Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (80 page)

Lewis took this attitude to the negotiations over the coal code. Patrick Hurley, the Republican secretary of war responsible for the orders that sent Douglas MacArthur against the Bonus Army in 1932, represented some of the mine operators. Hurley’s heartland upbringing matched Lewis’s; he proudly expatiated on his boyhood in Indian Territory and his hardscrabble youth on the frontier. He added, for Lewis’s benefit, that he had once worked in the mines and had carried the union card of the UMW. Lewis watched Hurley carefully from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. He raised himself to his full height, threw his head back, and declaimed what seemed to be congratulations. “It is a matter of pride to a member of the United Mine Workers to see a man of that organization go out into the highways and byways of national politics and make a name for himself that is recognized throughout the country,” Lewis said. His gaze turned to a glare as he continued: “But it is a matter of sorrow and regret to see a man betray the union of his youth”—and Lewis here brought Hurley’s fellow management representatives into his frowning view—“for thirty lousy pieces of silver.” Hurley leaped to his feet and rushed toward Lewis, angrily insisting that he retract the slander he had just uttered. Lewis stood fast, as though to let Hurley’s outburst break upon his rugged form. In a calm voice he told the chair of the meeting: “Strike out ‘thirty pieces of silver.’ Let it stand: ‘betray the union of his youth.’”

The coal operators—and other employers—were forced to accept the language of section 7a and to see its principles written into the industrial codes. But they weren’t without recourse. Despite its apparent curbs on company unions, many employers turned to just such alternative organizations and encouraged workers to join them. Some of the enticements were illusory, but others were real: higher wages, broader benefits, better working conditions. To workers accustomed to little but hostility from management, the company unions marked a signal improvement.

This was precisely what bothered Lewis, William Green of the American Federation of Labor, and other labor leaders. The company unions gave workers something, but not nearly what Lewis and Green thought the workers ought to receive and what they thought the workers would get under independent unions like the UMW and those affiliated with the AFL. In the several months following passage of the Recovery Act, company unions sprang up by the hundreds. The independent unions naturally complained, and many launched strikes to preempt the company unions, to resist their spread, or to register disapproval of the whole scheme. Meanwhile they appealed to the Roosevelt administration and to Congress to strengthen the guarantees they believed section 7a had accorded them.

T
HE
NRA
WAS
the most radical and potentially the most important of the New Deal programs, but the Civilian Conservation Corps was the closest to Roosevelt’s heart. It was also the one that promised to have the most immediate impact on the unemployment rate in America, a fact that intensified his affection for it. The stated goal of the CCC was to put a quarter million men to work within a few months; nothing so ambitious had ever been attempted by government in America. The nearest parallels were the raising of armies for war, which accounted for Roosevelt’s decision to enlist the War Department, despite early opposition from the military brass. The officers complained that their line was warfare, not social work. But when the commander in chief insisted, and when Congress supplied the money to ensure that the civilian corps did not steal resources from the military corps, the army came around.

Besides the War Department, Roosevelt recruited the Departments of Interior and Agriculture to construct the camps and supervise the projects the men would undertake. Meanwhile he kept a close eye on the whole affair. “I want
personally
to check on the location and scope of the camps, assign work to be done, etc.,” he wrote on an organizational chart he devised for the corps. This was a bad idea, as soon became apparent. Amid the myriad other demands on his time, Roosevelt couldn’t keep up with the creation of the hundreds, then thousands, of CCC camps. At first the corps’ director, Robert Fechner, humored Roosevelt and sent the president each request. But after the backlog at the White House started crimping the work on the ground, Fechner exercised greater authority of his own.

Neither Fechner nor Roosevelt—nor anyone else, for that matter—realized what the government was getting into with the CCC. The head of Agriculture’s Forest Service bravely promised to build the requisite camps—some thirteen hundred in the first wave—by midsummer, only to discover that his agency had nowhere near the requisite administrative and logistic capacity. Reluctantly he and Fechner leaned more heavily on the army, which, even more reluctantly, shouldered a larger share of the burden. The target population of the corps was unemployed young males from the cities, but they were soon supplemented by some twenty thousand “local experienced men”—lumberjacks, hunting guides, and the like. Dual necessity inspired this expansion: city boys who didn’t know a penknife from a Pulaski would have been lost, literally and figuratively, in the forests, and the loggers and guides would have been angry at being excluded from work they were particularly competent to do. “It is clearly impossible to import into forest regions non-residents even from within the same state, and have peace there unless local unemployed laborers, accustomed to making their living in the woods in that very place, are given fair consideration as concerns their own means of livelihood,” a letter to Roosevelt from Fechner and other interested parties asserted. The loggers, in particular, were a rough bunch. Should they be excluded they might burn down the camps or the forests or both.

Considerations of a slightly different sort caused Roosevelt to expand the purview of the corps to include American Indians. Poverty had been a severe problem on reservations and in the surrounding regions since the nineteenth century, and the drought that afflicted large swaths of the Plains deepened the misery. The drought simultaneously aggravated erosion, making the reservation districts suitable for the kind of restorative work that was part of the corps’ raison d’être. The requisite changes were made in the recruitment schedules, and nearly fifteen thousand Indians were added to the ranks of the conservationist workforce.

