Derailed by the Great War, pounded by the virulence of the Red Scare, progressive values were in retreat during the 1920s. Leading artists and writers fled to Europe to escape the sense of crude materialism and political repression that had followed in the wake of wartime hysteria. Without an international war to justify their need to fight, political bullies turned their wrath upon liberals, feminists, and all innovative cultural expression or experimentation.
Hounded and harassed by Red Scare “patriots” and Ku Klux Klan excesses, some radicals and reformers lapsed into silence. Many, including FDR, joined the business boom parade. Others, like Frederic Howe, Woodrow Wilson’s commissioner of immigration, now appointed to the Department of Agriculture, wrote bitter memoirs. Diplomats, like FDR’s friend Bill Bullitt, left the disappointments of Versailles to party in exile—to “lie on the beach and watch the world go to hell.” The tired and timid were overcome by a sense of political torpor.
But the women’s social reform network remained steadfast. During the 1920s its organizations actually grew in strength and purpose—and became during the Depression America’s most vital institutions of resistance to despair. Their settlement houses and community centers fed the hungry and continued to nourish hope. Internationally, while the United States retreated from its commitment to the League of Nations, only the women of the peace movement continued to agitate for mutual security policies and the World Court—led by Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
During the first hundred days, from 9 March to 16 June 1933, Congress enacted fifteen laws and FDR created a new bureaucracy that rooted the New Deal But at every level it bypassed women.
In the 1930s, with fifteen million Americans in a state of desperation and gloom, the women’s social reform network received a new respect. While communists and fascists threatened revolution, the women’s network had proposed only to humanize, democratize, socialize the capitalist economy.
While FDR resurrected the economy, ER mobilized the women’s network to demand a New Deal for women. In 1933, that was revolutionary. Every woman appointed to a position of responsibility required a fight; every achievement for women involved a battle. ER confronted the task before her in a combative mood. She and her mentors, most notably Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, had been in this fight for a very long time.
Dismissed for decades as socialists, meddlers, misfits, the indefatigable women of social reform remained eager to offer their expertise and services to the government. They hoped that with capitalism on the verge of collapse, their progressive and internationalist themes would at last be given space on the national agenda.
Although FDR’s Brains Trust failed to credit their work, the New Deal reflected their pioneering vision. Since the 1880s the great settlement house leaders had called for changes that would have guaranteed jobs and health care; housing, recreation, compulsory free education; decency in the workplace, security at home.
While Columbia University professor Rex Tugwell and other Brains Trusters were still schoolboys, ER’s colleagues—Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Lillian Wald, Mary Elizabeth Dreier—championed industrial codes, safety and health standards, fair work practices, trade unionism, minimum wage, an end to child labor, consumer labels.
They introduced public playgrounds, neighborhood houses, free night classes, public health programs, and the Visiting Home Nurse Service. For a brief political moment, Progressive Party politicians sought their support. In 1912, both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson courted endorsements from Jane Addams and Lillian Wald.
In 1924, ER chaired the first presidential women’s platform committee which presented the Democratic Party with the progressive women’s agenda. Published on the front page of The New York Times on 25 June 1924, it established goals for economic security that predated the work of FDR’s Brains Trusters by a decade: the right to bargain collectively; an eight-hour day; a federal employment agency to encourage full employment; abolition of child labor; equal pay for equal work for women and men; federal aid for maternal and child health; sex education and venereal disease prevention; public education for all; health care for all; an end to vigilante violence and the Ku Klux Klan.
The Red Scare and then the Depression unraveled their initial state and local successes, and by 1933 many of their achievements were undone. Sweatshop conditions reappeared. Eight- and ten-hour work laws passed state by state were scuttled. State and municipal industrial codes passed in dozens of progressive communities were ignored. Humanitarian programs were defunded.
Now ER and the women’s network confronted the future with renewed determination. The First Lady was primarily an activist who considered the game of politics a team sport. FDR liked to boast that he was a “practical politician.” He knew how to compromise, make deals, be duplicitous. ER understood the nature of the game, but wanted some assurance that it would be played for the right reasons, the most needful causes. During the 1920s she had written articles to demand real power for women and asserted that men played politics to win elections; women played politics because they sought to make things better for most people. FDR was the politician. ER was the agitator.
