UNTIL FDR’S STALLED POLITICAL TRAIN MOVED Forward, he was ambivalent about his wife’s political career and her emergent activist style. He joked with Josephus Daniels about their famous headline-hunting “squaws.” He and Louis Howe called many of ER’s new political friends “she-men,” and worried that Eleanor’s pronouncements on various controversies might tarnish his very polished veneer. On the other hand, he encouraged her work, and he enjoyed the role of tutor. He helped her with legal terms when she drew up a League plan to reorganize and democratize New York State (a shorter ballot, a four-year term for governor to replace the two-year term then current, an executive budget, and more efficient departmental organization). He gave her parliamentary advice and shared the tricks of politics that men had refined with years of practice.
During early power struggles within the League, occasional evenings were spent at East 65th Street devoted to the collective development of usable strategies; ER and Louis Howe worked on publicity; Elizabeth Read and FDR considered the legal angles; hours were spent on every detail. All crises were met by the full team. During a particularly nasty situation when their competitors sought to introduce a damning report to discredit Lape and Vanderlip, FDR coached ER. Arrive early; sit up front; as the last word of the report is being read, immediately “be on your feet.” You rise to have it tabled—”That motion is not debatable”—“and that should end the matter.” It worked. ER—tall, regal, in a rose-colored suit, with a long fur boa about her neck (borrowed from SDR)—stunned her adversaries. Esther Lape was triumphant: “The jaws of Mary Garrett Hay and her followers dropped as they filed slowly out of the …University Club.”
Although she remained concerned that her activities might reflect poorly on FDR’s various efforts to juggle adversaries and remain above the fray, Eleanor was no longer an ornamental wife who existed to accompany her husband on his political rounds. After the campaign of 1920, she might measure her words but she would not be silenced.
She continued to work for the League of Nations and the World Court after FDR gave up the subject entirely; and she publicly opposed the excesses of the Red Scare, about which he said virtually nothing. At New York’s annual League of Women Voters convention in May 1921, ER introduced a resolution to condemn Vice-President Calvin Coolidge’s attack against women’s colleges. Hotbeds of radicalism, Coolidge called them, filled with women mired in Bolshevik heresy.
The local press featured ER’s resolution against her “Husband’s Victorious Rival” with indignation. ER noted in her diary: “Foolish of me ever to do anything of the kind.” But she rarely hesitated when a cause was just and compelling, and endured endless amounts of press criticism, some of it potentially harmful to FDR’s interests.
Most startling was her departure from her original position on party loyalty. In one of her first editorials for the weekly News Bulletin of the State and City League, “Common Sense Versus Party Regularity,” she argued that voters of “the modern stamp” no longer adhere slavishly to their party’s candidates. Although she agreed that women should enroll in the party that best represented their principles, issues of personal integrity, vision, superior qualification should determine a person’s vote: “Small minded people will tell you that but for party regularity in all things party organization would not exist, and that party government is necessary to our National institutions. This argument has …been refuted a thousand times.” Better government depends on “individual nominees.” If our partisans “appear to us unworthy, then we have an even higher duty…. America must come first, not party.”
Tensions between the Roosevelts escalated during the spring of 1921. Although publicly FDR faced his election defeat in jolly style, and ER believed that he had never had any illusions of victory, its overwhelming nature was something of a jolt. After the campaign, FDR became involved with activities that only momentarily amused him; his new business enterprises did nothing to boost his spirits; and the navy scandal had not yet run its course. He drank more, and partied more.
During the early months of 1921, he seemed abstracted, frantic, and frivolous. In May, ER returned home from a weekend conference late one Sunday afternoon to be greeted by her maid’s announcement that her husband was in bed and unwell. ER rushed up the stairs, only to find him profoundly hungover “after a wild 1904 [reunion] dinner and party.” She would not abide it. Her words were harsh and bitter, her anguish profound and familiar. Then, in June, during the first family celebration with her Oyster Bay relatives since their campaign antics, FDR behaved uproariously. At Aunt Bye’s home in Connecticut, during the wedding party for Margaret Krech and Bye’s son, Sheffield Cowles, he became drunk, loud, and silly. His behavior in that uncongenial and treacherous company inspired their snide comparisons between “poor Eleanor’s” husband and “poor Eleanor’s” father. ER was humiliated.
The next week, FDR remained in New York, while ER and the children embarked alone upon the long but always healing journey to Campobello. Howe and his family would be there, and Mama would not. SDR had resumed taking her annual holidays in Europe.
The first weeks of July at Campobello restored a measure of harmony to ER’s spirit. The weather was splendid, her household congenial. ER had special guests whose company she particularly enjoyed: the children’s tutor, Jean Sherwood, and her mother, Mrs. Sidney Sherwood, who had become a good friend; Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco (daughter of Britain’s Liberal Party leader, Herbert Asquith) and her husband, the Romanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco, whose company had always delighted her in Washington. To accommodate Elizabeth Bibesco’s preference for whiskey before dinner, Eleanor had to break open Franklin’s locked liquor cabinet, because she could not find the key. Jefferson Newbold mixed the cocktails, and they were “very bad,” but Elizabeth “was sweet and I like her better than ever.” Prohibition meant very little to the Roosevelts. Even ER, whose lifelong dread of alcoholism dominated her response to people and situations, never considered Prohibition a usable deterrent. She momentarily supported the law, but preferred moderation to an actual ban, never imposed Prohibition on her guests, and would herself have an occasional glass of sherry or champagne.
With several servants, tutors, children, and guests, virtually every one of the eighteen bedrooms at Campobello was filled. ER managed the days with her usual efficiency, packed elaborate lunches, orchestrated picnics, dinners, and excursions, and prepared for FDR’s arrival. But FDR received an urgent telegram from Josephus Daniels. The Senate Committee on Newport had completed its investigation: “LIBELLOUS REPORT. CAN YOU GO TO WASHINGTON AT ONCE.“
The Senate committee’s report on the navy’s crusade against homosexuals targeted FDR, called the Dunn Board a cover-up, and FDR’s testimony before it “unbelievable.” The committee concluded that, since FDR “was a man of unusual intelligence and attainments,” he “must have known” in what activities his own operators were engaged. Therefore, the Senate committee charged, “Secretary Daniels and Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt showed an utter lack of moral perspective.” FDR’s willingness to allow young officers to be used to investigate perversion “is thoroughly condemned as immoral and an abuse of the authority of his high office.”
The committee denied FDR’s request to testify; they gave him their 625-page report and over six thousand single-spaced pages of testimony at 10:00 A.M. and gave him until 8:00 P.M. that day to respond. Then, at four in the afternoon, he was told by newsroom friends that the report had been released to “all the papers” without his being given any opportunity to “amend it.” Nevertheless, he appeared at eight that night as scheduled and presented his statement, in which he demanded an open hearing before the entire Naval Affairs Committee, certain it would be denied. With the exception of The New York Times, the newspapers generally reported his “complete denials fairly well.” On 23 July, the front-page Times headline announced:
LAY NAVY SCANDAL
TO F. D. ROOSEVELT
***
DETAILS ARE UNPRINTABLE
ER wrote her husband, who had never before been under such extreme attack: “It must be dreadfully disagreeable for you and I know it worries you though you wouldn’t own it.” ER gave him the words of encouragement her Aunt Bye had given her so long ago: “But it has always seemed to me that the chance of just such attacks as this was a risk one had to take with our form of government and if one felt clear oneself, the rest did not really matter.” The press accounts were dreadful, “but one should not be ruffled by such things. Bless you dear and love always.”
FDR did not go immediately to Campobello. He wanted to prepare a full statement, consider publication of his version of the facts, discuss his options. “I have talked to a good many people today and lots of them want to rush into print. But in view of the fact that no papers have taken it up it may seem best to drop the whole thing….” He was eager to get to Campobello:
Tell Louis I expect those boats to be all rigged and ready when I get up there and I am very greatly put out not to be there now.
Kiss all the chicks and many many for you
Your devoted F.
