She swam daily in the pool, and her effort to go off the diving board head first was a demonstration of sheer grit: she bent over the edge slowly, her fingers reaching toward her toes, at last tilting into the pool with a great splash. She never mastered it; she never gave up trying. She was always on the lookout for games and sports with which to amuse her guests and keep herself in trim. One season it was archery, another it was skiing (“I tried coming down one hill and to everyone’s amusement landed in a heap at the bottom”).20 But it was only deck tennis that she could enjoy herself rather than through her friends’ pleasure.
Her guest rooms were usually occupied, and rare was the day without its special excitement, whether it was the child star Shirley Temple and her parents, for whose visit Eleanor collected as many grandchildren as she could, or NYA administrators, who came to discuss their problems with her and whose presentation, when Franklin drove over and the officials crowded around his open car, she skillfully steered so that they put their best foot forward, for she wanted them to get more funds.21
Much as she loved the peacefulness of Val-Kill and a rainy day alone there before an open fire, she loved people more. Whoever interested her was invited to spend the day and told to bring his bathing suit. Eleanor would be at the Poughkeepsie station to meet him, a summery figure in a linen skirt and cotton blouse, white shoes and white stockings, a white ribbon around her hair.
One summer day she received a letter from Frank Harting, writing on behalf of himself and two friends with whom he shared an apartment. They were three young businessmen, he wrote, and were “rabid Eleanor Roosevelt fans”; she headed the list of people they would like to meet. “I was very much amused and somewhat flattered by your letter,” she wrote back. “I like young people very much as I have so many around me all the time, and I should like to know you three.” She invited them to spend a day at Hyde Park. “Tell Earl,” she instructed Tommy, “if he feels he should protect me he can plan to spend that Sunday here!”22
She enjoyed masculine company, whether it was Earl Miller, still a health magazine’s dream of virile manhood, the fussy but thoughtful Frank Harting, or the tall, saturnine Adrian Dornbush, head of the WPA’s Technical Services Laboratory, who came to her cottage to paint. Auntie Bye, too, had always been surrounded by a coterie of male votaries whom the family had called “Joe-Bobs.” Bob Ferguson had been one of them before he married Isabella, as had Joseph Alsop before he courted and married Corinne.
Eleanor still mothered Earl. She made a special Christmas for him, got him fight tickets through Jim Farley, and helped him finance the house he built near Albany. As chief inspector of prison guards in New York State, he was frequently in the vicinity of Val-Kill and kept an eye on it for “the Lady,” as he called her; a guest room was always there for him. Divorced in 1934, he presented to Eleanor a succession of ladies upon whom she showered gifts and kindnesses until they faded away. In 1941 he remarried. Eleanor wrote him faithfully, letters full of warmth and affection. Some of her friends were puzzled by her attachment to this “cop,” but if Franklin could make Missy a part of his household, she could do the same with Earl.
She encouraged his romances as, indeed, she did her best to help true love along whenever it showed up among her friends. She had liked John Boettiger, a newspaperman who had covered Franklin for the Chicago Tribune, and when Anna, separated from Curtis Dall, fell in love with him, Eleanor thought it was wonderful and shielded the courtship from prying eyes until Anna and John were ready to disclose it. Ever afterward Eleanor reminded her daughter that she had known John before Anna did. It gave her pleasure to lend her new cottage to Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway as a hideaway before they were married, and she did the same for the author of this book and Trude Pratt. Her gift of empathy enabled her to enjoy vicariously the love affairs of her friends: for her “there was no love/save borrowed love.”23
It was approximately two miles from the Big House on the Hudson to Val-Kill over a winding dirt road that went through woods and fields that belonged to Franklin, as did the wooded paths and hills behind Eleanor’s cottage, for Franklin was a canny accumulator of land and could not resist buying a farm if it came on the market and was in the vicinity of the Roosevelt acres, which now numbered about two thousand.
