Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  When Tiny came to New York she stayed at the little hideaway apartment that Eleanor and Tommy maintained on East Eleventh Street in the Village, in a little house owned by Esther and Elizabeth. So did Eleanor’s brother Hall. So did Earl. Eleanor no longer used the house on Sixty-fifth Street. When she and Franklin moved to Washington they had thought of selling it, but only if that also was Sara’s wish. They dropped the plan when Sara wrote her son,

  Yes, I should not care for being in New York and away from this house, which so exactly suits me and I have become fond of it. At the same time if we could get a good price, and if the money (half of the amount I get) would be a help to you, with your big family, I would willingly let it go and I should live in the country. Yet it would be a pity to sacrifice such fine property, for in time it will rise again in value.6

  James and Betsy used the house briefly, as did Anna and her children after she divorced Curtis Dall, but Eleanor preferred her little apartment in the Village. “Dear Georgie,” Tommy wrote the Negro maid, Miss Georgiana Turner, who worked for her and Eleanor in New York,

  Mrs. Roosevelt will be in on Monday just in time to go to the theatre. Will you leave for her some crackers and milk, so that she and Mrs. Morgenthau can just have a bite before they go to the theatre. Then will you leave some sandwiches and some iced Sanka and some fruit so that they can have something to eat when they return from the theatre. Mrs. Morgenthau will spend the night, so you will have a bed ready for her, as well as for Mrs. Roosevelt.7

  If Eleanor considered any place home, it was Hyde Park. “I am always given the reputation of being constantly on the move,” she said to a group of women who were meeting in Washington, and added, her voice becoming a little high-pitched as it still did when she repeated something that seemed to her quite absurd,

  in fact, one woman, I was told the other day, remarked that she did not see very much evidence that I ever stayed at home. As a matter of fact, I believe very strongly in deep roots in some piece of ground . . . some place that carried your memories and associations of many years. All of us need deep roots. We need to feel there is one place to which we can go back, where we shall always be able to work with people whom we know as our close friends and associates, where we feel that we have done something in the way of shaping a community, of counting in making the public opinion of that community.8

  The Hudson Valley from Tivoli south to Hyde Park was that place for Eleanor, and Val-Kill particularly. For years the Stone Cottage, two miles east of the Big House—for which Franklin had given her, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman lifetime use of the land (and where, as a measure of the intimacy of the three women, all the linen was marked EMN)—had been a refuge for her. There she found quietness when public life became too much, and devotion when, hurt by some new display of Franklin’s casualness, she needed sensitive response and the feeling that she was really loved. Since the mid-twenties no one had been closer to Eleanor than Nan and Marion, especially Nan. But now her feelings began to change. She was constantly growing: “There is something rather exciting about starting a new thing and one’s ideas run riot!” she wrote in 1937 when she was fifty-three. “If the day ever comes when some one talks to me about something and it does not at once start a dozen trains of thought, I shall feel that the real springs of life are slowing up and that age is truly upon me!” She told the Todhunter graduating class, “Don’t dry up by inaction but go out and do new things. Learn new things and see new things with your own eyes.”9

  She lived by this rule, her friends less so. There was a small sign that the relationship between her and her friends had changed when in late 1937 Marion asked Eleanor’s help in planning the expansion of Todhunter. Like Val-Kill, Todhunter was an enterprise in which the three women were partners, even though Eleanor had given up teaching when she went to Washington, except for a current-events class. She still came, however, for opening-day ceremonies and commencement, and still gave an annual party for the staff and had each graduating class at the White House for a week end. Although the school was an excellent one, it was Eleanor’s association with it that made it unique. Eleanor agreed to help Marion with her new plans, even though Franklin cautioned her, “You realize, of course, that if a campaign is undertaken, you will have to go to several dozen pep talk dinners and that the campaign is really based on your effective leadership.” She did most of the things that Marion asked of her, but she refused to be quoted in the fundraising brochure as saying that she intended to make the school one of her chief interests after she left Washington; she hoped, in fact, that she would be able to go on with her column, her lectures, her radio work. “I am terribly sorry,” she wrote the fund-raising firm, “but as I do not intend to make the school one of my chief interests, I feel it very much wiser to be absolutely honest. It will be one of my interests, but as I have no definite idea of what my other interests will be or where they will take me, I regret that I cannot change my statement.” In the end, to Eleanor’s relief, the expansion plans were abandoned because of the recession.10