Franklin returned to New York to find his desk cluttered with mail; he spent two weeks plunged in work, desperately trying to avoid his feelings, terrified that his political future was grounded. To distract him there were parties and sails; a Boy Scout outing; and the offer of Van Lear Black’s yacht, the Sabalo, for a cruise party to Campobello if he could leave on Friday, 5 August.
First, however, FDR had to work on his reply to the Senate committee. Angry and anxious, his career besmirched, FDR took the offensive and denounced the report as “mistaken,” “premeditated,” “unfair,” “partisan.”
None of this worries me, nor does the report itself worry me personally…. As an American …one hates to see the United States Navy, an organization of the nation, not of party, used as the vehicle for cheap ward politics. It rather amuses me to know that these Republican Senators consider me worthwhile attacking so maliciously and savagely. Perhaps they may later on learn what a boomerang is….
FDR denied any supervisory role: “A Secretary or an Assistant Secretary has plenty to do in the general management of a navy of hundreds of ships and hundreds of thousands of men without attempting to manage the details of an investigation of one small place by a dozen or so navy men.” Moreover, in September 1919, as soon as he learned of the “highly improper and revolting methods” used to get evidence,
immediate orders went out from me …that day to stop it…. That is all there is to the Senator’s unwarranted deductions.
Their insinuations that I must have known, that I supervised the operations, that I was morally responsible, that I committed all sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors, are nowhere supported by the evidence….
I accuse them of deliberate falsification of evidence, of perversion of facts, of misstatements of the record, and of a deliberate attempt to deceive.
Privately, Missy LeHand wrote ER on 5 August: “I thought he looked tired when he left.” They both hoped he would have a happy time on Van Lear Black’s Sabalo, and a carefree vacation.
FDR ARRIVED IN CAMPOBELLO WEARY BUT DETERMINED TO drown all his feelings in frivolity. The trip up had been arduous and stormy, and he had spent many unexpectedly tense hours at the helm, engulfed by a great fog. In his effort to shake exhaustion and depression FDR had arrived “bringing quite a party with him,” and for several days, ER noted, he made a nonstop effort to keep everybody entertained.
Early-morning sails, deep-sea fishing in the Bay of Fundy on the Sabalo, late-night conversation: There was endless recreation, but very little rest. After Van Lear Black left, ER and the children enjoyed more tranquil sails in FDR’s new boat, the “little Vireo.“
On 10 August, they spotted a forest fire while sailing. They all worked to stamp out the fire and then returned home “around four o’clock.” “My husband, who had been complaining of feeling logy and tired for several days, decided it would do him good to go in for a dip in a landlocked lake called Lake Glen Severn, inside the beach on the other side of the island. The children were delighted and they started away.” It was a jog of about two miles, after which FDR decided to cool off with another swim, this time in the frigid waters of the Bay of Fundy. After the run home, FDR ended the afternoon by reading his mail in his wet bathing suit on the windswept porch. “In a little while he began to complain that he felt a chill and decided he would not eat supper with us.”
Feeling unusually lethargic, FDR climbed the stairs to bed and got under the great comforter, hoping to avoid a cold. “In retrospect,” ER wrote later, “I realize that he had no real rest since the war.” She said nothing of his anguish over the Senate committee’s attack. Today, we know far more about the effects of depression and stress on the immune system, but then ER only noted that ever since the Armistice “he had probably been going on his nerves.”
The next day, Franklin came down with a mysterious fever. On 14 August, the anniversary of her father’s death, ER wrote the first letter about his still-undiagnosed condition to FDR’s half-brother, Rosy: “We have had a very anxious few days as on Wed. evening Franklin was taken ill. It seemed a chill but Thursday he had so much pain in his back and legs that I sent for the doctor, by Friday evening he lost the ability to walk or move his legs.” Louis Howe, “who, thank heavens, is here, for he has been the greatest help,” went in search of a specialist at all the nearby resorts, hoping to find somebody knowledgeable on vacation. He found a famous diagnostician, who spent several minutes, decided that FDR had a blood clot, prescribed frequent massages, and sent a bill for the astonishing amount of $600.
Daily FDR’s condition worsened. Temporarily, his hands and arms were paralyzed as well as his legs; he lost control over his vital functions; and his intermittently high fever resulted in delirium and many sleepless nights. For a short time, his eyesight seemed threatened, and his pain was everywhere and unrelenting. Eleanor slept on a couch in his room and, with Louis Howe or alone, managed to move him, bathe him, and turn him over at regular intervals. She administered catheters and enemas, massaged his back and his limbs, brushed his teeth, shaved his face, waited on his every need day and night for three weeks. “It required a certain amount of skilled nursing and I was very thankful for every bit of training which Miss Spring [the children’s baby nurse] had given me.” FDR was thankful too, and together they rallied for that extra effort to reassure each other: They bantered, laughed, and sought to conquer their gravest fears.
In those days of devotion and struggle, FDR’s trust and respect for his wife were expressed as rarely before; their lifelong union, for so long in disarray, was refortified as neither ER nor FDR would have imagined possible under any other circumstances.
During those first weeks, other specialists were brought in. Dr. William Keen arrived from Bar Harbor and suspected some kind of paralysis. He considered ER’s endless ministrations exceptional, heroic; and worried about her own health: “You have been a rare wife…. You will surely break down if you too do not have immediate relief.” But, ER recalled, it “was hard to get” anybody up from New York; when a trained nurse, Edna Rockey, did arrive, FDR wanted ER to continue many of the nursing duties. She did so until his condition stabilized.
Not until 25 August, when Uncle Frederic Delano arranged a consultation with a Boston specialist, Dr. Robert W. Lovett, was infantile paralysis—commonly called polio—diagnosed. Frequent massages, which had been incorrectly prescribed and actually increased the pain, were immediately discontinued. But there was no alternative treatment, nothing really to prescribe beyond hot baths, which might relax and encourage the patient.
SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT, UNAWARE OF HER SON’S CONDItion, returned from Europe during the first weeks of this ordeal. FDR generally met his mother’s ship whenever she returned from abroad. Now ER arranged to have Sara’s brother and sister meet her. On 27 August, Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law: “Dearest Mama, Franklin has been quite ill and so can’t go down to meet you on Tuesday to his great regret, but Uncle Fred and Aunt Kassie both write they will be there so it will not be a lonely homecoming. We are all so happy to have you home again dear, you don’t know what it means to feel you near again.”
From the beginning, ER and FDR chose to appear cheerful and optimistic as they faced the unknown together. During SDR’s first visit to them at Campobello after her return, she was amazed by their buoyancy and determined to follow “their glorious example.” She wrote her brother Fred that “the atmosphere of the house is all happiness” and there was much laughter, “Eleanor in the lead.”
In addition to her nursing duties, Eleanor served temporarily as secretary and social organizer. She encouraged FDR’s friends to write jolly letters, and wrote notes of thanks to those who did. She was particularly grateful to Missy LeHand: “Your letters have amused him and helped to keep him cheerful.”
Louis Howe, ever mindful of FDR’s public career, dedicated himself to keeping all news concerning FDR’s illness out of the press. In mid-September, great care was taken to move Franklin in secrecy from Campobello to Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, on a private train arranged by Uncle Fred. In the months that followed, FDR rarely complained about the extreme pain he was in, and never lost his determination to triumph and prevail. Everybody around him, including his mother, maintained a cheerful confidence. Eleanor wrote that SDR was “really very remarkable…. I am sure, out of sight, she wept many hours, but with all of us she was very cheerful.”
Eleanor had been taught by her grandmother: “Never to cry where people are; cry by yourself.” Certainly she too, out of sight, must have wept many hours after her exhausting, terrifying days. Franklin remained in New York’s Presbyterian Hospital until shortly before Christmas. Although there was little actual improvement, she continued to believe that he would recover—but only if his attitude remained buoyant.
Because of her belief that only his spirit would enable him to triumph over his disability, Eleanor committed herself to doing whatever it would take to make him happy and contented. His very life depended, she believed, on his ability to remain active, interested, and ambitious in public life. And so, for months—for years, actually, but especially in those first months, when she was always at his side—she worked tirelessly in his behalf. ER brought friends and political associates to his bedroom to keep him informed and entertained. She clipped newspaper items for him, marked editorials he would either enjoy or abhor. She insisted, during the days of dread and despair, when he struggled without success to move his limbs or even his toes, that he continue to take a vital interest in the political world. In concert with Louis Howe, she kept up a running commentary on the current political scene—on who among FDR’s associates was feuding with whom on any given day, what deals were being made, with and without his approval, for or against his interests.