When Franklin was at Hyde Park Eleanor moved to the Big House, although she still worked at Val-Kill with Tommy. The Big House was dominated by Sara, who, though in her early eighties, kept a tight hold on the reins. At dinner Sara, as always, sat at one end of the table and Franklin at the other. She enjoyed the role of presiding dowager, and Eleanor was amused by Sara’s calm assumption that it was to her and her son that the limelight belonged. When the Swedish crown princess visited Hyde Park, Eleanor was late because the royal party had come ahead of schedule, “but luckily,” she reported, “my husband and my mother-in-law were the real hosts of the occasion so I managed to slip in unnoticed.” Sara wanted to have the same precedence accorded her at the White House but Franklin said he could not overrule the protocol officers.24
There was a time when Sara’s reproaches, complaints, and demands had upset Eleanor, but, as she wrote Maude, she was now so busy “I haven’t time to worry about Mama and her feelings which is a help!”25 She was considerate of her mother-in-law. It was still Eleanor who saw her off when she went abroad and was at quarantine to meet her on her return; but Eleanor lived her own life and when Franklin was not at the Big House she preferred her own cottage. For her part, Sara stayed aloof from Val-Kill, but Franklin did not. When he was at Hyde Park there was a steady flow of traffic between the Big House and the cottage. Eleanor had Franklin and his staff for steaks on her porch or, if he wanted to have a private luncheon at the Big House with some official, Eleanor had the rest of his household for a picnic, with James cooking the chops. On Labor Day the White House staff and newspaper people came for a picnic and baseball game. Usually, too, before the summer ended everyone journeyed to the Morgenthau farm at Fishkill for a “clambake,” which, said Eleanor, Franklin enjoyed as much as any other early autumnal event in Dutchess County. She organized the newspapermen and women into a Virginia reel, with Franklin calling the numbers: “I feel very proud of my pupils,” Eleanor noted in her column, “for I really started them . . . on the strenuous dance and they all seem to enjoy it and do it better each time I see them perform!” What the newspapermen thought is not recorded.26
Eleanor sometimes wondered how they would organize their lives after Sara died and the years in the White House were over. She thought the day of the very large estates was drawing to an end. “Here on the Hudson River it seems to face one every day,” she wrote a former Hudson River neighbor; “I ride over the Rogers place and wonder what is going to happen to it, and now the Vanderbilt place is in the same condition. Ogden Mills has given his to the state, but the state, after all, can’t be expected to take everybody’s land along the River.” Republican Howland Spencer, whose estate, Krum Elbow, on the west bank of the Hudson faced the Roosevelts’, disposed of his as a form of revenge against Franklin. In 1936 he had announced he was leaving the United States to settle on his 7,000 acres in the Bahamas as a protest against New Deal taxes. What do you think of “your friend” now, Franklin twitted his mother. “Dearest Son, I was rather upset this morning about the horrid paper you sent about Howland Spencer, & your dictated note calling him my friend. . . . ” In 1938 Spencer declared that because of New Deal taxes he was unable to maintain Krum Elbow any longer and sold it to Father Divine, an eccentric self-appointed Negro preacher, for one of his “heavens.” The country looked to Hyde Park. How would the president, with his strong streak of traditionalism and attachment for Hyde Park as it had been in his childhood, respond? It was Eleanor who commented through her column.
In Poughkeepsie I ran into some people who were much excited over the purchase by Father Divine of an estate across the river from my mother-in-law’s home. I always feel sorry for anyone who has to sell a country pl
ace they have lived in for many years and enjoyed. One has so much more sentiment as a rule about one’s country life. It must, however, be pleasant to feel that in the future this place will be “heaven” to some people, even if it cannot be to its former owner.27
Franklin wanted to keep Hyde Park not only the way it was in the thirties but the way it had been in his youth. The post offices that were built under his administration in Rhinebeck, Hyde Park, and Poughkeepsie were of gray fieldstone, an architectural style that he called “early Dutch colonial” and that he insisted was indigenous to the Hudson Valley. He persuaded Mrs. VanAlen, the niece of Frederick Vanderbilt, to offer the magnificent Vanderbilt estate, three miles north of the Roosevelts’, to the federal government; he then got the Historic Monuments Division to accept and maintain it not only as an example of the millionaire style of life at the turn of the century but for its trees, some of which were several hundred years old and not to be found elsewhere on the North American continent. And when he arranged to have his papers housed at Hyde Park in a fieldstone library building and for the Big House to go to the federal government, he spoke nostalgically of the “small boy” who “half a century ago” took especial delight in climbing trees, digging in woodchuck holes and playing in creeks and fields that were not much different than they had been in the time of the Indians.