  But the shift in her interests might not have led to estrangement if Marion and Nancy had not reacted possessively. The break came when the three women decided to liquidate the Val-Kill Industries, which produced furniture, pewter, and woven materials. Eleanor wanted to take over the factory building, “The Shop” as it was called, and convert it into a house for herself and Tommy. According to Marion, they liquidated the factory because it had become too great a drain on Nancy: “The load that Nan carried nearly killed her,” Marion was later quoted as saying. “I was carrying the school, but she carried the shop, the Democratic State Committee and was helping Eleanor with the homesteads.”11 Tommy’s version was different: the furniture factory did not show a profit, and Eleanor was underwriting the losses; friends suggested that she get a business-minded person to manage the enterprise, and when Nancy objected they decided to dissolve the partnership.12

  In return for clear title to the shop building, Eleanor proposed to relinquish her share in the Stone Cottage. It is not clear why Nan and Marion refused, except that they must have sensed that the new arrangements signified a change in Eleanor’s feelings toward them and her withdrawal from a relationship that had been most significant in their lives. Franklin felt they had become too possessive; grateful as he was for the companionship they had given Eleanor—he had even agreed to their becoming members of the Cuff Links group—he was irritated, he told Agnes Leach, who was a good friend of all three women, by the way they went around saying “Eleanor this” and “Eleanor that,” and he was outraged that after all Eleanor had done for them they should be making difficulties over the shop.13

  That was the way matters stood when, in the summer of 1938, Marion went abroad. “While I was gone,” she recalled three decades later, “something happened between Eleanor and Nancy. I don’t know what. Nancy and Eleanor had a very tragic talk in which both said things they should not have said, but when I came back Nancy was crushed and Eleanor refused to see me. What took place I don’t know.”14

  Eleanor did, however, spell out her version of what had happened in a letter to Marion on November 9, 1938, when she made a new attempt to gain clear title to the shop by turning over her share in the Todhunter School Fund to Nancy and Marion, and again, half a year later, when she finally insisted on withdrawing totally from Todhunter.

  The talk I had with you last summer was a very preliminary one, but it was the result of a long period in which you may not have realized that you, Nan and I were having serious difficulties. After you left, I had a long and very illuminating talk with Nan which made me realize that you and Nan felt that you had spent your lives building me up. As I never at any time intended to put you in that position, and as I never had any personal ambitions, I was a little appalled to discover what was in Nan’s mind, and of course must have been in yours. I know Nan well enough to know that you are a great influence and factor in her life.

  In addition, on a number of occasio
ns Nan has told me how extremely difficult my name made the school situation for you. You have told me that in spite of that, you wished me to continue my connection because we had begun together. However, in view of the fact that other factors have entered the situation which made me feel that we no longer had the same relationship that I thought we had in the past, there was no point in subjecting you to a situation which was detrimental. One real factor was that certain things came back to me through Franklin which made me realize many things which I had never realized before.

  With a completely clear understanding, both financially and personally, I feel sure that we can have a very pleasant and agreeable relationship at Hyde Park. Any work I do in the future will of course be along entirely different lines which will not bring me into close contact with either of you in your work.

  I shall always wish both you and Nan well in whatever you undertake, and I feel sure that we can all enjoy things at Hyde Park but not on the same basis that we have in the past.

  I am looking forward very much to having you and Molly and the girls here on Friday. The arrangements which you suggested for Saturday have all been made, and the girls here invited for four o’clock.

