For more than thirteen years Eleanor, often accompanied by Elinor Morgenthau, had lectured at Cornell’s annual Farm and Home Week to about two thousand women. She kept her promise and came back a few weeks after she had moved into the White House, bringing with her woven goods from Val-Kill looms. The exhibit of Val-Kill goods was intended to show homemakers how they could add to the family income by using skills they acquired through extension courses to make crafts for sale. Nan ran the shop, and Eleanor marketed the goods.
In 1931 after breaking ground for the home economics building at Cornell (which after her death the next year would be named in Van Rensselaer’s honor), Martha gave Eleanor credit for having helped make the case to Governor Roosevelt. In time the Martha Van Rensselaer School of Home Economics became the national leader in the field. Behind it was a partnership of women as effective in their work together as in their separate lives. There was no difference between their public and their private spheres. Carrie Chapman Catt, however, took exception to the way Martha and Flora combined work and socializing. “I was interested in the meeting around your breakfast table,” she wrote, but she wondered if it was not an “additional burden to the participants.”8
Another couple who remained among Eleanor’s closest friends were like Martha and Flora in that they did not want to be apart and yet had separate interests. Mary (“Molly”) Dewson, who called Polly Porter “partner” for all of their fifty-two years together, was a leader of Democratic women, working for FDR’s gubernatorial career and later as the head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Both Eleanor and FDR turned to her for leadership in pressing the need for New Deal policies. Moss Acre, their summer home in Castine, Maine, was where Eleanor, Marion, Nan, and the children stopped en route to Campobello Island. Perhaps hoping for confirmation that they had made a good decision about Val-Kill, Eleanor, Marion, and Nan need have looked no further for evidence of a felicitous and successful female household than Molly and Polly’s commodious house in the woods on Penobscot Bay with rooms for guests. After years of living in a small Greenwich Village apartment in New York City during Molly’s political assignments (and Polly’s unhappiness) and spending only summers at Moss Acre, in 1952 Molly and Polly retired to live there full time. Although they had lived near Marion and Nan in Greenwich Village, they were not especially close friends. Polly did not participate in their political meetings; she was more interested in her homes, her dogs, and gardens. Molly, a Wellesley graduate, and Polly, a daughter of great wealth, were from a social class different from Marion and Nan, and perhaps Marion and Nan, who had to work for a living, felt this difference keenly. After Molly was out of politics and had moved to Maine, she missed her weekly lunches with Eleanor and felt a little left out.9 On occasions when Eleanor visited other friends in Castine, Molly was invited to be with them, but Polly stayed home.
Molly and Polly were in a partnership that was extremely close on the domestic level, but Molly’s political career was widely divergent from Polly’s interests. Eleanor saw that this difference worked well, but perhaps she was as not as sensitive to their division of duties—it was simple for Polly to leave politics to Molly and for Molly to leave the garden and housekeeping to Polly: there was no competition. Friends never seemed to have observed the slightest jealousy between the two. In fact, Polly was known to tell friends who might have wondered if she was as “smart” as Molly that Molly had chosen her.
