In the campaign of 1956 Grandmère again played an active and pivotal role in Adlai Stevenson’s campaign, but this time, as never before, she herself came under attack by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and others with whom she’d been aligned throughout her political life. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in schools. Grandmère maintained the stance of gradual social integration, a stance she had adopted throughout the years in many other similar issues. Her position, which was Stevenson’s as well, caused an outrage with the NAACP and a break with the Americans for Democratic Action. In her mind, rights belonged not to any single group or organization but to individuals. Although her forcefulness may have influenced acceptance of a more moderate plank in the Democratic platform and mollified the still powerful Southern bloc of voters, Stevenson was again unsuccessful in his bid for the presidency. Grandmère hoped to help her friend gain office in his third and last attempt at the presidency in 1960, but this time it was a young senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who proved Stevenson’s undoing. Her initial lack of enthusiasm for Kennedy, influenced not only by her loyalty to Stevenson but also by her dislike for Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, FDR’s one-time ambassador to Great Britain, was eventually replaced with a respect for the younger man’s intelligence and ideals. In 1961 Grandmère returned once again to the United Nations, where she served with her dear friend Adlai Stevenson, whom Kennedy had appointed ambassador to the United Nations. Grandmère also assumed chairmanship of the Kennedy administration’s Commission on the Status of Women and held a seat on the Advisory Board of his innovative Peace Corps.
In 1961, just one year before her death, Grandmère was still a frequent and welcomed visitor on the floor of the UN, here with her close friend Adlai Stevenson, the US Ambassador to the United Nations.
In all that Eleanor Roosevelt accomplished, in all of the trials and disappointments of her own life, she never once lost faith in the innate goodness of humankind, and she could never relinquish the belief that it was her duty to help all people enjoy the fulfillment of a life well lived. Shortly after her seventy-fifth birthday she summed up her entire life: “On that seventy-fifth birthday I knew that I had long since become aware of my overall objective in life. It stemmed from those early impressions I had gathered when I saw war-torn Europe after World War I. I wanted, with all my heart, a peaceful world. And I knew it could never be achieved on a lasting basis without greater understanding between peoples. It is to these ends that I have, in the main, devoted the past years.”
At age seventy-seven, the active nature of Grandmère’s life had not diminished in the least, but many of her friends were noticing an evident change. She pushed herself unmercifully, giving speeches and making personal appearances, writing, and taking in the steady stream of visitors who sought her advice and counsel about so many matters. Perhaps the never-ending demands prevented Grandmère from retiring, but I think she simply refused to give up what she viewed as her duty to her countrymen… the world over. Accolades for her poured in from all corners of the world, but perhaps none were more poignant than Malvina “Tommy” Thompson’s when she said to Lorena Hickok, the newspaper reporter with whom Grandmère had built such a close and lasting friendship for almost thirty years: “[Working with Mrs. Roosevelt] gave me a reason for living. My boss is a very big person, just about the biggest person in the world. Anything I can do to help her—no matter what—justifies my existence.”3, 4 On another occasion, when one of my young cousins asked Tommy, “Who is Grandmère?” she replied, “Why, your grandmother.” “I know that,” came the retort, “but who is she? Daddy listens to what she says. You do what she tells you to do. Everybody stands up when she comes in. [So] who is Grandmère?” Perhaps Tommy might have answered: Your grandmother is America’s conscience.
Welshpool, the principal village on Campobello as it appeared in c. 1920s, was the center of one of the most important places in my grandparents’ lives, and some of their most intimate and profound years together.
Campobello
I know a place where resonant tranquility reigns, for if useless thoughts are stifled there, the echo of others returns again until I can hear it. A place for choosing, where choices are made. A retreat, a defense against excess, against too much speed, and the crowds that confuse the game of life.
