Abstract
She Was One of Us, the title of this book, is taken from an AFL-CIO pamphlet published after Eleanor Roosevelt’s death. It was literally true: Roosevelt, who wrote a daily column for United Features Syndicate that appeared in sixty-two newspapers around the country, joined the Newspaper Guild in 1936, soon after its founding, and remained a dues-paying member throughout her life. Today, when unions are viewed as only a small step above Voldemort in the eyes of the mainstream media, the story of such a prominent public figure openly and forcefully advocating on behalf of organized labor is a welcome pick-me-up. Can we imagine Michelle Obama in 2012 proudly proclaiming her membership in a union?
This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive biography of Roosevelt. That has already been done. Rather, it focuses on her relationship with working people and organized labor, from her early days as a volunteer in New York Settlement Houses to her later years as a confidante of Walter Reuther and other labor leaders and a powerful voice for the labor movement.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s views on unionism were shaped early on, and they informed her position on major issues throughout her career. In the first chapter of the book, O’Farrell shows how Roosevelt progressed from a socialite who felt a responsibility to “do good” for the poor to an advocate of workers’ right to organize and fight for their own betterment, largely because of her relationships with Rose Schneiderman, Maud Swarz, and other activists from the Women’s Trade Union League. Eleanor relied on these friends all her life for advice and counsel.
Roosevelt’s crucial step from charity to solidarity entailed several corollaries. In her view, unions did not merely improve wages and benefits for members; they were vital crucibles of democracy. To the extent that they lived up to their promise, they provided their members with the tools and skills needed to govern themselves in their organizations and in society at large. She did not see unions as “interest groups”; instead she believed that “organized labor does benefit all labor, whether organized or unorganized” (p. 117). Other corollaries of Roosevelt’s view of unions that show up repeatedly in her writings are strong support for labor education and culture on the one hand, and for civil rights and women’s rights on the other.
In her long public career, Eleanor Roosevelt’s life intersected with most of the major issues that have shaped today’s labor movement. As a rank-and-file union member, but one whose opinion was often sought because of her access to power, she played a singular insider/outsider role. Respecting the legitimate authority of elected leaders, she did not overstep her role by entering the internal debates as a union member. But she definitely expressed her opinions, both publically in her newspaper columns and in private conversations with labor leaders. These opinions, on most of the major debates, would gladden the hearts of labor educators today. And on those issues where she did not take—or took a while to come to—what we today would consider a progressive position (e.g., the ERA, public sector right to organize), her reasoning is still interesting to read and important to set the struggle in its historical context.
This book does not go into depth on many of the most significant struggles in labor, such as the role of anticommunism or third-party politics, but it does provide a very readable narrative that touches on all these issues, providing a framework from which to branch out in further reading.
In short, this book would make a fine introduction to the history of organized labor in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, a period that shaped today’s labor movement.