Hyde Park on Hudson
No one could remember when they had last flown the Union Jack in Hyde Park, Dutchess County, but the chances were it had been back in colonial times. Now, all those years later, the British flag and the Stars and Stripes were strung in alternate rows between the trees along a short stretch of Main Street. There was a large welcome sign on the approach to the village from the town of Poughkeepsie and smaller ones on several other buildings. The post office, immediately opposite the village garage, strewn with bunting, looked especially festive.
Although home to just eight hundred people, Hyde Park had grown accustomed to its unlikely role as summer capital of the United States. Whenever the opportunity arose, the town’s most famous son, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often known simply as FDR, would slip away from the stresses of Washington DC and pitch up at Springwood, the colonial-style clapboard house set in 1,300 acres of woodland with glorious views of the valley leading down to the Hudson River, which had been in the family for more than seventy years.
Since Roosevelt’s election as president almost seven years earlier, this was where he had entertained visiting princes, prime ministers and presidents. Like American leaders before and after him, Roosevelt appreciated the usefulness of a place away from the formality of the White House to which he could invite allies or opponents and pursue politics and diplomacy in a beautiful, relaxed setting. He also loved this house and this particular corner of New York State. It was in his blood. “All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” he once declared.
It was also where he played, enjoying the company of the various women who had assumed a special role in his life since an affair two decades earlier that had taken the passion out of his marriage to Eleanor, turning their relationship into one of friendship and mutual support. And it was into the surrounding countryside that he would go careering off in his open 1936 Ford Phaeton, which was custom-built with special hand controls that allowed him to drive it without using his feet. Usually, one of those women, maybe Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, his long-serving secretary, or Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin, would be by his side.
Yet the visit this weekend was to be something different: on the evening of Saturday 10th June 1939, Springwood would play host to the King and Queen of the United Kingdom. As the New York Times put it, Hyde Park was preparing for a “new and unique role in its history – to serve for one brief weekend as the unofficial capital of the entire Englishspeaking world”.1
As citizens of a nation born of a struggle against an earlier British monarch, the people of the United States could have been forgiven a feeling of indifference towards George III’s great-great-great-grandson, a quiet and tongue-tied man of forty-four who owed his place on the throne to the decision of his elder brother, Edward VIII, to give up his crown to marry Wallis Simpson.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Since King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had arrived in Canada just over three weeks earlier, the US newspapers, radio and newsreels had recorded their progress across North America with a growing sense of frenzy. The Americans had been led to expect an uncomfortable, stuttering monarch obsessed with formality and protocol. Instead they encountered a smiling and relaxed man who seemed in many ways just like them – and beside him a charming young woman who dazzled everywhere she went with her beauty and style.
This frenzy had reached a crescendo three days earlier, when the Royal Blue train on which they had been travelling through Canada crossed Niagara Falls and they set foot on American soil – making George VI the first reigning British monarch to do so. Their visits to Washington and New York had drawn crowds of more than a million people, more even than had turned out to see them during their many stops north of the border. Now, after a short drive through a part of the United States that had seen some of the fiercest fighting during the war waged by the American colonies against the British Crown, they were due to arrive in Hyde Park.
The locals had initially been slow to latch on to the significance of the occasion, not least when it came to decorating their town. The Town Board had no power to appropriate money for official decorations except on Memorial Day, which had already passed. After much thought, the problem was solved by Elmer Van Wagner, the Hyde Park supervisor, who asked the seven members of the board to stump up $5 each and appealed to village merchants to pay their bit, too. In total, some $80 had been spent on decorations, Van Wagner told the New York Times: most of the flags had been rented and a special welcome sign had been made to order at a cost of $4; a special large Union Jack for display in the Town Hall had set them back $4.50.
Asked what he would do with the flag after the visit, Van Wagner paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “Guess I’ll present it to the King.” In total, some five to ten thousand people were expected to crowd into the town for the occasion; fields and side streets were to be converted into parking lots to accommodate the influx of cars.