—Anonymous, translated from the original French
ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY things about Grandmère’s life was the extent to which she traveled the world. She was one of the best traveled women in history, from those trips in early childhood touring Europe with her parents to her times with Mademoiselle Souvestre and the almost endless crisscrossing of this nation while serving as her husband’s eyes and ears. And in the later part of her life there were visits to the far reaches of the world to further the cause of human rights and peace. She experienced grand palaces and sumptuous luxuries. She witnessed firsthand the ravages of war and the horrors of abject poverty. But always, no matter how exotic the itinerary of her most recent trip, Grandmère longed for home.
As a Roosevelt, Grandmère visited and lived in some of the grandest and most notable estates of the country: Algonac and Tivoli, ancestral homes of the Hudson Valley, as well as the homes of her parents in New York and Meadowbrook on Long Island. Grandmère remembered Sagamore Hill, her uncle Ted’s beautiful estate overlooking Long Island Sound, which rang with raucous laughter and good cheer, as one of the most joyous “homes” of her childhood. Once married, she spent weekends, summers, and holidays at Springwood, Franklin’s pastoral lifelong home and the place dominated so thoroughly by his mother, Sara. And who could forget the four-story brownstone in Manhattan, Eleanor and Franklin’s first home as a young married couple, joined as if by umbilical cords at every floor to Sara’s own brownstone? Finally, of course, there was the White House, the one place she never wanted to call home.
There were many places in Grandmère’s life, each with its own memories. Some separated public life from her private moments, and all played a role in her being, but only two would she ever truly consider home. Val-Kill is the place most commonly associated with Grandmère; that small farm gave her sanctuary from her busy life, particularly after the White House days. But another, less publicized place that was an integral part of the annual summer rituals of her life was the “cottage” at Campobello. “There [were] good and bad memories there,” Grandmère would say about Campo, “but the bad get the better of me when I’m there alone.” To her, Campobello was perhaps an enigma, the only place where she and Franklin shared life, alone as a family with their children, the one place she felt she could be wife, mother, and mistress of the household without the ever-present interference of Sara. But as she said, there were also bad times and difficult associations with Campobello.
Campobello Island, a small Canadian isle just off the coastal Maine town of Lubec, is the largest and southernmost of a chain of small islands plunked in the Passamaquoddy Bay, which itself feeds into the Bay of Fundy. The waters are icycold, seldom reaching above 50 degrees even in the summer months, and are known for having the most dramatic tidal changes anywhere in the world—ranging from 17 to 20 feet or more. Just nine miles in length and three miles at its widest, its craggy cliffs and rugged beaches emerge from the sea. It boasts pristine, bucolic meadows and gentle dark pine forests with vistas embracing, as Senator Edmund Muskie once said, “the solidity of the coast and the exuberance of the open water.”
This is an island of stark contrasts. The western side enjoys no natural harbors, and the cliffs rise high above the almost inaccessible beach to heavily wooded forests. The northernmost part is said to resemble Scotland, with its thin topsoil and open, gently rolling meadows. The southern portion of the island, however, is often shrouded in fog and is almost tropical and primordial in the abundance and luxuriance of its vegetation. It is here, at Liberty Point, that Grandmère loved to walk with grandchildren in the eerily dark, gray-green lichenhung forest called
Fog Forest. On almost every day of my holidays on the island, I recall walking there with Grandmère, surrounded by fireflies even during the late afternoon, and being assured by her that I had nothing to fear, as these were only little elves who were there to help guide our way through the forest.
