ER’s response to FDR’s first hundred days was hopeful but also critical. After years of anxiety, drifting, waiting upon the “laissez-faire” or “natural” course of the economy to correct itself, the government acted. With amazing unity, Congress, the president, and business leaders agreed: The government had a role to play to save America from fiscal disaster. The president’s first act in office was to call Congress into special session to deal with three problems: banking, the federal economy, and unemployment.
ER was impressed by the initial “spirit of cooperation.” Business leaders “who ordinarily would have scorned government assistance were begging the government to find solutions for their problems, willingly accepting almost anything that was suggested.”
But she considered it all merely a first step toward a far distant goal. Experimental and imaginative, the first New Deal still ignored the very foundations upon which, ER believed, democracy depended: housing, health care, and education. And virtually all of it discriminated against women.
Bankers and economic “royalists” were thrilled by FDR’s first two pieces of emergency legislation: the Banking Act, which passed the first day with little opposition; and the more controversial Economy Act, which appealed exclusively to fiscal conservatives. It passed the House 266-138 only because sixty-nine Republicans voted for it, while ninety-two Democrats voted against it.
The Economy Act eliminated or downsized government agencies, reduced government salaries, cut veterans’ pensions and medical support, and called for the firing of all federally employed women married to federally employed men. It made FDR seem “a states’ rights, limited government, penny-pinching Democrat.”
In the spring of 1933, FDR turned to the business community and focused on deflation, reduced government spending, and a balanced budget. In this phase of the New Deal he ignored the terrible impact state and municipal budget cuts were having, for example, on education. ER was particularly disheartened by America’s neglect of its most precious resource, the nation’s children. The U.S. commitment to education was paltry, and ER called rural education a total disgrace. Spending cuts in education diminished children’s lives, and she joined New York’s Episcopal bishop William T. Manning in opposing New York’s “staggering and crippling cuts” in public education, including the layoff of eleven thousand teachers.
Bishop Manning (with whom FDR had worked closely during the 1920s to raise money to build New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine) described the situation in a journal called School: Teacher layoffs resulted in greatly increased class size; evening schools, summer sessions, and continuation and adult education programs were abolished; athletic centers and school gardens were eliminated, repairs and replacements postponed, supplies and equipment reduced. Bishop Manning concluded that it was “not the time to weaken our schools, when the crumbling morale of many homes is only kept from breaking by the hope of opportunity for the children.”
ER called for relief efforts that would employ teachers in community service. Voluntarily, teachers in New York City, she noted, were feeding hungry children in the schools at their own expense. “I think we should all give them thanks,” but we should also investigate the dimensions of the need throughout the country “and make sure that no child suffers from malnutrition.”
While FDR initially called for deflationary measures, cost-cutting that would balance the budget, ER called for increased expenditures. Their most public disagreement was clearly presented in competing columns of the Women’s Democratic News. In response to her contrary views, FDR wrote his first and only editorial—to urge popular support for the Economy Act and for still further reductions in local taxes. The Economy Act, he insisted, would save the federal government “25% in its normal cost to the taxpayer.” But federal expenditures were only 35 percent of the nation’s total tax bill. Therefore, “the real meat in the coconut is the expenditures of local government which is over 50%…. The real saving, the big saving must be made in cutting the local governments…. It is the only practical way. It is their responsibility.”
But that would dry up local spending for education and the public services that people needed most, ER had countered in her column. This was a time to expand government services. The real problem, ER wrote, was to levy taxes from “proper sources,” from “people who are endowed richly with this world’s goods, or such businesses as are making large profits.”
ER urged more individual and community vigilance concerning “the way banking businesses are run.” “Congressional investigations lately have given many people the feeling that they are a little too much like innocent lambs led to slaughter in the hand of our great financiers.”
Contrary to FDR’s initial legislation, ER called for a transformation in our “sense of values” so that we can “adequately help other human beings.” She devoted several chapters of her book It’s Up to the Women to those issues that required federal and local investment. Recreation—camping, hiking, sports—was basic to life. “We have been so busy making a living that we have had less time really to live…. I always feel that education should open as many avenues as possible to us so that we may have as many ways of obtaining recreation and enjoyment as possible.”
Healthy family life required available, affordable health care, and ER called for medical security: Only “the very rich and the very poor” had real access to quality hospital care. For those of “average means” a serious accident or illness was a “calamity” that involved dreadful debts, preventable suffering, avoidable death.
She wrote that public health began with education, and included the construction of public health clinics, hospitals, and hands-on treatment: nutritional programs and agricultural experimentation to make healthful diets available to all. She called for family planning, now called sex education, for boys as well as girls: “To me it seems that one cannot lay too much emphasis on the necessity for planning family life in order that the health of the family may be kept on a high level.” But it was years before the New Deal addressed education or health.
FDR at first ignored the fact that schools were closed or closing all over the country because local communities had run out of money as property taxes diminished. In Georgia, where at Warm Springs FDR enjoyed his “second home,” 1,318 schools were shut down, and hundreds of thousands of students were locked out. In Akron, Ohio, schools remained open, as long as teachers agreed to work without pay. Chicago owed its teachers over $28 million; 85 percent of Alabama’s schools were closed. Nationwide, over 100,000 teachers were unemployed.
Deflation, salary reductions, and cost-cuttings failed to address the magnitude of America’s problem. Yet FDR’s Economy Act was limited to such measures. It reduced all government salaries by 15 percent, and streamlined the federal bureaucracy. By June, dozens of agencies and commissions had been terminated. FDR cut aid to vocational education, agricultural colleges, and the Farm Bureau’s experiment stations and extension programs by 25 percent.
