Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (86 page)

Hopkins soon became a symbol of the New Deal, ministering to the poorest and most unfortunate victims of the depression. He and those he gathered around him—“they were young, thin, overworked-looking, and tremendously alive,” a newcomer to the cadre wrote of the Hopkins crowd—tried to give work to the jobless in exchange for the aid they dispensed, but the work was secondary and sometimes nonexistent. Either way, the program was controversial. When the jobs didn’t appear, the workers were on the dole, which was bad for their morale and for the politics of relief. When the jobs did develop, they were often patently make-work, which was almost as bad.

Though Hopkins spent swiftly, he didn’t spend lightly. “It takes a lot of nerve to put your signature down on a piece of paper when it means that the government of the United States is going to pay out a million dollars to the unemployed in Chicago,” he explained. “It takes decision, because you’ll have to decide whether Chicago needs that money more than New York City or Los Angeles. You can’t care very much what people are going to say because when you’re handling other people’s money whatever you do is always wrong. If you try to hold down wages, you’ll be accused of union-busting and of grinding down the poor; if you pay a decent wage, you’ll be competing with private industry and pampering a lot of no-accounts.”

To help determine whether Chicago needed money more than New York, Hopkins relied on reports from agents he sent into the field. Lorena Hickok was one of the best. Hickok covered the country from east to west and north to south. In the coal valleys of West Virginia she learned that the greatest need was for hospitals. “There is not in the state a single city or county hospital with free clinics or free beds,” she wrote Hopkins. The endemic poverty of the people of the region had deepened amid the depression. “Some of them have been starving for eight years. I was told there are children in West Virginia who have never tasted milk.” The malnutrition magnified the chronic diseases of miners and their kin, and the maladies of the poor in general. “I heard of whole families having tuberculosis in some of the mining camps. There are the usual elements of typhoid…. Dysentery is so common that nobody says much about it. ‘We begin losing our babies with dysentery in September,’ one investigator remarked casually. Diphtheria was beginning to break out in Logan and Mingo counties when I was there.”

In Kentucky Hickok found the same problems and some others. “They are a curiously appealing people,” she said of the mountaineers of the eastern part of the state.

They all carry guns and shoot each other. And yet they never think of robbing people. I cannot for the life of me understand why they don’t go down and raid the Blue Grass country…. They shoot each other, and yet there is in them a great deal of gentleness. Toward their children, for instance. And you hear about them stories like this: Relief in Kentucky having been none too adequate in the matter of clothing, most of them are scantily clad. An investigator visiting one of their villages back up in the mountains in Clay county a few weeks ago noticed that all the men and boys, as they passed one cabin, pulled their caps down over their eyes. When asked why, they told him: “Well, you see, the women folks in that thar place hain’t got no clothes at all. Even their rags is clean wore out and gone.”

Adequate clothing was a problem in North Dakota too. Hickok described one farmer, no poorer than many on the Northern Plains. “‘Everything I own I have on my back,’ he said. He then explained that, having no underwear, he was wearing two pairs of overalls and two very ragged denim jackets. His shoes were so far gone that I wondered how he kept them on his feet.” Hickok was visiting in October; already the north wind nipped bare and lightly covered flesh. She and her companions walked about a farm house, shivering themselves in their thick coats and jackets. “When we came out to get into the car, we found it full of farmers, with all the windows closed. They apologized and said they had crawled in there to keep warm.”

R
OOSEVELT DISLIKED
relief as much as many of the recipients did. He acknowledged its necessity in the early days of his administration, but he never beat down his nagging concern that it demoralized its recipients and risked making the temporarily unemployed permanently unemployable. For this reason he determined to phase out relief in favor of jobs—private jobs if possible, government jobs if necessary.

The federal jobs program had been divided since 1933 between the fiefdoms of Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins. Different philosophies drove the two men. Ickes, heading the Interior Department’s Public Works Administration, thought like a businessman, insisting on value for money. He contended that federal projects should prime the pump of the private economy and then liquidate themselves. He preferred spending money on equipment to spending money on workers, as the former would stimulate employment among equipment manufacturers and strengthen the private sector, with long-term benefits for the whole economy. Hopkins, by contrast, thought like a social worker. His goal was to put as many people on the job as possible. What those people produced was less important than the fact that they received a paycheck. Their pay would benefit them at once and benefit the larger economy as they spent it on food, clothes, housing, and other necessities.

The competing philosophies produced confusion in the administration of the relief programs and bruises among the administrators. Ickes, the older of the two, constantly felt put upon. “I worked every Sunday and every holiday, Christmas included,” he recalled with martyred pride. “I signed all of the public works contracts myself. I must have signed, at first, at least 5,000, each one in triplicate. My desk used to be piled so high with stuff for signature that it was appalling. I was working beyond human endurance.”

Hopkins considered Ickes a plodder who simply didn’t understand the crisis the country faced. “All day planning the work program, which would be a great deal easier if Ickes would play ball,” he recorded in his diary in May 1935. “But he is stubborn and righteous, which is a hard combination. He is also the ‘great resigner’—anything doesn’t go his way, threatens to quit. He bores me.”

Ickes thought Hopkins a spendthrift. “It is becoming ever clearer that Hopkins is dominating this program,” Ickes said of relief in June 1935. “And this domination will mean thousands of inconsequential make-believe projects in all parts of the country.”

