What can be learned from Chapter Introductions
The New Deal1
May 27, 1938: Eleanor Roosevelt visits Arthurdale, West Virginia
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her square dance partner promenaded down
the aisle of clapping onlookers in the Arthurdale High School Auditorium.
Five years had passed since Mrs. Roosevelt helped to establish the resettlement
community of Arthurdale, West Virginia, and she wanted to be on hand to celebrate the
graduation of its first high school senior class.
In 1933 in the midst of the Depression, the federal government persuaded a
number of families to move from Morgantown, West Virginia, where most farm families
could barely eke out a living, to Arthurdale. Residents there would ideally be able to
remain employed and self-sufficient during the year by combining subsistence farming
with small industry. To encourage people to make the move to Arthurdale, the federal
government promised that each family would have a house with plumbing and electricity,
a plot of land, and a job in a near-by factory.
Arthurdale was the first of the government-sponsored communities established by
the Resettlement Administration, one of President Roosevelt's New Deal programs.
These communities gave hope to people mired in the Depression. Under the President's
leadership, the United States government assumed a new responsibility for the welfare of
the American people and for the future of the nation's economy.
Quiz
1.In what year did Eleanor Roosevelt help establish Arthurdale?
2. If subsistence farming means producing just enough food for survival, what did the
Resettlement Administration also provide that would help family finances?
3. In your own judgment, what obstacles might the resettlement program face?
4. Why did the author use the word "ideally" in the second sentence of the second
paragraph?
5. How well do you think this program worked? (a) Succeeded beyond all
expectations (b) Achieved what it set out to do (c) The program had moderate
success (d) Failed miserably.
1
Gary B. Nash, American Odyssey (Westerville, OH: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1999), p. 450.
What can be learned from Chapter Introductions
The New Deal2
May 27, 1938: Eleanor Roosevelt visits Arthurdale, West Virginia
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her square dance partner promenaded down
the aisle of clapping onlookers in the Arthurdale High School Auditorium.
KEY
Five years had passed since Mrs. Roosevelt helped to establish the resettlement
community of Arthurdale, West Virginia, and she wanted to be on hand to celebrate the
graduation of its first high school senior class.
In 1933 in the midst of the Depression, the federal government persuaded a
number of families to move from Morgantown, West Virginia, where most farm families
could barely eke out a living, to Arthurdale. Residents there would ideally be able to
remain employed and self-sufficient during the year by combining subsistence farming
with small industry. To encourage people to make the move to Arthurdale, the federal
government promised that each family would have a house with plumbing and electricity,
a plot of land, and a job in a near-by factory.
Arthurdale was the first of the government-sponsored communities established by
the Resettlement Administration, one of President Roosevelt's New Deal programs.
These communities gave hope to people mired in the Depression. Under the President's
leadership, the United States government assumed a new responsibility for the welfare of
the American people and for the future of the nation's economy.
Quiz
1. In what year did Eleanor Roosevelt help establish Arthurdale?
1933
2. If subsistence farming means producing just enough food for survival, what did the
Resettlement Administration also provide that would help family finances?
Employment at a factory. (Plot of land, plumbing, and electricity)
3. In your own judgment, what obstacles might the resettlement program face?
Answers might vary but availability of work, who would work the farm, and the
break-up of neighborhoods are reasonable conclusions.
4. Why did the author use the word "ideally" in the second sentence of the second
paragraph?
If everything went according to plan, the poorest people would live
comfortably.
5. How well do you think this program worked? (a) Succeeded beyond all
expectations (b) Achieved what it set out to do (c) The program had moderate
success (d) Failed miserably.
2
Gary B. Nash, American Odyssey (Westerville, OH: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1999), p. 450.