She was convinced that the federal government had a primary responsibility to confront basic and urgent social issues, and was most closely identified with two organizations that specifically anticipated the changes promised by the New Deal, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), and the National Consumers League (NCL).
The Consumers League movement began in 1888 when Leonora O’Reilly, a shirtmaker, called upon philanthropist Josephine Shaw Lowell (the first woman appointed to New York State’s Board of Charities in 1876) to help recruit privileged women willing to meet with factory workers. O’Reilly’s appeal for “help and sympathy from the wealthy and educated women of New York for their toiling and downtrodden sisters” resulted in the National Consumers League, founded in 1891.
Until her death, on 17 February 1932, attorney Florence Kelley led the NCL, and it had a mighty impact on America as consumers organized around her slogan to “investigate, agitate, legislate.” Kelley, the daughter of Quakers and educated at Cornell University, was the divorced mother of three. Brilliant and determined, when she agreed to lead the NCL, she moved from Hull House in Chicago to Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement and became an energizing center of New York’s progressive network, which included the leaders of the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903.
Kelley was the leader of the women’s network which included ER, Molly Dewson, Frances Perkins, Rose Schneiderman, and Clara Beyer. They considered Kelley, in Perkins’s words, “the mother of us all.”
ER rejoiced when the network’s first legislative success, the Sheppard-Towner Act, passed. Signed by President Warren Harding on 23 November 1921, it protected mothers and infants, provided health education, well baby clinics, childhood nutrition, and prenatal nursing care. Kelley and her circle were convinced a “new day had dawned.” The act was opposed by the American Medical Association and Red Scare groups, including the Woman Patriots and the Sentinels of the Republic, which called it a conspiracy to “Sovietize” America. But the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional in 1923. The attacks continued, however, and in 1927 funding for the first federal act to protect mothers and infants ran out.
ER campaigned vigorously for the continuation of Sheppard-Towner. On 5 January 1927, she argued for its extension on behalf of the League of Women Voters, then an activist organization. She wrote to Senator Royal Copeland of New York, a physician:
I hardly think it is necessary to urge [your support], as I know you as a doctor must appreciate the wonderful good [it] has accomplished, especially in the rural districts of our own State….
Of course, I realize that the old States rights cry might be raised, but then we might just as well give up any agricultural aid or any aid towards road building, and I do think mothers and babies are a fairly important asset to this country, and I feel sure that you feel the same.
Senator Copeland read ER’s letter into the Congressional Record. But Sheppard-Towner was defunded, and not reconsidered until the New Deal. It was nonetheless so popular that forty-five states continued some form of infant and maternity care, without federal support.
ER and her colleagues also crusaded for a National Child Labor law to outlaw factory work for young children. In 1923 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional both a federal child labor measure and a District of Columbia minimum wage law for women. Kelley was outraged: Why are “seals, bears, reindeer, fish, wild game in the national parks, buffalo, migratory birds, all found suitable for federal protection; but not the children of our race and their mothers?”
A child labor amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress and signed by Calvin Coolidge in 1924, but state ratification was blocked by shrieks of Bolshevism: Various church groups and opponents of public health, public education, and all public improvements protested the amendment as a government intrusion into the “freedom” of family life. ER personally campaigned for it in 1928, and was attacked in the pages of The Woman Patriot. The amendment languished until 1933, when ER and her circle reignited interest in the outrages that faced “our toiling children.” During the first months of the New Deal, several industries, including textiles, banned workers under the age of sixteen. But most industrialists preferred their economic traditions: Why hire a man for a dollar, or a woman for fifty cents, when you can hire a kid for a dime?
Even some of FDR’s political allies squirmed away from the issue. In 1934 ER wrote Robert Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and FDR’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, to protest an editorial that branded Florence Kelley and other amendment supporters communists.
Actually ER’s letter to the ambassador was a curiously diplomatic document, which revealed her ability to combine personal flattery with blunt political criticism:
It seems rather dreadful to make a complaint and ask a favor in the same letter, but that is what I am about to do.
A very old friend of mine, who worked very hard for the President in the campaign, has a daughter, Faith Whitney, who would like to be presented at court some time in the not too distant future….
