by Susan Quinn
CHAPTER TEN
NOW OR NEVER
THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS that fall of 1934 were going to be the first real test of the Roosevelt presidency. FDR’s election in 1932 was more of a referendum on Hoover’s failures than on FDR’s promises. But now, after two years of activism and some signs of progress, the New Deal was on the line. To move forward with the “bold, persistent experimentation” he promised when he took office, FDR needed an unprecedented midterm triumph: a net gain of seats in House and Senate that would allow him to be even bolder, to complete what many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, considered half-measures that “only bought time.”
As the election drew near, Eleanor reluctantly resumed her role as “Mrs. R.” She was pleased, as she wrote to Hick, that FDR was in a “militant” mood after the resignation of his budget director, Lewis Douglas, a man who opposed public works measures. She was also enthusiastic about participating not just in FDR’s campaign but also in the campaign of her friend Caroline O’Day, who had worked on Democratic campaigns with her in the past. O’Day was running for “congressman-at-large,” a position that was created to reflect a population increase without the reapportionment of districts. She would be representing all of New York State.
Both the Roosevelts were eager to have O’Day in Washington. Eleanor in particular saw O’Day’s candidacy as an opportunity to influence decisions on the issues she cared most about: peace, women’s rights, Negro rights, and the exciting new idea of Social Security.
Eleanor Roosevelt was breaking new ground: never before had a president’s wife participated in a congressional campaign. As usual, she insisted that her work as finance chair for O’Day had nothing to do with the White House or being First Lady. “I believe in certain things,” she told the New York Times, “and I think a person who does believe in certain things has a right to support them.”
Campaigning for O’Day brought back happy memories of the 1920s, when the two were part of a lively political quartet, along with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, barnstorming around New York State. O’Day, who devoted herself to politics after her wealthy husband died in 1916, even played a small part in the original Val-Kill partnership. “When politics is through with us,” she wrote in the Women’s Democratic News in 1925, “we are retiring to this charming retreat that is now rearing its stone walls against the beautiful cedars of a Dutchess County hillside.”
Eleanor liked to point out in her stump speeches around the state that O’Day represented “the real reason most women enter politics”—not to win elections but to change the social order. Eleanor criticized the Republicans for their short memories. In 1933, they were willing to accept regulation. They said, “‘Take our business. Do anything to make it run.’” Now “the sick man is better and doesn’t like ‘regulation.’” Nothing matters but profit. Nor was it right for Republicans to call for a “balanced budget” when so many people were still suffering. “Are you going to stop feeding the hungry?” she asked.
Hick too was caught up in the partisan fight. Her reports, as she made her way east from California through Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and finally Kansas, devoted more time to taking the temperature of the electorate. California, she reported, was on a hunt for Communists, orchestrated by the right-wing, “violently anti-administration” metropolitan newspapers. The list of “reds” included Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and, down in the Imperial Valley, Harry Hopkins and the president himself. But Hick had the impression that the majority of Californians, while they hated and feared Communists, “do not believe quite all the newspapers have to say on the subject.”
Farther east, in places like Winnemucca, Nevada, she found ordinary people—garage men, filling station people, restaurant keepers, storekeepers—believing that business was a little better than it had been the year before. “Sometime, somewhere, somehow, they feel the President will find a way out.”
There was even some good news in a couple of places. Virginia City was prospering, thanks to a new gold and silver mining technique. And the construction of the monumental Boulder Dam (later Hoover Dam) now employed about forty-eight hundred men, many of whom would have otherwise been wandering the country in search of work and shelter.
What people didn’t like, however, was the intrusive “social working” by the federal government, especially when it meant that pay was sporadic and inadequate. “This ain’t a job,” a worker on a high school stadium in Casper, Wyoming, told her. “I don’t know exactly what you’d call it, but it ain’t no job—not when some case worker comes and tells you how much you need to live on, decides for you, and you only work two or three days a week, and then maybe you don’t even get all the case worker says you should have. A man doesn’t feel he’s getting anywhere, somehow.”
People asked when the federal government would bring back the Civil Works Administration, a program that had employed hundreds of thousands building roads and bridges for a brief period before being discontinued out of political caution. It was a message that Hick’s boss, Harry Hopkins, heard loud and clear.
In Kansas, where farmers had suffered years of drought, Hick saw miles of burnt brown pastures and Russian thistle piled up to feed the very thin cattle. Yet farmers who were offered a chance under a federal relocation program to move to better land refused. “All we need is a little rain!” one protested.
“Human patience,” Hick wrote Hopkins, “is a beautiful—and terrible—thing!”
It was funny in a way. Here she was, bringing hope for the future, and they were telling her they didn’t need her government welfare. Just a little bit of rain. “They don’t want to be ‘rehabilitated,’” Hick wrote Eleanor in September. “Tonight the humor of it hit me right in the stomach. I laughed and laughed. . . . I wonder if we aren’t rather losing our perspective.”
