Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
148
Sanchez recalled that “it was so dark and dusty [he] couldn’t find the
entrance” to the radio station where he had been heading next. After groping
around in blasts of wind that felt like somebody was “sandblasting” his face,
he made it into the radio station, KGNO, and crawled up the pitch-black
stairwell to the second floor where he waited for more than three hours. A
group of begrimed people stumbled into his temporary sanctuary, detoured
from their trip to a movie. Caught in the gale of dirt, they had “abandoned their
car, held hands, and feeling the curb, found their way to KGNO.” Not wanting
his mother to worry about him, Sanchez headed home as soon as possible. He
remembered others dying in subsequent years of dust-induced pneumonia,
and though he survived to tell the tale, his family’s circumstances were bleak:
“Our homes were made of old lumber that the railroad had thrown away. No
one had storm windows or doors so the dust just sifted in. My mother had to
put wet rags over the windows and doors to keep some of the dust out of the
air so that we could breathe.”
The
gritty swirls of dust marched across the middle of the continent, strip-
ping
paint from new cars and houses, crackling with enough static electricity
to make metal poles shimmer and snap. Although the center of the dust bowl
was in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, dirt from storms like this reached as far
as Washington, DC, and New York City. There were even instances of dust
bowl sand drifting out on the jet stream to land on ships’ decks at sea. The
six-year drought ended in 1937. Two years later, The Wizard of Oz, starring
Judy Garland as Dorothy, was released. Although L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories
were three decades old, the opening dust bowl scene must have seemed more
documentary than fantasy to the sand-blasted sodbusters, railroad hoppers,
store clerks, Okies, and general nesters who toughed out six years of drought
and dust.
During
the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration imple-
mented
all sorts of programs designed to improve life on the farm. Minimum
prices were guaranteed for a variety of meats, vegetables, and grains. The
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) paid southern farmers to put
hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton under the plow, literally lowering
production to raise prices—then the AAA paid plantation owners in cash for
the ruined cotton (during the decade, farm prices rose by 40 percent). The
Rural Electrification Agency brought electricity to outlying farmhouses no
private utility company would have dreamed of supplying at so much expense
for so little financial return. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest
river-damming irrigation project in the history of the nation, provided jobs,
corrected soil erosion, diminished malaria breeding grounds, and provided
steadier electric power throughout the South. But not everyone in the southern
Midwest would benefit from New Deal programs.
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Sharecroppers both black and white provided the bent-backed, cotton-
picking labor that slaves had done for 200 years. Sharecroppers owned noth-
ing
but a few clothes—and sometimes a pot, a fork, and a Bible—and they
owed one-half of their cotton crop to the plantation owner in payment for
the dubious pleasure of working the land, which left a starving share for the
cropper’s family. When the AAA started to send checks to farmers in 1934 to
slow cotton production, the plantation owners kept the cash for themselves,
rarely passing any down to tenants or sharecroppers. An insurgent union called
the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union (SFTU) formed slowly and painfully to
fight for some crumb of the greenback pie being delivered to the landowners.
Segregated tradition gave way to integrated need, and the SFTU became a
biracial movement: hunger and oppression looked black and white. In ugly
response, owners of large farms took two actions: first, they worked with local
sheriff’s departments to beat and shoot SFTU organizers throughout the South,
once breaking into a church and blasting worshippers in the back as they tried
to run; and second, they told their congressmen in the Democratic Party to
pressure President Roosevelt not to help the SFTU. Roosevelt agreed, believing
he could not push through other elements of his New Deal without the sup-
port
of his party’s southern wing. In 1935, Congress passed the Wagner Act,
giving workers the right to collective bargaining, the right to form unions with
federal protection. But the Wagner Act did not cover southern tenant farmers
and sharecroppers, and the Farmers’ Tenant Union crumbled and sank back
into the cotton fields by the end of the decade. Northern steel and autoworkers,
however, flooded into the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations,
a union for unskilled laborers. Under the leadership of its president, John L.
Lewis, spark-scarred machine hands gained higher wages and shorter hours.
In the North, workers might be poor but they could vote, so they had power
over their congressmen. In the South, workers were poor and could not vote,
excluded by dirty tricks like the poll tax, usually a one-dollar registration fee
that sharecroppers simply could not pay. Without money and without the vote,
poor southerners bent back under the lash of tradition.