But ER’s battle to keep FDR’s spirit alive was continually in conflict with Sara’s plans, for Sara took the very opposite approach, out of her no less passionate belief that his improvement depended on his retirement from public life. SDR wanted her son to assume his proper role as the squire of Springwood. That quiet, healing place that had so well served her “beloved invalid” husband would now be best for her beloved invalid son.
Sincere on both sides and impossible to compromise, the battle raged daily, but always in tones that were muted and acts of spite that were hushed—so as not to disturb the patient. For a time, Sara sabotaged every effort Eleanor and Howe made to enliven Franklin’s spirits. She opposed Howe’s presence in the 65th Street house and worked to turn the children against his and Eleanor’s plans and against Howe personally. When ER moved her daughter, Anna, out of her large sunny room on the second floor to give it to Howe, Sara persuaded Anna to resist: She need not move into a small dark room—without her own bath, on the third floor in the back of the house—for that “ugly, dirty little” intruder.
The house on 65th Street was in fact very crowded once a live-in nurse and Howe were added. Howe, who spent his days downtown in FDR’s office, shared his—Anna’s—room with the day nurse; ER gave up her room altogether for the live-in nurse. She slept on a bed in one of the boys’ rooms, dressed in her husband’s bathroom, and during the day “was too busy to need a room.”
For Eleanor, the winter of 1921 was “the most trying winter of my entire life.” Her mother-in-law’s criticisms, asides, and admonitions tore away at her spirit. But Sara’s manipulation of Anna’s adolescent needs was particularly demoralizing. In ER’s view, Anna “felt that I did not care for her and I was not giving her any consideration. It never occurred to her that I had far less than she had.” During these painful moments, ER behaved with her own daughter much as her own mother had with her: She became cold, and distanced; she “shut up like a clam” and refused to speak with Anna about any of the several issues that devastated her heart.
Anna was fifteen that autumn, the age ER had been when she left for Allenswood, and ER enrolled her daughter in Miss Chapin’s school. She hoped that “the same relationship would grow up between Anna and Miss Chapin as I had with Mlle Souvestre.” But Eleanor had not realized that New York schools were so “set and rigid.” Anna at fifteen hated Miss Chapin and everything about her school. Tall, sophisticated for an adolescent, but frozen out of all family conversations and treated like a child, she was sent into a school where the cliques were well established. Her eight years in Washington had made her an outsider to her New York schoolmates. Anna felt rejected at school, mistreated and misunderstood at home.
Not until ER broke down one afternoon in April 1922, while reading to her youngest sons—five-year-old Johnnie and seven-year-old Franklin, Jr.—did her children begin to sense the enormity of the family’s situation and the depth of their mother’s sorrows. Once she began to sob, she simply could not stop. When Elliott, now eleven, returned from school and saw his mother in that rare state, he simply fled. The two little boys also ran from the room. Louis Howe came in at one point, made an earnest effort to comfort her, but soon “gave it up as a bad job.” The evening wore on and on. ER was inconsolable. For hours she sat on the sofa and “sobbed and sobbed.” SDR was in the country, and finally ER found an empty room on her side of the house, locked the door, and composed herself. “Eventually I pulled myself together, for it requires an audience, as a rule, to keep on these emotional jags.” It was “the one and only time” ER went “to pieces” in that particular manner in her entire life.
It seemed, however, a fitting climax to an era of unhappiness and anxiety. And it served several purposes, not least of which was to pave the way to a new relationship with her children, and especially Anna, who now realized something of the pain and anguish her mother had endured so stoically. But not until Anna’s coming-out week in Newport, where “gossipy old Cousin Susie” revealed the details of her father’s “escapade” with Lucy Mercer, did Anna understand more fully the origins of her mother’s erratic moods, the nature of her parents’ complex relationship. For the present, she went to her mother, who “poured some of her troubles out and told me she knew she had been wrong and that I did love her.” Increasingly, if hesitantly, Eleanor took her daughter into her confidence. She took her to the theatre, and to Tosca, her first opera; she invited her to political activities, which they both enjoyed.
OUT OF THE CRUCIBLE OF FDR’S ILLNESS, THE ROOSEVELTS’ lives were transformed once again. Eleanor considered Franklin’s triumph over his disability “a blessing in disguise.” Although many believe that his strength of character predated his bout with polio, and served to help him transcend his cruel circumstances, ER believed that his struggle “gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.” She believed that during these grueling months and years of recovery he developed a new seriousness about himself, and a deeper empathy for other people.
His disability also caused ER to reconsider her own skills. She had, for example, never played with her children. That had always been her husband’s domain. Now she realized that, if her youngest boys were “going to have a normal existence without a father to do these things with them, I would have to become a good deal more companionable and more of an all-around person than I had ever been before.”
Now, inspired by her new friends, virtually all of whom knew far more than she did about games and diversions, Eleanor became a willing sport. She again took swimming lessons so she could get into the water with her boys; and began to hike, and camp, and run, and romp. She drove her own car, played cards, sailed, and became altogether a more adventurous, as well as a more considerate, person.
AFTER 1922, FDR SPENT MOST OF HIS TIME FISHING, RELAXing, and recuperating in warm waters off the coast of Florida. Although months of prescribed exercise and treatment had done little to improve his condition, he remained undaunted. He believed he needed new arrangements, pleasurable time where exercise combined with fun would change his prospects. In 1923, he rented a houseboat, Weona II. In 1924, he and his Harvard friend John Lawrence bought a houseboat, the Larooco (Lawrence, Roosevelt & Co.) for purposes of deep-sea-fishing expeditions—and general merriment.
On these ventures, aboard the Weona and the Larooco, and later in Warm Springs, Georgia, Missy LeHand was FDR’s primary companion. Warm Springs was her domain. There she was hostess: She wrote the letters to invite the guests, she organized the day, supervised the menus, and presided over the dinner table, regardless of the company. When ER visited, she was a guest—an honored, respected, and welcomed guest, but always a guest. FDR’s Florida jaunts and his stays at Warm Springs were always full of good friends, good cheer, and various high jinks. On his houseboat in Florida, FDR’s most regular companions included Lewis Cass Ledyard, Jr., Henry de Rham, and his wife, Frances Dana de Rham. FDR had courted Frances Dana, the granddaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Richard Henry Dana, while at Harvard, and they had remained good friends. FDR wrote his mother on 5 March 1923: “I have been in swimming four times and it goes better and better. I’m sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good…. Cass and Ruth and Henry and Frances have been dear and look after me all the time. They are great fun to have on board in this somewhat negligee existence. All wander round in pajamas, nighties and bathing suits!” FDR noted that he was writing Eleanor more “fully and I know she will read it to you.” But ER did not save his letters during this period.
It was precisely the kind of environment that ER hated, and she avoided it as much as possible. She disliked the fact of free-flowing rum, and she never enjoyed the climate. On the boat, when they were anchored at night, the wind howled and the chill came up “colder and more uncomfortable than tales of the sunny south led me to believe was possible,” and she felt unprotected: “It all seemed eerie and menacing to me.” On calm and balmy nights, she hated it quite as much. Since she was claustrophobic and feared seasickness, Eleanor refused to sleep below deck or under covers. When the wind was listless, as it often was, Florida’s mosquitoes all seemed to converge to torment her. Despite endless quantities of citronella, she always wound up with enough bites to look like an advanced case of smallpox.
Nevertheless, whenever she did go she made every effort to enjoy herself. On her first trip aboard Weona II, she brought along Esther Lape, who wrote to Narcissa Vanderlip on 1 March 1923: “I was happy to be with Eleanor Roosevelt when there was nothing for either of us to do. She is an utterly splendid person.” Inviting her own friends to accompany her, as she generally did on these trips, gave ER a new emotional security, which enabled her to encourage FDR’s pleasures, and to be glad that he had such attentive friends and companions of his own. Even Livy Davis, whose antics had in the past seemed to her both selfish and reckless, now won her admiration: Livy Davis had been among the few intimate friends who met FDR’s train from Campobello at the New York station. “In the next few years Livy was always most attentive and thoughtful, always doing the things you would not expect a man to think of doing.”