Molly, like Eleanor a consummate New Yorker, once gave up a political appointment that would have required her to work in Washington because Polly was unhappy when Molly was away politicking. In Maine, Molly kept up her political interests (she even ran for a local office, and lost) and a correspondence with old friends. Polly kept dogs and gardens. Together they often entertained and were entertained. At night, Polly read aloud as Molly did the mending by the fire. They made scrapbooks and diaries of their long lives together, documenting their travels, their efforts to farm, birthdays, books they read aloud, letters written and received, occasions with family and friends, and daily observations about the weather.10
For having worked for FDR’s 1932 election Molly was honored at a special dinner and presented with a gift—a chest of drawers from Val-Kill Industries (the subject of a later chapter). Later, after the Democratic Convention in July 1936, Eleanor invited a group of women that included Molly, Caroline O’Day, and Frances Perkins to Val-Kill for a weekend of relaxation and planning. Eleanor asked Nan to be the hostess. She could always count on Nan to get things ready, and the food and camaraderie were good. After they worked together, Molly wrote to Eleanor, “You are sort of my Mother Earth that I need to touch once in a while.”11
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Perhaps the longest-lasting and most amicable friendship with a female couple, and the one that most deserves to be compared to Eleanor’s friendship with Marion and Nan, was her friendship with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, described earlier as part of a New York City women’s network. They had met in 1920 in New York, and Eleanor continued her friendship with Esther after Elizabeth’s death in 1943—in late summer of 1962 coming home from Campobello, Eleanor made her last trip to Salt Meadow, their Westport, Connecticut, country home, only months before her death. There is no evidence that they ever quarreled. In fact, Eleanor looked to Esther and Elizabeth as a calming presence and often sought their wise advice as they worked together for world peace against the vocal opposition of political opponents. Eleanor and her secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson often took stacks of mail to be answered in the quiet woods of Salt Meadow. Beyond discussing their political interests, however, Eleanor often turned to Esther and Elizabeth to discuss personal things that were troubling her.12 Eleanor’s closeness to Esther and Elizabeth was reinforced by Tommy’s confidence in them. Although Tommy eyed all of Eleanor’s friends with some suspicion that they were using her, she seems never to have questioned Esther’s and Elizabeth’s motives. Tommy simply thought that they were the best friends Eleanor could have, and they were her friends, too.
Esther, a graduate of Wellesley, had taught English at Swarthmore College and at Barnard College and was a progressive activist for world peace and health care. She expressed effortlessly a kind of “class”—she moved with ease among varied groups, from the League of Women Voters to the American Committee on Russian Relations, favoring the recognition of the Soviet Union. Eleanor admired Esther’s intellectual brilliance. By the time Eleanor met her in 1920 in the New York State League of Women Voters—Esther was one of the founders—Esther was well known as a journalist and researcher. She was a youthful thirty-nine-year-old: stylish, beautifully dressed, confident, and graceful. She was elegantly partnered to Elizabeth, whom she adored; Elizabeth was a graduate of Smith College, with a master’s degree from Columbia University, and a graduate with distinction from the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, and a practicing New York attorney. Elizabeth became Eleanor’s attorney and adviser on many things as they studied the Congressional Record to keep Eleanor informed. Elizabeth was forty-eight years old, almost a decade older than Esther, and their age difference also expressed how well they related: Esther looked after Elizabeth, and Elizabeth made a happy home—she even felled trees at Salt Meadow, though she was not physically up to the task, but she wanted to perfect their landscape as she did their home.
In 1924 a Washington newspaper photographer captured Eleanor and Esther on their way to a Senate hearing about the Bok Peace Prize, an award that would be given for the best plan for how the United States could contribute to world peace (see page 95). Members of the Senate were aroused in opposition to this prize, and Esther and Eleanor came under considerable fire. When the Senate turned it down, they kept their cool and continued working for the World Court. The photograph tells a story of two handsomely dressed women striding with confidence into a Senate hearing: the man in the background may be a newspaperman who thinks he recognizes Mrs. Roosevelt, or perhaps he is impressed by the women’s
fashion in an environment of business suits. In January 1924 Eleanor was certainly recognizable, and Esther’s photo had been in the papers as the administrator of the Bok Prize. More than 22,000 proposals on ways to achieve peace were submitted, and Esther chose 20 of them to publish with her own analysis. The award received even more attention when Esther revealed that Eleanor Roosevelt and Narcissa Vanderlip, a progressive Republican and friend of Eleanor’s and Esther’s, were on the selection committee. The Senate had investigated charges that the Bok Peace Prize was a tool of “foreign governments or foreign institutions,” and eventually the hearings were suspended. There is nothing that bonds friends more closely than to have shared a lost cause, especially one as noble as world peace. Esther and Elizabeth were the most idealistic of all of Eleanor’s close friends, and Eleanor used them as a touchstone. They made the news as women going up against powerful U.S. senators, and they were taken seriously. Franklin’s friend and supporter Josephus Daniels wrote to tease Franklin about his wife’s news-making overshadowing her husband’s, relieved that he was not “the only ‘squaw’ man in the country.”13
In addition to her work for world peace, Esther took on another large cause: improved health care for all Americans; she used Eleanor to reach FDR to ask for his support. In 1937 she edited a two-volume report, titled American Medicine: Expert Testimony out of Court, from doctors in disagreement with the argument of the American Medical Association that health care was already adequate. Health care remained Esther’s lifelong interest well into the 1950s, and Eleanor continued to work with her to advance progress in health and medical research. They served together on the board of the American Foundation, which had published American Medicine.
