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Social Housing Found

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Background

My father, Walter Lincoln Whittlesey, was born in California in 1878. His ancestors go back to John Whittlesey, who was born on July 4, 1623, in Cambridgeshire near Whittlesey, England. He was one of a complement of young men who, in 1635, came to America with Robert Lord Brooks and his business associates of the Lord Say and Seal Company. Records indicate that John and William Dudley received a contract from the town of Saybrook in 1662 to run the ferry across the Connecticut River. In 1664 John married Ruth Dudley of famous Scottish ancestry. They were the parents of eleven children, the eighth of whom was named Eliphalet. He was my ancestor. My grandfather Albert, five generations after Eliphalet, was born in 1843 in Cleveland. He served in the 41st Ohio Infantry in Sherman's Army during the Civil War. His family had been prominent in Cleveland in the newspaper and real estate businesses. Albert's father died during the War and his real estate holdings were sold. When Albert returned from the Army and discovered that there was no estate, he traveled west. He settled in Colorado and became a cattle and sheep farmer. His herd was wiped out over night by hoof and mouth disease and he moved on to California as so many other Americans. He met my grandmother, Lucy Wright, also from Cleveland, and they were married in December 1873. After several years in Los Gatos, where Father was born on March 13, 1878, the family moved to Portland, Oregon, where Grandfather had a job in the lumber business.

Father was educated in the Portland schools and graduated from the University of Oregon Phi Beta Kappa in 1901. After teaching a few years at the University, he came East in 1905 to study economics and history at Cornell University. There, in 1906, he was recruited by Woodrow Wilson to be one of the famous forty new preceptors at Princeton University. He left Princeton in 1910 to take a position with the Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph Company. Father and Mother were married on April 1, 1911 and took up residency at 400 Riverside Drive in New York City.

My mother's forebears came from Germany and Poland. Her grandfather, born in 1805, was an architect who spent much of his professional career away from home on building projects, including the Cologne Cathedral. He married Wilhelmina Yaeger in St. Goar, Germany, in 1829. They moved to Darmstadt where Wilhelmina ran a girls school. Wilhelmina opposed Emperor Frederick's policy of conscription into the Army and she sent her boys to America when they had reached sixteen years of age. Johan, born in 1836, was sent to America with an older brother Gustave in 1853. He worked for a time as a carpenter and then had an opportunity to study with a local St. Charles doctor and later at the St. Louis Medical School. In 1858 he went to Europe to further his training and was fortunate to train with some of the best doctors at the time including Doctor Rudolph Virchow. He returned to America in 1861 better trained than most of his American colleagues. He served as a surgeon with the Missouri State Militia Calvary in 1862-3. After his service in the Army he opened his practice with another doctor in St. Charles.

My mother was named Louise Jeanne Bruere. Her mother married Johan in St. Charles in 1862. They had nine children. Grandfather was determined the children be well educated. All four boys and the oldest two girls attended college even though money was scarce. My mother was born in St. Charles on Christmas Day 1883. At the age of 12, she became a serious student of music and singing. Her father bought for her one of the famous Steinway grand pianos that had been on display at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. That piano would be with us throughout our childhood. At the age of 16 Mother traveled to Wales by herself to study with Franken Davies, a renowned baritone well known in England and the Continent. She returned from Europe in 1904. She needed an audition with an agent to launch a professional career, but the family baulked at paying the fee. On a visit to her brother Gustave in Portland, Oregon, she met my Father. She found Father interesting and admired his keen intellect and immense knowledge of history and literature.

Throughout her life Mother was always in search of ways to use her intellectual talents and be independent. In 1916 she became interested in farming for the purpose of supporting the War effort as a food producer. She attended agricultural school in Farmingdale, Long Island, and then bought a 70-acre farm in New Preston, Connecticut. Mother was in constant difficulties managing erratic and sometimes drunken farmhands and trying not to be cheated by her neighbors and suppliers. She did some teaching at a local girls private school. The collapse of farm prices in 1920 was devastating. The farm was sold in 1922 and the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, on Father's reappointment to the Princeton faculty as an Instructor and later Professor in Politics and History.

I was born on the farm in Connecticut. The story goes that my brother John jumped off a feed bin and my pregnant mother caught him in her arms, starting labor that led to my being born five minutes before midnight on that Thursday, September 22, 1921. The only person on hand was the maid. The doctor did not appear until after my arrival. It would not be the last time that professional medical help would fail my family.

