Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

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  Propriety—wasn’t that supposed to be Eleanor’s territory? As they crossed into their forties, the cousins suddenly started to resemble each other, at least around the edges. Just as Alice began to fret about public opinion, Eleanor became more comfortable kicking it aside. On a lovely late August afternoon in Hyde Park, Eleanor and Franklin went on an outing along a stream a few miles away from Springwood, joined by what she called a “gay party of picnickers.” In retrospect, that was an apt description, given that their companions were her lesbian friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. The couples had become close; Franklin playfully called Nancy and Marion “the girls,” referred to himself as “Uncle Franklin,” and designated the foursome “our gang.” With the burbling Fall Kill Creek supplying a sort of natural mood music, Eleanor began to lament the end of summer and what would likely be the gang’s last picnic before Sara mothballed the house for the winter. The “girls” agreed. Franklin, however, wasn’t having any of it. “But aren’t you girls silly,” Franklin said. “This isn’t Mother’s land. I bought this acreage myself.”7 In that instant, a plan was hatched. “Why shouldn’t you three have a cottage here of your own, so you could come and go as you please?”8

  Within days, Franklin wrote to a contractor friend, explaining the assignment: “My missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods.” Before long, he had deeded the land to the three women, appointed himself general contractor, and managed construction of a one-story, Dutch-style stone building complete with swimming pool and gardens. He gave it, too, a wry nickname: “the honeymoon cottage.” FDR was referring to its cozy, bucolic, away-from-it-all charm, but whether he meant to or not, the literal meaning could apply as well. The women ordered personalized stationery that read, “Val-Kill Cottage” (taking the Dutch translation of the nearby creek’s name). Eleanor monogrammed the bath towels and linens herself with the initials EMN, for Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy. She only had a room in what became Nancy and Marion’s permanent home, but this was very much their place. When the house was still under construction, the women became frustrated by Franklin’s micromanaging of the project, so the ladies loaded John, FDR Jr., and two other boys into a big blue Buick they’d bought together and took off for a camping trip to New England, Quebec, and Campobello. At one point when they couldn’t find a camp-site, they pulled up to a farm and Eleanor asked if they could pitch their pup tents for the night. “Where are your husbands?” the farmer asked her. “Mine is not with me and the others don’t have husbands,” she replied. “I don’t want women of that kind,” he said. And so they piled back into the Buick and left.9

  Eleanor didn’t care what the farmer, or anyone else, thought. Nancy and Marion helped her feel free. With them, she could leave behind her obligations as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law. Their friendship was based on shared values rather than on bloodlines or class. That became even more evident when the three women decided to go into business together. In 1926, they established Val-Kill Industries, a factory focused on reproductions of Early American wood furniture, along with a few products created on a metal forge and a small loom. Their idea was to use Val-Kill as a sort of progressive workers’ commune, in hopes of providing economic support to rural tradesmen who were finding it increasingly hard to survive in America’s changing economy. As a business, it was a failure. Val-Kill never employed more than thirty craftsmen, and Eleanor had to sink more and more of her own funds into the project. “In fact, I was probably one of the best customers the shop had, because I bought various pieces of furniture as wedding presents and gifts for other occasions,” she said.10 But the experience was invaluable. Val-Kill was Eleanor’s first real attempt at community building and economic engineering, both of which would play a role on a larger scale during the New Deal just a few years later. “Val-Kill,” Eleanor would say, “is where I used to find myself and grow.”

  Even by the permissive standards of the Roaring Twenties, Eleanor’s keeping house with two unabashed lesbians was a remarkably bold—and, to some, confusing—idea. Sara was completely perplexed by the arrangement. “Can you tell me why Eleanor wants to go over to the Val-Kill cottage to sleep every night,” she asked one of Eleanor’s friends. “Why doesn’t she sleep here? This is her home.”11 Of course, that was the other reason the previously conventional Eleanor, who only a few years earlier had devoted herself to the arcane Washington practice of “calling,” was suddenly building her own little Bohemia on the Hudson. She never felt at home at Springwood, and Sara never could see it. But Franklin did. However estranged they had become romantically, Franklin and Eleanor still cared deeply about each other’s happiness. Besides, he knew that helping his wife acquire a room of her own would buy him a much-needed dose of domestic tranquillity. In that sense, Val-Kill was indeed Eleanor’s “honeymoon cottage.” It offered her, for the first time in her adult life, a chance to live by her own rules, pursuing her own priorities and dreams.

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  Despite the family’s initial trepidation about Alice’s pregnancy, she soon found herself in a familiar spot: thumbing her nose at society with impunity. The minute the news broke, the press began acting as if the royal family had just trumpeted the next heir to the throne, rumors be damned. “She is still the Princess Alice and she succeeds by means which would be the ruin of others to attempt,” wrote The New Yorker.