An amazing document, contradicted by subsequent New Deal programs, the Economy Act represented the enthusiasms of his conservative budget director, Lewis Douglas. The tall, handsome, thirty-nine-year-old rugged individualist cowboy appealed to FDR. For a time this son of a great Arizona copper-mining fortune, whose father founded the Phelps-Dodge Company, was as close to the president as Louis Howe and Raymond Moley. A Social Darwinist darling of Wall Street who “confused the principle of laissez-faire with the Word of God,” Douglas gave FDR legitimacy among fiscal Tories but alarmed New Dealers, who watched in horror as he downsized or eliminated useful scientific, research, census, and survey programs—most of which were restored during the 1940s.
Although ER despised Douglas’s methods, his cabinet presence gave her an ironic gift. To serve, Douglas resigned as Arizona’s only representative to Congress. His decision enabled ER’s closest girlhood friend, Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway, to join the Roosevelts in Washington. Elected in a landslide victory as Member of Congress at large, she served her 450,000 constituents (over 140,000 of whom were on relief) with vigor.
A warm and generous hostess, and a successful rancher, hotelier, and businesswoman, Isabella Greenway was devoted to the welfare of all Arizonans and successfully championed New Deal projects for her state. Unlike Douglas, she fought for the interests of workers and labor groups.
Greenway brought a welcome flamboyance to ER’s circle. She cherished their biweekly “air our minds” luncheons, which featured good cheer and candid conversation with Frances Perkins, Mary Harriman Rumsey, and another of ER’s girlhood companions, Elisabeth Cameron Lindsay, daughter of Henry Adams’s friend Elizabeth Cameron. Married to Sir Ronald Lindsay, Britain’s ambassador, ER appreciated Lady Lindsay’s “keen,” occasionally “wicked,” sense of humor. “We looked at things from more or less the same point of view.”
Of her core political group, nobody was closer to ER than Isabella Greenway. A woman of spontaneity and action, she was on a plane within thirty minutes when ER called her during the campaign to visit in California. When she arrived, ER asked about her baggage. She had her toothbrush in her briefcase, and knew she could depend on ER for a change of clothing and everything else.
Their first collaboration, begun even before Greenway was sworn in, was to protest FDR’s Economy Act. While ER emphasized the cuts which affected women, Greenway condemned veterans’ reductions. The founder of the Arizona Hut, a woodcraft factory to employ convalescent veterans, Greenway was outraged by the cuts which harmed them. She agreed with Louisiana Senator Huey Long: “Talk of balancing the budget! Let them balance the budget by scraping off a little of the profiteers’ profits from the war.”
ER was particularly outraged by the administration’s decision to fire federally employed wives. Between 1929 and 1933 it had become customary for married women to be the first fired. Several states passed laws to fire and ban married schoolteachers, university professors, and hospital workers, regardless of their family situation or need. According to The New York Times, the First Lady insisted vehemently that it was a “very bad and very foolish thing” to establish marital status as a standard for dismissal. Why should hardworking, competent women whose work was useful be idled to offset other costs, or balance the budget?
ER also rejected FDR’s idea that government workers were earning more than they needed. While he made a grand gesture of returning to the Treasury 15 percent of his own first salary check “as a symbol” of what government workers and others might do, ER declared that government salaries “in most cases are so small as to be hardly enough to support more than two persons, and certainly not enough on which to educate and rear a family.”
Despite his wife’s opposition, and an ever-growing storm of protest, FDR refused to address the hated marital status clause. Within two years, thousands of women were dismissed. Many had worked for over fifteen years, and they lost all right “to reappointment and to the pension, toward which they had been contributing.” According to the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, “nine out of ten of those discharged were in real need of their jobs.” Home mortgages were foreclosed; life savings were lost. The formerly working wives of Army and Navy personnel were now on relief. Some couples chose divorce to retain their family income; some men who earned less than their wives resigned instead. It was a bitter rule, and ER and her allies repeatedly spoke out against it.
It was astounding and unprecedented for a First Lady to protest her husband’s legislation. But on this issue ER did so in many forums, in print and on the air, none more publicly than in It’s Up to the Women, where her chapter “Women and Jobs” caused the most enduring controversy.
ER believed absolutely that individual happiness for women, married or single, required work outside the home. Without that, she insisted, there was no personal or economic independence.
ER specifically rejected the ancient tradition that “a woman’s place was in the home. She must marry, and if she did not marry, she had no work in the world.” The dreaded image of the spinster aunt, forced to become the family servant in exchange for food and lodging, might now be erased. The modern woman was a working woman, who wanted to be “able to do something which expresses her own personality even though she may be a wife and mother.” ER refused to see a conflict between “a woman’s career and a woman’s home.”
“A woman, just like a man, may have a great gift for some particular thing. That does not mean that she must give up the joy of marrying and having a home and children.” In fact, she warned, “Mr. Man” might awake one morning “to find that you have a wife in your home who is an automaton—no longer a fulfilled and happy personality.”
ER’s political philosophy represented the radical end of New Deal thinking. It embraced the needs of unorganized workers, the marginalized, and dispossessed: landless and migrant farm workers in the Southwest; sharecroppers in the Southeast; urban “slum” dwellers; domestic workers; uprooted and unemployed industrial workers—women and men. It would be years before the New Deal addressed their needs, but ER was among the first to put them on the national agenda.
By publishing It’s Up to the Women in November 1933, ER sought to go beyond the established network of women activists and reach out to all women in America to join her in a crusade for change and decency. The White House had never before been used as a platform from which the First Lady expressed dissenting political ideas.
Pioneering feminist scholar Mary Ritter Beard praised the book and celebrated “Mrs. Roosevelt as Guide and Philosopher” in the New York Herald Tribune: “For more than a century the Great White Father in the White House has been instructing his people in right conduct…. And during all those years the First Lady of the Land has remained in the background…. But now the Great White Mother emerges as a personality in her own right and starts an independent course of instruction on her own account.”