Also
during the 1930s, under prompting from labor unions like the Ameri-
c
an Federation of Labor and from local welfare agencies, approximately
400,000 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans—many of them U.S. citizens
born in this country—were forcibly deported as repatriados, “the repatriated,”
a word used insincerely and inaccurately. One-third of all Spanish-speaking
residents of Los Angeles were deported, along with hundreds of thousands
of men, women, and children from Arizona and Texas. Only ten years later,
when more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into concentra-
tion
camps during World War II, the U.S. government would entirely reverse
course under the bracero program, which imported Mexican laborers to work
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150
the fields of the West from which the Japanese had been plucked. When they
were needed as cheap labor, Mexicans were invited—officially and unof-
ficially—to
enter the United States; when the economy slumped, Mexicans
and Mexican-Americans were chased away.
The dust bowl was no one’s friend, certainly not gentle to the hangers-on
at the fringes of the American economy. However, people of all colors and
creeds found a powerful friend and ally in the White House, though it was not
always the president. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt—niece to former president
Theodore Roosevelt, former volunteer dance teacher at a settlement house
in New York City’s Lower East Side, journalist writing a daily column titled
“My Day”—coolly ignored the angry comments of racists and conservatives
as she urged her husband to make the New Deal an equal deal for all.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Before the Depression
Eleanor Roosevelt was anything but common, but she championed the com-
mon
causes of common people. Not since Dolley Madison had smoothed
political feelings, thrown festive soirees, and saved an original oil painting
of George Washington from the flames of British temper in 1814 had there
been as independent and powerful a woman in the White House as Eleanor
Roosevelt.
S
he was born in 1884, the daughter of Elliot Roosevelt, the dashing
youngest brother of Theodore, and his wife, Anna. Eleanor’s childhood had
equal parts tragedy and chance. For tragedy, her father Elliot’s alcoholism
competed with her mother Anna’s distaste for Eleanor’s physical features,
namely a set of buckteeth. Her father abandoned her all too often for hunting
getaways and bars, literally leaving young Eleanor on the street outside “his
club” one afternoon until the establishment’s doorman saw her and ordered
a taxi to take her home.
15
Her mother abandoned little Eleanor from the
outset, unsure of how to raise a bucktoothed girl in an upper-crust society
that demanded conventional beauty of its women. But the Roosevelt family’s
iron will braced Eleanor’s spirit to withstand the dwindled love of a besotted
father and disappointed mother. Eleanor could and would care for herself,
and she was not without allies or friends. Raised for a time by her maternal
grandmother in New York City after Anna Roosevelt died in 1892, Eleanor
first found sympathetic friends at the age of fifteen in England at an exclusive
school, Allenswood, presided over by the gifted Madame Souvestre. There,
Eleanor met other young women of means and minds, and under Madame
Souvestre’s careful tutelage, she realized that there was room in the world
for women of soaring spirit.
S
oon after returning from England, Eleanor went to a party she did not want
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
to attend: her own. For members of old money, landed families, a coming-
of-age ball was held to announce adulthood. In Eleanor’s case, this meant
an evening of unwanted small talk and the recognition that her new-found
freedom was not long to last because the party also heralded her availability
for marriage. Having enjoyed classic literature and tours of Europe with
Madame Souvestre, Eleanor knew that marriage would entail the confines
of home, weighted down by the children she would be expected to have.
One starry-eyed suitor turned out to be much better than her fears. This was
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fifth cousin and Harvard student who knew
what he wanted: to marry Eleanor and to be president of the United States.
She elected him husband in 1905, twenty-eight years before the rest of the
country elected him president.
F
or ten years, Eleanor and Franklin shared an intimate love, though he was
soon distracted by his ambition. In 1910, Franklin was elected to the New York
State Senate and in 1913 landed the same federal-level job his older cousin,
Theodore, had held: assistant secretary of the navy. To get these jobs and keep
them, Franklin had to flash his delightful smile at innumerable hand-shaking,
martini-sipping functions. Meanwhile, Eleanor was in the midst of birthing
and raising five children under the domineering eye of mother-in-law Sara,
who had never wanted any competition for her son’s love. Sara Roosevelt
hovered. She went so far as to buy adjoining apartments for herself and for
Franklin and Eleanor; then she had doors installed to join the apartments on
every floor.
Eleanor Roosevelt handled the children, the meddling mother-in-law, and
the attention-seeking husband with grace and charm. But in 1915, Franklin
complicated their domestic tranquility by having an affair with his wife’s social
secretary. Eleanor discovered the truth when, after he returned from a tour of
war-torn Europe, she unpacked his suitcase and found a bundle of love letters
that she could not resist reading. After confronting him about the affair, which
Franklin promised to end, Eleanor said she would remain in the marriage—a
necessity for a man with major political ambitions. In return (though nearly
a decade later), Franklin built her her own house, Val Kill, right down the
road from the family mansion, Hyde Park, in New York. By the late 1910s,
the Roosevelts maintained a marriage as true friends, and though they often
lived apart, their public lives were intertwined.