With Livingston Davis, Missy LeHand, and FDR’s sturdy valet, LeRoy Jones, to accompany him and take care of his most basic needs, ER knew that her husband was well attended, and joined him now only on special occasions.
In fact, Eleanor and Franklin were infrequently together after 1923. Although in almost every letter ER wrote to her “Dearest Honey,” she told him “We all miss you dreadfully”; and although she always signed her letters “Ever lovingly,” neither partner had or made any substantial time for the other. Their lives simply went in different directions. They were pulled by different interests, attracted by different people.
Their marriage became only one of several vital centers in their lives. With all the independence and protection that wealth and prestige can secure, they shielded the many dimensions of their lives behind a tapestry of genuine devotion and family ritual. Birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and anniversary celebrations became great public feasts at which his closest friends and her closest friends shared the table. During the 1920s, it became traditional to spend Thanksgiving at Warm Springs, Christmas at Hyde Park, and their March anniversary off the Florida coast. Though ER’s birthday generally passed without notable celebration (throughout their marriage, FDR seemed to be traveling, on a hunting, fishing, or sailing trip, during the week of 11 October), ER organized elaborate birthday revels for FDR in January, usually in New York. The core revelers were members of the “cuff-links club” he had created after the 1920 election, when he presented initialed cuff links to his closest staff, and they in turn gave a pin to ER. The club was continually enlarged as new friends entered the company, and over time included several of ER’s closest friends as well.
FDR counted on ER to protect his privacy, as she could increasingly count on him. They depended on each other for protection from the’ prying eyes of SDR, and any of their acquaintances who might not approve or understand their compatible if unique arrangements.
On 24 February 1924, for example, when Missy LeHand returned to the Larooco after attending her father’s funeral, ER wrote FDR: “I haven’t told Mama that Missy is back because I think she has more peace of mind when she doesn’t know things!” If ER ever resented FDR’s long absences, she never said so. On occasion she missed him; on less frequent occasion she joined him: “I miss you very much and want your advice so often but I imagine it is as well you are far away from all entanglements….”
They had few, if any, secrets from each other. FDR always knew where and with whom ER was. Her daily letters were full and detailed. On 1 March 1924, for example, she spoke at Skidmore on the World Court and the League of Nations; lunched with the dean of Bryn Mawr’s Summer School for Women Workers; read at the Women’s Trade Union League in the evening; and “Nan spent the night following dinner, as Marion was away.” Similarly, ER knew FDR’s whereabouts and the details of his company. Concerning Missy LeHand, ER was routinely supportive and solicitous.
THE MAJOR SOURCE OF TENSION BETWEEN ER AND FDR DURing the 1920s was financial. Their political contributions and FDR’s Southern vacations had become costly. FDR’s business instincts were often unsound, and many of his riskier investments failed to return profits. He lost money on everything from oil wells to lobsters to a fantasy of transforming zeppelins into a commuter transport service. He made money, however, in a slot-machine business and as president of a Canadian corporation, United European Investors, that bought up devalued deutsche marks to invest in booming Weimar industries. He was also guaranteed an additional $10,000 annually when, on 1 January 1925, he formed a new law partnership with Basil O’Connor—which, because of FDR’s political connections, was assured of acquiring a large number of municipal contracts. During this time, FDR’s civic activities proliferated. He became chairman of the Boy Scouts of Greater New York, was the national director of the $10-million fund drive to complete New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and committed himself to his most personal concern, the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
Despite her own trust income, ER depended on FDR to pay the family expenses. He controlled the purse strings, but frequently he went to his mother for all the bills neither of them could afford. During the months of his illness, and the years of his effort to recover his health by extended trips in warm-water resorts, unpaid bills remained unpaid for weeks, even months, while ER’s insistent letters of reproach were met with forgetful silence. It was untenable. Eventually she set out to earn her own money from lectures, magazine articles, and guest appearances on radio shows. During the 1920s, financial independence enabled ER to pursue the interests and causes she believed in, and to manage her own life.
This independence incensed her mother-in-law: According to ER, although her mother-in-law believed in a vague sort of way that her children and their children should work, “she wanted them all at home under her supervision and guidance, for she had a strong feeling about holding the family together in almost matriarchal style.” Sara Delano Roosevelt “always regretted that my husband had money of his own from his father and that I had a small income of my own; and when I began to earn money it was a real grief to her.”
In March 1925, ER joined FDR in Florida, to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. On the train ride down, she read Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph. Published in 1924 and now a feminist classic, it is a romantic tale of cross-generational love between an intense and passionate fifteen-year-old girl and her gifted composer father’s even more gifted protégé. The father dies; the lover marries another; the girl is exiled to a boarding school; their love is haunting, compelling, forever. Filled with unrequited and requited love, poverty, greed, and familial heroism and scandal, the book appealed to ER. As she read it, she noted in her journal: “No form of love is to be despised.”
ER’s words were a variation of a conversation in the book, where love is celebrated for all its faults: “No sort of love ought to be despised, since, in spite of its rude beginnings, it is the first source of civility.” As ER traveled to meet FDR and their friends for an anniversary feast, her mind was elsewhere. In particular it was on a new cottage that she was planning to build with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman.
ER had left New York reluctantly and somewhat fatigued. She had in fact spent several days in the hospital alone, and was hurt that FDR had failed even to respond to her letter. He sent no flowers, no note of greeting; he completely ignored her stay in the hospital. Although her gynecological procedure was not serious, she was puzzled, and tired, and indirect:
Dearest Honey, I don’t know whether my handwriting has really become so bad that you can’t read it or whether you missed a letter. But I wrote you from the hospital that Dr. Ely decided it would be wise to curet…. I was only there a few days but the rest was rather nice …though the boys wrote Granny that they were very lonely as ever since you went away I was always on the go!
As soon as she left the hospital she resumed her activities: Thursday, she went with Elinor Morgenthau to Albany; Friday she visited Aunt Tissie and Cousin Susie; Saturday she went with the boys, Nan, and Marion to Caroline O’Day’s for the weekend, and stayed until Monday night. Tuesday she went with Nan to Albany for the Child Labor hearing, followed on Wednesday by the forty-eight-hour hearing. On her return to New York City she went with Nan, Marion, and Louis “to dine near the Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street” before they “saw James Joyce’s Exiles, which I hated.” She then took the midnight train to Syracuse University, where she was scheduled to give a speech, lunch with the staff, and dine “at a sorority with the president of the Girls’ Congress.” The next day she visited her sons at Groton, and made plans to be with FDR: She left on the sixth to reach Long Key on 8 March.
During the ten days ER spent aboard the Larooco, she experienced some lovely moments, and was particularly moved by the speech that Henry Morgenthau made to toast the Roosevelts. She played endless games of whist with Louis Howe and enjoyed several sparkling conversations filled with long-range political strategies.
ER left on the eighteenth and wrote FDR: “I think you must have had a touch of that sadness which in spite of all its sunshine the Florida landscape always gives me! It is a bit dreary as a country, but I liked the life better this time than ever before.” She noted in her journal that during this cruise she had a very “satisfactory talk with F about cottage affairs.”
ER FIRST MET NANCY COOK, WHO WAS THEN ASSISTANT TO Harriet May Mills, first director of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee, in June 1922. Nancy Cook needed a “name” speaker to chair a fund-raising luncheon for activist women Democrats, and she telephoned ER. Her timing was perfect. Although ER was fully involved with the bipartisan League of Women Voters, she was frequently badgered by Louis Howe to get into mainstream Democratic Party politics. But until Nancy Cook’s call ER had repeatedly refused. Although there is no record of their discussions, they had several long conversations on the telephone before they met, which created a stimulating, oddly stirring expectancy between ER and Nancy Cook. Whether or not the friendship that developed between them embraced amorosity, from their very first meeting their relationship was marked by an element of romance.