When they were in New York City, Esther and Elizabeth maintained a beautiful apartment in Greenwich Village where their personal chef served a fine cuisine to their women friends, followed by stimulating literary readings and discussions. This setting reminded Eleanor of her happy years with Mlle Souvestre at Allenswood in England more than any other place she had ever known. Over the door of their house at Salt Meadow Elizabeth had carved Plato’s invocation to Pan, the god of the woods and fields, which petitions, “Give me beauty of the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be one.”14 Their motto, Toujours gai, was painted over the lintel. Eleanor and Tommy, her secretary, often visited Esther and Elizabeth at Salt Meadow, and when Elizabeth was too busy to see them Eleanor and Tommy talked with them by phone. In this case, Eleanor and Tommy and Esther and Elizabeth had struck the perfect balance.
In another respect, Esther and Elizabeth were models for Eleanor: they wore expensive clothes, and they ordered the best fabrics and shopped at the best dressmakers. After Eleanor had met them in 1920, they had begun to influence her wardrobe and sense of style by recommending their own tailors. Eleanor had purchased clothes in Europe—during her honeymoon and when she returned with Franklin in 1919—but she did not spend a lot of time shopping in New York. She clearly had paid careful attention to her clothes on the day she and Esther were photographed on their way to testify before Congress. From hats to shoes, the women are elegantly dressed in black. Eleanor was forty, Esther forty-two (their October birthdays are three days apart). Esther wore a fur piece and a shorter skirt with a stylish kick-pleat, Eleanor had satin cuffs and collar; they matched one another stride for stride, watching their steps.
In some ways, Eleanor’s relationship with Esther and Elizabeth was the longest, most continuous, and best of her close friendships. There was never a rift between them for over a half-century. Considering all of Eleanor’s friends, Esther and Elizabeth seem from this distance to be the ideal companions. The threesome worked beautifully because they were so harmonious together. The friendship changed somewhat when Elizabeth’s health began to fail, and Eleanor shared Esther’s deep grief when Elizabeth died in December 1943. Eleanor returned to Salt Meadow to keep company with Esther, and the following spring at Esther’s request she planted bulbs where Elizabeth’s ashes had been scattered. Eleanor and Esther continued to work together for the rest of Eleanor’s life.
A quite different friend to Eleanor was Rose Schneiderman, who directed the New York Women’s Trade Union League. She and her lifelong companion, Maud Swartz, who had learned organizing in the British labor movement, taught Eleanor about trade unions. They were stalwart working-class women, unafraid to confront authority in defense of a woman’s right to equality. They met in 1922, and Eleanor’s authenticity appealed to Rose; the two women became instantly allied in their interests. Marion and Nan were also close friends within the circle of labor activists. Rose, a daughter of religious Jews who had emigrated from Poland, was a dynamic speaker who had galvanized her audience when she spoke after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 (Joseph Lash called her a “a redheaded packet of social dynamite”).15 By the time Eleanor met Rose, she was one of the most recognized leaders of the women’s trade union movement. When she entertained working women in the clubhouse of the New York Women’s Trade Union League, which Eleanor supported, she invited Eleanor to read to them, followed by cookies and hot chocolate, which Eleanor brought. Eleanor in turn invited Rose to the Roosevelt twin house at East 65th Street for a Sunday night supper of scrambled eggs (Eleanor’s only accomplishment as a cook, not counting roasting hot dogs at Val-Kill). She felt less free to invite Rose and Maud to Sara’s house in Hyde Park, but she sometimes did, and she invited them to Val-Kill and to the summer cottage on Campobello Island, too, where they engaged in lively conversations with Marion and Nan. When Eleanor once left the island briefly to take care of other family matters, she reassured Franklin that she left Rose and Maud in charge of the boys, believing that they were far more capable of handling them than the children’s tutor.