In Princeton the family owned a house on Ober Road. In 1926, Mother decided to move to England of which she had fond memories. In a letter to her sister Alice she wrote that her reason for going was "to find a more cultured and enjoyable environment in which she could raise her children." We lived in Bournemouth on the Southern coast for three years. Mother received a substantial portion of Father's salary and she had help from several of her sisters. Mother had a number of English friends including Sir Dan Godfery, the Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony. She performed several times with the Symphony until the day a bobby showed up at our front door to invite Mother to come down to the station. She was told that her passport did not allow her to perform. These were hard times for the British, and there was unemployment everywhere, including musicians. In time her sisters withdrew their support and we returned to the United States in February 1929, six months before the stock market crash.

After a year and a half in Fleetwood, New York, Mother returned to Princeton. A prime reason was in seeing that Father obtained tenure. She had been very popular in her previous stays in Princeton and was admired by the President of the University. My brother, two sisters, and I enjoyed Princeton and its university amenities – tennis courts, skating rink, the campus to ride our bikes and interesting events like concerts, sports and famous visitors to the University. Mother was interested in a variety of social causes such as early child care, health care and home education. While Mother voted for the socialist candidate Norman Thomas in the 1932 election, she welcomed the election of FDR who was known personally by her brothers Robert and Henry and sister Wilhelmina.

Father received tenure in 1933. Mother then picked up and moved to Washington, DC, with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My brother John stayed with Father. We lived in a third floor two-bedroom apartment in a small four-story red brick building on 17th Street next to the Tally-Ho restaurant. The first floor was occupied by a real estate office. A small top attic apartment was occupied by a very elderly black woman named Rosa, the daughter of slaves freed during the Civil War. She was a very pleasant person who always said hello on her way up and down the stairway. We visited with her briefly on several occasions but never learned much about her background. On the second floor was a charming toy store with all sorts of interesting things, many from foreign countries. We enjoyed visiting the shop and discussing items with the proprietor on our trips up and down to our apartment. The toy store gave us an opportunity to say hello to Mrs. Roosevelt who came in occasionally to purchase toys for her grandchildren. She became one of the people we most admired.

Our playground was the sidewalk around Farragut Square. I became acquainted with the newspaper man who sold papers on 17th and K Streets and became an unpaid helper. The Evening Star was the evening paper that many picked up on the way home. I remember well the edition that reported on a "communist cell" in the Administration. Among the accused in the picture on the front page was my Uncle Robert, for whom I am named. He and others had been accused of being "communist brain trusters." The fuss had started when on March 23, 1934 James H Rand, Chairman of the Remington Rand Company and Chairman of the Committee for the Nation, stated that the Administration's Bill for Regulation of the Stock Exchange would "push the nation along the road from democracy to communism". To back this up, Rand referred to a paper written by Dr. William Wirt, a member of the Committee and Superintendent of Schools in Gary, Indiana, for the past 25 years. Wirt asserted the existence of a group of inside brain trusters "who proposed overthrow of the social order" and saw Roosevelt as a transitional figure, a Kerensky in the revolution. These ideas were revealed at a Virginia dinner party put on by a Miss Alice Barrows. I recall the day Uncle Bob came by our apartment on 17th Street to pick up a Bible to be sure he had it handy when he testified at the House of Republicans. When he did testify, Bruere described Wirt's comments as irresponsible and outrageous. He did acknowledge, when asked whether he had been a member of the Socialist Party, that he had been a member for a year in 1910. But he said he had withdrawn when he became "convinced that the Marxian revolution theory was not appropriate to the conditions of American life." The whole affair went down in history as a foolish performance on Wirt's part. The Wirt affair did, however, contribute to the emergence of political opinion on the part of some that the New Deal contained subversive elements and needed to be watched. It reflected the fears that some people had of communism and radical groups and individuals. The bonus March on Washington had been put down by the army and there were leaders of major trade unions that were active members of the Communist Party. Russian communism was being exported around the world and National Socialism was emerging in Germany. Other countries, such as the Scandinavian countries, had model socialistic societies. They were admired at a distance, but were regarded as contrary to the American free enterprise system. Many Americans saw the Depression as a failure of the capitalist system. However, there was never a threat that socialism would take hold in America. Its culture of individual enterprise would not only bar socialism, it would impede social action vital to the country's progress.

