ER returned from the coal mine in Ohio to a Washington in turmoil. Tensions mounted as opponents pressed the Supreme Court on the legality of the New Deal, and on 22 May FDR vetoed the veterans’ bonus bill. It had passed by a large majority with liberal support, including ER’s friends Caroline O’Day and Isabella Greenway. An issue since 1931, it had engendered two veterans’ bonus marches—one repelled by Hoover, the other mollified by ER’s visit. The issue would not go away, and seemed to ER’s circle a matter of simple justice. Why not give the promised bonus now—to veterans who had risked life and limb and remained virtually everywhere marginal and underemployed? In her maiden speech to Congress in 1934, Greenway spoke on its behalf, and now she led the effort to override FDR’s veto.
FDR appeared personally, before Congress and broadcast his veto message. He condemned the Patman Bonus Bill as discriminatory, inflationary, and fiscally unsound. The effort to override passed the House, 322 to 98, but fell short of the needed two-thirds vote in the Senate.
ER stayed out of the dispute between her friends and her husband, but was relieved by FDR’s appearance before Congress, which served another purpose: His determined, vital manner announced that he had resumed his leadership role. According to Time, his sulky “winter peeve” was over.
Then on 27 May 1935, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that the federal government had the right to protect the people economically and socially. In three unanimous decisions, it challenged executive authority and congressional legislation to enlarge administrative activities.
In the Humphreys case, FDR had “exceeded” his authority by removing William E. Humphreys, a belligerent Republican opponent, from his position on the Federal Trade Commission. This seemed a gratuitous slap at the president, since in a 1926 case the Court had ruled the executive had such removal power; FDR was astounded by the unanimous decision.
Then the Frazier-Lemke Amendment to the National Bankruptcy Act, which sought to protect farmers from mortgage foreclosures, was declared unconstitutional as a violation of “due process.” Justice Brandeis opined that foreclosures were in the public interest of “eminent domain” and must be protected.
Finally, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the fountainhead of New Deal activity, was toppled in the famous Schecter, or “sick chicken,” case.
In Brooklyn, four Schecter brothers were found guilty on nineteen counts of filing false reports, ignoring wage, hour, and health inspection regulations, and selling chickens unfit for human consumption—all in violation of NRA’s Live Poultry Code. The Supreme Court denied the federal government’s right to regulate, since the chickens were not involved in interstate commerce. This decision ended the administration’s right to set up codes regulating child labor, hours and wages, safety and sanitation conditions, and it doomed Section 7A, which encouraged labor unions. For all the cooperation between industry, government, and labor in the creation of these codes, NIRA was declared an Unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive.
The Court’s charges of overcentralization, of excessive and illegitimate power, were a blow to the entire premise of the New Deal. Most states had been relieved to have the national government take over some responsibility for the care of the poor and unemployed. The South, anxious to preserve its race traditions of peonage and discrimination, hailed the decision as a triumph of states’ rights.
ER regretted the decision that shot the Blue Eagle down. NRA had “seemed a simple way to keep bad employers doing what was right.” She thought FDR would be devastated and told Marion Dickerman, who was at the White House that night, that she “dreaded” dinner. They were astonished to find him in a jolly mood, even more “zestful and buoyant” than usual, eager to renew the good fight.
On 31 May, FDR told his press conference that the Supreme Court sought to return America “to the horse and buggy definition of interstate commerce.” He compared the Schecter case to the Dred Scott case in its grave implications. Since the Dred Scott case (1857) declared a slave not human but chattel property and helped engender the Civil War, it was a remarkable statement.
FDR asked: Did the U.S. government have the right to “control any national economic problem,” or were America’s most important issues in the separate hands of each state? Since virtually all commerce was now in some way interstate commerce, from sick chickens to raw materials to manufactured goods, all industrial and labor decisions impacted on everybody in every state. This was no time to abandon a nationally coherent recovery program.
The Supreme Court’s challenge invigorated FDR. The only way to combat the Court’s reactionary sentiment was to press Congress on pending legislation to advance the New Deal, and go beyond industry-dominated NRA codes. Until that moment, FDR had ignored Senator Wagner’s national labor relations bill, which guaranteed independent unionism, collective bargaining, a balance of power between industry and labor, protected by a National Labor Relations Board.
The Wagner Bill, supported by progressives, was opposed by Southern leaders. FDR had opposed it in 1934, and as recently as 15 May had told reporters he gave it no “thought one way or the other.” Now he called for its immediate passage. It had already passed the Senate, 63–12; it passed the House in June by voice vote; and FDR signed the National Labor Relations Act on 5 July 1935.
American workers began to organize as never before—democratically, militantly, multiracially. It was what ER and the Women’s Trade Union League had long hoped to see. In fact, as soon as NIRA was struck down, Rose Schneiderman, Maude Swartz, and Pauline Newman consulted with Robert Wagner. They had worked together ever since the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911, when they all served on New York’s Factory Investigation Commission. Now they lobbied for a clause against the discrimination of women workers (which was finally included in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act).
