She Was One of Us

Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker

Brigid O'Farrell

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801462450
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Although born to a life of privilege and married to the President of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt was a staunch and lifelong advocate for workers and, for more than twenty-five years, a proud member of the AFL-CIO's Newspaper Guild. She Was One of Us tells for the first time the story of her deep and lasting ties to the American labor movement. Brigid O'Farrell follows Roosevelt—one of the most admired and, in her time, controversial women in the world—from the tenements of New York City to the White House, from local union halls to the convention floor of the AFL-CIO, from coal mines to political rallies to the United Nations.

Roosevelt worked with activists around the world to develop a shared vision of labor rights as human rights, which are central to democracy. In her view, everyone had the right to a decent job, fair working conditions, a living wage, and a voice at work. She Was One of Us provides a fresh and compelling account of her activities on behalf of workers, her guiding principles, her circle of friends—including Rose Schneiderman of the Women's Trade Union League and the garment unions and Walter Reuther, "the most dangerous man in Detroit"—and her adversaries, such as the influential journalist Westbrook Pegler, who attacked her as a dilettante and her labor allies as "thugs and extortioners." As O'Farrell makes clear, Roosevelt was not afraid to take on opponents of workers' rights or to criticize labor leaders if they abused their power; she never wavered in her support for the rank and file.

Today, union membership has declined to levels not seen since the Great Depression, and the silencing of American workers has contributed to rising inequality. In She Was One of Us, Eleanor Roosevelt's voice can once again be heard by those still working for social justice and human rights.

1

Why Women Should Join Unions

Mrs. Roosevelt asked many questions but she was particularly interested in why I thought women should join unions.

Rose Schneiderman, All for One, 1967

Seamstresses and glove makers, laundry workers and printers mingled with fashionable society matrons, labor organizers, and politicians as they boarded a large rented boat and slowly lumbered up the Hudson River. On Saturday, 8 June 1929, the sun was shining and a warm breeze that rippled the water in the harbor would also stir the stifling hot air in the sweatshops and the laundries, the tenements and crowded streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, all left behind for the day. As the jumble of buildings receded from view, the hillsides came into focus, lush with the deep green of the forests dominated by oak and maple trees among the evergreens. Flowers sparkled along the shoreline, redbud, dogwood, and mountain laurel, in stark contrast to the sheer rock formations. A train whistle screeched as railcars flashed by on the narrow tracks, speeding along the river’s edge going north from the city to Yonkers, Greystone, and New Hamburg. As Rose Schneiderman later recalled, it was a beautiful day to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women’s Trade Union League.1

On deck, distinguished New York citizens talked and laughed with recently arrived immigrants. Ladies wore lovely hats and sensible shoes, some of better quality than others. Men were dressed in dark suits and neckties, straw hats and bowlers, some more worn than others. Sounds of Yiddish, Italian, Polish, and Russian mixed musically with the English of high society and the Irish pub. The destination of these unusual traveling companions was Poughkeepsie, where buses waited to take them five miles north on the Old Post Road to Hyde Park and Springwood, the family home of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mrs. James Roosevelt, the governor’s mother, had issued invitations for a gathering from two to six in the afternoon.

Rose Schneiderman was not on the boat. She and Maud Swartz, her friend and partner at the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), had joined the Roosevelts at their home the night before to make final preparations and be on hand to greet the guests as they arrived. Eleanor Roosevelt reminded the governor about the event: his was the starring role, “the ‘piece-de-resistance’ tho they have a pageant at 3.” The afternoon program overflowed with education, politics, song, and dance. Mary Dreier, one of the founders and wealthy activists known as “allies” in the WTUL, put the final touches on the pageant she had written for the occasion. Pantomime and songs told the story of working girls: the shirtwaist strikes of 1909, the devastating Triangle Company fire, employer resistance, and police brutality. The young women in the cast wore the working girls’ shirtwaists and skirts and performed their show for over four hundred guests on the rolling lawn of the governor’s mansion overlooking the Hudson River. Their voices rang out as they marched and sang, “Though to jail we had to hike, We won the strike, hurrah.” Using drama, song, and stories, they told the history of the Women’s Trade Union League and the struggle of working women to join unions. They educated as they sang and danced, a familiar technique for women’s labor programs.2

Governor Franklin Roosevelt used the occasion to ask for labor’s help and to show support for their cause. He announced his appointments to a new commission created by the legislature to make recommendations on an old age pension law for the state and called on organized labor to support the program, long a goal of the WTUL. While praising the League’s work, he went on to note that “employers and employes [sic] alike have learned that in union there is strength…. There has also been a growing realization on the part of our people that the State itself is under obligation to those who labor, that the citizen who contributes by his toil to the wealth and prosperity of the commonwealth is entitled to certain benefits in return.”3

Mrs. Thomas Lamont, chair of the League’s finance committee, presented Schneiderman with a check for $30,000 to retire the mortgage on the League’s clubhouse at 247 Lexington Avenue. As president of the League, Rose thanked her and acknowledged the contributions of the Roosevelts. She highlighted the improvements in wages and working conditions for women that the League had helped to accomplish in its twenty-five-year history. John Sullivan, president of the New York State Federation of Labor, and Mrs. Henry Goddard Leach, president of the state League of Women Voters, also spoke.