It is on the eastern side of Campobello that most of its inhabitants live, for this is the side that provides the most hospitable harbors. The earliest settlers of this incredible little island came in the early 1700s, if not before… no one seems really certain. It was in 1770 that the first “Principal Proprietor of the Great Outer Island of Passamoquoddy,” Captain William Owen, arrived with a royal grant from King George III in hand, granting him almost kingly powers. Indeed, for several generations, until the late 1800s, these Principal Proprietors were the lords of the island (one even adopted the self-proclaimed title “Prince of Campobello”), and the people were merely their tenants. In 1881 Mrs. Cornelia Robinson-Owen, the last descendant of the Owen family, sold her interest in Campobello to a group of American businessmen, whose intent was to turn the island into a summer resort for wealthy Americans. Over the next three years, no less than three luxury hotels were built: the Owen, built upon the original homestead of the Owen family, the Tyn-y-Coed, and the Tyn-y-Maes. Built during the “Gilded Age” of American prosperity and indulgence, the hotels of the Campobello Company thrived and prospered until about 1910. The hotel brochures would proclaim the virtues of the resort as “provided with all the comforts of a refined home, a quiet and retired life, made wholesome by the soft yet bracing air, never too hot and seldom too cold… here is the sanitarium, the corrective. Baths of fog are as needful to the senses and the skin as the sun.” The varied pastimes available to guests attracted many of America’s most prominent aristocracy, among them the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, New York.
Arriving first in 1883 to stay at the Tyn-y-Coed Hotel with their one-year-old son, Franklin, James and Sara Delano Roosevelt immediately fell in love with the island. Before summer’s end they had bought ten acres of land on the high point overlooking Friar’s Bay, and promptly began construction of their fifteen-room summer “cottage,” which was not completed until 1885. Soon after their decision to purchase and build, several other prominent Victorian families followed: the Wells, Porters, Sturgis, the Cochranes of Philadelphia, and the Kuhns of Boston; there was even a family from St. Louis. As the resort thrived, the “regulars” were provided with a vast array of social activities. There was the Campobello Dramatic Club and the Grand Annual Ball; the Campobello Debating Society, begun by John Calder and George Byron (who, as legend would have it, refused membership to a young FDR because he was not eloquent enough—they considered his wife, Eleanor, the more accomplished speaker!).
The residents of this island have been seafaring people from the beginning, and it is the residents—perhaps twelve hundred strong year-round and not much more during the “tourist season”—who provide the island with its real history, not the Roosevelts nor the other aristocratic Americans who became summer dwellers, nor even the early landed Principal Proprietors, who ruled the land almost as their own feudal fiefdom. And it was the people of this island, primarily fishermen and a few small farmers, who were so loved and respected by both Eleanor and Franklin. Folklore has it that most all of the islanders descend from perhaps ten families going back to the earliest days, and even today everyone knows everyone’s business. They are a gentle and supremely kind people, always quick to assist a stranger but slow to accept outsiders into their fold. Over the years, however, these genteel yet ordinary people reciprocated the warmth that Eleanor and Franklin held for them by accepting our family, and perhaps all that came with us, into their lives. Well, perhaps “accept” is not the proper word, but they were always gracious and patient with our intrusions into the tranquility of their lives.
My grandparents with Anna, Franklin Jr., John, Miss Sherwood, and “Chief.”
I think everyone who has ever visited the family compound on this idyllic island has to be, in one way or another, deeply impressed, not by the house or the expected trappings of luxury, for there really were few, but simply by the place. Campobello is one of those magical places, a romantic vision drawn from a great painting or a classic tale, a place of the imagination suddenly appearing in reality, the kind of place to which your soul clings. My own memories of my visits as a young boy have left deep feelings within me. Every time I return the floodgates of memory open wide and fill me with many joyous recollections, some perhaps imagined, as happens with childhood memories. For me, Val-Kill will always embody the “essence” of Grandmère, the complexities of the woman she was and the life she lived. But Campobello will be the one association I have with Grandmère that is strictly of her as my “grandmother.” This was a mystical, magical place—it still is for me, and perhaps for my siblings and cousins too. This was the “other home,” where she would break away from the sequential and all-too-busy daily routine and regain her sense of well-being and oneness. It was here, as perhaps nowhere else, that she could be comfortable and secure in having her children and grandchildren at the center of her universe—at least for a few precious moments in time.
At the helm during a “stiff Bay of Fundy breeze,” FDR’s love of the water began early in life (Campobello c. 1888).