The women’s labor movement was refortified by the Wagner Act, and its passage revived several long-delayed WTUL initiatives. In Virginia, for example, as early as 1914 Lucy Randolph Mason became industrial secretary of Richmond’s YWCA to campaign for decent labor standards and workers’ compensation laws. For twenty years she combated “the lack of social control in the development of southern industry.” In 1931, the Southern Council on Women and Children in Industry hired Mason to campaign for hour and wage benefits for women and for a ban on child labor throughout the Southern textile industry. In 1932, when she replaced Florence Kelley as director of the National Consumers League, she moved to New York. But shortly after the Wagner bill passed, she decided to return to the Southern labor struggle.
The great-great-granddaughter of George Mason, who signed the Declaration of Independence and wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights, daughter and granddaughter of Episcopal ministers, radical “Miss Lucy” became a force in the multiracial union movement battling for a new South. She was fifty-five, white-haired, and widely recognized as a Southern lady: “When Miss Lucy entered a union meeting, the men instinctively got to their feet.” While Lucy Randolph Mason organized Southern textile workers and was “roving ambassador” for the CIO, she became one of ER’s key advisers on urgent labor and race issues, civil rights, and civil liberties.
Also in May 1935, an excited Harry Hopkins escorted his Grinnell College friend Hallie Flanagan to a White House garden party to meet ER. The White House lawn was festive with hundreds of strolling guests, the Marine Band, and tables filled with refreshments and flowers. Uninvited, Flanagan was staggered by Hopkins’s presumptions, but “learned that the busiest woman in the U.S. was never too occupied to give attention and understanding” to problems she considered important. And the idea of a national theater seemed to ER very important. Just returned from a European tour of government theaters, the director of Vassar College’s Experimental Theatre was already known to the First Lady. She urged Flanagan to wait in the Blue Room, and they could meet after the party.
Flanagan waited a long time, “looking out on the broad white marble hallway with its stretch of red velvet carpet, its palms, and crystal chandeliers.” Eventually, she was escorted to ER’s “apartment, where she sat at her desk, looking as fresh and rested as if she had not just shaken the hands of some five hundred guests” in the mid-May sun.
ER asked specific questions about the costs and details of Vassar productions, and was interested in classical, experimental, modern plays. She wanted America to “consider the theater, as it was considered abroad, a part of education.” She surprised Flanagan when she referred to “our heritage of Puritanism in its relation to the stage,” which rendered the theater the “last of the arts to be accepted.” With ER’s enthusiasm and Flanagan’s commitment, the new Federal Theatre became the core of WPA’s most exciting arts projects.
Fully aware of Flanagan’s radical vision, the First Lady became her chief adviser, defender, and most prominent booster. Pert, red-haired, dynamic, fiery Flanagan was controversial from the beginning. Her commitment to relevant theater, political drama, and mixed-media productions was nationally known years before she was appointed to the WPA. In 1931, Can You Hear Their Voices, for example, was hailed by the New York Times critic as “a play in which propaganda did not defeat drama.” But make no mistake—“it was all propaganda—scaring, biting, smashing propaganda.” And in the end a prison-bound father sends his sons off to communists to help “make a better world.”*
With the directors of other WPA arts projects—Henry Alsberg, who planned a series of travel guides for every state; Nikolai Sokoloff who envisioned symphony orchestras in every community; Holger Cahill, who wanted to create community art centers in every neighborhood—Flanagan, and ER, thrilled to the possibilities of “a new people’s art,” with community theaters in every locale. The hills and hollows, valleys and deltas of America would be transformed by a shared popular culture.
Appointed on 27 August 1935, by 1936 Hallie Flanagan wrote ER that there were “3,654 theatrical people with 3,654 theatre temperaments, not only at work, but at peace.”
ER encouraged Flanagan’s goals of children’s theaters, Negro, Yiddish, Spanish theaters, mixed ensembles, traditional and university theaters, straight revivals, classics done experimentally, regional theaters, touring companies, and dance, vaudeville, and marionette units. Plays were mounted quickly in all major cities that first year.
In Chicago, several vaudeville units played in parks, and two large theater companies offered a series of plays. A large vaudeville unit, including “a complete circus” of more than seventy performers, toured Boston. “50,000 persons weekly” attended Massachusetts theaters. The Negro Theatre in Harlem produced an “untitled play” by Zora Neale Hurston, Macbeth, and St. Louis Woman, by Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, directed by John Housman.
There were theaters in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, including the Popular Price Theatre, which boasted Lillian Wald’s original theater team: Helen Arthur, business manager, and her partner director Agnes Morgan, along with Aline Bernstein and other notables who ran the Henry Street Settlement’s Neighborhood Playhouse.
Soon the Federal Theatre Project employed 5,644 “professional theatre people, including actors, directors, designers, stage-hands … with many being added daily.” Supported by Elmer Rice and Harry Hopkins, Flanagan wanted especially to produce adult, relevant, uncensored theater—which might also “throw a spotlight” on conditions of despair, on rootless rural poverty and “ramshackle tenements and unite an audience that something must be done.”
ER relished Flanagan’s political determination and quick wit; but Flanagan did not entertain everyone. When asked, for example, “Would you produce a play written by a Communist?” she replied: “If it was a good play, we would produce one written by a Republican.”