In
1920 Franklin made an unsuccessful bid for the vice presidency, losing
to the Harding ticket and its promise of normalcy. Eleanor was there at his
side, waving, smiling, and trying to control her runaway voice, which was
high to start with and regularly took off by a shrill octave or two without her
permission. The polio virus hit Franklin in the summer of 1921 while the
family was vacationing in Maine, and once more Eleanor stood firmly by
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152
him, pulled back to his side by the quite literal necessity of propping him up
as he tried to regain the use of his legs. Most people who caught polio did not
suffer any paralysis, but a small minority did, and for most of them the loss
of mobility was permanent. As the years progressed, Franklin and Eleanor
resumed their separate private lives.
P
opularity from the Pulpit: Aimee Semple McPherson
Few Americans would have known who Eleanor Roosevelt was before 1928
when her husband became, much to her chagrin, governor of New York State.
Zora Neale Hurston’s name would have been slightly better known in literary
circles, but both women were invisible compared to the holy glow of Aimee
Semple McPherson. A two-time widow from Ontario, Canada, McPherson
turned people on to God by getting people to tune in to her. Discovering a
talent for revival-style preaching of a Pentecostal bent (including speaking in
tongues and faith healing), McPherson draped herself in bright white, stylish
outfits, giving congregants the unique opportunity to hear God’s word while
seeing her shapely legs. What could not be seen from the pews of her 5,300-
seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles could be imagined by listening to her
broadcasts over KFSG radio—McPherson’s own station. Her Foursquare
Gospel movement blossomed into hundreds of churches and a groundswell
of interest in fundamentalist Christianity outside its rural crib in the South
and Midwest. More than an evangelist for the Word alone, McPherson clinked
glasses with seemingly unlikely types, like the sharp-tongued secularist H.L.
Mencken; she championed the Good Book while he guffawed at its most
fundamentalist followers. In 1925, Mencken traveled to Dayton, Tennes-
see,
to cover the trial of John T. Scopes, whom prosecutors charged with
teaching evolutionary theory in violation of a new state law. While Scopes’s
conviction was later overturned on technical grounds, Mencken had a riot-
ous
time lampooning the creationist residents of rural Tennessee for hatching
“conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters.”
16
More important to the
average American than the tabloid stories about Aimee McPherson’s side life
(including allegations of love affairs with a married man) were the food and
clothes she distributed to the needy during the Depression. The occasional
scandal chased after her, as stories true and untrue haunt all celebrities, but
Aimee Semple McPherson remained well loved and admired. She trained
women to be ministers and invited African- and Latino-Americans to sing at
her church on equal footing with white performers. The same tendency toward
charity and kindheartedness that earned the flashy McPherson an adoring
public was also at work for Eleanor Roosevelt. But where Aimee McPherson
chased after the spotlight, Eleanor Roosevelt tried to avoid its glare, at least
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
until her husband became president. It took a severe national crisis to make
a president and first lady better known than a radio celebrity and personality
of the magnitude of Aimee Semple McPherson.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Progressive Politics in the Depression
During the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt was probably the most
popular woman in the nation, better loved, perhaps, than Shirley Temple
(child star of the movies), Amelia Earhart (“Lady Lindy,” the first woman
to fly solo across the Atlantic; her airplane vanished in the South Pacific in
1937), or Claudette Colbert (another movie starlet of mischievous beauty).
Eleanor went where Franklin could not, literally and figuratively. Literally
she traveled more than 40,000 miles to view New Deal projects like hospitals
being built through Works Progress Administration funding, and she even
took a train two miles down a coal shaft to see the conditions endured by
miners—one of the class of workers offered the opportunity to join a union
under the 1935 Wagner Act. Figuratively, Eleanor Roosevelt tested the limits
of the Democratic Party’s liberalism with regard to African-Americans and
other groups on the margins of society. In 1939, for example, an upper-crust
association, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), refused to let
a world-class opera singer, Marian Anderson, sing at its jubilee because she
was black. After touring internationally because no major U.S. symphony
wanted a black soloist, Anderson returned to the same conditions she had
left. So Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and found just the right
place for Marian Anderson to let loose the vocal angels: the public grounds
sprawling out at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, where 75,000 people
showed up to listen. Every night Eleanor filled up a basket with memos meant
to pester Franklin’s presidential conscience about this or that, and she filled
the basket so full and so often that he finally told her not to put in more than
three requests a night. Eleanor promoted the cause of poor farmers, abandoned
wives with children to feed and no food in the cupboards, and just about every
other group of disadvantaged Americans. Consequently, African-Americans
in particular flocked to the Democratic Party, almost fully abandoning the
Republican ranks, the party of Abraham Lincoln. The New Deal was the New
Reconstruction, or at least Eleanor Roosevelt tried to infuse her husband’s
administration with progressive politics.