And now for my bitter complaint: I feel quite sure that you are not in sympathy with this editorial, but all the world has sent it to me and I wonder if you could say something, gently but firmly, to your editor about classing as communists these people who have worked for years for exactly what the administration has now done through its [National Recovery Administration] codes. Because of the code, great numbers of states are rapidly ratifying this amendment, and this would put the administration, and the President himself, in the class of communists.
With all good wishes and many apologies for being disagreeable….
The real issue, ER wrote for publication, was the government’s right to regulate, to intervene into the sacrosanct realm of private property, private enterprise, and the family: “It is said that this is no time to pass [the Child Labor Amendment] because many families are dependent upon the pennies which their children may pick up.” ER did not argue with the right of children to make small amounts of money, but noted that the real objection was that this amendment “would be an entering wedge and would mean that Congress would tell the fathers and mothers of the country where they should send their children to school, and how they should educate them. I can only say that an entering wedge is already with us, for we already tell people that their children must be educated. We also tell people they must have their children vaccinated.”
ER also intensified her commitment to the NCL’s struggle against toxic wastes that imperiled the health of factory workers and people who lived near toxic dumps. During the 1920s, the NCL’s first effort was to achieve a ban against industrial radium poisoning, especially among workers in watch and clock factories. ER joined that effort, along with the NCL’s protests against untrue advertising practices, now reintroduced by Rex Tugwell.
Although Tugwell failed to credit her, Florence Kelley introduced the concept of ethical advertising and product labeling in a consumer campaign against advertising abuses as early as 1899: “What housewife can detect, alone and unaided, injurious chemicals in her supplies of milk, bread, meat, home remedies?” The NCL then published a “white list” of retail stores which met minimum standards of hygiene “and treated their employees fairly.” The NCL’s first white label campaign involved underwear—since every “lady,” affluent or worker, purchased, for example, “drawers, chemises, petticoats, corsets,” and “flannelette goods.” To be awarded a white label, a manufacturer had to answer several questions: Were children employed? Were factory laws violated? Were decent work standards met?
The National Consumers League became the most influential consumer movement of the early twentieth century. By 1906 there were sixty-three leagues in twenty states; by 1913 there were thirty thousand members. When National Recovery Administration codes were introduced in 1933, the NCL’s white label campaign became government policy.
Shortly after FDR’s election, ER and her friend Lady Astor, the former Nancy Langhorne of Virginia, spoke at the thirtieth anniversary luncheon of the National Consumers League, which was also a memorial to Florence Kelley. The first woman to sit in Parliament, Nancy Astor’s politics were complicated, but she admired ER and considered her Kelley’s heir. “I came to pay tribute to two great women, Florence Kelley and Eleanor Roosevelt…. I was thrilled to think that you are to have a woman in the White House who doesn’t deal with things at the top but with those at the bottom. I don’t believe the world quite realizes what a wonderful asset it will be to have such a First Lady….”
In response, ER’s speech was uncommonly bold: “There is something fundamentally wrong with a civilization which tolerates conditions such as many of our people are facing today. We talk of a ‘new deal’ and we believe in it. But we will have no ‘new deal’ unless some of us are willing to sit down and think this situation out. It may require some drastic changes in our rather settled ideas and we must not be afraid of them.”
Throughout the White House years, the NCL and the WTUL were the foundations upon which ER stood as she fought for a New Deal for women. To rally public support for the changes she championed, she also relied upon her weekly press conferences for women journalists only.
Every Monday morning, ER met with forty accredited “newsgirls,” many of whom were hired because of her press conferences, and they tended to be loyal to the First Lady and to protect her from public criticism. They included, outstanding reporters, representatives of both national press syndicates and small-town newspapers. Decades later, former Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith, during the 1930s wife of Maine congressman Clyde Smith, remained grateful that ER invited her to attend even though she wrote for one of America’s smallest weeklies, in Skowhegan, Maine. During her first conference, ER created a relaxed atmosphere in the Red Room on the first floor, surrounded by roses and spring flowers. She passed around a box of candied fruit, and established the ground rules. She brought members of the women’s network eager to address urgent issues; occasionally she brought visiting notables, women writers, performers, artists.