—
ON NOVEMBER 6, 1934, Caroline O’Day and the entire Democratic ticket scored a huge and unprecedented victory in the midterm elections. For the first time in history, the party of a sitting president gained seats in both houses of Congress: nine in the House and nine in the Senate.
A few days later, Harry Hopkins was driving with his assistant Aubrey Williams and a few other political pals to the racetrack in Laurel, Maryland, when he suddenly announced, “Boys, this is our hour. We’ve got to get everything we want—a works program, social security, wages and hours, everything—now or never. Get your minds to work on developing a complete ticket to provide security for all the folks of this country up and down and across the board.”
Very soon Hopkins had a proposal to take to FDR, who was spending his traditional Thanksgiving break in Warm Springs. By the end of the vacation, Hopkins and FDR, with the help of Rex Tugwell and others who were on hand, had worked out a plan for the most ambitious program ever undertaken by any federal government anywhere in the world. At that point, the new plan did not yet have a name.
It still didn’t have a name on January 4, when FDR, giving his State of the Union speech to Congress, translated it into down-to-earth language. The heart of the plan would be work projects, using the skills and trades of the unemployed. The projects should be “useful,” should spend a considerable portion on wages for labor, and should promise an ultimate return to the federal treasury. The government funds should be “actually and promptly spent” and must in all cases give employment to those on relief, in localities where need was greatest.
In April, when Congress finally approved and funded the new relief project, it was still a many-headed beast without a single leader; Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins were vying for dominance. FDR, trying to please everyone as usual, kept the two men guessing about who would head up what was finally taking shape as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In the end, the risk-taking Hopkins won out over his more prudent rival Ickes, who was left to oversee larger projects as head of PWA.
Eleanor had her doubts about WPA. She feared it wasn’t ambitious en
ough in a nation where unemployment was still at 20 percent. She and many others thought it a mistake to target only relief recipients for WPA assistance. In order to qualify, a person had to be reduced to destitution. Eleanor believed WPA should have been more inclusive.
But in the end, WPA would prove to be one of the New Deal’s most important programs, providing more than eight million jobs to hungry and needy Americans, while enormously improving the country’s infrastructure, transforming its public spaces, and inspiring a wave of creativity in the arts.
In the meantime, FDR’s choice of Harry Hopkins to head WPA was good news for Hick. Hopkins trusted Hick’s reports from the field; now he would need her to monitor implementation of the new program. Hick still had a job.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BLOWING OFF
WHEN HICK AND ELEANOR went to the opera together, Hick, to the amazement of her companion, would sit frozen in a kind of trance after the curtain came down. She could be “torn to shreds” listening to a recording of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. She rooted without reservation for her team—whether it was the Minnesota Gophers or the Brooklyn Dodgers—and she was amazed and amused that Eleanor cared not a jot one way or the other. In October 1932, in the middle of FDR’s first campaign for president, Hick got to attend the World Series with the Roosevelt family at Yankee Stadium. It was game three of the Series, between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs—a thrilling game in which Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig each hit two home runs. But what made the game a baseball legend for all time was Babe Ruth’s “calling” his second home run—pointing out the spot in the bleachers where he planned to land it—before he swung the bat. Eleanor, comfortably wedged between FDR and her son Jimmy, slept through the entire thing.
There were many times when Eleanor grew impatient with Hick’s lack of control over her feelings. “Why do you have to feel in a way which makes you have bad times?” she protested to Hick, after Hick had stormed off in one of her fits of jealousy. Yet Hick’s ability to “feel” was one of the things Eleanor loved about her. Though Eleanor kept her own feelings under control, she gravitated to people who were capable of strong emotion and rebellion. At Allenswood, she passionately defended the girl who was expelled for throwing an inkstand at a teacher. As First Lady, she took her cue from people who were zealous about their causes. Even though she often wished Hick could be calmer about their relationship, Eleanor admired Hick’s ability to write and live with such passion. She once praised one of Hick’s reports for being “explosive.”
Even after the satisfaction of the midterm victory, there was still plenty for Hick to rage about back in the field. After the passage of WPA legislation, in April 1935, things got worse instead of better for people relying on the New Deal. With the mindlessness of a huge bureaucracy, the federal government cut off funding for existing programs in many places before the WPA funding made its way through the pipeline to actual human beings. It led Hick to file some of her most outraged reports. In Toledo, Ohio, she wrote, seventy-two crossing guards had their pay cut off yet continued to guard children crossing the street, working only for groceries while they waited for the WPA to kick in. Two months went by, and there were still no paychecks.
“People keep asking them, ‘Got your pay yet?’ When they answer no, the President loses another friend.”
“We’re getting a bad reputation,” Hick warned, “for not living up to promises.”
Even more shocking was the situation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Hick arrived that December in biting cold and deep snow. The district WPA director, one Mr. Sweet, met her at the train station and drove her, slithering and slipping, up to the worksite on top of a small mountain. In wind that cut to the bone, two hundred men were at work clearing underbrush and digging out stumps to make a roadway and build a ski jump. The road they were building was to be named Franklin D. Roosevelt Parkway. It was a magnificent site, with forty-mile views on a clear day. From one spot, Hick counted eleven lakes. Beautiful pines ran down the steep slopes. It was indeed a perfect spot for a park and a ski jump.