What can be learned from Chapter Introductions
Arthurdale Continued3
The New Deal build about a hundred communities, mostly all-rural farm
colonies like Penderlea Homesteads in North Carolina or industrial subsistence
settlements like Austin Homesteads in Minnesota. The one experiment which
caught public attention was the Arthurdale project at Reedsville, West Virginia, in
the depressed mountain coal country. The personal pet of Mrs. Roosevelt, who
spent thousands of dollars of her own money, Arthurdale proved an expensive
failure. "We have been spending money down there like drunken sailors," Ickes4
lamented. Although the leaders of the movement thought they were giving people a
chance to escape the evils of industrial society, the subsistence homesteads which
proved most successful were those close to Los Angeles and the Columbia River
Valley. Both took on the appearance of any suburban subdivision. As soon as the
worst of the Depression was over, people hurried to get back into the "real world of
the bustling city streets. The subsistence experiment seemed more a search for an
ark of refuge which indicated the despair of the early thirties.
Ironically, at the very time the New Deal was celebrating the calm and quiet
of rural life, the country was beginning to learn some desperate facts about living on
farms. The novels of Erskine Caldwell—especially Tobacco Road, James Agee's
sensitive Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Frazier Hunt's articles in the New
York World-Telegram, all opened the nation's eyes to the misery of the
sharecropper. The croppers he saw in the South, Hunt wrote, reminded him of
Chinese coolies working alongside of the South Manchurian railroad, save that in
China he never had seen children in the fields. These people "seemed to belong to
another land than the America I knew and loved."
Quiz
1. Why did Arthurdale receive so much publicity?
2. What did the leaders of the New Deal think was the primary purpose of
resettlement?
3. Where were people living before they were asked to resettle in Arthurdale? (a)
cities (b) suburbs (c) mountain communities (d) farms.
4. Besides the realities of finding work, why did people turn away from rural life
during the Depression?
5. In what ways did Leuchtenberg's account differ from your text?
6. Why do these accounts differ?
3
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, NY: Harper and Row
Publishers, 1963), pp. 136-7.
4
Secretary of the Interior
What can be learned from Chapter Introductions
Arthurdale Continued5
KEY
The New Deal build about a hundred communities, mostly all-rural farm
colonies like Penderlea Homesteads in North Carolina or industrial subsistence
settlements like Austin Homesteads in Minnesota. The one experiment which
caught public attention was the Arthurdale project at Reedsville, West Virginia, in
the depressed mountain coal country. The personal pet of Mrs. Roosevelt, who
spent thousands of dollars of her own money, Arthurdale proved an expensive
failure. "We have been spending money down there like drunken sailors," Ickes6
lamented. Although the leaders of the movement thought they were giving people a
chance to escape the evils of industrial society, the subsistence homesteads which
proved most successful were those close to Los Angeles and the Columbia River
Valley. Both took on the appearance of any suburban subdivision. As soon as the
worst of the Depression was over, people hurried to get back into the "real world of
the bustling city streets. The subsistence experiment seemed more a search for an
ark of refuge which indicated the despair of the early thirties.
Ironically, at the very time the New Deal was celebrating the calm and quiet
of rural life, the country was beginning to learn some desperate facts about living on
farms. The novels of Erskine Caldwell—especially Tobacco Road, James Agee's
sensitive Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Frazier Hunt's articles in the New
York World-Telegram, all opened the nation's eyes to the misery of the
sharecropper. The croppers he saw in the South, Hunt wrote, reminded him of
Chinese coolies working alongside of the South Manchurian railroad, save that in
China he never had seen children in the fields. These people "seemed to belong to
another land than the America I knew and loved."
Quiz
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
A personal pet project of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Resettlement gave people a way of escaping the evils of industrial society.
(c)
Conditions of the sharecropper as told in books and newspapers.
Arthurdale was a failure. There were more successful resettlement experiments. The
motive of escaping industrial society (a strong belief of FDR). Rural life was not
painted with an idyllic brush.
6. Answers should vary: Some might indicatge that the purposes were different.
Nonetheless, both agreed that government became more actively involved in its
citizen's welfare. It is unfortunate that Nash chose to use a failure as a method of
introducing one of the major effects of the New Deal.
5
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York, NY: Harper and Row
Publishers, 1963), pp. 136-7.
6
Secretary of the Interior