ER intended to manage the news. Her conferences were coordinated, carefully arranged. Louis Howe, Stephen Early, and Hick considered the participants and gave ER advice. FDR’s advisers worried that she might get him ”into trouble”. “Louis Howe and my husband alone seemed unworried.” She credited Howe with her “confidence” in journalists. “He had a very high regard for his own craft and insisted that newspaper people were the most honorable group in the world.” ER shared his conviction, despite occasional tricksters who betrayed her trust. ER hated to be misquoted, and Tommy attended every conference to take her own notes.
However informal and charming, ER had a stern side. Her first announcement sounded fierce: The press conferences were “planned for your convenience,” and everyone was to be guided by specific rules of conduct—no gossip, no leaks, no scoops. No kidding. She would take “no political questions whatever. Whoever does ask such a question never comes back.”
Eventually, she changed her mind; and her press conferences became a vital source of news. But the women of the press respected ER’s boundaries and acknowledged her threat: If she was displeased, they would be banished.
ER said that “all women in public life needed to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.” Focused on public policy, she ignored personal insults. Although attacks on her children upset her, she remained unruffled by criticism. When friends like Hick feared she would be wounded by a particularly vicious article, she was invariably unconcerned. During the first month in Washington, several male reporters trailed her everywhere, eager for a story. When her horse slipped in the mud, the press reported the mishap with a certain glee:
ER “was thrown into a mud puddle in Potomac Park.” But, ER told reporters, the horse merely fell to its knees, and “I slid off very gracefully right into the mud…. It wasn’t a real fall, I just slipped down to the ground.” She remounted and continued her ride, and delighted in the cherry blossoms and Japanese magnolia trees just coming into full bloom.
On this occasion, ER sounded defensive. But generally the First Lady was resilient and tough regarding the press, and she used intrusive reporters, as she did her press conferences, to advance her political agenda. According to Bess Furman, at FDR’s press conferences, “all the world is a stage”; at ER’s press conferences, “all the world is a school.” The fact is, both Roosevelts enjoyed “the bully pulpit.”
Although she invited controversy, ER strictly limited discussion to those activities she considered newsworthy. She also rejected ghostwriters. When NBC asked her to read a script somebody had written for her, she replied with an official announcement issued by the White House press office: The First Lady would “never consent to have anyone write a broadcast or make one for her. She is sorry but has made this rule and has kept to it consistently.”
Through her public activities, writings, and broadcasts, ER set a new pace, new goals, a new understanding of what was possible and acceptable for women to achieve. If her views represented heresy and radicalism to some, for ER and the women’s progressive network they represented the substance and soul of America, the long-postponed American Dream.
Positions of influence and respect for women were central to that dream. As soon as FDR was elected president, Mary Williams Dewson (called Molly) and ER met to draw up a list of qualified women for federal appointment. Dewson arrived in Washington for the inauguration armed with the names of sixty women of achievement, all of them dedicated Democrats. By 1935 over fifty women had been appointed to ranking national positions and hundreds to leadership positions in various government agencies on the state and local level.
ER and Molly Dewson, officially chair of women’s activities of the Democratic Party, actually controlled patronage for women directly. ER personally submitted their lists to Jim Farley, who as boss of the Democratic Party presided over patronage, or to Louis Howe or Frances Perkins, or an agency or cabinet official on whose goodwill she could rely. She could generally rely upon most cabinet members, except Harold Ickes.
Close to Jane Addams, Ickes had been legal counsel to Chicago’s WTUL and was a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. But he disliked ER, criticized her privately, and publicly disapproved of her “meddling.” Some observers thought she reminded him of his wife, Anna Wilmarth Ickes, a forceful, independent woman of wealth whose published anthropological studies of Indians of the Southwest were highly regarded. Their difficult marriage was the subject of considerable Washington gossip.
The impact of Ickes’s opposition to ER’s influence was minimized by her alliance with Jim Farley. They had worked together since the Smith campaign of 1924. ER understood Farley, and respected his position. Her first words upon landing in Chicago during the 1932 convention were addressed to him: “A fine job, Mr. Farley.” With FDR’s entire party waiting on the tarmac, ER headed directly for Boss Farley, hands outstretched to thank him for his role in getting her husband nominated. Not everybody remembered to do that, and Jim Farley never forgot it. In return he accepted her judgments, which tended to be final, even though he often disagreed with her. “He trusted me as a person….”