But the men, Hick learned, had been taken off relief just as soon as they went to work for the WPA, and had been waiting for a whole month for the first paycheck from the new agency. Some of them had been coming to work with “nothing but onions” (Hick underlined for emphasis) in their dinner pails. Thirty of them, she realized, “hadn’t brought dinner pails because there was nothing to bring in them.” Some of them were threatening to walk off the job. But so far they were “still plodding along, patient, dumb. . . . Ye Gods,” Hick fumed, “doesn’t anyone in Washington realize what it means to run into debt when you are trying to support a family?” She returned to the office and “landed with both feet” on the disbursing officer, who promised to get some of the checks out there that afternoon, and the rest the next day.
But Hick couldn’t get the workers out of her mind, “out there in the bitter wind, working on the ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt Parkway.’” Mr. Sweet couldn’t either. Finally, he said, “Aw, hell, let’s send some food out there.” Hick responded, “You bet,” and offered to pay for it.
“No, you won’t,” was his answer.
Sweet gave an assistant a ten-dollar bill and told him to load up the car with sandwiches and hot coffee and get it out to the job. “And God help him if he ever told where it came from.” Hick and Sweet agreed to go fifty-fifty on whatever it cost.
Hick considered writing a report to Harry Hopkins that would be “anything but pretty.” But she decided to wait, believing that the payroll business would work itself out. “We’re in this mess,” she wrote Eleanor. “It should have been prevented, but wasn’t. . . . And in the meantime I blow off to you. Because you are safe.”
Hick knew that she was sometimes viewed back in Washington as a Cassandra who saw only the “dark side.” But what she was witnessing, day in and day out, would make anyone feel gloomy. “And God help us if Congress ever really does start an investigation of relief and WPA. . . . The thing’s too big. It’s got out of hand. And much of it is so ridiculous. . . . Objective? HELL—I can’t be objective.”
As outspoken as she was, Hick was temperate in comparison with a seventeen-year-old colleague and friend named Martha Gellhorn. Hick had encouraged Harry Hopkins to hire Gellhorn to report from the field. But she sensed early on that Gellhorn was likely to be even less able than she to keep the emotional distance required for the job. After two months in the field, Gellhorn was so outraged by the poverty and bureaucracy that she stormed into Hopkins’s office and threatened to quit and write an exposé. Hopkins convinced her to go meet with Mrs. Roosevelt instead.
Gellhorn took an immediate liking to Eleanor; she later described her blue eyes as “attendrissantes”—enveloping their object in tenderness. Eleanor managed to get past Gellhorn’s indignation about relief programs and discover that she was unhappy as well about the winding down of her affair with Bertrand de Jouvenal. Eleanor convinced her to stay on the job, promising to make sure her reports got read and to try to turn them into action.
Gellhorn now became Hick and Eleanor’s shared project. “Poor Marty!” Eleanor wrote Hick. “I guess you’ve got to take her on and be her ‘tower of strength.’ Don’t let her get sorry for herself and become just another useless, pretty, broken butterfly. She has too much charm and real ability for that.”
Hick promised to do her best. “Since I backed her originally,” she wrote Hopkins, “I’m prepared to take any rap there is.” There were two things to be done, Hick believed. First, she had to get “a broader, saner viewpoint on this thing.” Second, she had to learn to “keep her mouth shut.” She has “plenty of ability,” Hick told Hopkins. “I’ll manage her somehow, or wring her neck.”
But Gellhorn refused to be managed. She stayed on the job for another ten months. Then one day, on a visit to the little town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, she discovered a group of farmers and rancher
s toiling away for a dishonest contractor. “They told me about how awful it was—these big strong westerners just shoveling mud around.” She took the workers out for beers and suggested to them that the way to get attention was to throw some bricks though the windows of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration offices. After she left town, some of the men did just that, triggering an FBI investigation of possible Communist activity. Gellhorn wrote gleefully to her parents that she was now considered a “dangerous Communist.” Hopkins was forced to fire her.
It says a lot about Eleanor’s attraction to dissent that she remained Gellhorn’s friend and admirer. She invited her to dinner with FDR and encouraged her to speak her mind to him. Knowing that Martha had no place to go when she lost her job, Eleanor even invited her to live and write at the White House. It was there that Gellhorn began work for which she was much better suited, using her experience in the field to create a masterful collection of fiction, The Trouble I’ve Seen.
What set Hick apart from someone like Martha Gellhorn was her ability to be a team player. Unlike Eleanor, Hick had a fan’s temperament: just as she had cheered on the Gophers back in Minnesota, she now rooted wholeheartedly for FDR, Hopkins, and the WPA. When there was good news, she was just as capable of celebrating as she had been of crying foul. There was, increasingly, more to celebrate. Back in 1933, Hick had written a vivid description of sixty-three families blacklisted by a mining company for union activity, and living for the two years since in tents about forty miles from Charleston, West Virginia.
