Of all the issues on ER’s agenda, none was more bitter than the U.S. government’s refusal to confront lynching. The ravages of the Depression and the rise of racial violence and fascism in Europe fortified white supremacists in the United States. Similarly, America’s commitment to segregation and its ghastly habit of public lynching, unpunished and unopposed, emboldened Nazis in Europe. During the 1930s, the Klan regrouped, and a new generation of night riders appeared. Opposed to a New Deal for all, Southern leaders determined to retain their privileges which depended on humiliation and degradation, peonage and poverty.
There were twenty-eight lynchings in 1933, and it was clear to ER that the federal government had to take an official stance to oppose these atrocities. ER joined the NAACP’s crusade to pass a federal antilynch law. Lynchings were not merely public hangings, they were community ceremonies witnessed by mobs of men, women, and children who worked themselves into bloodlust as torture and burning proceeded. They were a historically sanctioned tradition, protected by “states’ rights,” and local “law enforcement” agents and the “best people” in the area either participated in or condoned the event. Lynchings were as depraved a means of social control as any society had devised.
In 1934, ER joined a growing biracial movement of opposition to lynchings that called for a new day in the United States. Walter White’s 2 April “Welcome Home!” letter concerning the Virgin Islands enclosed a lawyer’s brief for the Wagner-Costigan bill which White hoped “you will find time in your busy life to read.”
Introduced in January 1934, the bill (S.1978) called on the federal government to hold local officials accountable if they “failed to protect its citizens.” Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado opposed America’s long collaboration with mob rule. In response to the proliferation of lynchings in 1933, Wagner deplored the “shocking reversion to primitive brutality” and the community climate which “connived with mass murder.”
The Wagner-Costigan bill promised “equal justice to every race, creed and individual” and would penalize the state or local government: If a lynching went unprosecuted for thirty days, federal law enforcement would intervene and charge local officials whose indifference or collusion made them responsible for the delay. They could receive a fine of up to $5,000 and/or a jail term of up to five years. In the original bill, the county in which the lynching occurred would be fined up to $10,000.
ER’s alliance with Walter White intensified as they worked together to promote this legislation. Walter White, the NAACP’s president, was white-skinned. With blond hair and blue eyes, he could easily have been a passing Negro rather than a Negro leader. His dedication to justice was forged during his college years at Atlanta University, when he began to investigate lynching for the NAACP. After graduation he continually risked his life by infiltrating lynch mobs on behalf of the Dyer antilynch bill of 1922. His researches resulted in his vivid book Rope and Faggot.
During the 1920s, a new liberal Southern movement stimulated by Will Alexander, a Methodist minister and social worker who founded the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, opposed race violence and promoted racial harmony. In May 1930, many people agreed with Will Alexander that lynching would soon become a “lost crime.” But the day he made that prediction, at a Methodist church conference, another black man was hanged and burned, and in 1930 the lynching rate doubled. Alexander organized a Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, which produced two monumental studies: Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching and James Chadbourn’s Lynching and the Law. These books proved, Will Alexander declared, that lynchings “could have been prevented, and any honest, vigorous effort on the part of law enforcement officers could have found those who did the lynching.”
The studies confirmed Ida B. Wells’s 1892 analysis: Greed, not woman’s honor, was behind most lynchings. Now, Alexander thought they “had stripped lynching of its last shred of respectability.”
Insulted to be excluded from Will Alexander’s Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, Southern white women, led by Jessie Daniel Ames, a prominent Texas suffragist and director of Women’s Work for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, called a meeting on 1 November 1930 to repudiate the connection between lynching and the “honor” of Southern women.
Ames’s new Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching resolved:
[Lynching] is an indefensible crime, destructive of all principles of government, hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity, debasing and degrading to every person involved….
It brutalizes the community where it occurs, including the women and children who frequently witness its orgies…. It brings contempt upon America as the only country where such crimes occur, discredits our civilization, and discounts the Christian religion around the globe….
Thousands of white Southern women joined the movement against lynching, which black women had pioneered since Ida B. Wells’s lonely campaign generated the NAACP’s activities in 1910 and the Women Anti-Lynch Crusaders of 1922.