After her long angry winter, ER won several victories—highlighted by the creation of the National Youth Administration, which represented a great personal triumph. Since 1933, ER had decried the neglect of youth, the discriminatory practices of the CCC, and the lack of training, jobs, and alternative education for young people suffering in every state. With schools everywhere in crisis, young women and men were just dumped into the stagnant economy without hope—entirely marginal to New Deal programs. Even WPA employment was limited to workers over twenty-four. ER had called repeatedly for a national youth program.
She spoke of a “stranded generation,” compounded by the totally neglected factor of 200,000 “wandering women,” who averaged twenty years old. ER asked Frances Perkins to investigate new programs for young women and suggested an alternative to CCC camps in “plant nurseries.” But the secretary of labor dismissed the idea as seasonal and useless. ER then suggested “internships in public services”—libraries, government agencies, education departments, health centers.
She agitated for a specific youth program for over a year, and wanted it to include rural and urban youth, women and men. She held conferences with Education Commissioner John Studebaker, with WPA administrators Aubrey Williams (a Birmingham, Alabama, social worker and outspoken rebel son of the Confederacy) and Harry Hopkins. In June 1934, Studebaker called a national youth conference to address the calamity that faced almost four million “out of school employables,” aged eighteen to twenty-three, who had nothing to do and nowhere to go. Studebaker wanted a youth division established in his department. Every time ER brought up the idea with FDR she was rebuffed.
Finally, in June 1935, Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams met again with ER. This time, ER returned to FDR determined to have the plight of America’s youth addressed. All winter her suggestions, her concerns, her daily proddings had been discarded.
Hick continued to worry that ER would leave FDR; for months she feared fireworks. But ER only grew colder. And the White House became during the winter of 1935 an exceedingly frosty place. ER might have thought she was subtle, might have believed her husband failed to notice her prolonged silences, might even have imagined her blue tones of cold invisible. But he knew them as well as anyone. He had witnessed those icicles that might at any moment dart from behind her eyes, and linger unspoken as she pressed her lips. They were familiar, and dramatic—though he might choose to ignore them.
Now, in the summer of a bruising and disappointing year, her persistence was rewarded. As social security legislation continued its agonized trek through Congress, FDR accepted his wife’s suggestion. In her memoir, ER described the conversation that launched the National Youth Administration, one of the New Deal’s most useful agencies:
I waited until my usual time for discussing questions with him and went into his room just before he went to sleep. I described the whole idea … and then told him of the fears that Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams had…. He looked at me and said: “Do they think it is right to do this?” I said they thought it might be a great help to the young people, but they did not want him to forget that it might be unwise politically. They felt that a great many people who were worried by the fact that Germany had regimented its youth might feel we were trying to do the same thing…. Then Franklin said: “If it is the right thing to do for the young people, then it should be done. I guess we can stand the criticism, and I doubt if our youth can be regimented….
On 26 June 1935, FDR announced the NYA, by executive order. Unlike other federal agencies and in contrast to social security’s limitations, NYA was inclusive: It promoted fairness in all its programs for women and men and specifically rejected racial discrimination. Black and white workers were paid the same wages and received the same student benefits.
NYA provided aid to high school, college, and graduate students to continue their education and provided work projects to train out-of-school jobless youth, women and men. NYA’s contributions to struggling students were generous: Over 200,000 high school students were supported “at a maximum of six dollars a month,” 100,000 college students averaged $15 monthly, and 4,600 graduate students earned $25 to $30 monthly.
There were community and rural youth development, recreational leadership, public service, and research projects under way, for which $20 million had been allocated. Junior employment counselors were stationed at state employment offices in selected cities; a Negro office with Negro counselors was established in North Carolina; one hundred educational camps for five thousand women were planned; forty-five were opened by July.
In every state, African-Americans were fully represented. More than 120 Negro colleges participated in the student aid program. NYA employed white and black youths, women and men, in the arts and professions, in skilled and unskilled positions, and provided a full range of training programs in resident and non-resident projects.
ER remained NYA’s “chief adviser, chief publicist, chief investigator.” She worked more closely with NYA than with any other program except Arthurdale and conferred daily with Aubrey Williams, Mary McLeod Bethune, whose Office of Negro Affairs operated out of NYA, and Betty Lindley, who directed young women’s projects. Little happened at NYA without her knowledge and input, and she “was very proud that the right thing was done regardless of political considerations.” Actually, she noted, it was “politically popular and strengthened the administration greatly.”
Of all ER’s correspondence with administrators, her exchanges with Aubrey Williams were marked by a unique candor and mutual trust. He sent ER federal analyses and state reports, and she sent him blunt policy recommendations:
If a group in Georgia developed “a clerical project for youth … why can it not be done in every state?…” “Was the Oregon library project accepted or not?”
NYA strengthened the burgeoning civil rights movement. Williams hired “Negro staff workers” “to insure full participation in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, and elsewhere.”
ER was particularly interested in the women’s camp program, headed by Hilda Smith. Although NYA was the least discriminating agency, women were still shortchanged. In many communities their very right to work was challenged, and pay differentials endured. ER resented it, and she wrote, broadcast, protested continually.
