Eleanor's Little Village
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ARTHURDALE, W.Va. -- More than three-quarters of a century ago this forgotten community, tucked in a wrinkle of rugged West Virginia, was surrounded by poverty and privation. The mines nearby were quiet, the miners unemployed, hopeless. Prosperity -- even the merest, meanest prospect of subsistence -- was a cruel, unattainable notion; it was not around any corner anywhere close to here.
And yet suddenly there were stirrings in these hills. Homes were built, farms laid out, a school established. Small crafts industries were sprouting. An assembly building began to take shape. A tea room opened. The first lady of the United States dropped by. Sometimes a band struck up the Virginia Reel, and Eleanor Roosevelt -- the portrait of sobriety, nobody's idea of a good-time girl, indeed nobody's idea of a woman who knew what a good time was -- was caught up in that folk dance.
Today this community, the first of the nation's 99 New Deal communities, is all but forgotten again. It is a monument to Depression-era social engineering, a landmark in the history of American economic experiments, a highly successful and deeply flawed effort at government planning, and yet the world goes on beyond Arthurdale, paying little mind to what happened here -- what was tried here, when hope was a thing with feathers but without a nesting place.
The story began when Lorena Hickok, the Associated Press writer who very likely was Mrs. Roosevelt's lover, set out to portray America in Depression and visited Scotts Run, where she found housing "most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs." She later returned with Mrs. Roosevelt, who said the "filth was indescribable" and who left determined to provide an antidote to the despair she found amid the tipples, the slag piles, the black shanties planted on the sides of the gulches and the stirrings of radical labor groups like the National Miners Union, backed by the Communist Party.
Of all the Washington undertakings designed to battle Communism -- secret wars in Central America, two overt wars in Asia, a bungled invasion of Cuba, witch hunts in the State Department and Hollywood -- the assault on poverty in Scotts Run is among the most benign. The Pumpkin Papers in Whittaker Chambers' farm and the intercepted cables of the Cold War never possessed the moral power that Mrs. Roosevelt found in the contents of a miner's weekly pay envelope. It was one dollar.
First Published August 14, 2011 12:00 am