Eleanor arrived at the luncheon with a bouquet of violets for Nancy Cook. Marion Dickerman recalled that she strode into the banquet room, looked around, said only, “Where is Miss Cook?” and, immediately “presented the violets to Nancy—a gesture of poignant sweetness for the younger woman.” Between women, gifts of violets were quite the rage during the 1920s—they appear again and again in feminist literature as an international symbol of affection.
Shortly after that luncheon, ER invited Nancy Cook to spend a weekend with her at Hyde Park, and they quickly discovered they shared many interests, as well as a chemical and vibrant connection of rare intensity. ER described her as “an attractive woman who had distinct artistic ability and could do almost anything with her hands.” Nancy Cook was a potter, a jeweler, a photographer, and a carpenter.
Strong and athletic-looking, with penetrating brown eyes and short-bobbed curly hair, Nancy Cook looked boyish. She was dashing and roguish, flirtatious and irreverent. A capable administrator, she was an imaginative and efficient political organizer. They had fun together, and in her company ER did things she had never done before. On one occasion, she horrified her family by appearing with Nancy in identical brown-tweed knickerbocker outfits—evidently very British, with vest and jacket—that ER had ordered made.
However much time ER and Nancy Cook spent together, the dynamic of their friendship always included Cook’s lifelong partner, Marion Dickerman. Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman had lived together since 1909, when they were graduate students at Syracuse University. Although Cook was seven years older than Dickerman, and emotionally they were very different in style and temperament, they were drawn “together forever by ties of mutual inward need.” According to Dickerman, Cook lived at a faster pace, on a more energetic frequency, which she found refreshing and stimulating. Cook in turn was attracted by Dickerman’s calm steadiness and “rhythmic regularity.” Ardent suffragists and pacifists, during the war they went as Red Cross volunteers to London. They worked at the Endell Street Hospital, which was a woman-centered institution created by two women physicians and staffed almost entirely by women physicians, nurses, and practitioners. There, Nancy Cook’s notable woodworking talents were put to use making artificial limbs.
When they returned to New York in August 1919, Marion Dickerman was greeted at the dock by her brother with the news that she had been selected to run for the New York State Assembly against the reactionary Assembly speaker, Thaddeus Sweet, a Republican who had opposed every piece of social justice legislation introduced by the Women’s Joint Legislative Conference, formed in 1918 by Mary Elizabeth Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins’s sister and closest ally.
The Women’s Joint Legislative Conference, an organization that particularly engaged ER’s time, consisted of post-suffrage feminists who were now active in the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the Consumers’ League. Florence Kelley, Maud Swartz, Margaret Norrie, Nelle Swartz, and Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, among others, joined Mary Elizabeth Dreier to campaign for a minimum-wage law, the eight-hour day, compulsory health insurance, improved schools and educational facilities, and health and leisure standards for working women. “Having fought for democracy abroad,” they announced, “let us seek to establish it on a sounder basis at home.”
They determined that Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet was their primary enemy, and Marion Dickerman—well born, well educated, attractive, dignified, eloquent, and well known in Oswego—could defeat him. She was endorsed by the state Federation of Labor, Prohibitionists, Democrats, and Socialists. But as soon as her candidacy was perceived as a serious threat to Sweet, she was personally vilified and Red-baited. Because she had no time to have a campaign photograph taken, the first press photos showed her still in her wartime uniform. The opposition press ridiculed her as an “Escaped Nun.” Her tires were slashed during campaign meetings; she was denied rental spaces in local theatres; lights were turned off as she spoke. Armed with an electric torch, she announced: “After their darkness, came our light.”
Running for New York State office during the height of the Red Scare, Dickerman was accused of responsibility for the race riots in Chicago, the police strike in Boston, and the coming “nationalization of women,” allegedly Kollontai’s primary threat and Revolutionary Russia’s chief export. Sweet’s good friend, New York State Senator Clayton R. Lusk, the author of the infamous Lusk Report on Revolutionary Radicals, was brought in to campaign against Dickerman: “This country is face to face with organized treason heavily financed from abroad and drastic measures will be necessary to put down this menace.”
Despite this antiwoman, antireform, anti-Bolshevik propaganda barrage, Marion Dickerman—with the help of Mary Elizabeth Dreier and Nancy Cook, who served as her campaign manager—lost by a sufficiently small margin (seventeen thousand to ten thousand votes) to destroy Sweet’s gubernatorial ambitions.
After the election, Dickerman temporarily removed herself from the political fray to accept a position as dean at the New Jersey State College in Trenton, and spent the summers teaching English at Bryn Mawr’s Summer School for Women Workers. Nancy Cook was invited by Harriet May Mills to help organize the new Women’s Division of the Democratic Committee in 1920. While Nancy Cook remained in New York and Marion Dickerman went where her career as an educator led her until 1923, they continued to live and work together whenever possible, and to share their cooperative apartment in Greenwich Village.
ER’s friendship with Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman evolved into an intimate association that lasted for over fifteen years. Although the three friends seemed during this time inseparable, Dickerman recalled that ER was closer, more attracted, and more devoted to Nancy Cook. She “loved Nan much more than she did me.” But Marion Dickerman denied that she was ever “jealous,” a minor emotion she discounted—both for herself and for those she admired. Because almost all the letters between Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, as well as between Cook, Dickerman, and ER, have disappeared, it is impossible to recapture either the tone or the precise geometry of their friendship. The letters that have survived indicate that ER wrote to Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman often and at length, as was her lifelong habit with people close to her. ER missed them profoundly when they were separated, and in 1925 no other friends filled the space that they did at the core of her heart: “I feel I’d like to go off with you and forget the rest of the world existed.”
During the 1920s, whenever she traveled without Marion or Nancy she longed for their company, no matter whom else she might be with. In February 1926, aboard the Larooco, ER wrote:
Florida is queerer each year and the people make me want to know why they are here. We have a mechanic on the boat today who brought his wife because they’re living in a tent and I suspect she wouldn’t be left alone. Well, she’s a little German dressmaker and the most unhappy, out of place person. What is she doing here?…
I wish you were here. It would do you good and I should enjoy it…. Much love to Nan and to you, life is quite empty without your dear presence.
That spring, while touring the Massachusetts countryside with her boys and on her way to visit Franklin at Louis Howe’s for a day, Eleanor wrote, “I wish you were coming with Nan to-morrow, it doesn’t seem quite right to be seeing things without you.”
After 1925, ER, Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and also Caroline O’Day created the Val-Kill partnership—which eventually included the Women’s Democratic News, which ER edited, the Todhunter School, where Marion Dickerman was principal, and the Val-Kill furniture factory, which opened in 1927, over which Nancy Cook presided. Although Caroline O’Day’s precise role in these enterprises remains unclear, and she never lived at the cottage, she was associated with and financially contributed to every aspect of the partnership, and was personally closest to Marion Dickerman.
A wealthy suffragist and pacifist, Caroline O’Day had been associated with Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement. After suffrage, she became co-chair of the Democratic State Committee and head of its Women’s Division. She was one of the most active women in the Democratic Party after 1925; from 1935 to 1943, she would be New York State’s member of Congress at large, a position that no longer exists but was tantamount to Senator.
Born Caroline Love Goodwin, she was the daughter of a prosperous and landed Savannah family. Brilliant and artistic, she graduated from the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens, Georgia, and was sent to Paris to study with Whistler. She also studied in Munich, in the Netherlands, and at Cooper Union in New York City. Her paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1899 and 1900, where they won honors. She married Daniel O’Day, a vice-president of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, whom she met during a blind date in Amsterdam. O’Day encouraged and supported his wife’s suffrage and pacifist activities, and after he died suddenly in 1916, she devoted the rest of her life to social reform and progressive politics.