My memories of Campo are indelible. It’s an island that looks fantastically eerie on a full-moon night and stunningly beautiful at sunset. Island days shrouded in fog assume that quiet, peaceful rhythm so perfectly conducive to dreaming. There was always an atmosphere of great excitement when preparing for an expedition to Campobello. I would arrive at the little Maine town of Lubec in a carload of excited and tired siblings, cousins, and accumulated others after a long drive, usually from Hyde Park. The arrival time had to be well planned, for as I recall the only way to transport this entourage and their baggage was by a small car ferry. Actually, it was merely a small scow tied to and powered by an even smaller outboard motorboat. It was so rickety that I was certain we would never reach our destination, a feeling reinforced for me by tales of prior disasters related by an older brother, sister, or cousin. The strength of the tides in the narrows was such that the boat operator had to aim for a landing point high above the actual target, but somehow they always made the desired point. Of course, what seemed to me an endless expanse of water, with the island itself usually obscured by fog, was in fact a mere several hundred yards. In days gone by and before the advent of telephones, the residents of Campobello used to literally shout their grocery and supply orders across the waters, to be filled by local merchants and later transported across by ferry.
This fearsome arrival was soon forgotten as my senses filled with the joy that was Campobello: the lush green of the landscape, the crisp air, the constant breeze, and the silence, disturbed only by the wondrous sounds of birds and gently lapping water. To me, a little boy from Texas, my every arrival on Campobello can only be described as one of the greatest adventures of my young life. I couldn’t imagine that another place like this existed anywhere else in the entire world. It was entirely foreign to all that I had known—a dreamland, a place so quiet and pure, a place that somehow I knew was special… not just to me but to my grandmother. I could almost sense that Campobello had uplifted any burden she might have been carrying and filled her with peace and tranquility.
My grandfather’s lifelong love affair with the sea was born here, during his childhood. It was Captain Eddie Lank and Shep Mitchel who taught FDR how to handle a boat with confidence and adroitness to navigate the tricky, sometimes treacherous tidewaters of Passamaquoddy Bay and the Bay of Fundy. Captain Lank was sufficiently impressed by his abilities at age ten to pronounce, “You’ll do now. You’re a full-fledged seaman, sardine-sized.” Indeed, by his teen years Franklin had already become an expert seaman and wanted nothing more than to spend his days on the water. For his entire life, through good and bad times, it was to his beloved island that FDR was always drawn. And it was to C
ampobello that he turned to replenish his heart and soul, even after the place had “stolen from him,” or so said Sara, his physical strength and mobility.
With neighboring friends, sailing was an almost constant summer pastime (c. 1890).
FDR on a sailing trip with James and Elliott.
The stories of FDR’s yachting and sailing adventures at Campobello are both abundant and fascinating. There were long cruises at summer’s end with many male companions (no wives) on the family yacht, Half Moon, and many day trips with children and assorted guests on the twenty-four-foot sailing sloop Vireo. While Assistant Secretary of the Navy he occasionally visited the island on the battleship USS North Dakota. On one such trip FDR assumed the battleship’s helm in a bad fog from its young commander, Lieutenant William Halsey Jr. (later Admiral “Bull” Halsey, Commander-in-Chief of the Third Pacific Fleet), who would recall years later how a “white-flannelled yachtsman” who “really knew his business” had taken his ship through that menacing and dangerous channel. And of course, there were the multitude of family excursions to picnics and visits to friends on the village of St. Andrews and at Welshpool. No place drew my grandfather like Campobello did, until he contracted his disability there and dedicated his life to the almost all-consuming business of politics. In later years FDR would visit Campo less frequently, partly due to the demands of his responsibilities but also because of his physical limitations. My uncle Franklin Jr., who was born on the island in August 1914, would say that his father would not return as a disabled person to the place where he had so often walked and run, whose cliffs and forests he had explored, or where he had often gone horseback riding. It was perhaps too painful to relive those days of wistful freedom.
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