by FDR
FDR christened the finished house “The Honeymoon Cottage,” which was not far off the mark. Initially Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy slept together in a single, loftlike dormitory bedroom. Much of the furniture, made by Nancy Cook and her assistants, bore the women’s initials: E. M. N. Eleanor embroidered towels and linens for the cottage, likewise emblazoned E. M. N., and the three women received housewarming gifts of silver, crystal, and china engraved with their initials intertwined. Franklin frequently gave Eleanor presents for the cottage, especially plantings and picnic accessories. He inscribed a children’s book, Little Marion’s Pilgrimage, to Dickerman: “For my little Pilgrim, whose progress is always upward and onward, to the Things of Beauty and the Thoughts of Love, and of Light, from her affectionate Uncle Franklin.”6 He autographed a favorite speech, “Another first edition for the library of the Three Graces of the Val Kill.”7
The cottage became the focus of the women’s lives. Nancy and Marion retained their Greenwich Village apartment, but it was merely a place to stay during the week until they could go home to Val-Kill. For Eleanor, the life she now led came close to re-creating the rebellious feminism she had enjoyed under the tutelage of Mlle. Marie Souvestre at Allenwood. The swimming pool was always open to Franklin and his friends, and there was a special barbecue pit where he could grill his hamburgers, but Val-Kill was a woman’s world, a place where shared confidences became the rule, where Eleanor’s earnest sense of duty yielded to spontaneous and casual pleasures.
Sara accepted the arrangement with remarkable grace. “Eleanor is so happy over there that she looks well and plump, don’t tell her so,” she wrote FDR soon after Val-Kill opened.8 When she saw that her daughter-in-law was fully committed to her new life, Sara became an ardent supporter. She appeared with Eleanor at political luncheons and dinners, and became a patron of almost all of ER’s activities, whether they advanced Franklin’s political career or not.9
On one such occasion Sara hosted a luncheon Eleanor was giving for thirty-five board members of the National Council for Women in the double dining room on East Sixty-fifth Street. Among the guests was Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women. “I can still see the twinkle in Mrs. James Roosevelt’s eyes,” Bethune remembered,
as she noted the apprehensive glances cast my way by the Southern women who had come to the affair.
Then she did a remarkable thing. Very deliberately, she took my arm and seated me to the right of Eleanor Roosevelt, the guest of honor! I can remember too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride. From that moment on, my heart went out to Mrs. James Roosevelt. I visited her at her home many times subsequently, and our friendship became one of the most treasured of my life.10
While Eleanor settled in at Val-Kill, Franklin pursued his quest for a cure at Warm Springs, Georgia. He learned of the therapeutic effect of the thermal waters at the hill country resort during the Democratic convention in 1924. The Wall Street banker George Foster Peabody, a member of the New York delegation who wintered in Columbus, Georgia, told Franklin of the wondrous cures wrought by the warm mineral waters that bubbled from the earth. Peabody had recently bought the Merriweather Inn, a genteel ruin of a hotel that bordered the spring, and urged Franklin to go down and try the waters for himself.