She urged Flora Rose and her friends at Cornell to do a survey of “occupations for girls,” which Aubrey Williams agreed to sponsor. She urged Clarence Pickett to work with NYA projects for the “stranded coal areas” and wanted various training schools for girls, including “health and nutrition” schools, to supplement the subsistence homestead movement.
Ultimately, ER considered NYA a primary weapon in the war to achieve real security—which depended on education, job security, housing, and public health. She involved herself in every innovation, and her activities were appreciated by the workers in the field. Margaret Ordway, who headed a program in North Carolina, wrote ER a long letter of gratitude: “Out here we think of the NYA as your government child. Certainly no member of the alphabet family is more popular. This mountain district comprises seventeen counties,” and Ordway wanted ER to know of their achievements—and their difficulties. NYA had funds for “pay-rolls.” Ordway might employ “every eligible youth in Macon County,” and had 114 enrolled. But in every county every supervisor had the same complaint: They had no tools, no materials, no way to train or teach. Without books, paper, crayons, it was hopeless. Still, “our mountain youth” were not idle:
We have enclosed springs; piped water to a number of schools; erected drinking fountains; repaired windows …; made passable some side roads to churches and schools. “Hit used to be what we had to tote the corpse, now we kin ride hit right up to the door.”
Eleven girls and women, living at distant places in the county (all I have found that possess the essential gift), are visiting pre-school children in the remotest coves and on barren mountain sides. They tramp miles and miles carrying their packs of scrapbook materials … and second hand primers…. Some of these tots had never seen a book or heard a rhyme. Suppose we had some real kindergarten materials?
There were no fabrics for quilting, no wool for knitting. The girls had no skills, and there were no materials to teach them to weave or spin or basket. For each girl in the program, NYA funds were “a temporary blessing but it does nothing toward her bleak future.”
NYA teachers like Ordway cared profoundly, and there were daily improvements in the quality of life. “When seeking to correct the girls whose appearance is rowdy, I suggest the First lady should be their pattern, and it usually works.” Ordway told one girl: “If you were to see Mrs. Roosevelt you would find that she does not … have gory fingernails, or smear paint on her cheeks.”
Using the regional compliment, the girl replied, “with the most radiant smile: ‘No, she wouldn’t do nothin’ like THAT, Mis’ Roosevelt is re-al common.’”
ER passed this letter on to her husband, having penned across the top: “FDR, worth reading. Shall I see what Aubrey can do or is it hopeless?”
NYA represented a critical turning point in ER’s independent role as First Lady and as her husband’s partner in an increasingly difficult political climate. Robert Sherwood observed that she had become “the keeper of and constant spokesman for her husband’s conscience.” For months she had badgered, cajoled, and grown cold. She initiated and nurtured allies; joined and enhanced political movements. She refused to give up or give in. It was a woman’s way of power. And as conservative opposition to the New Deal intensified, so too did her determination to achieve all that could be achieved—for all the people, including the most needy and still neglected.
She decided to write a series of articles during her summer vacation to address issues she wanted moved to the front of her husband’s agenda. While FDR held Congress in session during Washington’s steamiest summer months to deal with social security, a new banking bill to extend the Federal Reserve Bank’s authority, and a controversial “soak the rich” tax law that increased inheritance and corporation taxes, ER left Washington for New York, and then Campobello.*
For ER, Campobello was always more than that Canadian island just across a narrow riptide from Maine’s easternmost town of Lubec. At Campobello, weather was always memorable. Fond of quoting her mother-in-law’s adage “All weather is good weather,” ER was actually thrilled by stormy turbulence. For ER Campobello was the place where the power and endurance of love, friendship, commitment, overcame the pain of betrayal and fear.
At Campobello, ER and Louis Howe forged their permanent partnership on FDR’s behalf in 1921; After FDR contracted polio, ER bested her mother-in-law who wanted her son to retire to Hyde Park as a country squire.
Now her first confidant and only intimate bridge to Franklin was often bedridden. All winter, Louis Howe had been close to death, in an oxygen tent, sometimes in a coma. Despite his advanced emphysema compounded by pneumonia, he rallied in March, and in June seemed on the road to renewed political activity. ER felt free to leave him for the first time all year, content to be back at Campobello to ponder the future—in a place filled with encouraging memory.
ER’s guests might deplore endless days enveloped in fog and frost-filled summer nights, but with Tommy she churned out dozens of pages each day. The sprawling house was filled with guests and staff; and ER had a splendid time.
In addition to her working team, Tommy, Earl Miller, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman, there were visits with Molly Dewson and Polly Porter in Castine, Maine. Rose Schneiderman, Jo Coffin, Helen Keller, and the Clarence Picketts, with several relief workers, spent their holiday at Campo, including “a Miss May from Kentucky and a young girl Mary [Davis] has taken in the whole summer. Quite a household, isn’t it?”
Characteristically, ER wrote Hick: “Oh, I wish you were here. I ache for you when things are so lovely but you wouldn’t be happy so let’s just hope it will be equally lovely whenever we are together later on.”