Jessie Daniel Ames believed that Southern women needed to know their sheriffs and marshals. They needed to know the men under the pillowcases: She intended “to reach the … the wives and mothers of the men who lynched….”
But she refused to participate in a congressional campaign. Ames told her biographer Jacquelyn Dowd Hall that she did not believe Southern women “would have gone along with us if we had endorsed a federal anti-lynching bill. They’d say we were following the Yankees and doors would have been closed to us.”
ER admired Jessie Daniel Ames’s commitment to education and protest; was impressed by her forceful publications. But in 1934 ER believed that federal legislation was needed, and she made several attempts to persuade Ames to join the effort.
After her first meeting with Ames, ER spoke with White, who was impatient with Ames’s tired arguments. He agreed with her opposition to the $10,000 community fine because it would cause hardship and intensify opposition; it should be lowered. But he could not understand her “fear that anything done to stop lynching may increase lynching. The plight of the Negro in the areas where lynchings are most frequent is so terrible that it could hardly be worse.” In addition, White concluded, violent groups were being refortified all over the country, including the Ku Klux Klan, “Nazi, Fascist, and other reactionary groups, who are so bitterly fighting the President’s recovery program.”
ER then invited Ames to lunch on 15 April. Ames had begun to realize she was increasingly isolated when state leaders of her own organization called for support of the legislation. Also, on 13 March 1934, 1,000 women representing 250,000 members voted unanimously at the Southern Methodist Woman’s Missionary Council convention meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, to endorse Costigan-Wagner. Ames left uncertain, and ER wrote again on 20 April to persuade her to endorse the legislation.
The real urgency, White repeatedly wrote ER, was to get the president to speak out for the bill. Held up by a small group of Southern senators, it had popular support and a congressional majority. It could be brought up before adjournment—but only if FDR supported it. Every time he requested a meeting with the president, McIntyre told him the president was too busy.
FDR’s refusal to speak out on lynching had been a matter of bitter observation even before the bill was introduced. In the autumn of 1933 he was asked at several press conferences to comment on three lynchings that occurred within weeks of each other. Each time; he replied only: No comment.
How, the Philadelphia Tribune editorialized in October 1933, could the president of the United States receive an honorary degree from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, without saying a word about the lynching that had occurred only hours before in Princess Anne County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore?
The reference was to what The New York Times called “the wildest lynching orgy in history.” On 18 October 1933, “a frenzied mob of 3,000 men, women, and children … overpowered 50 state troopers” to remove a prisoner from his cell. George Armwood, twenty-four, was accused of attacking an aged white woman. He was stripped naked, tortured, and hung. Then his body was dragged “half a mile on Main Street to a blazing pile in the centre of the thoroughfare.” Although local officials made an effort to protect him, the mob “seemed crazed.”
In November, during a concerted effort to get the state of Maryland to respond to Armwood’s lynching, the NAACP called upon FDR to comment. Finally, after a California mob seized two white men out of a San Jose jail and hanged them, FDR publicly deplored “lynch law” as “a vile form of collective murder.” On 6 December 1933 on a nationally broadcast radio address to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, FDR protested those in “high places or low who condone lynch law.”
Walter White telegraphed that “12 million Negroes” applauded FDR’s words. But the president would say nothing about the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynch bill, endorsed by long lists of mayors, governors, clergy, journalists, writers, artists, and college presidents as well as the National Council of Jewish Women, the YWCA, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the ACLU, the Writer’s League Against Lynching, and other organizations representing millions of Americans.
By April, White counted fifty-two Senate votes in favor and thirty opposed. He believed the bill would pass, if only it was brought out of committee and put to a vote. This time, White insisted, everything was in place: The bill’s timing was perfect; Southerners who could not vote for it had indicated they would absent themselves. FDR had only to support it.
White feared that “failure to pass the bill will result in a serious increase in the number of lynchings.” It was palpable in California, and across the South: A “mob spirit” was “now pent up not only against Negroes but against other minority groups.”
ER wrote to White on 2 May:
The President talked to me rather at length today about the lynching bill. As I do not think you will agree with everything that he thinks, I would like an opportunity of telling you about it, and I would also like you to talk to the President if you feel you want to.