FDR was initially unimpressed by the prospect, but during the summer of 1924 Peabody directed a stream of testimonials to Franklin that eventually piqued his interest. In October, he, Eleanor, and Missy went down to see for themselves. Eleanor stayed for a day, found the rigid segregation and tumbledown poverty not to her liking, and returned to New York to assist in the final days of Al Smith’s gubernatorial campaign. Franklin and Missy remained three more weeks.11
Roosevelt found the magnesium-laced waters astonishingly buoyant. Swimming in the warm Merriweather pool, he found that his unbraced legs would hold him upright and that by thrashing his powerful arms and shoulders he could move himself back and forth across the water. In his three weeks at Warm Springs he felt that he had made more progress than in the preceding three years. For the first time since August 1921 he thought he felt life in his toes and rejoiced at being able to stay in the water two hours at a time without becoming fatigued.12*
When Franklin returned to New York, he laid plans to purchase Warm Springs and convert it into an aftercare facility for polio victims. “I feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could be established,” he told Sara.13 Eleanor fretted that Franklin was squandering his resources and lacked the patience to succeed at so ambitious an undertaking; Basil O’Connor was concerned that Franklin was overcommitting himself; and George Peabody was asking $200,000 for the property—roughly twice what he had paid for it a few years earlier. But Louis Howe was supportive and immediately set about raising funds for the project; Missy never questioned the effort; and, most important, Sara added her backing.14
For FDR, Warm Springs offered the opportunity to be in complete charge of a significant undertaking—a means of reestablishing his self-esteem. Warm Springs would be his alone, a haven much like Val-Kill was for Eleanor: a place where he could do as he pleased, when he pleased, free from the formality of Hyde Park and East Sixty-fifth Street. More to the point, it provided an opportunity to participate in the fight against polio. Roosevelt had no special training in physiotherapy, but he became an authentic pioneer in its application. His infectious enthusiasm galvanized polio victims hitherto without hope. By instinct and example he infused others with his own unconquerable spirit as he led exercises at the pool or lolled in the sun, chatting happily with anyone who passed by. He called himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt” and took a genuine interest in those who came to Warm Springs to exercise under his care.
In April 1926 FDR completed his negotiations with Peabody and purchased the Merriweather Inn, its cottages and pools, plus 1,200 acres of undeveloped land for $201,667.83—approximately two thirds of his fortune.15 Shortly afterward he bought an additional 1,750 acres. With the help of Sara—who organized exclusive dinners for potential donors—and the indefatigable Louis Howe, Roosevelt organized the Warm Springs Foundation (later the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) with a panel of distinguished backers, including Wall Street bankers George Foster Peabody and Russell Leffingwell; businessmen Herbert Straus and William H. Woodin; his friends Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and Basil O’Connor; and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors.* Edsel Ford personally contributed $25,000 to provide a glass enclosure for the swimming pool.16
Warm Springs provided a challenge, and Roosevelt threw himself into every detail. He persuaded Dr. LeRoy Hubbard, a respected orthopedic surgeon who supervised rehabilitation care for the New York State Department of Health, to come down and take charge of the patients’ treatment. Hubbard brought with him a trained nurse and physiotherapist, Miss Helena Mahoney, who hired a dozen young phys ed graduates from Peabody College in Nashville to work with the patients in the pool. “Our rate is $42 a week,” FDR wrote Paul Hasbrouck, a polio victim in Poughkeepsie. “This includes board, lodging, medical and therapeutic treatment, pool charges, etc.—in fact, everything except your traveling expenses and cigarette money.”17 But no one was turned away for lack of money. Indigent patients were supported by a Patients’ Aid Fund that Roosevelt established, and when that was depleted, he asked that the bills be sent to him personally at Hyde Park.18
From the fall of 1926 until the autumn of 1928, FDR spent well over half of his time at Warm Springs. He ordered a cottage built for himself, all on one level with a driveway designed so he could enter the house directly at grade level. He also engineered an ingenious set of hand controls for an automobile to drive through the Georgia countryside. A local mechanic converted an old Model T Ford to Roosevelt’s specifications, and by the end of 1926 Franklin was whizzing about Warm Springs at twenty-five miles an hour. Roosevelt was a confident driver and controlled the car with ease. And after five years of being dependent upon others, nothing gave hi
m greater pleasure. He became as familiar to the people along the dusty roads of Merriweather County as the rural mail carrier—except, one resident remembered, “the mail carrier did take Sunday off.”19