ER and Molly Dewson worked publicly and privately for every woman FDR appointed. Dewson recalled that she first went to Warm Springs, FDR’s healing center in Georgia, in 1928 to lobby for Frances Perkins’s appointment to New York’s Industrial Commission, at ER’s suggestion. Neither Dewson nor ER was personally close to Perkins. According to Dewson: “She is like Kipling’s cat that walks alone. It was just that I admired her work for trade unionism and for better working conditions.”
Patronage for ER involved two issues: She wanted to see progressive women Democrats in power to build momentum for a New Deal for women, and she wanted women who traditionally worked hard and long with no reward to receive tangible recognition. Occasionally ER sought to reward hardworking women with patronage jobs for their husbands, sons, nephews. “There is a young man… whose mother was a great help in the campaign. If he could get some kind of a job either in Seattle or in Idaho…”
ER was outraged when her preferred candidates were passed over for political reasons—such as competing patronage claims by male politicians.
ER’s personal involvement in such matters was ongoing: “Dear Jim: I am horrified at the Donahue appointment! How could you do it before some of the other women had been considered? Is it McAdoo, and must we have terrible women who are opposed to us, just because McAdoo wishes it?” ER was rankled in part because she deplored “KuKu” McAdoo—Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and a presidential aspirant who had accepted Klan support in 1924. By 1933, California Senator William Gibbs McAdoo was a regular stumbling block for progressive women.
While every achievement was arduous, Dewson and ER got notable women appointed to significant office. In addition to Frances Perkins, Mary Harriman Rumsey headed the Consumers’ Advisory Board of NRA, Florence E. Allen was a judge of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Josephine Roche was assistant secretary of the treasury, Nellie Tayloe Ross was director of the Mint; and others.
ER celebrated every breakthrough women made. She hosted musical receptions in the East Room to honor Amy Beach, for fifty years America’s most notable woman composer. Other women composers also gave concerts, including Iris Brussels, Charlotte Caldwell, Dorothy Radde Emery, Grace Boles Hedge, Mary Howe, and Florence Lowenberg.
ER worked hard to achieve a major appointment for her friend Ruth Bryan Owen. Daughter of Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, and attorney Mary Baird Bryan, Ruth Bryan Owen was appointed envoy to Denmark and Iceland. Elected to Congress in 1928 and 1930, representing Florida’s fourth congressional district, from Jacksonville to Key West, she initiated legislation to protect the Everglades as national parkland; served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, fought for a Department of Education, and a better funded, enlarged Children’s Bureau.
She hoped to be appointed secretary of the interior, and wrote her friend Fannie Hurst: FDR “thinks the time has come to put a woman in the cabinet,” and Interior “having Education, Conservation for forests, care of Indians, National Parks & general safe-guarding of natural resources,” appealed to her because of her congressional experience and environmental struggles.
However disappointed, when FDR named her “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Denmark,” she became the first woman to hold a major diplomatic post. ER honored her with a festive dinner attended by eight hundred women and men, where Fannie Hurst toasted her great friend: Owen “was blazing a trail in diplomacy just as the women in covered-wagon days had blazed a trail in geography.”
But for all ER’s connections, Molly Dewson’s vigor, and FDR’s goodwill, opposition to women in public life continued. While Jim Farley considered ER’s recommendations “with respect,” Dewson realized “how much more clamorous the men are” about patronage. In April 1933 she wrote a seventeen-page letter to ER detailing Farley’s reaction to the first hundred names they had submitted. There were delays and detours; they were unable to present more than one name at a time; it was agonizing. By June, Dewson reported, only seven women recommended by the Women’s Division were appointed; six others were “pending.” By July she was exasperated and wrote ER: “Heavens but the nicest of men are slippery as eels.”
“Throughout the 1930s, ER and Dewson worked every channel of influence to promote women to positions of respect, prestige, power. Only women in power, ER believed, would consider the needs of women without power; men in power rarely, if ever, did.