  She signed herself “affectionately.” Marion replied that she had never used the expression “building up” nor even entertained the idea, and she knew nothing of what had come back to her from Franklin, with whom she had spoken for a few moments only after Eleanor had refused to talk with her for the second time. However, she accepted Eleanor’s decision to sever her connection with the school and wished to consider a matter closed which had caused her much unhappiness and disillusionment. She, too, signed her letter “affectionately.”

  Eleanor’s final transaction of giving up her share of the Todhunter School Fund, however, added to her disaffection from her friends. When Marion informed Franklin that she considered the fund a school trust and not the personal property of the three, Eleanor indignantly pointed out that they had all paid income taxes on their share of the fund which came out of the school profits; “If I were to die my executors would be obliged to get my share of that fund for my estate.” If Marion did not consider this a fair way of compensating Nancy for her share in the shop building, Eleanor was prepared to agree to a cash payment. “I have, however, as great a desire to feel during my life I am living in a building which I own as you have to feel that this fund which you have earned shall be used for purposes which you decide on. Therefore, I will only live in the shop building if there is a tangible settlement of the cash values according to Nancy’s accounts.” And when Harry Hooker told her that she did not have to file a gift-tax return in connection with the transfer of the fund to Marion and Nancy, Eleanor stubbornly insisted she “would rather pay the gift tax, as I want to have it registered that I gave up something which I had possessed. It is not a school fund. It belonged to the three of us jointly.”15

  Eleanor brought all the financial papers to Elizabeth Read, who did her income-tax returns. Elizabeth was horrified by the injustice of the settlement, but she was unable to get Eleanor to change her mind. “Elizabeth, what you say is true—but I can never forget that these two girls are afraid of the future and I am not.”16

  For Eleanor, the chapter of Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman was closed. She continued to include them in the Cuff Links dinners at the White House and invited them to the big entertainments at Hyde Park when the president was there, and she sent them a turkey at Thanksgiving and small gifts at Christmas, but she brushed off every attempt to revive the old relationship. The real state of her feelings was indicated by Tommy, who in writing a well-meaning gentleman said, “I doubt if it would be of much help to you to consult Miss Cook about anything concerning Mrs. Roosevelt.”17

  Eleanor thought of herself as a countrywoman, and at times even imagined that if she had been born under other circumstances she might have made “a fairly adequate farmer’s wife, having the necessary health and energy.” Those she had, but other rural talents she lacked. She was all thumbs; try as she would she was never able to achieve the results with furniture stains, flower arrangements, and vegetables that Nancy managed effortlessly. Fortunately, there were always friends eager to serve her, and while communications between the two houses at Val-Kill, which were only 150 feet apart and connected by a flagstone walk, were, after 1938, restricted to the amenities, the costs of landscaping and the flower beds continued to be shared and for a time were under Nancy’s supervision.

  But Eleanor wanted the cottage to be her own and had made that clear even before the break. Otto Berge, who built the furniture, should bring it to the house, but “I don’t want anything moved into its place until I am there to direct it.”18 There was a good deal of pine paneling in the new cottage and she had the woodwork rubbed down to look the way the furniture did, but she was the judge of when a satisfactory stain had been achieved. The pool was in front of the Stone Cottage; she invited the contractor who had built it to come to Val-Kill with his family for a picnic “and incidentally show some of the rest of us what has to be done about the pool so if anything happens to the man in charge, there would be more than one individual who understood the works.” She supervised the spring planting around her cottage herself, and the excitement of returning to the country a few weeks later to find all her plants and bushes growing so fast she hardly recognized them had a special savor. “I love contrasts in flowers as I do in people, the pale columbine is a good foil for the sturdier zinnia,” and no garden was complete for her without “some old fashioned yellow rose bushes, a bed of lilies of the valley in some shady spot and sweet peas and pansies to grow more abundant the more you pluck them.”19