Roosevelt became the leading citizen of Merriweather County, thrilled at his exposure to the life of ordinary people in rural Georgia. When he ran for president, he carried the county by margins ranging from 50 to 1 in 1932 to 16 to 1 in 1944—a result significantly different from Hyde Park and Dutchess County, which he never managed to win.20 Georgians were open and friendly, FDR liked to say. He remembered their names and considered many of them his friends. He often ventured out alone in his Model T, pulling into farmyards to talk crops and cattle, parking in front of the drugstore, honking his horn and ordering a Coke, nosing into a hollow to buy corn liquor from the local bootlegger. “He was a man that could talk to you,” a farmer remembered. “He had sense enough to talk to a man who didn’t have any education, and he had sense enough to talk to the best educated man in the world; and he was easy to talk to. He could talk about anything.”21
Roosevelt also listened. The stories of low farm prices, failed banks, and rural poverty stayed with him into the White House. From the poor people of Merriweather County, Franklin learned what it meant to be without electricity and running water; for children to be without shoes and adequate clothing; for a simple grade school education to be beyond the reach of many who lived in the hardscrabble backwoods. Merriweather County raised corn and short-staple cotton, but drought, falling prices, and the boll weevil made it all but impossible to turn a profit. Farms were small, plowing was done by mules, not tractors, and mortgage indebtedness increased annually. FDR tried his hand at farming and experimented with cattle and timber, but without success. “It pleased him because it offered a challenge,” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell remembered. “But there was never a more dismal prospect than was offered by farming that ridge at Pine Mountain.”22
Warm Springs, on the other hand, more or less held its own. “You needn’t worry about my losing a fortune,” Franklin assured Sara. “Every step is being planned either to pay for itself or to make a profit.”23 The American Orthopedic Association approved Dr. Hubbard’s treatment program, and by the end of 1927 seventy-one patients had visited the resort. The number grew to eighty in 1928—as many as the facilities could accommodate—and the staff totaled 110.24 Warm Springs would not be free of financial worry, however, until FDR became president and the March of Dimes was organized, first to raise money for the foundation, then to aid polio research nationally.*
While Franklin toiled at Warm Springs, Eleanor found herself fully engaged teaching history, English, and current affairs at the Todhunter School for Girls on East Eightieth Street, just off Park Avenue. In 1927 ER, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook purchased Todhunter—an elite private school for daughters of wealthy New Yorkers—from its founder, Winifred Todhunter, who was returning to England. Dickerman became principal and Eleanor associate principal. Todhunter resembled Allenwood in its commitment to female achievement, and, like Marie Souvestre, Eleanor set the tone for the school.25 A naturally gifted teacher, she urged her students to challenge authority and, consciously or unconsciously, proselytized relentlessly for the social ideals of the Democratic party. “I am very anxious to send a class which has been studying with me … to see the various types of tenements in New York City,” she wrote her friend Jane Hoey, who directed the city’s Welfare Council. “I would like them to see the worst type of old time tenement. They need to know what bad housing conditions mean.”26
Eleanor became a role model for many of her students and urged them to assume responsibility for their lives. “In the future,” she said, “there will be nothing which is closed to women because of their sex.”27 For Eleanor herself, teaching at Todhunter represented enormous personal fulfillment. “I like it better than anything else I do,” she told The New York Times in 1932.28*
While FDR exercised at Warm Springs and Eleanor taught at Todhunter, a great deal of the responsibility for the children fell to Sara. When James was confirmed at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, it was Sara who stood in for his parents, just as it was she and Cousin Susie Parish who chaperoned Anna’s social debut. Twice Sara took Anna and James to Europe, and Elliott, unhappy at Groton, asked permission to live with his grandmother and attend high school at Hyde Park. (Permission refused.) Anna and the two younger boys, Franklin Jr., and John, who were at school in New York City, usually spent each weekend at Hyde Park.29 “Looking back on this period,” said James, “I must say in all honesty that neither Anna, my brothers, nor I had the guidance and training that I think father would have given us had he not been involved in his own struggle to re-establish a useful life for himself.”30
That struggle was going remarkably well. By 1926 FDR had learned to walk short distances with a cane in his right hand and a crutch under his left arm. But the difference in height between the cane and crutch made him appear distressingly awkward. He also tried walking with two canes, but the lateral lurch that entailed was equally disconcerting and the slightest nudge could knock him to the ground. Neither method resembled normal walking, and neither would convince an audience that Roosevelt was on the road to recovery. Working closely with Miss Mahoney, FDR developed a technique of walking with a cane in one hand while tightly gripping the arm of a companion with the other. In 1924 he had made his way up the aisle at the Democratic convention leaning on a crutch while holding fiercely to James. By substituting a cane for the crutch the effort looked more natural, and it became Franklin’s chosen method of locomotion at public events.