She invited him to the White House for tea the following Sunday, 7 May. Sara Delano Roosevelt joined ER and White, and they had a long conversation. FDR had not yet returned from his afternoon’s sail on the Potomac when White arrived. After the president finally joined them, he proceeded to banter until ER turned insistently to the subject at hand.
FDR was blunt: “Joe Robinson [Senate majority leader, from Arkansas] tells me the bill is unconstitutional.” In addition, there was the threat of filibuster.
In rebuttal to each, one of FDR’s points, White presented dramatic and specific facts.
The president turned sharply: “Somebody’s been priming you. Was it my wife?”
He turned to ER: Had she coached Mr. White?
ER suggested they continue the discussion.
FDR turned to his mother: “Well, at least I know you’ll be on my side.”
But SDR “shook her head.” No, his mother agreed with Mr. White.
FDR “roared with laughter and confessed defeat.” Walter White left the White House feeling optimistic.
But FDR still did nothing on behalf of the bill, and firmly stated he would not “challenge the Southern leadership of his party”:
I did not choose the tools with which I must work…. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule … are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill [needed] to keep America from collapsing.
FDR did not exaggerate. The powerful opposition the administration faced was highlighted almost daily in long reports Hick sent Hopkins and ER from her second tour of the South, now into the Southwest—from Alabama and Louisiana into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. After FDR abruptly cancelled CWA because of Southern and conservative opposition on 1 April 1934, the relief situation worsened, and she was plunged into gloom. The Depression intensified, until federal work efforts were restored by WPA in 1935.
Hick wrote from North Carolina: “Sometimes I think the white people in the South would be perfectly happy if we’d take over the job of feeding all the Negroes just enough to keep them from starving in droves and cluttering up the streets and alleys with their dead bodies!”
On 11 April, Hick sent ER her report from Houston: “At no time previously, since taking this job, have I been quite so discouraged as I am tonight., Texas is a Godawful mess.” Relief funds were exhausted, and the politics of the local administration and the state relief commission were scandalous: “God help the unemployed.”
Relief in Houston “is just a joke. A case worker in charge of single women told me tonight that she had orders today to cut their weekly food allowance down to 39 CENTS! They’ve been getting less than 50 cents a week for some weeks….”
Hick was particularly dismayed by the attitude of industrialists who dominated Texas’s economy, especially oil drilling manufacturers. They told her at lunch their business was actually thriving, and they needed more workers. But they could not “take on any more untrained men…. ‘It costs too much.’ “
And that, Hick stormed, when “the relief load is 12,500 families with applications coming in at the rate of 1,100 a week….
“Don’t you see? Those babies are thinking in terms of 1929 profit. Why, they’ll let orders go, dammit, before they’ll permit their cost of production to go up and cut into their profit. Now, if that’s following the spirit of the New Deal, I’ll eat my hat….”
Hick had no idea where it would all end. The prospects everywhere were tragic. She had dinner with several social workers who handled “unattached people, including single women.” They told her that most of the young women “supplement their relief by having lovers or practicing prostitution.” One night a male social worker put on old clothes and went through “the transient set-up, to see how the transients were treated. Several girls solicited him as he walked along the streets. To one of them he said:
‘I can’t. I have no money.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ she said wearily, ‘It only costs a dime.’ “
As Hick wandered about in search of some usable solutions, she slid back into her populist, racist views. She had met a “retired capitalist,” the local chair of Houston’s relief funds. He liked what he saw in his recent visit to Italy, “believes in Fascism,” and concluded, “If Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere….”
Hick was impressed. “Honestly,” she decided, “If I were 20 years younger and weighed 75 pounds less, I think I’d start out to be the Joan of Arc of the Fascist movement in the United States.”
Hick then had second thoughts; perhaps “Russia is better off.”
If we have to have a dictator, I personally would prefer Roosevelt…. I wonder if his best chance wouldn’t be to go completely red and get it that way. Anyway, the ‘fat boys’ aren’t going to play ball with him. Not on any voluntary basis.
Disturbed by Hick’s ode to dictatorship, ER wrote that she would not show her “gloomy” report to FDR and hoped “somewhere you find things more cheerful.”