It’s Up to the Women lacked the verve and spice of ER’s feminist articles published during the 1920s, and it was filled with homilies, home remedies, maternal advice. But for all the platitudes and evasions, ER’s goal was subversive. As First Lady she meant to reach every woman in America: It was up to them to take charge, to organize and agitate on behalf of social progress. She challenged women to think for themselves; to consider their own lives; to take the battle for modernity into their own homes. ER criticized privileged Women of her own class and culture who continued to live in luxury without a care for the world about them. She urged them to volunteer; to get out and about; to be satisfied with less material opulence. She addressed poor women of the cities, who always had to work outside the home to keep their families from starvation and who, without leisure or comfort of any kind, managed to feed and clothe their children and struggled to provide education.
ER addressed poor country women, who bore the additional burden of loneliness. One farm woman told her, “I haven’t been outside my yard in nine months except to take the children to the doctor.” There was “less opportunity on isolated farms to learn from each other and you will often find the farmer sending all the milk to town and feeding his children on condensed milk, sending the vegetables to the market or grocer and keeping none for the children.”
In country and city, domestic workers suffered most. Domestic workers were generally disregarded and abused because of their “foreign” birth or African-American ancestry. Their pay was insignificant; their family and leisure needs were discounted. ER called on all women to consider the important work actually done by women in domestic service and to upgrade household work to “the plane of any other professional or industrial occupation.”
ER’s goal was long-range: to create a grassroots movement, led and informed by women, that would create a groundswell of support for the more essential changes New Deal rhetoric promised. FDR’s goal was immediate: to achieve the possible from his political opponents. Their own needs dire, they momentarily supported government intervention.
The third bill introduced during FDR’s deflationary binge was the low-alcohol content 3.2 Beer and Wine Act, a first step back from Prohibition. The sale of liquor would create a new source of taxable revenue, and the bill served as something of a diversion during the tense Senate debate over the Economy Act.
On 7 April 1933 “light” spirits were again sold legally throughout America. Although many expected the First Lady to condemn the legalization of liquor, ER was relieved. Prohibition never worked, and she deplored the bootleggers and gangsters it spawned. Like most Americans, ER considered it a welcome change, which helped transform the nation’s mood.
However much America’s spirits lifted, FDR himself acknowledged that his first three laws were not “constructive.” They did nothing really to change the economy’s direction. Nevertheless, they represented a useful political strategy: His deflationary, business-building steps ensured him the support of congressional conservatives, who were, at first, too grateful to oppose him. By April he changed course and pursued public works, unemployment relief, mortgage relief, and farm parity and began to transform government-business relations in America.
Several New Deal ideas sailed through, including the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established to refinance mortgages and lend money to homeowners. Other acts were enormous, confusing, controversial. ER was particularly thrilled by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)—which ER singled out for celebration in It’s Up to the Women.
Workers in the past, ER wrote, had too little influence and made no decisions. The needy and the people most involved were never consulted. She believed NIRA was to change that. Through the National Recovery Administration (NRA) it sought to revive business by creating councils of business leaders, consumers, and workers; they would collectively introduce decent codes of industrial behavior.
She championed the new agency in every way, and she titled the last chapter of her book “Women and the NRA.” NRA codes set wages and conditions of work industry by industry. The NRA’s Blue Eagle became the first and most dramatic symbol of the New Deal, under the flamboyant administration of General Hugh Johnson. He had worked with Bernard Baruch during World War I in the War Industries Board, which served as the NRA’s model.
The NRA championed “industrial self-government” and promised dramatic reforms, including occupational health and safety standards, unionism, and such workers’ demands as minimum wages and maximum hours.
Conservatives considered Section 7A, which encouraged unionism, NIRA’s most radical feature. It also established the Public Works Administration (PWA), which was to be administered by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.
On 17 May 1933, FDR asked for $3.3 billion in PWA funds to construct roads, bridges, and other federal projects. It was America’s first peacetime public works project, and FDR said that “history would probably record it as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”
For ER, Rose Schneiderman, Frances Perkins, and all their friends in the Consumers League and Women’s Trade Union League, the NRA seemed the achievement of their lifelong goals. Perkins and Schneiderman had campaigned for industrial codes ever since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, when 146 women perished. That tragedy resulted in New York’s Factory Investigating Commission (FIC), which hired Perkins, Schneiderman, Mary Dreier, and Pauline Newman. In 1915, their work was supported by Al Smith and Robert Wagner, then New York legislators, and resulted in New York State’s first Industrial Code. Perkins was the only woman appointed to New York’s Industrial Commission in 1919, and FDR appointed her New York’s industrial commissioner in 1928.
Now Perkins was secretary of labor and she appointed fiery, red-haired labor orator and former milliner Rose Schneiderman the only woman member on the National Recovery Administration’s Labor Advisory Board. President of the WTUL, an expert on wages, hours, and industrial working conditions, Schneiderman was expected to submit ideal codes for those industries where women predominated. Schneiderman called her years in Washington “the most exhilarating and inspiring of my life.”
They were also years of anguish. After her first month in office she denounced the NRA’s imposition of lower minimum wages for women and demanded a single wage scale for men and women. ER, the National Consumers League, the National League of Women Voters, and the National Woman’s Party joined her protest. It was one of the few times business and professional women who championed the Equal Rights Amendment joined hands with working women and their social feminist allies.
But their unity on behalf of a single wage scale was ignored. The act appeared with a “joker” clause: “When females do SUBSTANTIALLY the same work as males they shall receive the same pay.” By 1935, pay differentials ranged from five to twenty-five cents an hour in over one-quarter of all codes—especially in businesses that employed large numbers of women. Despite all protests to Hugh Johnson and FDR, wage discrimination prevailed. Moreover, discriminatory NRA codes locked industrial practice into government policy.
Feminists compared NRA provisions with the plight of women in Italy and Germany: “Women are being forced back to the laundry tubs in Fascist Europe. Women are being paid lower wages than men under more than 100 of the NRA codes in effect in the United States today.”