With so many gaps in the documentary record, the intensity and the nature of the emotional dyads and triangles within the rectangle are lost. Nevertheless, the first public mention of “The Cottage” on the Val-Kill was written by Caroline O’Day in November 1925, in the Women’s Democratic News: “We will let you in to the secret of The Cottage. When politics is through with us we are retiring to this charming retreat that is now rearing its stone walls against the beautiful cedars of a Dutchess County hillside. Here we mean to embark on an absolutely new enterprise….”*
Val-Kill, their new “cottage,” was two miles away from Springwood, on the eastern side of FDR’s sprawling property, set apart by the Val-Kill stream, which served almost as a moat. A noisy rolling-logged bridge was built over the stream, presumably to discourage animals; it enabled cars to travel to the door but only after creating an unusual wood-on-wood racket—to announce visitors and interlopers alike.
According to Marion Dickerman, it was FDR who originated the idea of their home on the Val-Kill. One afternoon, ER “remarked rather wistfully” that their picnic on the banks of that rocky stream was likely to be the last of the season, because SDR planned to close the Big House. FDR protested: “But aren’t you girls silly? This isn’t Mother’s land. I bought this acreage myself. And why shouldn’t you three have a cottage here of your own, so you could come and go as you please?”
He donated the property, and offered to build the swimming pool for use by all their friends and family. Almost immediately, on 5 August 1924, he wrote his contractor friend Elliott Brown: “My missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods and want, instead of a beautiful marble bath, to have the stream dug out so as to form an old-fashioned swimming hole.”
Val-Kill had touches of romance that fully justified FDR’s sobriquet: “The Honeymoon Cottage.” Much of the furniture, made by Nancy Cook and her assistants in their own factory, bore the initials E.M.N. ER embroidered towels, dressing-table covers, and linens E.M.N. And the three women received presents of silver, crystal, pewter, and porcelain engraved with their initials. FDR frequently gave ER and her friends gifts for the cottage, especially plantings and picnic accessories. He inscribed a book, Little Marion’s Pilgrimage, to Dickerman: “To my little pilgrim, whose progress is always upward and onward, to the things of beauty and the thoughts of love, and the like—From her affectionate Uncle Franklin, on the occasion of the opening of the love nest on the Val-Kill.” He autographed a favorite speech: “Another first edition for the library of the Three Graces of the Val-Kill.” Sara Delano Roosevelt, on the other hand, detested Val-Kill and disapproved of ER’s new friends, who smoked, wore neckties, and were entirely independent. She could never understand how or why ER preferred to live with that couple in “that hovel” rather than with her, in comfort, and with the appropriate number of servants.
Just as ER behaved toward Missy LeHand as first wife and was always gracious and solicitous, so FDR assumed the role of concerned and generous paterfamilias in relation to Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. He called them “the girls,” and acted as if they were his charges—occasionally uncontrollable, to be sure—but fully his to guide and instruct. They, in turn, were entirely devoted to the promotion of his career, and if he felt condescending toward “the girls,” it was all disguised behind genuine bonds of friendship and political loyalty, as well as considerable quantities of shared merriment.
On one occasion, for example, Marion Dickerman—believing that FDR had changed his mind about paying for the swimming pool—offered to terminate their entire agreement and abandon Val-Kill. The truth was, he responded, ER had told him to pay the contractor nothing without checking with her, since she believed the contractor was double-billing them. He continued:
So what is it all about? Why the injured tone …Oh ye of little faith! Don’t you poor idiots realize how much I care for you both and love having you at Val-Kill!…
Think it over, my dears, stop talking about “cheapening our relations,” stop listening to fairy stories, …get your feet on earth and be your own dear straight forward nice selves…. If I had you here I would spank you both and then kiss you.
FDR presided over every plan for Val-Kill. When ER and her friends decided to depart from his advice regarding the placement of one window, he wrote an irate letter: “If you build it that way, I’ll never come to visit you.”
In the same letter “To Dear Nan—also Marion,” FDR wrote that ER was to arrive at Warm Springs shortly, but only for ten days: He wished that she would stay longer.
She will certainly get lots of sleep and reading down here. There is no possibility of keeping her from getting tired in New York. The only way is to plan to get her away from N.Y. and when the cottage is built that will be one means toward the end.
A great deal of love to you both. I wish you could be here too. Perhaps next year we can make it a real family party.
The letter was also signed by Missy LeHand, who wrote a postscript: “Dear Nan & Marion: I just want to send my love to you both, also. I wish you were both coming. It will be nice to have Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Throughout the Val-Kill construction process, tensions over authority divided ER and FDR. Increasingly Eleanor fought for a controlling influence on all issues that concerned her. But she was continually eclipsed by Franklin’s male authority in the world of blueprints and business. Husbands were supposed to bid and to bargain with contractors and construction crews. Women were not, after all, supposed to build houses for themselves.
FDR hired Henry Toombs, his friend and Caroline O’Day’s cousin, to serve as architect on the project. When ER, Dickerman, and Cook indicated a willingness to pay more money to get their home built faster, FDR countered: “If you three girls will just go away and leave us alone, Henry and I will build the cottage” for much less money.
To remove themselves, they agreed to go on a camping trip to Campobello with the boys—ER’s two sons FDR, Jr., and John, her nephew Henry, and young George Draper, the son of FDR’s classmate and physician—and leave matters to FDR. It was a curious summer. ER would have preferred to supervise the building of her own home. She would also have preferred to be with Anna and James during their tour of Europe that summer. Because her own European tour with Marie Souvestre had meant so much to her, she had always been eager to introduce her children, and later her grandchildren, to that experience. But Sara had pre-empted her in that, as in so many other things, by inviting James and Anna to accompany her—without even consulting ER on the subject. When ER learned of the trip, according to Anna, “Suddenly to my horror Mother burst into tears…. She had always looked forward herself to taking Jimmy and me to Europe, but she did not have the money to do so. So Granny [did.]”
ER’s camping trip, with two tents and cooking gear (including a stove upon which Nancy Cook “produced some very good meals”), was for her a first, and by no means unpleasant, experience. Still, there were accidents and tensions: The boys fought; they disappeared; Junior cut his leg with an ax; and there was a surprising animosity toward three women traveling “alone.” On one occasion, a farmer refused them space to camp after he asked “Where are your husbands?” When ER replied, “Mine is not with me and the others don’t have husbands,” he declared that he did not “want women of that kind” camping on his fields and sent them off into the night.
The entire trip was an adventure. They went north to Ausable Chasm, then on to Montreal and Quebec, over to the White Mountains, up Mount Washington by the “little cog railway,” and across another mountain on burros, which ER found “great fun,” and on to Castine, Maine, to visit Molly Dewson and Polly Porter; ER and the boys stayed in a guest cottage “down by the water.” From Maine, they went on to Campobello, which ER had avoided since the summer FDR was stricken. To her relief, she found it “still serene, beautiful and enjoyable.”
While they camped, FDR purchased lumber and fieldstone, trim and doors, grass seed and gravel for much less than they had previously arranged. He sent them weekly bulletins: The swimming pool was completed; the ground was graded; the new road was laid out; the grass seed went in. He contracted the stone workers, carpenters, and plumbers; and agreed on all the needed materials. “In closing, I can only suggest that hereafter you call Father the ‘Cascaret’—he works while you sleep.”
ER was not amused: “Dearest Honey! I don’t like your suggested new name though you certainly do work—But we don’t sleep. I won’t be slandered! If you lived with four small boys you would feel very active.”
FDR acknowledged that the boys were a handful and were “made of steel and rubber.” He did not mean to minimize ER’s frequently lonely effort to keep the family on an even course. And he apologized: He appreciated ER’s ability to keep the family united, the children active and entertained.
The shared intimacy of Eleanor’s court and Franklin’s court stretched the limits of a delicate balance. There were occasional errors and misperceptions; then there were hurt feelings, moments of confusion and remorse. ER resented not being consulted on significant family decisions, such as her children’s college intentions. She had, for example, many conversations with her son Elliott regarding his poor grades at Groton, his general lack of interest in school, and his unwillingness to go to Harvard. She agreed that he probably needed to be free of the shadow of his older brother, James. He wanted at first to go to Princeton, and then he threatened to run away out west, an idea ER never opposed. She was surprised, therefore, in the autumn of 1926 to learn that her husband, without consulting her, had made other plans. She wrote to FDR: “Elliott tells me you and James decided he would go to Harvard next year. I am sorry but I suppose you had a good reason. Write me of your talk with the boys….”
