Eleanor and Franklin (87 page)

The defeat of the government factory was a major setback. The efforts to get an industry for Arthurdale were further hampered by the rulings of Comptroller General McCarl, who refused to allow
government funds to be used to subsidize private industry on the projects. McCarl is “not only a Republican,” fumed Ickes, “but . . . a reactionary Republican.”
³¹
At Baruch's suggestion, Eleanor spoke with Gerard Swope of General Electric, who was a supporter of the resettlement idea. For a brief period a subsidiary of General Electric operated a vacuum-cleaner assembly plant in Arthurdale but closed it down for a lack of orders. Throughout the thirties Eleanor tried to get an industry for Arthurdale. Businessmen who wanted entrée to the White House would raise her hopes with big schemes and promises, and one even established a branch of a shirt factory, but at no time during the decade was more than a third of Arthurdale's labor force employed by private industry. As the prospect of employment faded, the problem of how the homesteaders were to pay for their homes and achieve a decent standard of living became less soluble. It produced a series of clashes between Eleanor and Ickes.

The prime question was: if the government were creating a new community in which a factory it would build and the farmlands it would purchase would set the levels of livelihood, what should those levels be? Eleanor thought that Arthurdale—indeed, the $25 million set aside for the whole resettlement division—should be used as seed money to show what could be done through social and economic planning to create a better life for people. If the objective was to place “as many people as possible in as cheap houses as possible, then I think the 25 millions had much better be turned over to the relief administration,” she stated. This was also Pickett's view. “It was only secondarily a relief measure,” he said; “primarily it was thought of as the beginning of a decentralization program for workers in industry. It was hoped it might find wide application. The picture was of millions of workers living in small homesteads with some two or three acres of land for gardening.”
³²
If this was utopianism, then even the Chamber of Commerce shared it, because after a visit to the new community its president, Henry I. Harriman, endorsed Arthurdale and the program of the resettlement division as “fundamental and far-reaching” in that it would show the way “to the necessary decentralization of industry” and “the relief of mass congestion in the cities.”
³³

In deciding what industry should be brought to Arthurdale, Eleanor wrote Baruch, at a time when she and Wilson thought they would have some choice in the matter, the important thing was “that a family shall have a sufficient means of livelihood and the assurance of an ability to pay their expenses covering a standard which we hope to
establish as something to shoot at in all rural industrial communities.”
³⁴
That standard, she felt, should include indoor bathrooms, a new type of rural school that would be the center of community life, and an innovative rural health program. Shown four alternative budgets for the homesteads by Ickes, she chose the most costly. She and Howe fought for refrigerators. Charles F. Pynchon, a Chicago building contractor whom Ickes, distrustful of Wilson, named to manage the Homestead Division in a businesslike way, omitted refrigerators from the Arthurdale plans. Everyone owned an icebox, he assumed, and the homesteaders could bring along their old ones. But few of the miners had them, Pynchon was told, when a furious Howe upbraided him for the omission: “I know Mrs. Roosevelt will be shocked because she has been looking over and picking out refrigerators for some time.” Howe was in charge of the “Electrical Committee” reviewing Arthurdale's electrical requirements, the same letter said, and did not understand why he was never consulted. “I think I will have to request the firing of the man in charge of electrical matters as the President is particularly anxious that the electrical part is done under my supervision and in close contact with me.”
³⁵

At times Ickes seemed to agree with Mrs. Roosevelt that resettlement should be a pioneering division within the government and that Arthurdale should be
the
demonstration project. He had heralded the purchase of the Arthur estate as the beginning of an experiment that would show “the way to a new life for many others.”
³⁶
But he was a suspicious administrator who liked to keep a tight control over every reach of his domain, and Wilson's direct access to the White House vexed him. His office planted a secretary on the unsuspecting Wilson who notified Burlew whenever Wilson was called to the White House. Obsessed by the fear of graft, Ickes insisted that the homestead communities be administered by Washington. Wilson, a Jeffersonian, wanted them to be self-governing, the responsibility local. So did Eleanor. “She was a great community person,” Wilson observed, “and she believed that since these units were small, since they were experimental, there must be a maximum amount of local interest and local initiative in them.” In the spring of 1934 Ickes overrode Wilson and federalized the fifty projects that had been announced, whereupon Wilson resigned and returned to Agriculture as assistant secretary.
³⁷

The first fifty projects were of three types—experimental farm colonies, homestead-garden colonies located within commuting distance of some type of industrial employment, and four settlements for
stranded miners in Appalachia. Of these Arthurdale alone escaped the secretary's executive clutch.

“I am becoming worried about the Reedsville, West Virginia project,” he wrote in his diary, December 2, 1933.

I am afraid that we are due for some criticism for our work there. In the first place, we undertook it too hastily. Colonel Howe, in a rash moment, told the President that we would start work within three weeks. . . . The result has been that we have rushed ahead pell-mell. I am afraid that we are spending more money than we have a right to spend. Another thing that bothers me is that Colonel Howe, with I think the approval of Mrs. Roosevelt, wanted us to enter into a contract for some 60 or 75 knockdown houses. I understand that these houses are only about ten feet wide and I am afraid that they will look a good deal like a joke.

Howe's prefabs became an albatross around Arthurdale's neck. He had ordered the fifty Cape Cod houses at a cost of $1,000 apiece over the telephone. Eleanor had tried unsuccessfully to argue him out of doing so, and when she visited Arthurdale she went straight for the first of the prefabs which had been put up. Pickett reported to Wilson her great disappointment. “She said she should have stopped Louis Howe from ordering those houses. She was afraid they would turn out to be just exactly what they were when she saw them.” Their size was less a problem than their flimsiness, designed as they were for Cape Cod summers, not Appalachia winters.
³⁸

“We had fifty families out there in freezing winter weather sleeping under tents,” Howe later said defensively. “We had to find accommodations for them somehow.”
³⁹
The houses were a blunder whatever the excuse. The blunder was compounded when the foundations that had been prepared for them proved to be too large. As a consequence the homesteaders who had hoped to be in their houses by Thanksgiving did not move in until June 7, 1934.