Although ER and such social feminists as Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, and Rose Schneiderman argued for projective legislation for women workers and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1920s, ER believed in equal pay for equal work. She now publicly deplored wage scales that classed adult women with young boys and professional women with unskilled men, and that set minimum wages for women at half the wage rates for men, often in the same industry and at the same tasks.
She demanded a single minimum wage standard for NRA codes and repeatedly insisted that the New Deal should mean a “square deal for women”: “There may be some special reason why they are doing these things at this time, and in any case I have no right to interfere, but I… hope that any such discrepencies may be only temporary….” But pay differentials were permanent, and ER continued to speak out against them.
Schneiderman’s efforts on behalf of African-American women were also blocked. Her only success was in the NRA code for the handkerchief industry, where she persuaded manufacturers to remove their ban on hiring black women for skilled positions. But she was unable to prevent a line in the laundry code that permitted employers to pay black women less than half the salary of white women, and she was unable to prevent the exclusion of domestic workers from all NRA consideration. Despite her protests, and ER’s efforts to have domestic work valued as any other employment, they were denied NRA benefits.
Nevertheless, working women and men in various industries considered the NRA a great leap forward, and white women benefited especially by those codes that included mandatory minimum hourly wages and maximum-hour provisions. Moreover, Section 7A promised to end company unions and potentially encouraged labor’s right to bargain collectively without restraint or coercion.
On 3 July 1933, Schneiderman wrote ER:
I had a most thrilling time at the hearings on the cotton textile code where I sat in as a member of the Labor Advisory Board. The code, though not an ideal one, will go far toward making life and work for the tens of thousands of textile workers more humane and secure. The fact that children under sixteen will now be outlawed from the industry will not only help make room for adult men and women but will also set a standard for other industries. General Johnson is a peach….
For ER the NRA was only a first step. “It was up to the women” to end “sweatshop conditions” and buy only from merchants who sold Blue Eagle merchandise. She called for individual vigilance and consumer boycotts, and urged women to recognize that every act was a political act. Since women did almost 90 percent of all buying, how they spent their money profoundly influenced life for labor, industry, and agriculture. All personal decisions mattered. No woman should buy a dress or a pair of gloves made “under sweatshop conditions.” “No matter what we can afford to buy, we cannot afford to buy at the expense of the health and strength of our fellow human beings.”
An invigorated consumer movement was spearheaded by her friend Mary Harriman Rumsey, who was appointed director of the NRA’s Consumers’ Advisory Board in June 1933. Barnard graduate, key founder of the Junior League in 1901 (which ER joined as a charter member), and renowned horsewoman, the independent activist daughter of railroad financier E. H. Harriman was an imaginative crusader. Her father’s generation emphasized competition, she told a reporter; his “was a building age.” “Today the need is not for a competitive but for a cooperative economic system.” Personally, Mary Harriman Rumsey created cooperative business ventures as well as community councils and neighborhood organizations.
Influenced by the works of Irish poet, mystic, and reformer George Russell (AE), she proclaimed consumers by right the third and equal partner in a cooperative commonwealth of business and labor. An ardent New Dealer, Mary Harriman Rumsey encouraged her younger brother Averell to leave his business interests, the excitement of Meadowbrook and his polo ponies, and join her in Washington, where all the “real excitement” was, she assured him, to be found.
ER supported every consumer and labor effort as the NRA developed. On Friday, 13 October 1933, two days after her forty-ninth birthday, ER was given a bouquet of red roses and the first labeled NRA garment, made under the Coat and Suit Code. Hailing a “new era” for labor, ER received Blue Eagle label 000001 and her daughter Anna received label 000002. As ER accepted her gifts, a new silver-fox-collared black cashmere-and-worsted coat, from the shop workers, she said that the code meant fair wages, decent hours, sanitary conditions, and regular work. It ended “the disadvantage of seasonal unemployment,” and it ended the sweatshop.
When the millinery industry became NRA, ER attended an even more emotional ceremony. Using a gold thimble presented to her by Sarah Leichter of the Millinery Workers Union, the First Lady sewed the first label into her new dark-brimmed straw hat with white quills. ER was joined on the platform by New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who said: “Any industry that cannot pay a living wage is not worth saving.”
ER’s commitment to the NRA extended to her own small craft shop at Val-Kill, and to house servants: “One has no more right to expect sweat-shop hours and wages in one’s own home than in a factory.”
But the NRA was fatally flawed. Some considered it an industrialist’s blessing. With no provision for price controls, manufacturers passed along increased wages to consumers. There was no government authority behind the NRA beyond its moral maxim: “We Do Our Part.” And it was voluntary. There were mine owners, farm owners, countless companies without competition, with no need to join.
ER understood that the NRA was a limited first step. But she wanted it to succeed. After all, the War Industries Board had worked in wartime, and she hoped industrialists would be inspired by Hugh Johnson’s enthusiastic leadership.
But Johnson’s public style was wild and unpredictable. He was overworked, drank too much, offended too many. A missionary for capitalist self-control, he agreed to such labor demands as maximum hours and minimum wages, supported public works and full employment. Conservatives considered him a maniac: prolabor, pro-union. Radicals called him the Mussolini of the New Deal: a crusader for trusts, government-protected cartels. NRA’s road was to be very bumpy.
ER worked to promote New Deal ideas that urged a truly mixed and planned economy. She championed public works and nationally owned industries and utilities to secure the income needed to pay for social services. If utilities were government-owned, rural America might be electrified, and everybody would have running water, indoor plumbing, access to public transportation. Utility profits could pay for a national health care program and for public education through high school. Depression conditions generated such dreams, and they seemed entirely feasible.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was the first and last such experiment. TVA was a vast scheme that would electrify and develop one of the nation’s poorest regions—the seven states of the Tennessee River basin: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky. With this massive public works program, full employment would occur; poverty would disappear; the area’s scourge of malaria, tuberculosis, pellagra would subside.