Content herself, ER was dismayed that Hick was again disgruntled with her work. She had helped Hick secure her WPA job, because she dreaded Hick’s idea of going to Europe or Asia as an international correspondent, and apologized:
I realize that it would be easier for you to go where new sights and duties offered distraction. I blame myself much for putting you through all this and offering you so little when I hoped to really help. You need not fear however that my love is less or that your suffering will alter my feelings it just makes me very sorry.
But ER was now the journalist, and at Campo she wrote two syndicated newspaper articles, a long piece on women in politics not yet placed, and a column for Cosmopolitan. ER did not pause to consider how Hick might feel—even as she discouraged Hick’s hopes to resume her own career.
ER’s days were also filled with robust physical diversions. She walked Tommy and Nan along the rocky precipices above the shoreline: They “are stiff and wary but we are sticking to it daily!” She took the tiller and sailed herself; and although “Marion has had the curse, tomorrow we are going to start playing tennis.” ER was interested that Earl played tennis “naturally, although he knew nothing in fact of the game.” And she had time to read: Louis MacLeod’s “The Divine Adventure,” an Irish allegory, which was charming; and Elizabeth of Russia, which “I enjoyed.” ER and her company read aloud Rebel Saints, a book of radical Quaker history, which “proved so interesting we didn’t go to bed till 10:30, which is very dissipated for us!”
Hick replied to ER’s notion of a “quiet” and “tranquil” summer with her own fantasy:
It was nice to think that you wished I were there. You’re probably right, though when you say I’d not be very happy. I’d probably feel like a fifth wheel. Well—never mind, darling! The time will come when it won’t matter to me that there are so many others who have priority rights to your interest and affection. Then I daresay we’ll be one nice big happy family (!?). You must admit, though … it’s sometimes rather tough to be the most recent of the people who have any claims on you! I have no seniority rating at all! I am so very much ah outsider. But when the time comes when I don’t care so much—or at least not in the way I care now—it will be easier. Anyway, I’m glad you’re up there & enjoying it. And we’ll have our time together later on.
ER “had to laugh! No dear, we won’t ever be a happy family party here! We might spend a night or even a weekend in close proximity now and then but never more, somebody’s feelings would be hurt and I’m too old to live under a strain. You and I will always want to have some time alone together….”
Politically, Hick was disturbed by the economic situation throughout the Northeast and confused by her interviews with certain work relief administrators:
Saw Mr. Herzog, the WPA man, this afternoon. He’s certainly hard boiled enough. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. But it does strike me that we’re slightly inconsistent in our attitudes toward—and treatment of—the unemployed.
We start out, in 1933, by working ourselves up into a sort of frenzy of sympathy for them. We do everything we can to make the acceptance of relief “respectable.” We put in a CWA program with wages away above those paid in private industry.
And now, in the state of New York in 1935, we turn ’em over to a man like [Lester] Herzog, who seems to think, rightly or wrongly, that they are bums and chiselers, goes at his job with this attitude.
“By God, we’ll quit coddling these babies and get ’em off relief!”
Hick was especially incensed about Herzog’s plans for women:
[He thought they] ought to be working as domestics. God damn it—I just wish some of these people who think all unemployed women ought to be delighted to hire themselves out as maids or scrubwomen had to take a whack at it themselves. Believe me, Madame, I’ve been a servant—a maid-of-all-work, a slavey in a boarding house! I know what it’s like. People make me sick….
ER and Ellen Woodward struggled to diversify women’s work, and Woodward wrote ER that by October more than sixty thousand women were “actually at work on WPA projects” in thirty-four states. There had been notable successes regarding training and reemployment in private industry, and new programs included bookkeepers in New York City, public health nurses in Mississippi, and library projects throughout the country.
During 1935 there were almost one thousand library projects in forty-two states, which employed ten thousand women in work relief. Books were cleaned, fumigated, mended, rebound; newspapers were clipped for research projects, scrapbooks, displays; library books were classified, catalogued, indexed; books were transcribed into braille using blind workers; professional librarians ran countless reading and community programs.
In Leslie County, Kentucky, women on horseback carried books into remote areas accessible only to packhorses. One group of the “Packhorse Library Project” comprised four women with books in their saddlebags who began the day at “Hell-for Startin Creek,” then followed “a tortuous, twisting stream with a rocky bed and brush-tangled banks” to “Devil’s Jump Branch,” where they separated, each following a different tributary to reach fifty-seven mountain communities.
But for all the exciting and innovative projects in libraries, museums, laboratories, recreation centers, and schools, more than 50 percent of women at work in the WPA were still in sewing rooms, and a great many worked as domestics. During much of 1935, Woodward’s letters to ER concerned their shared enthusiasm for “training courses for household workers.” By 1936 there were training programs “for every branch of household service” in twenty-one states, with more than 7,600 women enrolled.
ER sought economic justice for women in WPA, and Woodward wrote: “For the first time in the history of industry, women were accepted on an equal basis with men.” WPA employed married, widowed, and single women with dependents, as well as single “unattached women” without dependents.
Virtually all unemployed nurses were employed on WPA public health projects, resulting in a massive public health crusade. Thousands were immunized against diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid. Antituberculosis campaigns were generated, and schools and camps for tubercular children created; treatment for long-ignored regional scourges of pellagra, malaria, hookworm became commonplace. Child care and maternity clinics mushroomed; first aid, hygiene, and home care instruction proliferated.