A fervent democrat, ER was not amused by casual references to fascism and communism, and especially resented all discussion of FDR as a benevolent or potential dictator. ER was aggravated by Hick’s reports from her second tour of the South. Renewed serenades to white supremacy, they reveal the depth of America’s racial quagmire during the 1930s. While ER met and worked with Walter White in Washington, Hick sent reports from Alabama and Louisiana that contradicted everything ER believed in.
Unemployed professionals and white-collar workers failed to get the benefits due them while unionists were demanding more than their share and Negroes were devouring all available relief funds.
Hick had two suggestions: Create separate intake centers for white-collar workers so that they could get the benefits they needed and still retain their pride, and take most Negroes off relief. Hick’s racialist conclusion was based on what she was told by caseworkers:
In New Orleans, for instance, EIGHTY-FIVE PER CENT of the load is Negro! … There isn’t much doubt in my own mind that thousands of those Negroes are living much better on relief than they ever did while they were working. You hear the same stories over and over again—Negroes quitting their jobs or refusing to work because they can get on relief. Perhaps only half the stories are true, but that’s bad enough. And God knows the wages they receive are low, and that their standards of living ought to be raised. But God knows our money is limited, too…. If we were not carrying so many Negroes, I wonder if perhaps we couldn’t solve the white collar problem…
White-collar workers needed to pay higher rents; their suits cost more than overalls. She was adamant; it was obvious: Whites needed money; blacks could do without. And “the more people we carry who really could manage to subsist… the less adequate will be our relief for the people who really have to have it.”
Hick repeated that solution in her reports from Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico—where Indians and Mexicans dominated the relief rolls. In El Paso, 60 percent of the relief load was Mexican, and half were not U.S. citizens. Relief “is too attractive to thousands of Mexicans and Negroes who might be able to get along without it,” while whites over forty-five would “never get their jobs back. They’re our babies. And what are we going to do with them? … I’m talking about white people now.” People like herself, stranded women and men, single or married, were in trouble.
Hick’s screeds from the South galvanized ER. They coincided with her most vigorous efforts to build an antiracist movement, ensure relief equity, and achieve an antilynch law.
ER never allowed political differences to tear a relationship. But these differences pierced to the center of her political soul. One can only wonder why Hick sent ER messages so aggressively steeped in racialist bigotry, knowing how hard ER worked to change just such views and put issues of racial justice on the national agenda.
Since she knew it would aggrieve ER, perhaps her reports veiled other issues and emotions. When she told ER she wanted to return to her own work, become a foreign correspondent, and feared that ER was sorry they had ever met, ER replied: “No, I am always glad you were assigned to me in 1932,” and she did not enjoy Hick’s new career fantasy. “Europe and Peking” might well be “easier and pleasanter but you are seeing our own country in a unique way and… the rest of the world will perhaps come later!”
ER did not want their differences to end their relationship, and would more fully address Hick’s attitudes when she had more time.
At the moment, she was preoccupied by Crystal Bird Fauset’s new project. A member of the AFSC’s Committee on Race Relations, Fauset returned to Philadelphia “deeply moved by our conversation.” She thanked ER for giving “so generously of your time; and your interest, not only in the Institute but in the whole racial situation….”
ER had promised to help finance and promote a summer seminar at the AFSC’s Interracial Institute, and she quickly followed up with letters to friends. She wrote George Foster Peabody, president and treasurer of Yaddo, the writing colony, and a supporter of Warm Springs and other Roosevelt interests, for suggestions. She appealed to Vincent Astor, and sent a blunt request to Henry Morgenthau, Sr.:
Dear Uncle Henry: Will you do me a favor and see Crystal Bird Fauset? She wants some help in getting up an interracial institute for the better understanding of the Negro problems. I do think it is important….
Both Morgenthau and Vincent Astor offered to meet with Fauset; Peabody enlisted others and wrote ER: “I must say Bravo! You are splendid!”
ER presented her first forceful public speech against discrimination on Friday morning, 11 May 1934. She told the National Conference on Fundamental Problems in the Education of Negroes, meeting in Washington: “I noticed in the papers this morning the figures given of the cost in certain states per capita for the education of a colored child and of a white child, and I could not help but think … how stupid we are….” Since democracy depends above all on an educated citizenry, a literate, informed, and concerned people, “we should really bend our energies … to giving to children the opportunity to develop their gifts, whatever they may be, to the best that is in them….”