The Big House would always be his home but he, too, like Eleanor, wanted a place that would be built to his own specifications; he picked a hilltop behind Eleanor’s cottage, where the sky seemed closer and over on the horizon the peaks of the Catskills could be glimpsed through the violet haze, to build “a little refuge to work in, where no one can come unless he invites them.” Eleanor thought his plan to build a retreat on the Val-Kill side of his property “grand,” and while he was cruising in Pacific waters on the U.S.S. Houston in the summer of 1938, her cables consisted chiefly of building progress reports: “Most of excavating for your house is finished”; “Walls of your house going up everything moving satisfactorilly.”28
Although she was less a traditionalist than her husband and was more adaptable to change, Eleanor shared his feeling about Hyde Park and was actively involved in the affairs of the village and of the Hyde Park Improvement Association. Franklin declined her invitation to take part in its meetings at her cottage, but he did make suggestions on what could be done to improve the village at the annual meetings of the Roosevelt Home Club which took place on the grounds of his farmer, Moses Smith.29
Eleanor always hated to see the summer end—“the tang of fall makes me very sad because it brings the winter and all of its excitement very close.” She was perfectly sure “that some day when I have no longer any obligation to do anything in this world, I am going to be very happy enjoying rural quiet and watching nature carry on its drama of life from the sidelines.”30
42.LIFE WITH MOTHER AND FATHER
THERE IS A PICTURE OF THE ROOSEVELT FAMILY ASSEMBLED AT Hyde Park in September of 1934 for Sara’s eightieth birthday—a large clan, including several great-grandchildren, gathered around the matriarch. It was a much photographed family, chiefly because it was the family that currently occupied the White House, but also because its members made a handsome group together.
“As I looked at my two daughters-in-law,” Eleanor wrote about her fifty-third birthday party at the White House, “I could not help thinking how lucky we are! All the boys seem to have chosen, not only people that one can enjoy looking at, but the better you know them the more you like them. Best of all apparently we can all have good times together and I think it is a good thing for a family to be able to look back at happy times.” On that occasion she and her brother Hall located a pianist, and while he played they all danced; later everyone gathered around the piano and sang, including Franklin, who amused them by singing some old college songs. It was long after midnight before Jimmy and Betsy and the Morgenthaus were permitted to go home, and then only by grace of a plea from Eleanor, who felt that parties should end “when everybody is still apparently having a good time,” which meant 1:30 A.M. at the latest. But the two Franklins stayed up. “When I went in to see my husband this morning, he looked at me disgustedly and said: ‘It was three o’clock before I went to sleep!’”1
The four boys and Anna were built like their parents—tall, long-limbed, and long-armed, with strong bone structures, and they were brimful of energy. One summer when Franklin Jr. visited Eleanor’s Aunt Tissie at her shooting in Scotland, she walked the moors all day and played poker with him most of the night and never seemed weary. Why had she never told them about the Hall side of the family, Franklin Jr. asked his mother on his return; how could they help bursting with vitality since they got it from both sides of the family—the Halls as well as the Roosevelts? The Delanos did not lack for vitality either, Eleanor reminded her son. The children had their parents’ zest for life, and “love of adventure came to them naturally.”2
Family reunions were rambunctious affairs, full of “tribal affection” and equally uproarious argument and high jinks. Ike Hoover had written of the way Theodore Roosevelt’s exuberant children had taken over the White House so that it became “one general playground for them and their associates . . . roller skating and bicycle riding all over the house . . . giving the pony a ride in the elevator. . . . ” Eleanor and Franklin’s children were older but equally high-spirited. Christopher Phillips recalled that at one Christmas party Franklin Jr. and John crept up behind the president’s chair and tickled him. Roosevelt calmly reached his long arms behind him and pinioned them both. Muriel Martineau, over from London on a visit, thought the younger generation ill-mannered; the young girls staying at the White House were always late to dinner and kept the president waiting just because in New York it was fashionable to arrive a quarter to a half-hour late, and when the president came into the room many of the youngsters did not even get out of their chairs.3