Supper was served on the terrace. Nell Swartz, a member of the State Industrial Board, had an opportunity to visit with Morris Feinstone, secretary of the United Hebrew Trades. Eleanor Roosevelt could talk with William Collins, an organizer for the American Federation of Labor. Pauline Newman, an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), might catch the governor’s ear for a moment. Young factory workers and members of the League enjoyed a very pleasant and unusual day before boarding the buses that took them back to the boat, sailing down the Hudson, and returning to the Lower East Side, praising the governor as they went. “Was not the Governor great,” they enthused. “How democratic he is.” The New York Times declared this “the first time that a labor organization had met in such a setting.” It was not to be the last.4

This event marked a turning point for Eleanor Roosevelt. She had entered the 1920s with a basic understanding of work, politics, and unions. She first learned about dangerous working conditions, squalid tenements, and immigrant workers as a young girl volunteering with progressive reformers. Her aunt Bye, sister to Uncle Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States, taught her about political power behind the scenes. Knowledge about the traditional world of male trade unions was gained through her husband’s developing political career, but it was Rose Schneiderman and members of the Women’s Trade Union League who transformed ER’s basic awareness of labor issues into a core belief about unions and their ability to improve people’s lives. These women conveyed the depth of the problems faced by working people and offered the union framework as a critical part of the solution on the factory floor, in the classroom, and at the statehouse. When ER asked why women should join unions, they explained to her that women, like men, should join unions to secure their rights on the job and in the community. She made sure that FDR heard their lessons as well.5

Some years later, speaking before a WTUL audience, ER said: “I truly believe that I understand what faces the great masses of people in the country today. I have no illusions that any one can change the world in a short time…. Yet, I do believe that even a few people, who want to understand, to help and to do the right thing for the great numbers of the people instead of for the few can help.” The responsibility of individuals to work for the common good was one of her early core beliefs, and she credited her union friends with teaching her more than they realized. Accepted and valued by these working-class women, ER returned their friendship, incorporated their ideals and strategies into her own reform agenda, and joined forces with them to improve the lives of working women. She used her newly acquired knowledge and skills behind the scenes and in her public role as the governor’s wife to support unions, orchestrating a mix of social, substantive, and political events that she carried with her to the White House.6

Starting on the Lower East Side

Her efforts to understand the world of work began in 1902, when eighteen-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt returned to New York City from Allenswood, a fashionable English finishing school. At Allenswood, under the fond guidance of headmistress Marie Souvestre, young Eleanor developed a lifelong love of theater, art, and music. Encouraged to be independent and to think for herself, she was exposed to new, liberal ideas. Mlle. Souvestre was an atheist, a feminist, and an English positivist. Led by Frederic Harrison, the positivists supported trade unions and legislation to help the working classes. Later she acknowledged that much of what she became in life “had its seeds in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and strong personality.” She returned to New York to make her debut in society.7

A debutante’s life was filled with theater and concerts, lovely lunches, elegant dinners, and elaborate balls, but ER could not make this social world her whole life. She soon joined a group of elite young women who formed the Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements. Led by Mary Harriman and the daughters of several other wealthy New York families, they decided to do something useful for their city. They were part of a movement that swept through urban areas during the Progressive Era. By 1910 there were more than four hundred settlement houses across the country providing shelter, health care, and various forms of education and entertainment to the poor and to newly arrived immigrants. The movement was in full force on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the century.8

Tall and willowy, with long golden hair swept back from her face and caught in a braid in back, ER dressed in the fashionable high-necked, long-sleeved blouse known as a shirtwaist and a slim ankle-length skirt. Family and friends noted her lovely blue eyes. She cut a stylish figure when taking the elevated train or the Fourth Avenue streetcar from cousin Susie Parish’s house on the Upper East Side, then walking across the Bowery to the College Settlement on Rivington Street, two blocks south of Houston on the Lower East Side. She insisted on taking public transportation even at night and refused the rides offered in her friend Jean Reid’s carriage. Passing drunken men on the street corners and in the saloons of the Bowery made her fearful, but she loved working with the children. At the settlement house, a stately six-story red brick building with a basketball court on the top floor, she taught calisthenics and dancing to children who had already put in long hours of work in the factories or doing piecework at home. They were the sons and daughters of Jewish and Italian immigrants who were flooding the wretched tenements to work in the rapidly expanding garment industry. Between 1881 and 1924, 2 million Jews emigrated from eastern Europe to the United States; the vast majority started their new lives in this neighborhood.9