Politics was never far from FDR’s mind at Warm Springs. In 1926 he came north to give the keynote address at the New York Democratic convention and successfully fended off well-wishers who sought to nominate him for the U.S. Senate. “Please try to look pallid and worn and weary,” counseled Louis Howe, “so it will not be too exceedingly difficult to get by with the statement that your health will not permit you to run for anything for 2 more years.”31
Al Smith was reelected overwhelmingly in 1926 and immediately became the front-runner for the party’s nomination for president.32 After the bloodletting in 1924, the rural and urban wings of the party papered over their differences, McAdoo chose not to run again, and, in a reciprocal gesture of party unity, the Smith forces accepted Houston, Texas, as the convention site—the first time since 1860 that the party would meet in a southern city. Once again Smith asked FDR to deliver the nominating speech at the convention. For Roosevelt, it was another turn in the spotlight and the opportunity to demonstrate to the delegates how far he had come since 1924. “I’m telling everyone you are going to Houston without crutches,” Eleanor wrote Franklin at Warm Springs, “so mind you stick at it.”33*
FDR left Warm Springs early for the convention, traveling by train through the Middle West, speaking at whistle-stops on Smith’s behalf, and practicing with his son Elliott the cane-and-arm technique of walking to the rostrum. Franklin cautioned Elliott to appear jovial regardless of the tension he felt. No one should perceive the difficulty their effort entailed.
As in 1924, FDR was floor manager of Smith’s campaign. Except for a scattering of favorite sons from the South, there was no serious opposition, and Roosevelt tailored his nominating speech to the 15 million or so who would be listening on the radio. “I tried the experiment of writing and delivering my speech wholly for the benefit of the radio audience and the press,” Franklin wrote Walter Lippmann. “Smith had the votes anyway and it seemed to me more important to reach out for the republicans and independents throughout the country.”34 FDR recognized the challenge of writing for the new medium, which required a significant departure from the forensic flourishes of traditional campaign oratory. In the years ahead, Roosevelt would master the technique of projecting his personality over the air better than any other American politician of the twentieth century.*
FDR was in top form at the convention. As he and
Elliott made their way to the platform, without the crutches that had been so evident in 1924, the 15,000 delegates and spectators roared their approval. Franklin’s healthy appearance and evident high spirits belied any impression that he was an invalid. At the podium he seemed perfectly relaxed, perfectly natural, nodding left and right, looking up at the galleries, waving with his right hand to acknowledge the applause.
The speech was one of Roosevelt’s finest. Again and again he described the qualities Smith brought to the race, culminating with what in retrospect seems an almost autobiographical refrain. To be a great president, said FDR, required “the quality of soul which makes a man loved by little children, by dumb animals, that quality of soul which makes him a strong help to those in sorrow or trouble, that quality which makes him not merely admired but loved by all the people—the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellow man.”
The Roosevelt who delivered those lines was a far different man from the callow young assistant secretary of the Navy who had run for vice president in 1920. His concluding remarks invoking the image of the Happy Warrior brought the delegates to their feet in a remarkable display of party unity.35 Smith was nominated on the first ballot with 849 votes.† Senate Minority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas accepted the nomination for vice president, and the convention adjourned ready to take on Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis in November.