Administrative harmony and economic efficiency should have suggested that Roosevelt decide between his two relief administrators and their competing philosophies. But he didn’t. His refusal reflected his chronic difficulty letting subordinates go, but it also revealed his desire to play both sides of the street on the politics of relief. For those who wanted proof that the government’s relief dollars weren’t being wasted on meaningless projects, he pointed to the accomplishments of Ickes and the PWA, including the construction of the Bonneville Dam, the electrification of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Washington to New York, and the building of thousands of new schools, hundreds of hospitals, dozens of airports. To those who put more value on the number of jobs the government created, he cited Harry Hopkins, the FERA and CWA, and the 4.2 million Americans Hopkins put to work.

In the spring of 1935, as Roosevelt pondered how to expand the public works program, he had to decide who would handle the enlarged task. “Ickes is a good administrator, but often too slow,” Roosevelt mused. “Harry gets things done. I am going to give this job to Harry.” But not to Harry alone. The president appointed Hopkins head of a new agency, the Works Progress Administration, with charge of disbursing new federal job funds. Meanwhile Roosevelt made Ickes a member of the committee that oversaw allotments to the WPA. Ickes accepted the arrangement with comparative grace. “Hopkins will fly off on tangents unless he is watched,” Ickes remarked.

But Ickes and the committee couldn’t keep Hopkins grounded. Expanding on the fine print in the WPA charter, Hopkins launched numerous projects on his own authority. Before long he was encroaching on the territory of Ickes and the PWA. (It was at this point, if not before, that Ickes developed the conviction that Hopkins had chosen the name of his new agency to create deliberate confusion with the PWA.) Nominally the PWA was assigned all construction projects that cost over $25,000, but Hopkins defeated this provision by breaking large bids into several small contracts. And Hopkins was simply the more effective infighter. Hugh Johnson observed admiringly of Hopkins: “He has a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar, and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity—words kosher enough to get by the censor but acid enough to make a mule-skinner jealous.”

Hopkins, moreover, had imagination Ickes lacked. While the great majority of WPA money went to build roads, bridges, schools, libraries, parks, and other uncontroversial facilities, Hopkins spent substantial sums putting writers and artists to work. The Federal Writers’ Project employed several thousand journalists, novelists, and poets to gather memories and news clips into oral histories, local histories, and guidebooks to the forty-eight states. The Federal Theater Project enlisted playwrights, directors, and actors to carry the dramatic arts to communities that often hadn’t received them. Similar visual art and music projects did much the same for the artists and audiences involved.

Hopkins’s projects provoked controversy. Some of the fuss focused on the mere idea of underwriting artists and intellectuals. Hopkins dismissed this part of the criticism with a wave of his cigarette. “Hell,” he said, “they’ve got to eat just like other people.” He had more trouble with the complaint that many of the productions, especially by the theater group, displayed a liberal-to-radical bias. He could explain that artists tended left and that to dictate content to artists would constitute censorship. But conservatives, already annoyed at subsidizing eggheads, didn’t buy his disclaimers.

Ickes continued to have his own reasons for resenting Hopkins. Nearly every week the WPA encroached further into the territory of the PWA. “We voted millions upon millions of dollars for Hopkins, absolutely blind,” Ickes recorded after one cabinet meeting. By contrast, PWA projects encountered close scrutiny—“with Hopkins exercising what amounts to a veto power,” Ickes grumbled. Roosevelt appeared oblivious to what was happening. “Hopkins seems to sing a siren song for him.”

At temper’s end, Ickes confronted Roosevelt and declared that Hopkins was deliberately driving the PWA out of existence. “I never thought I would talk to a president of the United States the way I talked to President Roosevelt last night,” Ickes recorded. Roosevelt told him to calm down. He did, for a time. But the problem festered.

It came to a head at a cabinet meeting in the spring of 1936. Congress was considering the budget for the coming fiscal year; Roosevelt warned Ickes not to air his grievances against Hopkins in front of the Senate appropriations committee. “It was clear as day that the President was spanking me hard before the full cabinet,” Ickes noted. That afternoon he submitted a letter of resignation.

Roosevelt didn’t reply. Ickes had previously arranged a lunch meeting with the president for the following noon. Hearing nothing from the White House regarding his letter, he wondered whether the meeting was still on. He called Missy LeHand. Yes, she said, the president was expecting him. And yes, the president had read the interior secretary’s letter.

Ickes didn’t know what to think as he entered Roosevelt’s office. A slight smile, but nothing more, crossed the president’s face. Silently he presented Ickes a handwritten memorandum:

The White House

Washington

Dear Harold—

1. P.W.A. is not “repudiated.”

2. P.W.A. is not “ended.”

3. I did not “make it impossible for you to go before the committee.”

4. I have not indicated lack of confidence.

5. I have
full
confidence in you.

6. You and I have the same big objectives.

7. You are needed, to carry on a big common task.

8. Resignation
not
accepted!

Your affectionate friend,
Franklin D. Roosevelt

The two men ate lunch, and Ickes went back to work.

31.

A
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ECOVERY
A
DMINISTRATION
seemed to Roosevelt and to many of those who participated in crafting its codes, the reconstruction agency was never loved. Businesses chafed at its restrictions and cheated when they could. Labor alleged that the codes favored management and restricted the right to strike. Consumers, who valued the NRA least of all, complained that they paid dearly for the benefits to business and labor. The unspoken secret of the Great Depression was that for those workers who kept their jobs—in other words, for three out of four workers, even at the worst of the long slump—life wasn’t especially uncomfortable. Low prices meant that dollars stretched farther than before. A fundamental purpose of the NRA was to raise prices; to the extent that it achieved its purpose, it hurt consumers. This was one reason Hugh Johnson and the NRA spent such effort on moral suasion, for consumers’ material interests lay precisely in patronizing those companies that undercut the price-fixing aspects of the industrial codes.