At Eleanor's suggestion, Eric Gugler was asked to redesign and reconstruct the houses. The president liked Gugler, she told Wilson and Pickett. “Eric Gugler turned out to be a very excellent person,” said Wilson afterward. “He did a marvellous thing, but he said from the start, ‘When you change plans, it's going to cost a lot of money.'”
⁴⁰

Ickes resented Eleanor's involvement in Arthurdale and was exasperated by her refusal to subordinate human values to cost consciousness,
a point on which she was stoutly supported by Wilson and Pickett.
⁴¹
The debate over the size and design of the homestead houses, and, more generally, the standard of living that should be aimed at in the new settlements was fundamental and prophetic of later controversies over what constituted poverty and the government's responsibility to end it. Eleanor's view was that everyone had a right to a decent standard of living.
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Ickes feared that failure to keep the costs down might mean loss of “the popular support that is absolutely essential if we are to carry through the program at all.”
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On the issue of the Arthurdale houses, the president at first sided with his wife. Ickes went to the White House to look at the sketches Gugler had prepared for these houses, and recorded in his diary that they

were very attractive indeed but the cost of the thing is shocking to me. The President said we could justify the cost, which will run in excess of $10,000 per family, by the fact that it is a model for other homestead projects. My reply to that was to ask what it was a model of, since obviously it wasn't a model of low-cost housing for people on the very lowest rung of the economic order. . . . I don't see how we can possibly defend ourselves on this project. It worries me more than anything else in my whole department. The theory was that we would be able to set up families on subsistence homesteads at a family cost from $2,000 to $3,000 and here we have already run above $10,000 per family. I am afraid we are going to come in for a lot of justifiable criticism.
⁴⁴

The criticism was not long in coming. An article in the anti-administration
Saturday Evening Post,
“The New Homesteaders,” focused on Louis Howe's prefabs, how “the camp houses” had been “slowly tortured” into shape and buried “in a meringue of wings, bay windows, fireplaces, porches, terraces and pergolas.” Eight wells had been drilled and abandoned when the architect changed his mind about the location of the houses. Each enameled sink was equipped with a “large size patented grease trap which cost $37.50,” and which the author said was unnecessary. Arthurdale, he wrote, was an example of New Deal bungling and an object lesson in what happens in a planned economy.
⁴⁵

A newspaper friend sent a batch of clippings prompted by the article to Eleanor in Hyde Park. Rumors about the house had been around a long time, the reporter said; “should we have told you?” Eleanor
should be prepared to “explain frankly” when she returned to Washington.
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She had tried to get Howe and Ickes to make a statement that these houses “had not worked out,” she replied, and “that they were being made liveable, and that they would not cost the people moving in any more, as the basis for rent was to be set on the earning power of the community and not on the cost of development. For the first homesteads many things will have to be tried out which could not be paid for by the homesteaders.” The homesteads were a demonstration of community building

to show what might happen if industry could be decentralized and associated with agriculture and at the same time they are to experiment to find out how much of comfort and pleasure can be put into the lives of people living in this type of community. . . . I think all this should have been said long ago but that again is not my business. . . . I am begging them now to be entirely honest and very explicit. I am afraid I would always be more frank than is considered advisable by many.
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She was sure to be asked about Arthurdale at her first news conference when she came back to Washington, she advised Ickes, and she was writing out her statement “so that I will be sure to say the things which you all want me to say.”
⁴⁸

Arthurdale also drew the fire of the Communists. While conservatives complained that the government was subsidizing a life of middle-class affluence, the Communists attacked the homestead as a design “for permanent poverty.” Harold Ware, the Communist party's agricultural expert, collaborated on an article for
Harper's
in which he not only made fun, in a heavy-handed way, of Howe's truckloads of ready-made summer houses, but laboriously uncovered fascist implications in the homestead movement. If the West Virginia projects were a pattern for anything, they were “a pattern for the decentralization of poverty” and the establishment of “a state of serfdom.” Ware supported this last charge with a reference to the thirty years that the homesteaders had in which to pay for the houses.
⁴⁹

“Of course, the Reedsville project is just one big headache and has been from the beginning,” Ickes grumbled in his diary. There was Howe's initial mistake. “And then Mrs. Roosevelt took the Reedsville project under her protecting wing with the result that we have been spending money down there like drunken sailors—money that
we can never hope to get out of the project. This project has been attacked in a number of articles and magazines and newspapers, and we are distinctly on the defensive about it.”
⁵⁰

Ickes thought the president was swinging around to his views on cost: “As the President remarked to me: ‘My Missus, unlike most women, hasn't any sense about money at all.' He added with respect to Louis Howe that Louie didn't know anything about money, being as he is an old newspaperman, although he did pay tribute to Louis's political sagacity.”
⁵¹
Two days after Ickes made this entry the voters overwhelmingly endorsed the New Deal in the 1934 congressional elections. Buoyed up by this unprecedented vote of confidence, Roosevelt was determined to push forward with his program, including a massive expansion of the subsistence homestead movement. He had also decided to take the program away from Ickes. The day after the president told Ickes he was considering turning over the Subsistence Homestead Division together with a rural-housing program to Harry Hopkins, Ickes wrote in his diary, “I won't be at all put out if I lose Subsistence Homesteads. It has been nothing but a headache from the beginning.”
⁵²
But he continued to grumble about Eleanor's role in the affair.