Elliott never did go to Harvard, but ER was not involved in his decision, and she resented, above all, not being taken quite seriously by her sons and the male part of the world she inhabited. During the summer of 1925, when Women’s Trade Union League leaders Rose Schneiderman and Maud Swartz visited at Campobello, ER’s sons listened with rude amusement while their mother and her guests discussed the intolerable condition of women workers and the need for trade unions and industrial protection. ER wrote Marion Dickerman: “At lunch we had a discussion on trade unions I was left as I always am with the boys, feeling quite impotent to make a dent…. [They] regard me as a woman to be dutifully and affectionately thought of because I am their mother but …I hold queer opinions [that] can’t be considered seriously as against those of their usual male environment!”
While the older boys were at Groton, the younger boys were at the Buckley School in New York, and also in dancing school, where the Roosevelts’ class traditions persisted: “The little boys have their last dancing class tomorrow afternoon and are doing a minuet in costume with wigs,” wrote ER. “They are so sweet!”
By the mid-twenties, ER was concerned especially about her older children. Anna was eighteen, unhappy at Cornell, where she never wanted to be, and still more unhappy at home, with all its tensions and undercurrents, particularly between her mother and grandmother. She wanted “to get out,” and became engaged to Curtis Dall, a rather conventional and balding financier associated with Lehman Brothers. Then thirty, he seemed appealing to Anna above all for his apparent stability; but Eleanor was not sure. “I don’t think she even thinks she’s serious but he is and I’m not sure she didn’t let herself get a bit further than she meant to be!” They were married in June 1926.
James was now at Harvard and attended all the appropriate club initiations and parties, but ER was dismayed by his correspondence: “I can’t say that three nights drunk fills me with anything but disgust!” “Elliott as usual thinks I’m hard on him because he won’t work really hard and I injured his feelings in public by making some remark about a gentleman who didn’t bathe for a week!” “The trials of a large family!”
Through virtually all of her children’s ordeals, her husband was away and ER was the responsible parent. She rarely complained, and more rarely still was she credited for her efforts. Rather, she was generally dismissed as a nag—and continually interfered with by her mother-in-law. SDR remained adept at salting old wounds and exacerbating their tensions about money. She succeeded especially in creating something of a stir when Anna married Curtis Dall.
SDR decided, without consulting Eleanor or Franklin, to present the young couple with an expensive cooperative apartment. She enraged ER by telling Anna to keep it a secret from her parents. When they learned of her intentions and opposed the gift because they believed the Dalls neither wanted nor could then afford to maintain it, she threatened to cancel it.
On 31 March 1927, ER wrote FDR that she had “a run in with Mama about getting a little more coal,” and then a real “bust” over the apartment. SDR wrote a rare letter of apology:
Eleanor dear, I am very very sorry that I hurt you—twice, first by not letting Anna tell you before it was decided & then by saying I would not give it to them. I certainly am old enough not to make mistakes & I can only say how much I regret it—I did not think I could be nasty or mean, & I fear I had too good an opinion of myself—Also I love you dear too much to ever want to hurt you. I was hasty, & of course I shall give them the apartment. I only wanted them to decide for themselves & surprise you & Franklin—No doubt he will also be angry with me—Well, I must just bear it—
Devotedly, Mama
ER wrote FDR that she had answered quite politely and apologized as well. But “[I] told her you never demeaned yourself by getting angry over little things. So you see I’ve been thoroughly nasty but I’ll try to behave again now for a time….”
Throughout this period, ER’s letters are laced with frustration—bills to be paid, forgotten allowances to be sent. It was annoying, and ER resented having to ask FDR for money. In the autumn of 1927, she wrote: “Please answer all the questions in my last letter & send me money…. How about Anna’s September 1st allowance, did you remember it? My love to Missy and much love to you dear. I do wish you were here these lovely October days.”
On 25 October, she wrote again: “I wired you for Anna’s September allowance because she asked me this am if you were giving her an allowance. Now, was when she needed it as she was moving in & they had $500 extra expenses…. I must have my money too dear. I know you hate to be bothered but these things must be.”
The more their lives diverged, the more their interests varied, the more ER needed an income of her own. She raised all the money for the political journal, the Women’s Democratic News, and was proud of her resourcefulness.
She wrote to FDR on 10 April 1926: “This has been a hectic week! I am learning the advertising business!” After endless phone calls, ER got enough ads for the journal to be self-sufficient. “So you see,” she wrote proudly, “this Bulletin is going to be a real business proposition.”
The first issue of the monthly appeared in May 1925 with features by prominent Democrats, legislative reports and proposals, news analyses, and sufficient advertising to pay all costs. ER was editor and treasurer; Caroline O’Day was president; Elinor Morgenthau was vice-president; Nancy Cook was business manager; and Marion Dickerman was secretary.
IN 1926, ELEANOR, NANCY COOK, AND MARION DICKERMAN bought the Todhunter School, a girls’ school in New York City, where ER also taught. In addition, she worked hard to sell the furniture reproductions that Nancy Cook made at their Val-Kill factory, opened in 1927. ER held showings in her East 65th Street house and at Hyde Park which brought in significant funds. They sold to Vassar, and to Sloane’s Department Store. They sold to FDR for Warm Springs, and ER bought Val-Kill furniture for all of her friends and most of her relatives. Still, however much ER may have contributed to the family purse, her finances remained connected to Franklin’s, and he controlled the purse strings: “Please send Nan a check if you haven’t and please send me one for I am broke and so is the shop!” she wrote him on 8 February 1928.
By 1928, however, ER had decided to become personally independent and financially solvent. Within two years, she earned thousands of dollars writing articles for popular magazines, including McCall’s and Redbook. Although her sons frequently mocked her efforts, she was delighted to be able to reach a wide and popular audience on a variety of subjects concerning women in politics, and relieved finally to be earning her own money. She wrote FDR, when she was offered $500 for “only 2500 words,” that she supposed “James will tell me he would not write for such a magazine, as he did about the Redbook. But I am glad of the chance!”
ER generally minimized her own contributions and her own achievements. In retrospect, her attitude seems more a defense against being unappreciated, against seeing her work and her efforts go unacknowledged, than an accurate measure of her real sense of self-worth. Many of her letters indicate that her feelings were hurt because her work was overlooked, her contributions taken for granted—especially by FDR and the members of her own immediate household. But she did seem more and more able to appreciate herself, even when those around her did not.
Moreover, ER gradually learned during this period of her life to be direct about her feelings, to acknowledge when she was displeased, angry, or in some way wounded. Griselda no longer sulked in dreary self-righteous silence. Rifts were healed with a new honesty and forth-rightness. Part of the reason for this was that for the first time she had friends who actually noticed her moods, and cared about them.
On 18 May 1926, ER wrote to Marion Dickerman: “I have just a minute and want to send you a line. I hate to think that you’ve been unhappy dear; it is new for me to have anyone know when I have ‘moods’ much less have it make any real difference & if you’ll try not to take them too seriously I’ll try not to let myself have them!”
Marion Dickerman remembered the 1920s as the “Invincible Summer” of their lives. During this time, ER relinquished the old “puritan” habits of social duty that had prevented her from enjoying spontaneous fun and the most casual pleasures. She embraced the countryside she loved in a new and athletic way. Her old fear of mountain climbing evaporated. ER hiked everywhere, covering great distances with an incomparably long and steady stride. She could outwalk anybody. She enjoyed swimming and riding. She loved to drive, and she drove fast. She wanted to fly, and she did fly with Amelia Earhart. ER became one of the first women to promote flying as a hobby, for the thrill of it. Her headaches and routine winter colds disappeared. She began to enjoy good food, different foods, and put on weight for the first time in her adult life.
SDR, who had an amazing capacity to reconcile herself to virtually all situations, wrote her son after spending some time with ER and her friends at the cottage: “Eleanor is so happy over there that she looks well and plump, don’t tell her so, it is very becoming, and I hope she will not grow thin.”
Val-Kill enabled ER to separate from her mother-in-law. Even in the environs of Hyde Park, ER was now physically removed from her constant gaze, daily intrusions, and frequent criticisms. This defused the immediate power struggle between them regarding the children. Although that struggle never really ceased, it was no longer the dominant factor in their daily relations.