The paper’s reporter found the people of Hyde Park taking things in their stride. “While not of the temperament that gives much outward expression to enthusiasm, the inhabitants of this community are giving every indication that they are aware of the role that history has assigned to them for the weekend,” he wrote.2
So, too, was Roosevelt. Unlikely as it may seem, given the radical nature of his politics, the Democrat President had been brought up with a strong interest in monarchy. As his son, Elliott, wrote later: “He was fascinated by kings and queens, half amused, half impressed by the pomp and pageantry that enveloped royalty.”3 This was due in large part to Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, by then a grand old lady of eighty-four, but no less domineering and imperious than she had always been. Sara’s own obsession with royalty has been traced back to 1866 when, visiting Paris at the age of twelve, she watched as Empress Eugénie drove past her in the royal coach. Many years later, Sara’s husband, James, bought her as a present the red velvet-lined sleigh that Tsar Alexander II had given to Eugénie’s husband, Emperor Napoleon III. Sara used it to ride around Springwood during the winter.4
In July 1918, when he was a thirty-six-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had fulfilled his mother’s dream and, during a visit to Europe, was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet King George V. Theodore Roosevelt, a distant cousin, had become a friend of the royal family while he was president before the First World War, and what was meant to have been a formal meeting to discuss the war effort assumed a more personal character. Conversation quickly turned to the twin passions shared by the King and Roosevelt: the Navy and collecting stamps.
And so, two decades later, in the run-up to the royal visit, despite the many other pressing political, economic and military problems facing him, Roosevelt had thrown himself into the organization of the trip and, in particular, the twenty-four hours that the King and Queen would spend at Springwood. From seating plans to choice of furniture and gifts, no detail was too small for the President’s attention. Eleanor, although no lover of pomp or formality, had no alternative but to get caught up in the preparations too.
For newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, though, one small detail of the arrangements mattered more than anything else: would the King and Queen be served hot dogs during the picnic that their hosts planned to hold for them? Since Eleanor had dropped a casual mention of the proposed menu into a press conference a few weeks earlier, the question had assumed almost an iconic importance. There was no better culinary symbol of American classlessness than the humble hot dog. The idea of feeding it to royalty amused and appalled in equal measure – especially after Sara, who never shied away from a public spat with her daughter-in-law, made clear her horror at the very idea of such a “vulgar” food being presented to the King and Queen.
Roosevelt’s mind was necessarily on weightier matters. The royal visit came at a sensitive time both for America and for Britain: the future of freedom in Europe was in doubt as Hitler’s aggression pushed the Continent towards war. Roosevelt cared deeply about maintaining that freedom, for the sake of both Europe and the United States. Yet he found himself in a difficult position: many Americans remained deeply suspicious of the Europeans and the British in particular, despite a shared language and culture. Deep-rooted animosity dating back to the War of Independence had been fuelled in recent years by anger at Britain’s failure to pay back all its debts from the First World War and by the policy of appeasement that Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, pursued towards Hitler. Whatever the rights and wrongs, many ordinary Americans simply wanted to keep out of an impending conflict thousands of miles away from home.
But the President’s hands were tied: although he was personally keen that the United States should play a part in the coming struggle – or, at the very least, help Britain and his allies to arm against Hitler and Mussolini – he knew he would have to carry Congress and the American people with him. What better way to enhance the image of the British at such a sensitive time than by hosting a visit by its two most prominent representatives, the King and Queen?
Just after six o’clock that evening, Roosevelt, Eleanor, Sara and their children sat in the library of Springfield waiting for the royal party to arrive. The President had a tray of cocktails ready in front of him. His mother, who was sitting on the other side of the fireplace, looked disapprovingly across at them. The King would much prefer tea, she said. Roosevelt, who, according to his wife, “could be as obstinate as his mother”, refused to back down and kept his tray ready.
Finally, at just after eight o’clock, the waiting was over. The sounds of motor cars announced the arrival of the royal party. One of the most extraordinary twenty-four-hour periods in the history of Anglo-American relations was about to begin.