First Lady. In 1937, he reported that the pecan workers of San Antonio wanted ER for president—a view he commended: “At the moment Eleanor Roosevelt has a deeper and closer understanding of the needs and aspirations of millions of Americans than any other person in public life.”

  ER always rejected such ideas: “Nothing on God’s green earth would induce me to run for anything.” But she demanded justice for all workers, including the embattled workers of General Motors in Flint, Michigan.

  Although she initially deplored confrontations and sit-down strikes, ER condemned GM’s Alfred P. Sloan for refusing to attend a conference Frances Perkins called with John L. Lewis in Washington. ER declared: “If we are going to settle things peaceably, we have to have a spirit of good will.” Sloan’s attitude of “fear and distrust” made it impossible to bargain collectively, which was labor’s right, and to “reach reasonable conclusions.”

  In 1937 when the Supreme Court reversed its twenty-year stand and finally held the minimum-wage law for women and children constitutional, ER proceeded to battle for minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws for all workers. So long as employers could pay women less for the same work, all would be underpaid.

  ER attended union meetings, participated in union socials, and personally helped mediate various strikes. She emphasized collective bargaining, and by 1938 hoped that unionism would promote “a yearly wage” to replace hourly wages, which, she said, were responsible for underemployment and workers’ indignity. When unionism was fully accepted, there would be a new deal of full employment and a truly living wage.

  For ER, democracy and workers’ rights were synonymous. In May 1934 she gave a lecture to 2,700 delegates at a YWCA convention on peace and progress. There could not be progress for some unless there was “progress for everybody; and [that] must include cooperation between industry and labor; with labor organized in unions so as not to remain weak and unsubstantial.” Industrial peace, as well as international peace, depended on justice for workers: “The old desire to gather profit for the few at the expense of the many” was what all religions and races must oppose today: Industrial peace depended on women’s involvement and an awareness of labor conditions in every community.

  ER made it clear that she did not limit her notion of community to white communities: We could not ostracize “some races” and pretend to be good Christians. We could not “follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and permit in this country some of the things we stand for today.” It was the responsibility of the YWCA to “reach out to all countries and spread the belief that human beings can grow into a brotherhood the world over.”

  Although ER said nothing publicly about sit-down strikes, she honored picket lines. In 1939, she even refused to cross one to attend FDR’s birthday ball at a Washington hotel where the waitresses were on strike for better daily wages.

  ER continued to hope that unionism and collective bargaining might be achieved without strikes. In an address before the League of Women Shoppers, chaired by her friend Evelyn Preston (married to the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin), ER said strikes “brought a great deal of harm” to both sides. Although she realized that in certain industries “there may be no other way,” she preferred to see “all factions” bargain collectively “in a spirit of good feeling.”

  ER completely misjudged the labor situation in 1937. For John L. Lewis and the CIO it was the year to organize the unorganized. Lewis had rejuvenated the union movement, and was responsible for the successful slogan: “The President wants you to join a union.” He had contributed heartily to FDR’s 1936 campaign, and in exchange for the United Mine Workers’ $500,000 cash contribution (the equivalent of $5 million in 1990s dollars), he expected presidential support for labor. Moreover, FDR’s campaign oratory against “economic royalists” gave Lewis every reason to believe he had presidential support.

  Sit-down strikes immobilized industry after industry and resulted in unionism’s greatest triumphs and heartbreaks. From the Firestone rubber plant strike in Akron, Ohio, in 1936 to the famous General Motors auto-workers’ triumph in 1937, there were almost seven thousand strikes. Mostly, the CIO achieved its goals: higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, paid vacations, dignity and respect for industrial workers. In fact, 60 percent of the strikes during the 1930s were for the right to unionize; union recognition meant respect. But everywhere the crusade was marked by contempt and organized cruelty.

  ER’s vision of an era of “good feeling” and amiable negotiation was mocked by industrial violence, company vigilantes, and local militias. Hundreds of workers were tear-gassed, wounded, shot. As the CIO organized to end industrial tyranny, antiunion terror intensified. In 1936, Ford, General Motors, U.S. Steel, and the du Ponts organized a “special conference committee” to crush the CIO with vigilante violence and charges of communism. These were the “economic Royalists” against whom FDR campaigned, and he was the target of their Red Scare tactics.

  Now, Wisconsin’s progressive Senator Robert La Follette held hearings on industrial violence, and his publicized findings stimulated a national debate about labor’s democratic right to organize against repressive, even torturous, industrial tactics. According to the Senate’s La Follette Committee on Civil Liberties, industry spent over $80 million to spy on and eliminate union efforts between 1934 and 1936. In addition to engaging in espionage, corporations stockpiled noxious gases, machine guns, and various projectiles. Between 1933 and 1937, Republic Steel, for example, purchased 552 revolvers, 64 rifles, 254 shotguns, 143 gas guns, 4,033 gas projectiles, 2,707 gas grenades, and many other weapons to use against its employees.

  La Follette’s committee deplored the climate of terror and intimidation, the armed brutality that curtailed “the exercise of constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech and of assembly,” which now specifically protected unionists as a result of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. In contempt of procedures set up by the National Labor Relations Board, industrialists escalated their intimidation, and fortified their arsenals.

  At the same time, strikes erupted nationwide: WPA artists, members of the Workers Alliance, held a “stay-in-strike” in New York City. College stu
dents picketed against food costs in Chicago. Newspaper reporters and workers struck from Seattle (the strike settled when Hearst hired the Boettigers) to Flushing, New York. Silver miners struck in Nevada; asbestos workers halted work in New Jersey’s Johns Manville Company.

  In January 1937, many Americans were disgusted to read in newspapers how Eleanor Roosevelt’s name was used to discredit unionists. When the La Follette Committee held hearings on “Jack Barton” (a.k.a. Bart Logan), his story made headline news. His effort to organize the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, in Bessemer, Alabama, resulted in harassment and three arrests: once as a suspected communist (though the Communist Party was then legal in Alabama); once for being in possession of seditious literature (including The Nation and The New Republic); and once for vagrancy (although he had $35 cash in his pocket and was employed). When questioned about his “communist” activities, he was asked what his contacts were with Heywood Broun and Eleanor Roosevelt.

  At his trial, the court refused him a lawyer or a jury, and he was sentenced to 180 days at hard labor and fined $100. When the International Labor Defense Committee provided bail, local authorities refused to accept it. He was forced into leg shackles on a chain gang. His legs became infected and his arrested case of tuberculosis flared. Within weeks he lost fifteen pounds, collapsed, and was sent to a sanatorium.

  Although ER’s connections to the many unionists who were asked about their alleged friendship with her were irrelevant, and usually nonexistent, she became personally close to one of the many heroes and victims of torture La Follette investigated, Joseph Gelders. The former physics professor at the University of Alabama, as Southern representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, launched a campaign for Bart Logan’s release. After a nighttime meeting in Bessemer, on 23 September 1936, Gelders was surrounded by four vigilantes and clubbed with a baseball bat. His nose was broken and he was beaten unconscious. When he awoke, he was stripped, flogged, kicked, and beaten again. Driven into the country and left for dead, Gelders survived and hitched a ride to a hospital in Clanton. Although he subsequently identified his assailants, the grand jury refused to indict them. The company controlled the town; unionists and their friends were unwelcome. Civil libertarians and Birmingham’s labor community organized against terrrorism and class war, with support from Governor Bibb Graves, who offered a $200 reward for the capture of Gelders’s attackers.