It was, for ER, a matter of self-interest and national preservation:
There are many people in this country, many white people, who have not had the opportunity for education … and there are also many Negro people who have not had the opportunity…. Both these conditions should be remedied and the same opportunities should be accorded to every child regardless of race or creed….
[You] can have no part of your population beaten down and expect the rest of the country not to feel the effects from the big groups that are underprivileged….
The federal government intended to help in the crisis; but this issue was chronic, because there were those who considered education “a menace.” Some believed “it was better not to educate people to want more than they were getting.”
In this speech, ER countered virtually every word Hick had sent to her over the past month:
To deny any part of a population the opportunities for more enjoyment in life, for higher aspirations is a menace to the nation as a whole. There has been too much concentrating wealth, and even if it means that some of us have got to learn to be a little more unselfish about sharing what we have than we have been in the past, we must realize that it will profit us all in the long run.
ER was adamant, and optimistic:
I think the day of selfishness is over; the day of really working together has come, and we must learn to work together, all of us, regardless of race or creed or color; we must wipe out, wherever we find it, any feeling… of intolerance, of belief that any one group can go ahead alone. We go ahead together or we go down together….
ER’s dramatic call for universal education and equality avoided the issue of segregation. But the group of educators, university scholars, and public school teachers she addressed that day came from every part of the country to demand a new deal for all children, and for the first time they officially condemned segregation.
Sponsored by the U. S. Office of Education, the conference resolved: “Enforced segregation, whether by law or local pressure in education as in the general life of the people is undemocratic.”
According to Harvard Sitkoff, there was no opposition, and historian Howard K. Beale argued that separate schools were inimical to black students’ “incentive, self-pride and esteem.” They “stigmatize the Negro and give his children a sense of inferiority and the white man’s children a feeling of superiority which can never be outgrown in later life.”
ER’s rallying cry “We go ahead together or we go down together,” in the context of that national conference, encouraged the civil rights movement that began to blossom during the 1930s. Her May 1934 address was broadcast nationally over the NBC network, and published in the Journal of Negro Education. It inspired activists in Washington and throughout the country. “Certainly,” Sitkoff concluded, “no individual did more to alter the relationship between the New Deal and the cause of civil rights.”
On education, ER worked with John W. Studebaker, U.S. commissioner of, education, Aubrey Williams and Hilda Smith, who shared ER’s enthusiasm for the creation of a national youth program, adult education projects, equal opportunity from nursery schools to parent-education programs, and federal aid to education. But in the South, federal support for education was actually rejected by state and local officials. Nevertheless, in 1934, thirty-three states accepted federal funds to keep rural elementary and high schools open and to pay teachers work relief wages where all school funds and credits had been “exhausted.”
In opposition to Hick’s suggestion that blacks be eliminated from the relief effort, Aubrey Williams assured ER that all state relief administrators and school officers received an order which covered “the essential points referred, to in Mrs. Roosevelt’s memorandum” concerned with “complete equity.”
Since in proportion to population unemployment among Negroes is equal to, if not even greater than, unemployment among other groups, and since educational opportunities for Negroes are notably inadequate, equity demands that educational relief to Negroes be at least at the level of their percentage of the population in each state….
Ironically, ER’s 11 May address coincided with the start of Hick’s two-week visit. ER wrote that she was to broadcast on Friday between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty, the day Hick was expected. Without mentioning the subject, she asked Hick to arrange her schedule with that hour in mind, “for I couldn’t bear not meeting you.”
There is no record of their conversations after Hick heard ER publicly repudiate everything she had written from Louisiana and the Southwest. But the day Hick left, ER wrote to apologize for their “bad times.” ER’s dismay and anger evidently exploded and she now promised “to try to keep on an even keel.”
Hick dearest, I know how you felt today, you couldn’t let go for fear of losing control and being with me was hard…. Darling I love you dearly and I am sorry for letting my foolish temperament make you unhappy and sorry that your temperament does bad things to you too but we’ll have years of happy times so bad times will be forgotten….