Even
the most popular politicians are unpopular with somebody. A Gal-
lup
poll in 1958 indicated that if respondents had the chance to dine with
three people in history, Eleanor would come in sixth, Franklin second, Jesus
eleventh, and Abraham Lincoln first.
17
On the other hand, anti-Semites in
the country called the Roosevelt administration the “Jew Deal” because of
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154
the notable Jewish people appointed to high-level positions. Conservative
Democrats and Republicans started to wonder together whether Roosevelt
was turning the nation into a socialist experiment because he promoted close
bonds between government and society, between the feds and the economy.
While the New Deal undoubtedly bonded the federal government more finely
and more firmly to nearly every facet of American life, the argument can
be made that President Roosevelt wanted to save capitalism, not smother it
with bolshevism or socialism. A national health care plan was not enacted,
private property was not confiscated by the government, and unions like the
United Auto Workers (UAW) did not damage the viability of companies like
General Motors or Ford. In fact, by 2007, when Ford Motor Company was
losing more than $2,000 per every car it sold, a leading expense keeping Ford
from being profitable was the pension plan created in the 1940s. However,
that pension plan—which guaranteed health care and monthly checks for life
after retirement—was exactly the plan Walter Reuther, UAW president, did
not want.
Reuther wanted companies to buy health care collectively and to
collectively pool their retirement funds, but major steel and auto companies
resisted, saying that such a plan was “communist” and that their freedom of
choice would disappear into any kind of collective scheme. Today, almost all
U.S. steel and auto companies are struggling, largely under the burden of their
pension plans, which would be less draining had they enacted Reuther’s plan.
Unions wanted capitalism to work. Agreeing, President Roosevelt promoted
certain safeguards—like the Securities and Exchange Commission, which
oversees Wall Street—in order for people to have faith in the system.
While government involvement in the economy has been debated ever
since, no one disagrees that it was World War II, rather than the New Deal,
that lifted the United States out of the Great Depression.
Notes
1. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New
York: Free Press, 1987), 78.
2. J.D. Reed, “The Canvas Is the Night, Once a Visual Vagrant, Neon Has
a Stylish New Glow,” Time, June 10, 1985,
www.time.com/time/magazine/
article/0,9171,958470-2,00.html.
3. Quoted in Martin L. Fausold and George T. Mazuzan, eds., The Hoover Presi-
dency:
A Reappraisal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 52.
4. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (New York: Mari-
ner
, 1999), 378.
5. Quoted in Schlesinger, The Cycyles of American History, 378.
6.
Earl Proulx, Yankee Magazine’s Make It Last: Over 1,000 Ingenious Ways to
Extend the Life of Everything You Own (Dublin, NH: Yankee, 1996), 346.
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
7. Special to the New York Times. “ESLICK DIES IN HOUSE PLEADING FOR
BONUS: Tennessee Democrat Stricken by Heart Disease in Midst of Impassioned
Speech. TRAGEDY MOVES VETERANS Shack Flags Put at Half-Staff––House Ad-
j
ourns and Will Vote on Patman Bill Today. ESLICK FALLS DEAD PLEADING FOR
BONUS.” New York Times (1857–Current file), June 15, 1932, www.proquest.com/.
8. Quoted in Tom H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great
Depression in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 138.
9. Quoted in M.J. Heale, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The New Deal and War (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 1.
10. Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, Stephen J. McKenna, eds., The World’s
Greatest Speeches (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 508.
11. “THRONGS ARE CALM AS BRANCHES CLOSE: Thousands Gather
About Doors, but Most Accept Situation Philosophically. 8,000 AT ONE BRONX
OFFICE Men, Women in Crowd––Line Begins Forming at 6 in Morning––Police-
m
en on Guard.” New York Times (1857–Current file), December 12, 1930, www.
proquest.com/.
12. Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 8.
13. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 54.
14. For a full account of Louis Sanchez’s life, go to Dust Bowl Oral History Project,
Ford County Historical Society: A Kansas Humanities Council Funded Project, August
18, 1998,
www.skyways.org/orgs/fordco/dustbowl/louissanchez.html.
15. Jan Pottker, Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her
Daughter-In-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 71.
16. Vincent Fitzpatrick, H.L. Mencken (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press,
2004), 77.
17. “Famous People,” The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (New York:
Random, 1972), 2: 1560.
OUT OF THE DEPRESSION AND INTO WAR
9
Out of the Depression
and Into War
First Japanese-American arrivals at the Manzanar War Relocation Center,
1942. (Eliot Elisofon/Getty Images)
157