ER valued her work and soon introduced her cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a Harvard senior, to this new world. She remembered that a “glow of pride ran through her” when one of the little girls said that her father wanted ER to come to their home so he could give her something because the girl enjoyed her classes so much. “Needless to say, I did not go,” she recalled, “but that invitation bolstered me up whenever I had any difficulty in disciplining my brood!” On another occasion a little girl was ill, and ER and Franklin went to visit the tenement where the child lived. “When we got out on the street afterward,” she wrote, “he drew a long breath of air. Not fresh air, there in those crowded, smelly streets with pushcarts at the curb. But better than the air in that tenement. ‘My God,’ he said, aghast. ‘I didn’t know people lived like that!’” Eleanor and her “feller,” as the children called Franklin, began an education that profoundly affected their views of the world.10

Learning about poverty, poor working conditions, and ways to confront these problems went well beyond giving dance lessons. Gathering the facts was a central tenet of the newly emerging field of social work and the basis on which to challenge existing laws and public policies, part of the Progressive Era “search for order.” Firmly rooted in this tradition, ER believed that “nothing could be done, of course, until someone knew the facts: seeking for them, checking them, investigating to make sure of what was actually happening. All of this was necessary before anything could be done to better conditions.” ER began the process of collecting data when she joined the Consumers League that winter. She went with an experienced older woman from the League to investigate garment factories and department stores. It had never occurred to her, she later recalled, that “the girls might get tired standing behind counters all day long, or that no seats were provided for them if they had time to sit down and rest. I did not know what the sanitary requirements should be in the dress factories, either for air or lavatory facilities. This was my first introduction to anything of this kind.” When she investigated the sweatshops in which artificial feathers and flowers were made, ER was appalled. She later recalled:

In those days, these people often worked at home, and I felt I had no right to invade their private dwellings, to ask questions, to investigate conditions. I was frightened to death. But this was what had been required of me and I wanted to be useful. I entered my first sweatshop and walked up the steps of my first tenement. It is hard to look back and remember the terrible world that, in actual years, is not really so long ago…. I saw little children of four and five sitting at tables until they dropped with fatigue, and earning tragically little a week. Conditions of employment were such that the workers were often in real physical danger and yet the average person was rarely aware of the situation.11

Through the Consumers League, ER was introduced to the “white list” and the potential power of the shopper. Members of the League evaluated retail stores and urged women to patronize only those stores on the list, which had been found to follow policies of equal pay for equal work, a ten-hour workday, and a minimum wage of $6 per week. She also learned about the need for legislation. One of the League’s major goals was to enact child labor legislation to end the kind of sweating work for children that ER observed. Acknowledging companies that had good working conditions and lobbying for legislation to prohibit bad working conditions were strategies she would long remember.12

Other members of the Roosevelt family discouraged this volunteer work. They were concerned that ER might be hurt or that she might bring some disease home with her from the tenements filled with immigrants. But family members had gone to the Lower East Side before: ER accompanied her father there when she was only six years old to help serve Thanksgiving dinners to the newsboys and went with him to help at the Children’s Aid Society. She accompanied other family members on charitable errands to Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery Mission, much in the tradition of her grandfather. The Junior League and the Consumers League, however, offered a new way to meet the charitable obligations of her class, one that was compatible with her father’s work in the past but also offered a deeper understanding of the causes of social and economic problems. Eleanor wrote Franklin that she had spent the morning “at a most interesting class on practical Sociology!” adding, “Now, don’t laugh, it was interesting and very practical and if we are going down to the Settlement we ought to know something.” She took her work seriously, spoke up in meetings, and became a confidante of other debutantes.13

Yet ER’s childhood experiences were quite different from life at Allenswood and volunteering in the tenements. The Roosevelts were one of the oldest and most distinguished families in New York. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of Anna and Elliott Roosevelt’s three children. In 1892 her beautiful socialite mother died of diphtheria. In...

Table of contents

• Abbreviations Used in Text
• Prologue: She Was One of Us
• 1. Why Women Should Join Unions
• 2. Here Comes Mrs. Roosevelt
• 3. Practicing What You Preach
• 4. In Her Own Way
• 5. An Essential Element of Freedom
• 6. Pointing the Way
• 7. We Have Something to Offer
• 8. A Revolutionary Period
• Epilogue: Close to Home
• Photographs
• Source Abbreviations
• Notes
• Note on Sources and Bibliography
• Acknowledgments