But Franklin and Eleanor took youthful irreverence in their stride. Ickes described a dinner on the presidential train when they went to inspect the Grand Coulee dam site:
It resolved itself into a debate between the members of the Roosevelt family, with all of them frequently talking at one and the same time. Mrs. Roosevelt precipitated the discussion by raising some social question and her three sons at once began to wave their arms in the air and take issue with her. She expressed belief in a strict limitation of income, whether earned or not, and the boys insisted that every man ought to have a right to earn as much as he could. The President joined in at intervals, but he wasn’t President of the United States on that occasion—he was merely the father of three sons who had opinions of their own. They interrupted him when they felt like it and all talked at him at the same time. It was really most amusing. At one stage when they were all going on at once, I raised my voice and observed to the President that I now understood how he was able to manage Congress. Senator Wheeler followed my remark with the observation that Congress was never as bad as that. That was about the sum and substance of outside contribution to the dinner talk that night, but it was all very interesting and very amusing.4
Eleanor and Franklin encouraged their children to have their own opinions and to express them without fear of embarrassing their parents. Yet Eleanor was slightly appalled when James, who was deeply involved in the politics of Massachusetts, a state with a large Catholic population, voiced his opposition to its ratification of the child-labor amendment. At the time newspaper publishers were insisting that the NRA Newspaper Code should permit employment of newsboys. “No civilization should be based on the labor of children,” Eleanor said tersely. What about James’ views, she was asked. She had written him in Boston asking for his reasons, she replied. “Of course, everybody is entitled to his own opinion,” she added. “I am merely asking his. I would never dream of doing more. Jimmy must have reasons which seem sufficient to him. They wouldn’t seem sufficient to me.”5
She and the president were equally tolerant of Elliott in the la
te 1930s when, as a radio commentator over the Texas network of which he was an executive, he frequently voiced anti-New Deal views and as a politician allied himself with the anti-New Deal crowd which favored pledging the state’s 48 votes to Garner in order to head off a third term. Elliott was a citizen of the United States and over twenty-one, and as such, Steve Early told the press, he was entitled to exercise his right of free speech. Although Eleanor and Franklin loyally defended Elliott’s right to oppose his father’s policies, a few months later Franklin, not without some satisfaction, filed in the family folder a news dispatch from Waco, Texas, reporting that supporters of a third term had drowned Elliott out with boos when he sought to introduce the keynoter, who favored pledging the state’s delegation to Garner. And still later he filed another clipping, describing a thirty-minute ovation for the president that Elliott had precipitated at the Texas Democrats’ state convention when he had defended New Deal spending and answered the charge of waste with the standard New Deal defense that hope had been kept alive.6
After his marriage to Anna, John Boettiger was offered and, with Franklin’s encouragement and Eleanor’s approval, accepted the publishership of the Post-Intelligencer, the Hearst paper in Seattle. “I shall miss them sadly but it does seem a grand opportunity and they will love it and so life is life, not always very pleasant,” Eleanor wrote her husband, who was en route to Latin America on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. “I can hardly bear to have Anna & John go,” she added a few days later, “but they are so happy that I wouldn’t let them know for worlds but it is better than Europe for at least one can fly out if necessary.”7
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