ER and FDR were united on every aspect of TVA, and she applauded his bold vision, which included local control, support for local crafts and culture, “and everything else” required for “a well-rounded civilization.” Inevitably, controversy surrounded TVA. It was an amazing experiment in “public ownership” for an area almost the size of England, with a population of two million people.
Senator George Norris asked FDR how he would respond to all the charges of socialism, communism, fascism, and how he would define “the political philosophy behind TVA.” FDR answered: “I’ll tell them it’s neither fish nor fowl. But whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.”
ER visited TVA often and considered it a model for the future: During the campaign of 1932 “my husband and I had gone through some of this TVA area” and were “deeply impressed by the great crowds,” their hopefulness, and their poverty.
Scarcely eight years later, after the housing and educational and agricultural experiments had had time to take effect, I went through the same area, and a more prosperous area would have been hard to find. I have always wished that those who oppose authorities to create similar benefits in the valleys of other great rivers could have seen the contrast as I saw it. I realise that such changes must come gradually, but I hate to see nothing done….
Unlike TVA, ER considered the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), a human disaster. It benefited only large farm owners and never “trickled down” to farm workers. The AAA raised farmers’ prices, and promised farm owners parity with industrial prices. To ensure higher prices (farm parity), scarcity had to be created: The enormous annual surplus of produce—wheat, milk and milk products, tobacco, livestock, cotton—had to be eliminated. To achieve scarcity, Henry Wallace introduced a “federal allotment” plan, whereby the government would pay farmers to reduce their crop acreage. Payments would be supported by a processor’s tax. In other words, not the farmer but the middleman would pay: Taxes on containers, boxes, and bottles were added to consumers prices.
Wallace’s scheme was a disaster for the South, where plantation owners discharged and evicted their tenant farmers and sharecroppers once they were paid not to grow their usual harvest of rice, cotton, or tobacco. While the Farm Credit Administration relieved the farm mortgage crisis for farm owners and Wallace’s allotment program guaranteed new profits to the largest landowners, the poorest and most devastated were now uprooted and torn from the land.
It led to unbearable misery and quickened the “great migration” from the rural South. To alleviate the most bitter consequences of AAA, more radical New Deal efforts were required, including the creation of the Farm Resettlement Administration of 1935—which ER heralded and championed from the beginning.
ER was appalled by the extraordinary waste involved in the AAA’s first efforts to create scarcity: Over ten million acres of cotton were destroyed; over 300 million bushels of wheat and countless acres of corn were wasted; over six million pigs were slaughtered; over a quarter billion pounds of meat were buried or processed into fertilizer.
Ruby Black wrote in Editor and Publisher that the First Lady “raised un-shirted Hell.” But the First Lady denied it. Despite the fact that Black’s source was one of ER’s “best friends,” Lorena Hickok, ER insisted that she made only one telephone call—and simply asked: Why do you destroy all this cotton when there are so many people shivering with cold? Why do you waste these pigs when thousands of people are starving?
That a decent and democratic nation caused such destruction without any distribution plan while Americans were ragged and hungry seemed to ER barbaric. Her complaints led to the creation of the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, which enabled Harry Hopkins’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration to purchase farm surpluses and donate them directly to relief agencies. Later, the national food stamp program was created to enable poor consumers to purchase food surpluses in ordinary store transactions.
Although ER was annoyed with Hick for leaking a confidence, the women of the press were angry that ER was not credited for her achievement. In a column syndicated by Scripps-Howard, Ruth Finney wrote: “Of course all the male officials are convinced they would have thought of it themselves, but they had not done so up to the time she insisted it was the thing to do.”
ER never forgave the secretary of agriculture. Her contempt for Wallace’s initial activities and long disregard for the cruel conditions that confronted landless farm workers lingered. However liberal Wallace’s views actually became, ER distrusted his judgment and was impatient with his statistical and scholarly approach to economic and human problems.
ER never relied upon Wallace as she pursued farm resettlement and the effort to create sustainable communities, which absorbed most of her personal time during the 1930s. She worked instead with Wallace’s assistant secretary of agriculture, Rex Tugwell, who for a time was one of her primary allies. Handsome, erudite Columbia University professor of government, Rex-ford Guy Tugwell was known as FDR’s most radical adviser. Called the Lenin of the New Deal, he was considered by FDR’s opponents unacceptably Red, and by ER’s friends unfortunately arrogant. He considered himself a genuine conservative determined to save capitalism through democratic planning and control.
Tugwell observed that mass production in advanced industrial societies guaranteed “permanent plenty” alongside widespread unemployment and poverty. He explained the Depression in terms of capitalism’s short-sighted refusal to distribute the economy’s inevitable surpluses. The problem was compounded by America’s high isolationist tariff policies, which hobbled the export market. Like ER, Tugwell argued that society had a responsibility to achieve security for all its citizens through consumer protection, public works, and the creation of sustainable communities. Consequently, during the first years of the New Deal, ER was one of Tugwell’s most abiding defenders. Their critics considered their views revolutionary and un-American.
Most controversial was Tugwell’s consumer protection activities. He arranged an exhibit the press called Tugwell’s “Chamber of Horrors” to dramatize the dangers consumers faced every day. He was amazed and bitter that his photographs of women disfigured, occasionally blinded, because they used various hair dyes, eyelash dyes, and dangerous chemicals for cosmetics failed to arouse a public outcry.
In March he issued an administrative order to lower the “maximum allowable” chemical spray residue (pesticide) on fruits and vegetables. Growers, especially apple producers, and politicians protested.