Moreover, ER was free for the first time to invite her own guests to a home where she felt in control. The humiliation of having to ask permission to invite anybody home, knowing that Sara never really did approve of her friends, was over. Marion Dickerman flattered herself that SDR’s politeness to her represented fondness. But Eleanor knew that Marion deluded herself. Privately, Sara never missed an opportunity to scorn all her friends. Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook were tolerated by SDR—they were the daughters of educated, old-family, affluent, Protestant New Yorkers. Rose Schneiderman—who ER never dared to invite to Hyde Park, for example—was an ardent unionist, a working-class Russian immigrant, committed to her class and her Jewish heritage. SDR disliked them all and resented their presence in her family circle. She disdained their style, their ideas, and their habits; loathed their presumptions, their knickerbockers, and their politics.
Eleanor’s removal to Val-Kill loosened her mother-in-law’s grip, and transformed their tug-of-war for FDR’s affections. ER had removed herself from the game—or at least from her former and subservient place on the game board. This left SDR temporarily distressed and worried about the future. Eleanor wrote Franklin from Campobello during the summer of 1925: “I wish you could read Mama’s last letter to me. She is afraid of everything…. Afraid of your going over bad and unfrequented roads, afraid I’ll let the children dive in shallow water & break their necks, afraid they’ll get more cuts! She must suffer more than we dream is possible!”
But as SDR came to understand that Eleanor and Franklin were both now fully embarked on a path to which they were committed, she too shifted gears, with remarkable grace. When she saw that FDR intended to remain active in business and politics, she became his most ardent and generous promoter. Eventually she also acknowledged the importance of ER’s activities, and appeared with her at political luncheons and dinners sponsored by such organizations as the League of Women Voters and the Women’s City Club.
Gradually, Sara became a patron of almost all ER’s activities—whether or not they helped to promote Franklin’s career. Although SDR did not share her son and daughter-in-law’s ambitions, and continued to detest their friends and associates, she was entirely proud of their achievements. If she could no longer dominate their lives, she could at least participate fully in them. Moreover, by supporting them financially and publicly she retained a semblance of control.
But for ER and FDR, the 1920s were not about control. They were about convalescence and independence and homes of their own. Out of their joint but separate paths toward greater health and fulfillment emerged a vision of a complex future that was to unite them in work and action as never before, while allowing each a full measure of autonomy.
AS ER PLANNED HER HOME AT VAL-KILL, FDR PLANNED HIS center at Warm Springs. At first ER disapproved of Warm Springs, located in Bullochville, Georgia. Warm Springs was reminiscent of the hometown of her paternal grandmother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, but her fond memory of the many stories told her by her father and her aunts did nothing to dispel the reality of the gloomy, ramshackle place she saw when she and FDR first visited it in 1924. ER found the Georgia countryside even less appealing than Florida. The healing, bubbling springs that shot out of the rocks and the pool were magnificent, but all the buildings of the former spa, now owned by FDR’s friend the philanthropist George Foster Peabody, were shabby and depressing. All the windows needed to be replaced, and there were cracks and holes in the roof and siding: “It won’t be practical in the winter for a long time if it ever is.” FDR was immediately drawn to the warm healing waters, in which he felt as if he could walk again. He dreamed of establishing and administering a modern therapeutic center, and purchased the facility from Peabody in 1926 for $195,000.
FDR planned to invest two-thirds of his assets into what ER at first dismissed as a chimera. When she expressed her reservations, FDR exploded in anguish. It was the first and only time ER witnessed the depth of her husband’s “discouragement” and “bitterness” about his condition. FDR made it clear that he was willing to spend any amount of money on the chance that he might “not be quite such a helpless individual.”
After this encounter, ER assured FDR that she would support any decision he made; she wanted him to do whatever he thought best. She also encouraged him to keep the houseboat, which he felt he must surrender for financial reasons: “Don’t worry about being selfish, it is more important that you have all you need and wish than anything else and you always give the chicks more than they need and you know I always do just what I want!”
Until his outburst, ER, Louis Howe, his mother, and even his law partners had been united in their opposition to Warm Springs.
ER wrote Marion Dickerman that FDR was hurt and dispirited by everybody’s lack of appreciation for what he was trying to do. He thought it was “a big thing which may be a financial success and a medical and philanthropic opportunity for infantile and that all of us have raised our eyebrows and thrown cold water on it. There is nothing to do but to make him feel one is interested….”
In the spring of 1926, ER went to Warm Springs, willing to help. After she left, she wrote: “I know how you love creative work, my only feeling is that Georgia is somewhat distant for you to keep in touch with what is really a big undertaking. One cannot, it seems to me, have vital interests in widely divided places, but that may be because I’m old and rather overwhelmed by what there is to do…. Don’t be discouraged by me; I have great confidence in your extraordinary interest and enthusiasm.” That autumn, the Larooco was destroyed in a hurricane, and once that source of diversion was gone, FDR devoted all his energy to his own physical therapy and the center at Bullochville, now renamed Warm Springs.
With FDR preoccupied by his new healing center, the partners of Val-Kill spent most of their time together. They seemed inseparable until 1932, when their friendship was eclipsed by changing circumstances, especially the appearance of new friends in ER’s life whom Marion and Nancy actively disliked, and who disliked them—Lorena Hickok in particular. But the germs of their growing estrangement were planted earlier. ER knew during the 1920s that she needed and wanted intimate friends whose loyalty she could count on for herself alone, as she could with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read.
But from the beginning, Marion Dickerman especially was dazzled by FDR, and her loyalties were divided. “Never in [her] life,” Marion Dickerman recalled, had she “met so utterly charming a man.” It seemed to her “only right and natural that people should devote themselves heart and soul to him and his career.” Nancy Cook too saw her political future in terms of FDR’s rising star. ER’s first mention of Nancy Cook in her correspondence with FDR, dated 29 June 1922, had included the premonitory sentence: “Spent a long time with Miss Cook and agreed to get up a tea with you at once.”
Eventually Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook began to consider themselves the bridge between Eleanor and Franklin, and began to fancy their diplomacy equally appreciated. ER tended to live at the Big House when FDR was actually in residence. But on one occasion they argued so vigorously that Eleanor “closeted” herself at Val-Kill for three days, maintaining her old-style silence. Only after Nancy Cook persuaded Franklin to drive himself over in his hand-controlled auto did ER reluctantly go out to him. They talked for over two hours in the car and then returned to Springwood. Cook and Dickerman took credit for great diplomacy, but their bridge work developed a perilously stretched quality. In time, it tilted too far over to FDR’s side, swamping the entire friendship between ER, Dickerman, and Cook.
ER SAW HER OWN STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE AS connected to the wider struggle for full economic and political power for all women. And she fully appreciated that the path to victory involved networks of friendship and support that enabled women to forge their demands from a position of strength and unity. Politics for ER was never a theoretical adventure. She understood politics as she understood her own life: There were things that needed to be done because they were good, and right, and decent.
In August 1923, during her first trip to Campobello since FDR’s illness, while reading aloud one evening to Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, and Rose Schneiderman, ER repeated several times one particular sentence from The Countryman’s Year by David Grayson (the pen name of Ray Stannard Baker): “Back of tranquility lies always conquered unhappiness.” She referred to that phrase often over the years. During the 1920s, ER conquered unhappiness, and moved beyond it.
*When I asked Caroline O’Day’s son, Daniel O’Day, about his mother’s intention of living at Val-Kill, he seemed amazed, and responded: “Goodness, no. Why should she? She had her own entirely comfortable place in Rye, and she lived with Frances Perkins.” To my understanding that Perkins lived with Mary Harriman Rumsey until her death in 1935 and after that shared a home in Washington with his mother, Daniel O’Day (who was nineteen in 1925) was adamant: He said he was in a position to know, since he and his older sister, Elia, and his younger brother, Charles, lived with his mother, and he at least hated Frances Perkins. All of Caroline O’Day’s papers have been lost; nor is she mentioned in any personal way in Perkins’s writings, or in her oral histories.—B.W.C.