Sara did not want her grandchildren exposed to the “riffraff” of the lower neighborhoods that Rose and Maud knew so well, but Eleanor defied her. She got her sons to send out invitations to a Christmas party to children of Trade Union League members. Eleanor bought gifts, Nan decorated the Christmas tree, and the boys, somewhat reluctantly, had their first introduction to families unlike those they had known. Frances Perkins, FDR’s secretary of labor, later credited the president’s education about trade unions to Eleanor’s friendship with Rose and Maud.
Eleanor’s and Franklin’s enduring friendship with Elinor and Henry Morgenthau Jr. was safely in their social class, both couples being from important New York families. Elinor worked in Eleanor’s women’s organizations, and Henry became FDR’s close friend and adviser—and eventually his secretary of the treasury. He was the son of Henry Morgenthau Sr., Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Turkey. The Morgenthaus had a beautiful house and a nearby farm in Hopewell Junction in southern Dutchess County, where they raised cattle and apples. Eleanor sometimes spent the night with Elinor when they were setting forth on travels, and she and Franklin attended the Morgenthaus’ large cookouts.
Among Eleanor’s closest friends, Elinor was exceptional: she was happily married, and her first priority was her own family—she and Henry had three children. Eight years younger than Eleanor, she was the daughter of a woolen manufacturer; her maternal grandfather had been a founding partner in Lehman Brothers. Expressing an early interest in the theater, she was active in the drama society at Vassar College. Eleanor envied Elinor for her college education, and Elinor’s affiliation was one of the reasons that Eleanor was drawn to Vassar—that and Vassar’s close proximity to Hyde Park, and the fact that it was an outstanding woman’s college. Vassar played an important role in Eleanor’s and Elinor’s lives, keeping them close to young people and to the intellectual and social lives of the college’s outstanding women faculty members.
Like Eleanor, Elinor had volunteered in a settlement house, located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the home of poor Jewish families. Elinor and Henry were Jews, but they cultivated life outside Jewish circles and stayed away from controversy, calling little attention to themselves as Jews. After the
Nazis rose to power in Germany, however, they became publicly active in behalf of America’s intervention in the war.
Eleanor’s close friendship with Elinor helped her come to terms with her early anti-Semitism, recorded in letters between Eleanor and her mother-in-law written after meeting Jews at New York parties. In the 1920s Sara invited Elinor and Henry Morgenthau to a party at Springwood, however, and found them an attractive couple, and she and Eleanor began to soften their views.16 Thereafter, Henry and Elinor were included at many Roosevelt occasions, on FDR’s houseboat in Key West, at Springwood, and in Washington. When Eleanor and Elinor began working for the Democratic Women’s Division, they traveled together with Marion, Nan, and Caroline O’Day, organizing women throughout New York State. In 1928 the Morgenthaus were proud to serve as alternate delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Eleanor wrote FDR, “Elinor and Henry are like children in their joy that she should be made a delegate at large—I never realized anyone could care so much.”17
In later years the Morgenthaus and Eleanor became ardent advocates of the new state of Israel. By then, Eleanor had other close Jewish friends—young Joseph Lash and his wife, Trude Pratt Lash, and David Gurewitsch, her personal doctor, and his wife, Edna. Now that she had a more public voice of her own, she became a powerful advocate for Jews at a time when many of her contemporaries still harbored anti-Semitic views. Eleanor’s earlier expressions of anti-Semitism had been harsh, and FDR’s willingness to confront what was happening to Jews in Nazi Germany was late in coming, but slowly both of them were moving beyond their own time and place in the midst of a changing world. Elinor Morgenthau, neither a firebrand nor an aggressor, was key to Eleanor’s transformation. She was very sensitive to slights and felt that friends like Marion and Nan did not like her because she was a Jew. In 1937 when Eleanor proposed Elinor for membership in the exclusive women’s Colony Club in New York City, she was blackballed because she was Jewish. Eleanor then resigned from the club. Elinor was a noble woman, and she deserves more recognition than she has received.
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 9