Another contingent came from the Bonus Army. Eleanor Roosevelt had charmed the veterans personally, but what disbanded the group definitively was the promise of inclusion in the conservation corps. This required some stretching of the corps mandate, as most of the vets were beyond the age limit of twenty-five years, and many were married, also in contravention of CCC practice. But smart politics and simple justice suggested that exceptions were in order, and Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the enlistment of twenty-five thousand vets. Some grumbled that the thirty-dollar monthly wage wasn’t what they had hoped for. But considering their alternatives, many judged the offer a bargain and donned the uniform of the CCC.

The vets found much about corps life familiar. Work days began with six o’clock reveille. The young men turned out of their cots in the tents that served as initial shelter, arranged in neat rows along paths lined with gravel. A first order of business in most camps was building wooden barracks to replace the tents; thereafter the men slept in bunks. A cold shower or splash constituted the morning ablutions, which were followed by a half hour’s calisthenics and other exercise. (Whether Roosevelt, in personally approving this part of the program, grew wistful at thoughts of Walter Camp’s wartime regimen is impossible to know.) Breakfast was served at seven and consisted of lumber-camp fare in substantial, if not Paul Bunyan-esque, proportions. Ham and eggs, hot cereal and stewed prunes, milk and coffee fueled the bodies for the morning’s work in the woods.

Roll call and inspection followed breakfast, and by eight the men were off to the job sites. If these were close to camp, they hefted their tools and walked; if farther, they piled into trucks and were driven. They cleared brush, built trails, and planted trees—hundreds of trees, thousands of trees, eventually millions of trees. At noon they broke for lunch, which was delivered to the site if they weren’t within walking distance of the mess hall. In the hall the meal was often hot; in the woods it typically consisted of sandwiches, more coffee, and pie. Work resumed and lasted till four, when the men returned to the camp. The hour before dinner was their own, to read any mail that might have come, write letters, play baseball or football, or do whatever else young men do in the absence of young women and alcohol. Some camps had libraries stocked with magazines and popular books; mobile libraries served those camps without fixed facilities.

All day the men wore work clothes, typically denim jeans and work shirts. For dinner they donned dress uniforms: olive drab supplied by the army. Eventually Roosevelt designed a dress uniform specifically for the CCC: forest green shirts and slacks. Dinner was even heartier than breakfast or lunch; the men downed beefsteaks, potatoes, bread, vegetables, fruit, milk, coffee, cake, and pie. An early measure of the success of the program was the muscle and bone the young men added to their frames. According to CCC statistics, the average enrollee arrived weighing 147 pounds and standing 5 feet 8
¹
/4 inches tall, at twenty years of age. This was below the norm for healthy, well-fed young men of that era, and it reflected the poverty most of the enrollees had experienced during adolescence. Within a month or two, the typical corpsman had put on ten or twelve pounds; many added height as well, though this naturally took longer.

Roosevelt remarked on the healthy growth when he toured CCC camps in August 1933. The president traversed the Shenandoah Valley west of Washington, stopping at five camps below the Blue Ridge. Someone in the corps had suggested that Roosevelt visit a model camp; he vetoed this plan in favor of examining several examples of the real thing. The five camps were a fair cross-section of the CCC in action. Each camp contained about two hundred men. Some of the camps were on public property; others were on private land. The men were clearing downed trees and dead wood, as a precaution against fire, and extending trails and improving roads. They were most proud of the stone guard walls they had built along the Blue Ridge Skyline Drive, where the pavement ran dangerously close to sheer cliffs.

Roosevelt rode in an open car beneath the hot Virginia sun. As he arrived at each camp, the men lined up in their army dress for inspection. They remained at attention till he gave the nod to their commander, who told them to break ranks—at which point they mobbed the president’s car to shake his hand. At one camp he ate lunch, attacking his fried steak, mashed potatoes, string beans, lettuce-and-tomato salad, and apple cobbler, washed down with iced tea, with almost as much gusto as the men did. “I wish I could spend a couple of months here myself,” he declared. “The only difference between us is that I am told you men have put on an average of twelve pounds each. I am trying to lose twelve pounds.” At another camp a self-proclaimed “Hillbilly Band” serenaded the president with “Turkey in the Straw.” At a third camp the corpsmen built a bonfire and burned an effigy of “Old Man Depression.”

For Roosevelt, the mission of the conservation corps had as much to do with conserving human resources as with saving America’s forests. He concluded his tour of the Virginia camps with the comment that he hoped the CCC camps all over the country were as inspiring as these. “All you have to do is look at the boys themselves to see that the camps are a success,” he said.

29.

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT VISITED
CCC
CAMPS, TOO, BUT USUALLY WITHOUT
her husband. She spent few days with Franklin—and of course no nights. She filled her calendar with her own activities, her own causes, her own companions. Being First Lady could sometimes be exciting. Amelia Earhart came to Washington and took Eleanor flying. “It was like being on top of the world!” Eleanor exclaimed. Being First Lady could also be a chore. She naturally hired a housekeeper to run the executive mansion; Henrietta Nesbitt received the job because Eleanor knew and liked her from Hyde Park, where she had operated a small tea house. The appointment was a disaster. The meals at the White House became notorious for the terrible food: leathery meat, watery soup, unrecognizable vegetables, cheap wine. Guests shared horror stories; Franklin complained. But Eleanor professed not to notice, and Mrs. Nesbitt stayed on. Certain of those who knew of the personal tension between Eleanor and Franklin surmised that Mrs. Nesbitt was, in a subtle and perhaps unconscious way, Eleanor’s instrument for asserting control over her husband in one area of their relationship where she could.