Sewing rooms, which were so offensive to Hick and others, were surprisingly diverse places that frequently included nursery schools, staffed by “a teacher, a registered nurse, a nutritionist, and a janitor.” Everything manufactured, from clothing, to dolls and toys, to household supplies, was “released to needy people or institutions.” Regional handicrafts were encouraged: “the patch-work quilts of the Carolinas; the leather works of New Mexico and Arizona; the spinning of raw wool in Missouri; the weaving of blankets in Kansas; the knitting of Siwash Socks [a traditional Indian pattern, dyed with the juice of native trees] in Tennessee.” Moreover, the sewing rooms “gave unskilled women workers … a chance to hold up their heads and earn a fair week’s wage,” wrote one former critic who visited a New York State sewing project.
At the end of July, ER sent Hick her just-completed article “Can a Woman Be Elected President” for comment:
I hope it will interest you, I put a lot of work in it but I know it is controversial and will cause violent differences of opinion. Marion, for instance disagrees with a lot of it! Tommy didn’t think I’d handle it in this way and is interested but I don’t think is entirely in agreement either!
Although her closest friends were disappointed, ER insisted on publishing her long turgid article, which concluded that women were not yet ready to run for high political office. The essay was stimulated by negative publicity heaped upon ER after several June graduation addresses. ER had been criticized for her views and unseemly ambitions, and several Republican papers suggested her presidential aspirations were linked to FDR’s fragile health.
In response, ER wrote a rhapsody to the kind of man a president needed to be, and used the opportunity to warn, even scold, women in politics. Sometime between suffrage and the Depression, women stopped marching for women. They seemed to ER no longer sufficiently interested in public affairs to demonstrate on behalf of their own needs or to advance social policy. They joined fascist and communist movements which were making deep inroads; but women who had once stood up for social justice as a group seemed now to ER uninformed and disorganized, their interests diffused and unfocused.
If women were, “as a rule,” somewhat “more sensitive” than men, it was partly because they had had to adjust to their environment more completely. “It has been their job to live with men as peacefully and as pleasantly as possible and to bring up children and help them to adjust to their environment.” Women had “not been physically dominant, therefore they have used their wits to make life more pleasant and agreeable, and to achieve their own ends with as little friction as possible.”
Ultimately, ER discounted the stereotypic myths attributed to women: “My own experience leads me to believe that men are as temperamental as women and as apt to be personal and lose the objective point of view as most women.” Still, in 1935 men were unready for a woman president, and ER concluded that the women’s movement, in disarray, was also unready.
ER wanted women to prepare themselves, to build networks of women’s support and action.
ER presented a formula for leadership:
[Women] should come up from the bottom and learn their jobs in public life, step by step, and above all, they must learn to take other women with them and not to hang onto a job because they feel they will never get another one and therefore be unwilling to let another woman profit by their experience….
ER’s views on women in politics had changed little since her 1928 Red-book article “Women Bosses,” which argued that “women must play the game as men do.” Not until there existed a strong, aware, united women’s movement would it be possible for a woman to succeed or survive in the vicious vortex of power politics.
But once women did organize and achieve leadership positions, ER was convinced “the advance of the human race toward the new goal of human happiness will be more rapid than it has ever been in the past.”
ER wrote that article while many grievous compromises to limit social security were being debated in Congress. She was disappointed and angry that organized women, who had since the 1880s fought for aspects of the social security package, including Sheppard-Towner and aid to dependent children, did not vigorously oppose the race and gender restrictions that degraded the bill.
She was dismayed that when urgent public activity was needed to achieve full employment and real social security, the women’s movement seemed moribund and quiescent.
ER had written It’s Up to the Women, convinced that women were then America’s most interested and organized group. She never changed her mind about the potential of women with power, and once told her radio audience that only women could adequately lead a peace crusade. When enough women organized for peace, wars would end, because “a woman’s will is the strongest thing in the world.”
But during the summer of 1935, ER turned to youth—the newly reorganized American Youth Congress, which now addressed precisely those issues of discrimination, housing, and jobs that she considered most urgent. Always on the lookout for any hint of public activity, the kind of grassroots activism that she considered the engine of democracy, she was thrilled to learn of the AYC’s second meeting in Detroit during the Fourth of July weekend, which included groups as diverse as the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the NAACP, along with traditional church, Y, university, and student groups. ER had been displeased by the first meeting of the AYC in 1934, which she considered undemocratic. But the events surrounding the second conference caused ER to change her mind.
Determined to hold an integrated meeting in Detroit, the AYC had signed a contract with the Fort Wayne Hotel to prevent discrimination in meeting rooms and guest rooms. But when black delegates arrived, the hotel refused to register them. When white delegates threatened to leave, the manager capitulated. All went smoothly until Saturday night while some delegates attended a dance and others met at a local drugstore—which charged Negro patrons double what white patrons were charged. A spontaneous demonstration ensued, with pickets and placards, young people in both formal dance attire and casual dress marching and singing and creating a stir.
When ER subsequently met with AYC leaders in January she was already one of their most ardent champions.