My uncle Robert Bruere had attended the Washington University of St. Louis and studied at the University of Berlin and University of Chicago from 1899 until 1904. It was here that he became involved in social policy issues with Jane Addams at Hull House and was increasingly interested in the living and working conditions of the poor. He moved to New York City in 1905 to be a writer and teacher at the Rand School of Social Science and the General Agent for the New York Association for the Conditions for the Poor. In the 1912 election Robert Bruere served as an advisor to Theodore Roosevelt on labor and social policy issues. He was an investigator in the infamous Triangle Building fire in 1911 in which one hundred and forty workers perished. He made a survey of factory conditions and issued a critical report that was endorsed by his friend Francis Perkins, then Secretary of the Committee of Safety. He became a labor arbitrator and was involved in the lockout of 60,000 garment workers in New York City. During the War, he was a mediator in labor disputes involving the International Workers of the World and he defended the International Workers of the World in their dispute with Colorado Coal and Iron over union rights and wages. He later became Associated Editor of the Survey Graphic and a contributor in labor issues, regional electricity and planning. After conversations with his friend Benton McKaye, the environmentalist, Uncle Bob organized a special edition of the Survey. That edition became a hallmark for regional planning in the country with contributors such as Lewis Mumford, Stuart Chase, Clarence Stein and others. He was on the Rockefeller study group that went to China and Japan in 1929-30. He served in FDR's Administration as the mediator for the Textile Industry Code. He was appointed by FDR as a member of the Camden Board of Arbitration and was a delegate to the Geneva Labor Conference in 1936 and 1937. In 1937 he was appointed by the President to be Chairman of the Maritime Labor Board. The dockworkers, both on the East and West Coast, had been on strike for nine months. Union leaders such as Bill Ryan on the East Coast and Harry Bridges on the West Coast, were determined union leaders.

The story goes that on one occasion, Uncle Bob was called by the White House and asked to visit with the President on his Potomac launch. Roosevelt would on occasion invite officials to visit with him as they traveled down and back on the river. Bruere dutifully came at the appointed time and sat in the forward waiting area of the boat. After some time he was ushered into the President's section and to his surprise learned that FDR was looking for Henry, not Robert Bruere. As they were well down the river, the President welcomed him, and they spent a pleasant hour talking about a variety of issues with which FDR was concerned.

Henry Bruere had a much deeper engagement with FDR as part of an interesting career that took him from social worker to bank president to presidential advisor. Henry was involved with social organizing in Boston and Chicago. He came to New York City in 1905 to be the Director of the Bureau of Publicity and Investigations for The Citizens Voice, later to be the Bureau of Municipal Research (BMR). His work at the BMR centered on municipal reform and budgeting. He backed John Purrow Mitchel for mayor and on Mitchel's victory became Chamberlain. He led the reform in city administration, abolished the pork-barrel system of appropriations and brought the City its first budget system. Henry was involved in addressing unemployment and relief programs. Frances Perkins, who would become FDR's Secretary of Labor, worked with Henry on these issues and later stated that this was her first experience with unemployment issues. Henry was famous for having recommended that his office be abolished when he left.

Henry Bruere's friend Paul Wilson, an economist, came with him from Chicago to work at BMR. Wilson was involved with the Mitchel campaign and became chief of staff to the Mayor. Mother got to know Wilson through Henry and he was one of two witnesses at her wedding in 1911. Several years later Wilson married Frances Perkins on September 26, 1913. From 1918 on Wilson suffered from a recurring illness that burdened Frances Perkins until his death in 1952.

Leaving the city, Henry did consulting work that led to an appointment as a senior executive of American Metals Company, a Vice Presidency of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and the 1927 appointment as a Vice-President of the Bowery Savings Bank. He became President of the Bank in 1931 and Chairman in 1949. When he retired in 1952, he was made an honorary Chairman for Life. During his career from social worker to bank executive, he never overlooked the social and civic sides of his work. For example, he was the Treasurer of the New York City Public Library for 25 years.

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Excerpted from Social Housing Found by Robert B. Whittlesey. Copyright © 2015 Robert B. Whittlesey. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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