  She does no official entertaining, gives no large parties, returns no calls. She breaks every rule in the book and in Washington the rules count. Yet an invitation to the Longworths is more prized by the discriminating than an invitation to the White House…

  If she does not feel like dressing, Alice—not the butler—may receive her guests at the door in a Chinese silk outfit something like a swell set of pajamas. She will sit on her feet on a tiger skin before the fire and smoke while Nick, after a wearing day on the floor of the House, fiddles with complete abstraction.12

  With similarly fawning reports being filed from all over the country, Alice felt secure enough of her place in the pecking order to really tweak the gossipmongers. She told Nick she wanted to name the baby Deborah—as in de (“of,” in French) Borah. He was not amused. “With all the gossip going around, why would you want to name her De-Borah?” he asked.13 They decided on Paulina, after Alice’s favorite saint.

  Despite Nick’s comment, it’s hard to believe he didn’t have suspicions about Paulina’s paternity, given the Longworths’ long-running estrangement and the incessant rumors. (Best joke at the time: What do the Longworth baby and a brand new parquet floor have in common? Neither have a bit of Nick in them.) Or maybe he knew the truth and just didn’t care. Nick’s House colleagues gave him a heartfelt standing ovation when the Associated Press first flashed news of Paulina’s birth on February 14, 1925. True to the baby’s quasi-royal lineage, the entire country seemed thrilled about the “Valentine Baby,” as Paulina became known. “For every newspaper it was a front page story,” wrote The New Yorker, which added an observation that must have warmed Alice’s vindictive little heart: “No such romantic glamor spun about the children of the Wilson girls, even though those happy events took place in the White House itself, and the grandfather of the youngsters was President. The nation reserved its rejoicing for the delivery of an heir to the Princess Alice; for the daughter of T.R.”14

  Paulina became a regular visitor to the House, sitting on Nick’s knee and smiling for the cameras while the proud papa beamed right back at her. Before her first birthday, Nick was elected Speaker of the House, his popularity boosted in part as the father of the country’s most famous infant. By 1926, the pundits speculated that Nick would run for president. They also speculated about where he got the idea: “In the nimble brain of that uncomformable woman, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Every move Nick makes is colored Alice blue…[She] has the finesse of a fencer. Also of a boxer, billiardist, bridge player and every other art requiring tact, discrimination and judgment.”15 Ev
en for wealthy women at the time, motherhood meant signing up for a lifetime of assignments and obligations tied specifically to the welfare of the family. Not for Alice Longworth. For her, motherhood merited a promotion to more important, less homebound pursuits. “It is no exaggeration to say that she shapes national policies, executive and legislative—not all policies, of course, but those she is interested in, and her interests are very wide.”16 In 1926, she was “virtually assured” to become the Republicans’ national committeewoman from Ohio—until she took her name out of contention. “I am convinced that the duties of national committeewoman are not in my line,” she said somewhat vaguely.17 In February 1927, she landed on the cover of Time magazine for no other accomplishment than being deemed “the most popular lady in the land.” She made news when she was paid $5,000 (roughly $68,000 in 2015 dollars) to appear in a Pond’s cold cream ad and again when, for some bizarre reason, the appendix she had removed in 1907 turned up in possession of the U.S. government, preserved in a bottle of alcohol. No matter how brightly Nick’s star shone, Alice’s made it look paler. Even the possibility of Nick’s becoming president was examined through the lens of his wife: How would she behave as First Lady? How would she feel about moving back into the White House? Would Paulina be as mischievous as First Daughter Alice? When Nick declared that he wouldn’t run for the White House after all, guess who got the credit: “Alice Rules ‘Nick’ Out.”18 Adding to poor Nick’s humiliation: that paper suggested that Alice’s preferred ticket was Borah for president, with her brother Ted for VP. Unfortunately for Nick, that was probably true.

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  The rest of the country was so busy beating the drums for Alice even she didn’t hear the footsteps approaching from Hyde Park. Eleanor clearly regretted running over her cousin Ted with the singing teapot; she tried to mend their relationship and never played that dirty again. But the 1924 campaign kindled a newly competitive, even combative, spirit in her, and like any recent convert she embraced her new assignment with the zeal of a missionary. When Franklin’s half-niece, Helen Roosevelt, came to visit Hyde Park with her husband, Theodore Robinson (Aunt Corinne’s proudly Republican son), in the fall of 1925, she found herself playing referee. “Eleanor also has become so rabid,” Helen wrote to Aunt Corinne, “that I see perfectly that I shall be a continual ‘buffer’ during the entire visit and am preparing to leap actively into all breaches at any moment.”19 Eleanor became a leading voice for the forty-eight-hour workweek and gradually took up almost any women’s rights issue. She spoke on the radio, hosted antiwar lunches, and wrote prodigiously for the Women’s Democratic News. She made a splash after she was arrested for disorderly conduct while picketing alongside striking box fabricators in New York, and she kicked up a storm with an article she wrote for Redbook: “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do.” All of a sudden she was being compared favorably with a certain male Roosevelt—Uncle Ted. “There is something about that smile that is reminiscent of her illustrious uncle, while the droop in the outer corner of her eyes likewise reminds one of the former President,” wrote the New York Times.20 Eleanor was soaring at last—and in more ways than one. She had always loved the idea of flying, and she persuaded her friend Amelia Earhart to give her pilot lessons. FDR, who was never comfortable with air travel, finally convinced her to stop.