ER was also gratified by the NYA’s first conference on the problems of black youth, which she considered a stirring success. On 8 August 1935, Aubrey Williams and Mary McLeod Bethune held a conference of Negro leaders and New Dealers committed to racial justice.*
It resulted in a permanent committee that fought for equity in education, training for leadership, inclusion in all NYA programs. For ER, the New Deal’s future was increasingly up to the youth—now organizing to confront the intense bigotry that everywhere limited progress.
Throughout the summer, ER corresponded with Walter White, whose many suggestions were sidelined in Washington. Although WPA salary differentials were prohibited, the NAACP lobbied for “a qualified Negro appointed as a Deputy Administrator in every state,” and Negro administrators responsible for the “proportional integration of Negroes in each project.”
While ER sent White’s suggestions on to Aubrey Williams and others, on 5 August 1935, Stephen Early sent a “personal and confidential” memo addressed to “Dear Malvina” at Campobello: “I have been asked to send you a memorandum containing information for Mrs. Roosevelt concerning Walter White…. The memorandum is sent at this time because Walter White has been bombarding the President with telegrams and letters.” White wanted Costigan-Wagner brought up again, before Congress adjourned at the end of August; he complained about the War Department’s policy regarding the assignment of “Negro reserve officers in CCC camps”; he complained about many things. “Frankly, some of his messages to the President have been decidedly insulting….”
Early was irate:
I am advised by those familiar with White’s actions at the Capitol that it was he who some time ago went into the restaurant within the Capitol Building and demanded that he be served, apparently deliberately creating a troublesome scene, compelling his eviction from the restaurant and giving rise to an issue, made much of in the press at the time. The belief in some quarters is that he did this for publicity purposes and to arouse negroes throughout the country through press accounts of his eviction….
Mr. [Rudolph] Forster [the executive clerk] advises that Walter White, before President Roosevelt came to the White House … has been one of the worst and most continuous of troublemakers.
Grandson of Confederate General Jubal A. Early, Steve Early celebrated the mythical magnolia South, and resented all efforts to change the patterns of his homeland. ER usually ignored Early’s contempt for her allies and sought to maintain cordial relations with her husband’s most important public relations aide. But this time she replied directly to his protest against Walter White:
I realize perfectly that he has an obsession on the lynching question and I do not doubt that he has been a great nuisance with his telegrams and letters, both now and in previous administrations…. I do not think he means to be rude or insulting. It is the same complex which a great many people belonging to minority groups have, particularly martyrs…. It is worse with Walter White because he is almost white. If you ever talked to him, and knew him, I think you would feel as I do. He really is a very fine person with the sorrows of his people close to his heart.
As ER considered Early’s challenge, her spirits were bolstered by her sense of new movements, and new alliances. Throughout America there had been student strikes for peace in April 1935; a new American Student Union led by Joseph Lash and Molly Yard was organized for activism against fascism, war, and race bigotry, and its earnest activities were displayed during the July AYC meetings. Not irrelevantly, ER wrote her letter to Early the day Aubrey Williams and Mary McLeod Bethune opened their exciting NYA conference. ER was profoundly encouraged by these new radical movements for democracy and change.
As ER prepared to leave Campo, she wrote Hick: “We have Marion to thank for a really lovely day [of sailing]…. You would have loved the wind and the big waves today, and the white foam on the dark rocks.”
Although she hated the thought of leaving, she looked forward to their reunion, and had second thoughts about their decision to spend the summer apart. ER now felt apologetic about their difficult time together in 1934:
After all dear,… last summer was really the longest time I’ve ever been with one person but I stupidly didn’t realize how weary you were and did the wrong things for you. I think how if we have chances to be together I won’t be so stupid or so selfish.
As ER’s productive and idyllic days at Campo ended, Hick completed her New York tour and was surprised by the upsurge in opposition to FDR among businessmen. The Depression had taught them nothing:
Not one damned thing! And more and more I’m sure that Harry Hopkins was dead right when he said, “Don’t forget it—this is a war between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’” I think the President needs to get out around the country. Only even then—everybody will “yes” him. When even Isabella Greenway—whether she’s right, or whether she’s wrong—doesn’t feel she can come right out to his face and argue with him, what can you expect of the rest of the country. I certainly do not think she was much impressed by what he was saying at dinner that night. But she never said a word. In my own small way, I’m as bad as any of the others. He’ll turn to me and say, “Am I right Hick?” I don’t always think he is, but I haven’t the nerve to say so….
Well—you don’t mind my raving on, anyway. Or do you?
If you got a laugh out of my idea of the possibility of a “happy family” at Campo—I was equally amused at your idea that I could get a newspaper job, telling them I never saw you and didn’t know what was going on. They’d never believe it, dear—unless I actually did quit seeing you. And that would be expecting a good deal of me…. I’m not prepared to give you up entirely! (And I don’t believe you would want that, either)….
With all my heart I love you.
ER did not blame Hick “for being gloomy” and wondered, actually, how anyone could hear all she heard and “keep your balance and keep calm.” “If you are doing nothing you are preparing FDR” for the difficulties of the coming election campaign: “And I think you are going to make him concentrate on administration which seems to me very necessary.”
