•
Perhaps those who have loved deeply never stop loving one another. Like the garden, which changes with every season, there is a natural rhythm to human lives and a rootedness buried deep in memory. This story is in homage to Eleanor, Marion, and Nan, and to friends everywhere who may take courage from their lives and find comfort and inspiration in their story.
EPILOGUE
The greatest thing I have learned is how good it is to come home again.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
After months of visibly declining health, Eleanor Roosevelt defied all odds and struggled to keep going. In the summer of 1962, three months before her death, along with her personal secretary Maureen Corr, who for most of a decade had taken Tommy Thompson’s place, and David and Edna Gurewitsch, she pushed herself to make one last trip to Campobello for the dedication of the Roosevelt Memorial Bridge, linking Lubec, Maine, to Canada. The Hammer family, which had purchased the Roosevelt cottage from Elliott, invited her to use it, and she flew with family members and friends. When the time came for the dedication, however, Eleanor was too weak to leave the house for the ceremony, and she was represented by her son James.
On the way home by car with Trude Pratt Lash, who had married her friend Joe, a trip she had driven so often herself, she insisted on stopping at her favorite stalls and shops to buy nuts and preserves that she always stocked for Christmas presents. In Castine she stopped at Moss Acre to see Molly Dewson and Polly Porter, and she stopped in Connecticut to see Esther Lape at Salt Meadow. After her visit with Esther, she went on to Val-Kill, where she spent several days, before leaving it forever, returning to New York City. Everyone who saw her recognized that the end was approaching. In and out of the hospital, she was treated by her doctor, David Gurewitsch, and Anna’s husband, Dr. James Halsted, whom Anna had married in 1952, but what was left unsaid was obvious to her family: she was dying and there was nothing more they could do (although David never lost hope). Her determination to leave the hospital and to be brought home to her house on East 74th Street was honored, and she arranged for a birthday party for the children. The end came slowly and painfully, as her doctors and family had to come to terms with her stated wish to be allowed to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt died 7 November 1962. She was seventy-eight years old. Marion had taken the train into New York City hoping to see her, and she did visit with her daughter Anna, who was in her mother’s home, waiting in the last hours with family and friends for the inevitable end. Marion was unable to see Eleanor. She learned of her death only when she got off the train returning home to New Canaan, just as the news was heard by the public.1
Eleanor had made a conscious decision to die in the home she had shared with Edna and David in New York City because she thought it would be hard for family and friends to come to Hyde Park. Her casket was taken to her house at Val-Kill, where family and friends gathered until it was time for the funeral at St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park on 10 November 1962. Apparently, Marion did not return to Hyde Park for the service, or at least Eleanor’s family does not remember having seen her. Among the many mourners attempting to comfort one another were her granddaughter Ellie and her friend Hick; Hick chose not to be present for the burial but to return to the site after the crowd had dispersed.
Eleanor Roosevelt was buried beside her husband in the rose garden at Springwood. The many guests included President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, former president Harry and Mrs. Truman and their daughter Margaret Truman Daniel, and former president Dwight Eisenhower. Her good friend Adlai Stevenson, whom she had supported in his two campaigns for president, concluded his eulogy in a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City: “Someone has gone from one’s own life—who was like the certainty of refuge; and someone has gone from the world—who was like the certainty of honor.”2
When Nan died on 16 August 1962, a little over a week shy of what would have been her seventh-eighth birthday, a memorial service was held at the Cook family home where Nan grew up and where Eleanor Roosevelt visited at 25 Elm Circle in Massena, New York. She is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery, Massena, in St. Lawrence County, New York. In news clippings at the Massena History Museum she is remembered as a “Massena girl, closely associated with Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt.” She left a historic record of still photographs and 16-millimeter films of people and places associated with the Roosevelts. They are maintained in the Dickerman-Cook Collection at the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites and constitute a rare informal look at guests that included FDR and political advisers, family, friends, school children, neighbors, and visiting dignitaries, many of them at Val-Kill picnics.
Marion Dickerman died in Kennett Square, Chester County, Pennsylvania, on 16 May 1983. She was ninety-four years old. She is buried in Westfield Cemetery, Westfield, Chautauqua County, New York. After Marion and Nan had moved to Connecticut, Marion had made a new professional life for herself as education curator at Mystic Seaport. She was invited often to speak publicly about her friendship with the Roosevelts, especially the president. It is a little known fact, however, that Marion was responsible for one of the great tributes to Eleanor Roosevelt. When Eric Gugler was commissioned to create a memorial to Mrs. Roosevelt at the United Nations, he turned for advice to Marion, whom he had known when he was working on architectural changes that Franklin wanted made to the West Wing of the White House. Marion and Gugler had seen one another during Gugler’s visits to Hyde Park and Val-Kill.