  She was happy at Val-Kill; it was her house in a way none had ever been before—a rambling, two-story stucco structure with some twenty rooms of all sizes and shapes, each with its own books and pictures that Eleanor took pleasure in selecting herself. Since the house in time accumulated wings, there were unexpected step-ups and step-downs, alcoves and recesses everywhere, and guests, if they wanted it, could have complete privacy. Eleanor’s bedroom overlooked the pond in which the sunrise and sunset were reflected. She slept on a sleeping porch surrounded by trees; in the morning there was the chirping of the birds to awaken her and at night a croaking chorus of frogs. On her bedside table was her father’s copy of the New Testament with his interlineations, the one that had accompanied him all around the world and that he and Anna had read together in the days of their courtship.

  Tommy, who had become much more than Eleanor’s secretary, had her own apartment in the cottage. When they had started to work together in the twenties at the New York Democratic State Committee, there had been one immediate bond between them: Eleanor had been no more experienced in dictating letters than Tommy had been in taking shorthand, and as a result they had gotten along famously. “Now Mrs. Roosevelt can dictate enough letters in one hour to keep me busy for two days,” Tommy told friends in 1936. Working for Eleanor Roosevelt was her life, and she wanted no other. She had begun as a shy, awkward girl from the Bronx, the daughter of a locomotive engineer, and now was a poised woman of the world. She had a strong, determined chin and could even say “no” to “Mrs. R.,” as she called her, in order to protect her. Once when Eleanor started to dictate a letter to an official asking him to do something on behalf of a petitioner, Tommy let her hands fall to her side: “You can’t do that,” she told Eleanor. “Of course I can,” was the reply, to which Tommy’s rebuttal was: “Don’t you know he’ll be back and ask to be invited to the White House as a return favor?” The letter was not written. During her White House years Tommy refused to go out socially. “If I lost my job tomorrow, those people wouldn’t give me house room,” she used to say. “And anyway you’re always expected to pay for such favors—in some way.”

  Eleanor reciprocated Tommy’s loyalty. Copy number 3 of This Is My Story went to her, and when Tommy became ill in 1938 and was taken to the hospital, Eleanor canceled all her appointm
ents to be at her bedside.

  Tommy’s apartment in the Val-Kill cottage had two bedrooms and a screened porch where, on genial summer days, breakfast and lunch were served. A living room served as Tommy’s office and a kitchen served as a bar, usually presided over by Henry Osthagen, a gruff-voiced employee of the Treasury Department who had been gassed in the war and who became Tommy’s companion after she and her husband separated. Guests at the cottage usually assembled in Tommy’s office-living room for drinks before going to dinner, a ritual that Eleanor never allowed to become too protracted. It was a family joke that when mother announced dinner, there was no nonsense—“it was ready—now.”

  After dinner the guests went into the living room and sat around the fireplace. Conversation never flagged, with Eleanor, her fingers busy with some piece of knitting, setting the pace. She loved to read aloud, especially poetry, and often the much-used Home Book of Verse or Auntie Corinne’s many books of poetry or, in the late thirties, “John Brown’s Body” by Stephen Vincent Benét was brought out. She read well and without self-consciousness.

  She managed an occasional week end at Val-Kill all through the winter but really lived there from Memorial Day until the end of September. The seasons in Dutchess County are very distinct, each with its own colors, shapes, and scents, and the changes and Eleanor’s pleasure in them were faithfully chronicled in her letters and columns. In winter she walked the snow-deep trails in high walking boots, a captive of the peacefulness of the winter landscape, and in summer she rode through the same woods on her horse Dot. Occasionally she saw a deer silhouetted against the trees and in July “an old friend,” a blue heron, flying out of the marsh. In July, too, the purple loosestrife, which grew in marshy ground, enveloped Val-Kill in a violet haze. The marshes were also a breeding ground for large wood-flies, which sometimes kept her from riding until the wind blew them away.