  Of course, with every speech and handshake, she was also helping raise FDR’s profile, even while he spent a good deal of time at his Warm Springs spa, determined to walk. As the 1928 election approached, FDR’s mentor, Governor Al Smith of New York, decided to run for president again, and he asked Franklin for a repeat performance as the man who introduced the “Happy Warrior” to the Democratic convention four years earlier. This time Smith got the party’s nomination, but even he realized he was a long shot in the general election, given that the Republicans had presided over a roaring economy for the last eight years. It didn’t help that Smith was a Roman Catholic, a sixth-grade dropout, and the purveyor of a New York accent as thick as the mustard on a Coney Island hot dog. His opponent, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, was an upright and fastidious Quaker whose work coordinating Europe’s postwar relief efforts had made him so popular the Democrats had briefly talked of drafting him. Smith was worried enough about carrying his home state that he begged Franklin to run for governor in the hopes that the Roosevelt name would attract enough votes to carry New York for the both of them. The scheme didn’t quite go down as planned. Smith got buried in the national election, losing forty states, including New York, while Franklin squeaked by with the narrowest of margins. Another election, another move into one of Uncle Ted’s old houses.

  Two days after Franklin’s victory, Eleanor unexpectedly played against the good-wife type again. When a reporter asked her if she was excited that her husband was now governor-elect, she came at him like a snapping turtle. “No, I am not excited about my husband’s election,” she said. “What difference does it make to me?”21 Eleanor knew that moving to the governor’s mansion in Albany meant she’d have to leave behind many of her own political projects—as with children, the wives of elected officials were supposed to be seen and not heard. She stepped down as the editor of the Women’s Democratic News and started to turn down speaking requests. Instead, she spent a good deal of her time commuting four hours to New York City, where she taught English literature and history at the Todhunter School for Girls, which she had purchased in 1927 with Marion and Nancy. Remembering how Mlle Souvestre had had such a profound impact on her life, Eleanor embraced teaching as an opportunity to do the same for a new generation of young women. Like her mentor, Eleanor challenged her students—most of them wealthy, spoiled, and maddeningly incurious—to discover and be themselves, not what society expected them to be. She especially wanted them to be aware of the great injustices around them and to try to change society for the better. In what would become her signature approach when she became First Lady, her classes took frequent field trips, venturing to outposts few teachers today would dare visit: a police lineup in a local precinct, a soup kitchen, and the worst kind of housing project she could find. “They need to know what bad housing conditions mean and then I would like them to see as model a tenement as possible in a bad neighborhood.”22 One of her favorite final exam questions was, “In what ways are negroes kept from voting in the South?” It would be at least twenty years before most Americans would even begin to think about voter suppression.

  While Eleanor was teaching social studies to the privileged young ladies of Manhattan, Alice decided to offer her own history lesson to Washington society. The same arcane social rules that governed the ritual of “calling” also dictated the seating chart at formal affairs. Who would sit to the right and the left of the host, or next to the Romanian ambassador, or the junior senator from Arkansas? All of it was determined by long-standing rules of protocol. The wife of the president naturally took precedence and received the best seating in the house (next to the host or the most honored guest), followed by the wife of the vice president and the wife of the Speaker. But what if the vice president didn’t have a wife and instead used his sister as a stand-in? Would she take precedence over, say, the actual wife of the Speaker?

  That was the question with President Hoover’s No. 2, a sixty-nine-year-old Kansan named Charlie Curtis. Vice President Curtis was a widower, which meant he needed to anoint an official hostess and dinner companion for formal Capitol Hill functions. The fact that he had asked his half sister, Mrs. Dolly Gann, to do the honors at first seemed insignificant—until Alice begged to differ. When she and Speaker Longworth learned in early 1929 that Dolly Gann would be seated ahead of Alice at a dinner thrown by Eugene Meyer, the publisher of the Washington Post, Alice called to say the Longworths wouldn’t be coming after all. The Dolly Gann Affair was born, and while a fight over place settings may sound ridiculous now, it burned up Washington for a year full of tit-for-tat snubs and hubbub. “This new turmoil over matters of social precedence has divided
Washington into two hostile camps, just as the Wars of the Roses of the 15th century divided the aristocracy of England into two great groups,” one paper panted.23 Invitations were accepted and then refused. Editorials were written and then debated. Finally, about six months after the first eruption, the State Department*1 ruled that Mrs. Gann did indeed outrank Mrs. Longworth. Some Solomonic dignitaries then took to scheduling twin dinners so that Dolly could preside at one and Alice at the other. Even Will Rogers lent his satirical voice to the shouting match, in an open letter to the Los Angeles Times: “Had dinner with Mrs. Longworth and sat by Mrs. Gann in the Senate gallery today and had a fine chat. So got everything fixed up between Alice and Dolly. Alice is to have preferential seating relief on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and Dolly on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Sundays is neutral.”24