They howled even louder on 6 June 1933, when ER’s old Sheppard-Towner ally, Senator Royal Copeland, introduced a new pure food and drug bill with a provision for precise labeling information for produce and canned goods. Industrialists went on a rampage: Tugwell sought to destroy confidence in American business.
Press attacks on Tugwell were unrelenting. Within the administration, he grew more isolated, and the consumer movement was increasingly ignored. Initially, FDR was pleased to be identified with an effort to upgrade Theodore Roosevelt’s 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and he encouraged Tugwell. After FDR turned away from the controversy, ER persisted—as did Molly Dewson and Frances Perkins. ER spoke out: Women want to know what they are buying. What is hiding in that closed can? What are women putting on their skin? What are they feeding their children?
To ER’s dismay, the press assaults rendered Tugwell’s “charter of honesty and fair dealing” a complicated, marginal issue, easy to mock and dismiss. Leading food and drug lobbyists defended the “sacred right” to advertise as a fundamental freedom.
Subsequently, journalists acknowledged that they ignored or distorted the controversy “because of their publishers’ intense opposition.” Most publishers refused to “print such unmistakable news as Mrs. Roosevelt’s endorsement of the bill.”* Tugwell’s consumer efforts came to naught, and the entire project was downgraded.
During the first years of the New Deal, ER’s most dependable ally was Harry Hopkins. Only Louis Howe among FDR’s extended staff was closer to ER.
Harry Lloyd Hopkins, a New York settlement house worker associated with Lillian Wald, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and graduated from Grinnell College in 1912. During the Depression he conceived of a relief project that involved instant jobs for New York City’s unemployed in parks and public facilities. As governor, FDR was impressed with Hopkins’s effort and established New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) in 1931, which Hopkins chaired.
On 21 March 1933, FDR announced his decision “to launch the biggest relief program in history.” Based on the work done in New York by Harry Hopkins and Frances Perkins and enhanced by the vision of Senators Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, and Edward Costigan, the Emergency Relief Act created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) to grant $500 million in aid to state and local governments.
It promised direct relief as well as the reemployment of millions of needy Americans. Hopkins’s agency quickly became the most vital pillar of New Deal hope.
Within twenty-four hours after assuming office, Hopkins organized his staff, disbursed social workers to investigate the neediest situations, ordered state governors to establish state relief organizations, and spent $5 million of his half-billion-dollar budget.
Given such crying need, Hopkins insisted, there was no time to waste. One thousand homes were being foreclosed each month. Millions of real people were starving. There was little to investigate. Relief applicants were not “morally deficient.” They were not responsible for their dreadful plight. Questions of “religion, race or party” were irrelevant.
FERA funds initially paid state relief agencies cash grants for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. While Ickes’s PWA funds moved slowly and involved big projects to get business moving, Hopkins wanted a Civil Works Administration (CWA) to provide immediate work for the relief of people in need. He hated the idea of the dole, and he believed in jobs: real jobs, at real wages.
Since there were no jobs, it was the job of government to create them. Within one month, Hopkins’s new CWA found work for over four million men. When Southern members of Congress protested that the CWA wage level was too high, Hopkins replied: “Some people can’t stand seeing other people make a decent living.”
A reemployment program, CWA was not a “relief” project: There was no means test, just valuable work with decent wages. When General Hugh Johnson told a press conference that CWA wages were higher than NRA codes anticipated, a “perfectly absurd situation,” Hopkins told the next press conference: “We are paying decent subsistence wages, nothing more.”
The sparring administrators met face to face. Johnson wanted to know why Hopkins had not consulted him before he established his wage scales. Hopkins asked: “Why didn’t you consult me before you approved your lousy codes?”
Johnson backed off. From ER’s point of view, there was no contest. Hopkins had the best interests of the people of America uppermost in his mind: His work projects included manual and factory workers, teachers and nurses, artists and writers, professionals and service workers. He was highly regarded by ER, Frances Perkins, and Lillian Wald, and his vision seemed the triumph of their best efforts, finally established as national policy. Work replaced want. Jobs meant dignity. “A new standard of public decency was being set.” Twenty million Americans benefited from federal relief funds during the dreadful winter of 1933–1934.
Inevitably, Hopkins had his detractors. He was high-strung and underweight, his eyes bulged and his energy bubbled. He chain-smoked and drank: endless cups of coffee by day, spirits by night. Disheveled and argumentative, he appeared as unkempt as Louis Howe. He liked to party with the rich and frolic in supper clubs. Divorced from Ethel Gross, a Jewish social worker, he left her and their four children in 1928. In 1929 he married Barbara Duncan, and their daughter, Diana, was born in 1932. His private life attracted gossip columnists.
Although Hopkins accepted sex segregation in employment and never included wage differentials in that large category he called “lousy,” he was the first male administrator to acknowledge that the New Deal neglected women.
FDR’s first hundred days did nothing for an estimated 140,000 homeless women and girls who wandered the streets and railroad sidings of America. Not one program acknowledged the needs of an estimated two to four million unemployed women, former workers in search of jobs. While married women were routinely fired, the plight of single, divorced, and widowed women was ignored.
On 20 April 1933 ER had addressed the annual meeting of New York’s Travelers Aid Society, to portray the misery of thousands of homeless women. Like Meridel Le Sueur, who published a vivid description of their plight in her book Women on the Breadlines, ER understood that women suffered more quietly than men. They did not sell apples-on street corners; they did not beg. They tended to disappear. They stared out the window, went to the library, sat on park benches, hid in the woods. They looked for work, sometimes solicited, and wandered about.
In January 1932, Le Sueur explained that her work was not fiction. “I did not write these stories, I recorded them…. A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics concerning her.”
When Meridel Le Sueur’s first story was published in New Masses, the editor advised women to avoid defeatism and consider “the unemployed councils … of the organized revolutionary movement. Fight for your class, read The Working Woman, join the Communist Party.” ER insisted on a New Deal for Women, to alleviate widespread suffering, as well as to redirect such rapidly growing revolutionary sentiment.
