Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (36 page)

Eleanor was less entranced by Warm Springs, which was one reason she had excused herself after helping her husband settle in. “I remember the first house we lived in, and my surprise that I could look through the cracks and see daylight,” she said of the cottage Franklin found delightful. The mode of living in backwoods Georgia was more rustic than she was used to. She described her “perfect horror” at learning that chickens for dinner had to be purchased live. “At Hyde Park there were chickens in the farm yard, but that was a mile away from the house and I didn’t hear them being killed. In Warm Springs they ran around in our yard, until the cooks wrung their necks amid much squawking and put them in the pot. Somehow I didn’t enjoy eating them.”

Yet Eleanor learned to like the neighbors. Her side of the Roosevelt family had a connection to the Warm Springs area. Eleanor’s Aunt Mittie—Theodore Roosevelt’s mother—was Martha Bulloch by birth; besides possessing uncles and cousins who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, Mittie had relatives for whom the town of Bullochville, adjacent to Warm Springs, was named. Eleanor never knew Mittie, who died the year Eleanor was born, but she and Theodore’s children spent many hours with Mittie’s sister, Anna Bulloch Gracie, who regaled them with stories of the antebellum South. “She had made me feel that life in the South must be gracious and easy and charming,” Eleanor remembered. The reality of southern life around Warm Springs in the 1920s was rather different. “For many, many people life in the South was hard and poor and ugly,” Eleanor noted of her initial visit. The experience affected her deeply; like her husband she had a habit of filing observations away for future reference. The trials of the South made her appreciate the kindness the neighbors showed her and Franklin. “Hardly a day passed that something was not brought to our door—wood for the fireplace, or a chicken, or flowers. Frequently the flowers came arranged in an old silver bowl or china vase that was a priceless family possession, and I would worry until the flowers faded and the container was returned to its owner.”

As Eleanor realized, it was Franklin, the celebrity visitor, the neighbors were most interested in. If one important, wealthy northerner had come to Warm Springs, others might follow, to the economic benefit of the town and county. “On Wednesday the people of Warm Springs are giving me a supper and reception in the Town Hall,” Franklin wrote Sara. “And on Friday evening, our last day, I am to go to Manchester, five miles away, for another supper and speech. I think every organization and town in Georgia has asked me to some kind of a party…. Missy spends most of her time keeping up a huge and constant local correspondence.”

D
URING THE MID-
1920s Roosevelt divided his time among Warm Springs, Hyde Park, and the Florida coast, where he cruised aboard a houseboat he purchased with a friend. The
Larooco
became a vacation home and office combined. Missy LeHand lived on board, managing Roosevelt’s paperwork and serving as his all-purpose assistant. Louis Howe traveled down from New York to apprise the boss of political developments and spike the Florida punch with his mordant wit. Howe dictated the bylaws of the logbook to Missy, who typed them for the record:

This Logbook must be entirely accurate and truthful. In putting down weights and numbers of fish, however, the following tables may be used:

2 oz. make 1 logbook pound.

5 logbook pounds make “a large fish.”

2 “large fish” make “a record day’s catch.”

2 inches make 1 logbook foot.

2 logbook feet make “big as a whale.”

Anything above “whale” size may be described as an “icthyosaurus.”

(Note: In describing fish that got away, all these measures may be doubled.

It is also permitted, when over 30 seconds are required to pull in a fish, to say, “After half an hour’s hard fighting…”)

When the spirits of the guests required fortifying—generally just as the sun was passing over the figurative yardarm—Roosevelt brought out the grog. In public Roosevelt was a proper dry, keeping well within the bounds of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. In private he was a merry wet, drawing on his private stash to serve drinks to guests at Hyde Park and, in southern Florida, capitalizing on that region’s proximity to Cuba and the rumrunners who plied the Florida Strait.

Roosevelt’s guests included college classmates, professional acquaintances, and friends of friends. Wives occasionally joined their husbands, affording Missy female company. “Resourcefulness and good humor weighed heavily with him in a man,” Elliott Roosevelt noted regarding his father’s choice of houseboat guests. “In a woman, he looked for warmth of spirit and physical attractiveness.” Frances de Rham, a spark from Franklin’s pre-Eleanor days, qualified on both counts, as did Cynthia Mosley, whose husband, Oswald Mosley, had yet to make himself notorious as Hitler’s principal British apologist.

E
LEANOR RARELY
came aboard. She didn’t fish or play cards, and she much preferred the company of her own friends. Two in particular satisfied her need for stimulation and affection. Nancy Cook, of the women’s division of the New York Democratic committee, had first been attracted to Eleanor by her family name, but before long a friendship blossomed and Eleanor was inviting Cook for weekends at Hyde Park. Cook was as irreverent and stubborn as Eleanor, at this stage, was proper and uncertain; Eleanor soon adopted Cook as her role model. To underscore the identification, Eleanor ordered matching tweed knickerbocker suits for the two of them.