During the two months until their reunion in July, Hick made a determined effort to be positive. There were improvements in the Midwest, and in Dayton, Ohio, successful subsistence homesteads were under way. ER was relieved that Hick sounded “so cheerful” and had finally found “this hopeful angle.” “Dear for your sake as much as mine we must try to keep happy together and you simply must not get so emotionally tired and worn out….”
But there was one more issue upon which ER wanted to take Hick “to task.” More than once she had ignored “that phrase” Hick used so often to compliment intelligent women: “She had the mind of a man.” Hick had used it once too often. Now, ER wrote, she never wanted to hear it again: “Why, can’t a woman think, be practical and a good business woman and still have a mind of her own?”
During the last days of May, ER traveled to West Virginia with Elinor Morgenthau. They visited Alderson Prison for women, where the rehabilitation program seemed splendid, and Dr. Mary Harris “is a wonder.” ER and Elinor Morgenthau visited Alderson annually, and supported the innovative programs that sought to return the women, many of whom had “not only a husband but a large number of children,” to their families with both psychological and work skills.
Concerned about prison reform, ER visited them regularly. Once she left the White House very early in the morning and failed to tell FDR that she would be gone. When he asked Tommy where she was, ER’s secretary replied: “She’s in prison, Mr. President.”
“I’m not surprised,” FDR said, “but what for?”
ER’s crusade to change America’s stingy attitude toward the nation’s neglected and rejected people increasingly met howls of protest. By 1934 every dollar spent, every schoolroom or new house contemplated, became part of the ongoing racial battle that drove and defined the twentieth century. But for ER and her allies, there was no turning back. There were many steps to take before people would no longer be condemned to suffer and wither. She was convinced that unless there was dignity for all, there would be security for none. White supremacy degraded the entire nation; a lynching diminished everybody’s life.
In June 1934, while ER was at Arthurdale, White wrote urgent daily memos to the president to bring up the antilynching bill before adjournment. Disregard for the legislation, White lamented, “is obviously encouraging lynchers to begin their deadly work again.” From South Carolina to California, lynchings had occurred; in South Carolina a grand jury had convened and every witness was sent threatening letters and crude drawings.
White was desperate: Representatives “of all races and residents of all sections … plead with you to act speedily and vigorously to save America from the horrors of more lynchings.”
Congress adjourned on 18 June without bothering about the lynching bill. FDR had said nothing to push it along. It was a grievous loss, but ER, the NAACP, and all the bill’s supporters regrouped to bring it up again in the autumn.
There was, however, one unexpected triumph: Congress finally passed the alley bill. On 6 June, ER told her press conference that she “suggested to the President” he invite Charlotte Everett Hopkins to the bill’s signing, “and the pen used be given to her.” On 12 June 1934, in the presence of her longtime colleagues, FDR complimented Mrs. Hopkins and celebrated a law that he hoped would make “Washington a model city” and serve “a great purpose.” FDR also said the $500,000 revolving fund promised in the legislation “was by no means sufficient” and suggested the commissioners turn to Harold Ickes’s PWA for additional support.
Charlotte Everett Hopkins said that the “worst thing we’ve had to fight has been indifference.” Most people in Washington “don’t know we have care.” She hoped the new law would change that. It was her birthday month; she was eighty-three, grateful to see this day.
ER was at Arthurdale for the official opening ceremonies on 12 June, which coincided with the signing of the alley dwelling bill. Her two victories filled her with pride and renewed energy.
For all their difficulties over Arthurdale, ER and Ickes worked harmoniously on Washington housing—and Ickes asked ER not only to remain honorary chair of the Washington committee but also to become an official adviser.
ER was “very glad to accept” and for many years led that small group of Washington civic leaders initially led by Charlotte Hopkins, including FDR’sUncle Frederic Delano and John Ihlder, who was named executive of the new Alley Dwelling Authority. The chief task of ER’s Washington housing committee was to lobby for the construction of decent housing to replace the alleys, so as to prevent homelessness, displacement, Negro removal. It would be years before adequate housing was built and, as at Arthurdale, the purchase of every tree, kitchen amenity, and indoor toilet was embattled. ER participated in the ongoing fight item by item.