Dismayed by official inaction, ER sponsored a White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women, on 20 November 1933. With Molly Dewson, the First Lady organized and planned the conference in less than a week. Fifty prominent women attended—social workers, clubwomen, private philanthropists, government administrators, and representatives of the WTUL, the Red Cross, the National Consumers League, and the League of Women Voters, among other groups.
ER presided at the November conference, and Harry Hopkins keynoted. He estimated that over 400,000 women required immediate help from FERA or CWA. Only fifty thousand women were actually on relief in the United States. Hopkins promised to increase that “eightfold” within “twenty-five days.” But he needed help. He wanted imaginative advice about available work, tasks suitable for women. FERA projects could not compete with the private sector, and men had decided women could not work outdoors. They were deemed too weak to garden or to rake leaves. Construction projects were closed to women. Besides, women with families could not travel as men could and, ER noted, had to work in their own communities.
Ellen Sullivan Woodward, appointed to head the Women’s Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in September, acknowledged that it was harder to find 500,000 jobs for women than it was to find four million jobs for men.
ER and her circle pointed out that ten to fifteen hours at steamy washtubs doing tons of laundry, as well as birthing and lugging children, created women strong enough to rake leaves.
Within two months, under Ellen Sullivan Woodward’s direction, more than 300,000 women were employed in various jobs. By January 1934, every state relief administrator was ordered to hire a Women’s Division coordinator to get women of all races and backgrounds into the workforce, in professional, skilled, and unskilled areas. Projects were created in canning and gardening, and in public libraries and schools. Desperately needed social services were provided in private homes and public institutions; in state hospitals and prisons.
The wellborn daughter of Mississippi gentry, Ellen Sullivan Woodward headed the women’s work divisions of various agencies as they were organized, beginning with the Civil Works Administration (CWA).
Skillful and ardent, Woodward was the only woman named to Mississippi’s State Board of Public Welfare when it was created in November 1932, and she coordinated Mississippi for Roosevelt. In May 1933, Ellen Woodward left Mississippi for Washington, never to return.
At first Molly Dewson scoffed at her appointment. Woodward should be rewarded for her campaign efforts, but this job was too challenging for this “bit of southern fluff.” Everyone who knew Woodward disagreed.
From the first, ER supported Ellen Woodward. The First Lady was chief adviser, “first sponsor, first critic, and first official friend.” But for all their work, women’s reemployment was slow, sporadic, inadequate. By 1938, 372,000 women had WPA jobs, but over three million women were still unemployed and almost two million women suffered the insufficiency of part-time work.
Over 25 percent of the women employed by FERA and WPA agencies were professionals: teachers, athletic directors, artists, librarians, nurses, performers, musicians, technicians, administrators. The vast majority were unskilled and were reemployed in domestic services, mattress and bedding projects, surplus cotton projects, and sewing and craft projects that appeared in every region. “In 1936, 56% of all women in the WPA worked in sewing rooms,” which seemed to many the deplorable triumph of sex segregation: Unskilled men were given a shovel, a hammer, or a hoe, but unskilled women had “only the needle.”
Both Woodward and ER were criticized for allowing such discriminatory practices, as well as wage differentials, to prevail. Civil Works Services (CWS), created specifically to provide jobs for white-collar women, paid its workers the prevailing local wage, often as little as the FERA allowable minimum: thirty cents an hour. CWA workers, mostly men, received a dollar an hour.
The effort to employ as many women as possible in the widest range of jobs allowable met the greatest wall of indifference. Nevertheless, many lives were improved by women’s programs. In 1933, 60 percent of all nurses were unemployed. By 1934, CWA employed ten thousand nurses in schools, clinics, and hospitals, constituting 19 percent of professional women employed. FERA librarians delivered “books by packhorse in the Kentucky mountains, by flatboat in the Mississippi Delta, by snowshoe….” Over one thousand libraries were opened in “log cabins, community houses, filling stations, country stores, barber shops.”
Still, women’s projects were continually demeaned. ER and Woodward had few, if any, real supporters among their male allies. Hopkins never endorsed the principle of equal work for equal pay, and despite ER’s efforts, FDR never spoke out in favor of women’s work.
The creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps dramatized women’s struggle. ER was particularly enthusiastic about the CCC. Like FDR, she was thrilled by the concept that offered unemployed urban youth aged eighteen to twenty-five outdoor jobs through a program that combined wholesome education, a new respect for the environment, and country living.
On 31 March, FDR signed the Civilian Conservation Corps into law, with an antidiscrimination clause. Chicago’s Oscar De Priest, the only African-American Member of Congress, had introduced an amendment to the CCC bill: “No discrimination shall be made on account of race, color, or creed….” It was accepted by voice vote. Unfortunately, no provision to include women was considered.
Ultimately, three million men, including 250,000 veterans, planted two billion trees, stocked millions of waterways with fish, and built 52,000 public camp grounds and 123,000 miles of roads. They connected twelve thousand miles of telephone lines, protected grazing lands, drained mosquito-infested marshes, fought fires, battled crop disease, preserved wildlife habitats and historic sites, built hiking and horse trails in the national parks. They were responsible for so many magnificent deeds that Grand Canyon park rangers were asked if that great miracle of nature was a CCC project. According to Barbara Kraft: “At a total cost of $3 billion, the CCC was a bargain for the government and the country.”
ER supported the CCC and helped establish lending libraries and book distribution centers for each camp. But she could not understand why women should be denied access to such a life-enhancing program.
She crusaded for a parallel corps, or a camp program, for needy young women that would combine education, recreation, and work in similarly wholesome surroundings. While FDR recruited 250,000 men, she demanded at least a hundred women in one camp by June. But her activities were scorned. Even in New Deal, circles, the idea of “She She She” camps was ridiculed. Several state relief workers anticipated “serious discipline problems if women were brought together to live.”