The third vertex of Eleanor’s triangle was Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook’s longtime domestic partner. Younger and quieter than Cook, Dickerman provided a steadiness Eleanor found appealing. Together Cook and Dickerman drew Eleanor deeper into politics of a progressive, even radical nature. Eleanor began consorting with feminists, trade unionists, and socialists. Dickerman had run for the New York state assembly against the conservative Republican speaker, who branded her a man-hating Bolshevik; she lost, but narrowly. She subsequently accepted a position as dean of New Jersey State College, yet her reputation for radicalism followed her. To Eleanor it added to her appeal.

The three women worked together and often played together. In the summer of 1925 they embarked on a road trip from Manhattan to Maine by a circuitous route. Eleanor brought Franklin Jr. and John, one of their cousins, and a friend of John’s. The plan was to camp along the way. Automobile campers often paid farmers for the right to pitch tents in a fallow field, but when Eleanor inquired of one farmer whether they might stay on his place, he eyed the three women suspiciously. “Where are your husbands?” he demanded. “Mine is not with me,” Eleanor answered, “and the others don’t have husbands.” The farmer snorted, “I don’t want women of that kind.” He told them to move along.

The trip tested everyone’s patience. Cook and Dickerman weren’t used to small boys and found their antics unpleasant. The young Roosevelts didn’t like their mother’s friends and let her know it. Franklin Jr. tried to cut down a tree with an ax and nearly lopped off his foot. Johnny and his friend wandered away in Quebec City and turned up only after thoroughly frightening Eleanor and annoying her companions further. The car crashed into a ditch and later a lumber wagon. By the time they reached Campobello the travelers couldn’t bear the thought of another mile in the big Buick; they summoned Dickerman’s sister and had her drive it away.

Yet the friendship among Eleanor, Nancy, and Marion survived and in fact grew stronger. Spurred toward personal independence by Nancy and Marion, Eleanor determined to build a house for the three of them on the property at Hyde Park. Franklin endorsed the idea, knowing how Sara cramped Eleanor’s style in the main house and how Eleanor’s friends irritated Sara. Franklin pointed out that he owned part of the property, having purchased a tract along the Val Kill, a creek two miles from the main house, on which the group often picnicked. As Dickerman told the story, Eleanor was lamenting, late in the summer of 1924, that the season would end, Sara would close up Springwood, and the good times on the Val Kill would cease. Franklin responded, “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?” The Val Kill idea took shape that autumn, and the cottage was built the following summer. For Nancy and Marion it provided a permanent home; the couple lived there till 1947. Eleanor came and went, according primarily to the needs of her children. By now her marriage to Franklin placed almost no demands on her; he scarcely figured in her considerations of where to spend her time.

Franklin called the Val Kill house the “Honeymoon Cottage.” How fully he intended the analogy is unclear, but the place certainly provided an idyllic escape of the kind associated with honeymoons. Eleanor embroidered the trio’s initials—“E.M.N.”—on the linen; friends provided monogrammed gifts of the sort newlyweds typically receive. Franklin himself furnished various items, including a book entitled
Little Marion’s Pilgrimage,
which he presented on the occasion, as he put it, “of the opening of the Love Nest on the Val-Kill.”

Val Kill became a world unto itself. The group pooled resources to build a furniture factory for Nancy, the artisan of the three. The factory produced replicas of traditional American designs, preserving a part of the nation’s heritage, as the three conceived it, while providing employment for craftsmen whose livelihoods were threatened by industrialization. “She wanted to use methods employed by our ancestors,” Eleanor said of Nancy’s plan, “and see whether she could find a market for furniture which, though the first processes were done by machinery, would be largely handmade and therefore expensive.”

The Val Kill partnership expanded into other areas. Eleanor edited a newspaper, the
Women’s Democratic News,
while Marion implemented her theories of education as principal of the Todhunter School for girls, which the trio eventually purchased from the British woman who had founded it. Eleanor joined Marion in attempting to bring the real world to the classroom, and vice versa. She taught courses in literature, history, and current events and led field trips to New York, where the students visited City Hall and sat in on trials in the courts. “This made the government of the city something real and alive, rather than just so many words in a text book,” she afterward explained.

15.

W
ITH
F
RANKLIN AND
E
LEANOR FASHIONING THEIR SEPARATE LIVES,
the children struggled to find their own niches. Anna experienced the greatest difficulty. Sara still employed Anna against Eleanor, constantly reminding her that her mother was neglecting her in favor of Louis Howe and now her new women friends. Sara insisted that Anna come out as a debutante at eighteen, despite Franklin’s apathy and Eleanor’s ambivalence. Eleanor might have sided with Anna, who detested the debutante crowd and all it entailed, but she declined to pick another fight with Sara, and the old, insecure part of her secretly wondered whether Sara wasn’t right to introduce Anna to high society. “I was
informed
that I had to come out in society,” Anna remembered. “And I
died….
I
wasn’t
going to come out. And Granny said, ‘You
are.
’ And I went to Mother, and she said, ‘You
must.
’” Anna knew better than to appeal to Franklin. “Father you couldn’t draw into this. He’d just say, ‘That’s up to Granny and Mother. You settle all this with them.’ I couldn’t go to Father on this. He wouldn’t give me the time of day.”