With a new Red Scare bubbling up, ER relied on Hick’s reports and more routinely passed them on to FDR.
In Buffalo, Hick was escorted by an old reporter friend who said that “FDR had slipped, badly—and among the middle class and relief groups….”
“A year ago,” he said, “most of these people would knock your block off if you said a word against Roosevelt. But now—you can walk into any saloon in East Buffalo and pan the hide off him—without ever getting an argument….”
[There were no jobs, and a] Republican “whispering campaign” [was] circulated among the unemployed and … lower salaried group. People who have jobs are being made to feel that the President’s program may cost them their jobs—“because it interferes with business.” … They are being told: “You don’t owe your job to Roosevelt. You got it back in spite of him, and, if he keeps on the way he’s going, you’ll lose it….”
On 14 August 1935, one day after Hick wrote that worrisome letter, FDR signed social security into law. For all its defects, the Social Security Act created a groundswell of enthusiasm for the New Deal among working people who voted. It also constructed a “safety net” that saved millions of Americans from neglect and despair.
FDR considered 14 August 1935 the most significant day of his administration. Though the act was flawed and insufficient, it was a momentous beginning: The U.S. government had tried to “give some measure of protection to the average citizen and his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.”
Far from being “universal,” social security was virtually segregated racially, and women were discriminated against. Agricultural and domestic workers, the self-employed, workers in small businesses with less than ten employees, “casual labor” or transient, part-time, seasonal, and service workers (such as laundry and restaurant workers), maritime workers, workers in nonprofit organizations, including hospital, charity, and religious workers, and local, state, and federal government employees, including teachers, were excluded from the only “entitlements,” old-age and unemployment insurance. As a result, 80 percent of black women were excluded; 60 percent of black men were excluded, and 60 percent of white women were excluded. Only half the workforce was included.
Only old-age insurance was the direct responsibility of the federal government, paid for by payroll taxes shared by employer and employee. By 1 January 1937, “Social Security” numbers were assigned to 38 million workers, now entitled to a secure old age. All other programs, including old-age assistance (for those not insured), unemployment insurance, aid to crippled, disabled, and dependent children, aid to the blind, and maternal and child health services and vocational rehabilitation were to be jointly administered by state and federal governments.
Despite an excellent Social Security Board, headed by progressive Republican John Winant, each state determined social security benefits. Residents of the Southeastern states received the lowest benefits in every category, and traditional discriminations prevailed.
After months of debate, haggling, and compromise, the Social Security Act introduced a two-tier welfare system, one for mostly white male industrial workers in interstate commerce who were entitled to insurance, and another for the truly needy, who generally remained truly needy. They depended on meager benefits cruelly limited by “means tests.” If a family was not destitute, had any property, a car or even a shack, they could receive no aid—until they gave up whatever they had. “Aid to Dependent Children” was quickly marked by local custom, and various levels of discrimination emerged state by state. Welfare for children did not include their mothers, who were reduced to a nationally sanctioned state-by-state form of beggary, “pitied but not entitled.”
ER considered the Social Security Act a first step, that gave America time to think: What was needed to avoid permanent poverty, she declared, was an entirely new way of thinking.
Actually to achieve a New Deal, ER worked ever more vigorously with youth and the most radical members of FDR’s expanding administration—notably Aubrey Williams and Mary McLeod Bethune, Will Alexander at FSA, and Hilda Smith, who headed the WPA’s worker education programs. The First Lady’s influence on them was noted by Hilda Smith, who inscribed her 1935 book of poetry, Frontiers, to ER, “who has helped us all to push on to new frontiers, and has always led the way—.”
*Vassar’s production of Whittaker Chambers’s documentary of the Arkansas drought, which caused suffering and starvation while Congress “dilly-dallied on the dole,” caused a sensation and toured nationally. According to Jane DeHart, Flanagan’s biographer. Can You Hear Their Voices was a prelude to the Federal Theatre’s popular “Living Newspapers.”
*FDR’s 1935 Revenue Act, damned as a “soak the rich” law, boosted top personal and corporate income tax rates from 63 to 79 percent and raised estate taxes. But during the 1930s only 5 percent of the population paid federal taxes. Fewer than 10 percent of American families earned as much as $3,200; only 1 percent earned over $10,000. Only one individual, John D. Rockefeller, was subject to the highest tax rate. Not until World War II did income tax finally involve over 70 percent of the population. Before 1935 the people who could least afford to pay shouldered the heaviest tax burdens—through excise taxes on cars, gasoline, liquor—which accounted for 55 percent of federal taxes collected. Only 27 percent was collected through individual corporate taxes. The Social Security Act added another regressive tax, the payroll tax. Nevertheless, taxes exacerbated tensions between FDR and business conservatives—who stepped up their war on the New Deal.
* Among America’s notable black leaders in attendance were Channing Tobias, director of New York City’s YMCA; Robert Weaver, Department of the Interior; Eugene Kinckle Jones, Department of Commerce; Howard University law professor William Hastie; Elizabeth Perry Cannon, Spelman College; A. A. Taylor, Fisk University; Ira Reid and Mordecai Johnson, Howard University; Marion Cuthbert, YWCA; and Walter White.