Frances Perkins supported ER’s insistence on at least one camp for women, and their efforts resulted in Camp Tera. At first sponsored by New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, it opened on 10 June 1933 on the shores of Lake Tiorati in Bear Mountain State Park.
When ER visited the camp the week after it opened, she was angry to find only thirty women there—when over one thousand had applied within days of its announcement. Hundreds of women had been registered, and ER wanted to know what knots in the red tape prevented them from being there.
The next day The New York Times headlined ”RECRUITING SPEEDED FOR WOMEN’S CAMP.” “‘Red Tape’ Is Denied.” ”MRS. ROOSEVELT HOPEFUL.” New York’s State Conservation Department and the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration promised to expedite the number of women for admission to the camp, which had a capacity of 360. Sixty-five women would be admitted by the end of the week. The delay was explained by the necessity for “thorough investigations of each applicant.” The women “must be without resources” and from age eighteen to thirty-five. ER denounced the requirements, and the age level was raised to forty. But nothing was done to alleviate the means test.
ER worked personally to improve the unfair situation for women. Camp Tera at first had no radio, and the women wanted music. ER donated a radio, and over time contributed books and various amenities. To create camp programs for women that would be educational, appealing, healthful, and stimulating, she worked with Hilda Worthington Smith, chair of the New Deal’s worker education project that was part of FERA’s Emergency Education Program (EEP).
Created during the summer of 1933 by Harry Hopkins, EEP was intended to reduce adult illiteracy and provide a vast range of continuing educational opportunities for adults. “Illiterates are dangerous to a democracy … easy prey to propaganda and exploitation,” declared Hopkins. However patronizing EEP’s statement of intent, it offered cultural and vocational education state by state and benefited millions of adults, including farm workers and sharecroppers, isolated mountain and urban youth, women and men. By 1937, 200,000 adults a year were enrolled in over twenty thousand classes, learning everything they wanted to learn: arithmetic, electrical wiring, ballroom dancing, Shakespeare, hygiene, and zoology.
The worker education program was one of the smallest components of EEP, but Hilda Smith infused it with energy and imagination throughout the thirty-five state programs she administered. As Bryn Mawr’s dean, Smith had helped found the vital Bryn Mawr Summer School for Working Women in 1921, which annually provided one hundred industrial workers with scholarship assistance to attend college classes in literature, history, speech, hygiene, economics, astronomy, creative movement, and other “liberal subjects.” ER and the WTUL supported this pioneering effort to provide working women “with complete freedom from economic anxiety and domestic care” while they studied. ER hailed Smith’s goals to combine leadership training and academic skills to widen women’s “influence in the industrial world and help in the coming social reconstruction.”
During ER’s November 1933 conference, Hilda Smith persuaded Hopkins to accept her idea of a nationwide program of residential worker schools and camps for jobless women. But little was achieved until ER called another conference on 30 April 1934: the White House Conference on Camps for Unemployed Women. Attended by seventy-five women and men, that conference resulted in a definite “plan of action.” By 1936, ninety camps served over five thousand women; eventually 8,500 women benefited from some resident camp experience.
The educational camps varied region by region and reflected cultural differences. There was a camp on a Negro college campus for Arkansas sharecroppers’ daughters, a camp in New Jersey for Eastern professional women, a college camp for Ozark mountain women, and a camp for Indian women of North Dakota who had never before left their reservations.
ER was disappointed in the judgment of relief administrators who refused to allow women “outside” work and prohibited them from reforestation and environmental projects. She remained bitter about discrimination in salaries and all benefits. Whereas young CCC men received a “wage” of one dollar a day, camp women received “an allowance” of fifty cents a week. Whereas men were generally recruited for a year, women were entitled to only two or three months in a camp program. Although the camps were not racially segregated, 90 percent of the campers were white; and arrangements to include widows and young married women with children were discussed but never materialized.
Whatever the limitations, campers were enthusiastic. Pauli Murray, who subsequently became an attorney, educator, minister, poet, civil rights activist, and one of ER’s first African-American friends, believed Camp Jane Addams saved her life. A recent Hunter College graduate, she was unemployed and barely scraping by on the economic margins of Depression America. Exhausted and overwonked, she was sent to the camp by her physician, Dr. Mae Chinn, because she was suffering from malnutrition and pleurisy. According to Pauli Murray:
The camp was ideal for building up run-down bodies and renewing jaded spirits…. We slept in winterized barracks, two women in each room…. A staff of young, well-trained counselors planned a wide variety of recreational pursuits—dramatics, arts and crafts, hiking along marked trails, rowing, and, when winter set in, sledding, skiing and ice skating. The outdoor life gave me a tremendous appetite; I got over my cough and began to gain weight.
ER was never quite satisfied by the camp programs. She was displeased that the Army ran the men’s camps in military style, and she regretted that more extensive opportunities were not offered for women. She wanted to see a more broadly defined program of two-year voluntary service and education that might create a national youth corps of women and men who would devote some time to the land and some time to the creation of schools, settlement houses, and health centers, and build the beginnings of an experiment in real utopian planning throughout America.
ER dedicated some part of every day to the achievement of the great promises introduced during the first hundred days, and she encouraged everybody to join her. She said in December 1933, “Peace time can be as exhilarating to the daredevil as war time. There is nothing more exciting than building a new social order.”
*A Pure Food and Drug Act passed in 1938, but it was meaningless. Tugwell called “the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Bill,” the Wheeler-Lea Act of 1938, “disgraceful.” There were “no standards, no grades, no penalties for fraud, no restriction on patent medicines of however dangerous a nature.” Congress had “truckled to every shabby interest.” The issue was shelved until environmentalists persuaded Richard Nixon to reintroduce the issue.