When Gugler showed Marion a model of what he had in mind, she hesitated to tell him what she thought, until she confessed that she believed he was striving for too much complexity: something simple seemed to her to be the appropriate way to honor Eleanor Roosevelt. She told him about the times that she and Eleanor had gone to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., where Eleanor found such comfort in the simplicity and dignity of a particular memorial.3 It was Eleanor’s favorite place in Washington, and she took special friends with her to sit in silence on the half-circular stone bench, there to gaze upon the Adams Memorial, a large bronze statue designed for Henry Adams by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in memory of Henry’s wife, Clover. In the serenity of a grove of evergreens and in the strength of a woman’s face, Eleanor had learned self-mastery for her own life’s journey.4
Following Marion’s suggestion, Gugler returned to his task, and when it was done he wrote to thank her for her help. On 23 April 1966, the monument was dedicated by the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation on the northeast corner of the United Nations Garden. It consists of a wide semicircular granite bench and faces a tall slab with a bas-relief of a flame bearing Adlai Stevenson’s words, “She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world.”
•
Today, visitors to the National Park Service’s Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site at Val-Kill in Hyde Park can tour the modest place Eleanor called home. It is a stucco building—awkward in its various additions—that was once the furniture factory, in close proximity to the stone cottage she shared with Marion and Nan. As soon as one steps inside, there is great charm and warmth. It feels as if Mrs. Roosevelt is at home.
Here we can imagine the life she lived, reflected in the simplicity and beauty of the knotty pine walls, the many photographs and prints, the books, furniture (much of it made in the shop), the porches, and the crooked lampshades, as if someone had just closed a book and turned off the light. Here is where Mrs. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy had tea when he came to ask for her support in his presidential bid; here Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie sat with his shoes off, resting as he watched a small television screen; here she and Tommy Thompson worked tirelessly on her books and correspondence. Comfortable sofas and chairs are for sitting by the fire. The dining table is set for guests. Up a narrow flight of stairs are a narrow hall and a nest of small rooms for Eleanor’s many guests. Her own bedroom is connected to a sleeping porch that faces the po
nd, where she liked to sleep in all kinds of weather. It looks down upon Stone Cottage. The bedroom is filled with photographs of family and friends, over the mantel and bed.
With her death in 1962, the children sold off the Roosevelt properties and put much of the contents of the houses for sale at auction. New owners turned the shop into rental units and began to develop the property without restriction as to use. Elliott had sold property across Albany Post Road for a drive-in theater.
In 1975 an impassioned group of concerned citizens stopped further desecration by raising the alarm and the funds to preserve the historic site. President Jimmy Carter signed the bill that created the Eleanor Roosevelt Historic Site. Ever since, National Park Service rangers have guided thousands of visitors through her home, filled again with what she loved.
Next door, Stone Cottage, as it is identified by the National Park Service that maintains it, exhibits Eleanor’s desk, Nan’s woodworking tools, and silver monogrammed with E M N. On a flickering screen Nan’s home movies show Marion tousling Nan’s hair and other happy times with the Roosevelts and many guests. Even in the empty spaces, there are echoes of a life lived.
•
After the last visitor has gone, as we stand on the bridge, listen to the creek and the birds, and breathe in the air, we can live momentarily in the world where Eleanor, Marion, and Nan lived: it seems timeless—unchanged and enduring. Later, the moon will rise, and the cottage will seem to float upon water.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first sought to learn the art of writing biography on the recommendation of Walter Beeker, that volcanic source of information for all his friends, who recommended that I read Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family, by Catherine Drinker Bowen, published in 1945. I often reread it to freshen my nib, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s graphic phrase.
Over many years I have read books about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt; visited on several occasions the historic sites at Hyde Park, New York, and the Roosevelt Campobello International Park in New Brunswick, Canada; worked in the archives at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park (FDRL) and the National Park Service (NPS) archives of the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites; and studied hundreds of historical documents.
The transcripts of two long interviews in particular were of special importance, both at the Columbia Center for Oral History, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City: one with Marion Dickerman and the other with Frances Perkins. A unique document is Esther Lape’s unpublished memoir “Salt Meadow: From the Perspective of a Half Century” (Lape Papers, FDRL).
Readers interested in learning more about Eleanor Roosevelt will find an abundance of published sources. I recommend starting with the first two autobiographies by Eleanor Roosevelt: This Is My Story and This I Remember. The most recent reissue of these two volumes in one book is The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor’s small book of her father’s letters, Hunting Big Game in the Eighties, is an especially revealing and endearing portrait of daughter and father as she wanted him to be remembered. Readers will enjoy her “My Day” columns (1936–62), easily available in the electronic edition of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. The project director and editor, Christopher Black, is a most generous and dependable resource. My favorite book about one of Eleanor’s children is Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt, edited by Bernard Asbell; a companion volume is A Love in Shadow: The Story of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, told by their son John R. Boettiger. An extremely useful book to keep on hand is The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, edited by Maurine H. Beasley, Holly C. Shulman, and Henry R. Beasley.
Among the books that have most informed my own understanding are those by Eleanor’s great friend Joseph Lash, who met her when he was in his thirties and remained a close friend until her death. Lash’s books include Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir; Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers; Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends; A World of Love: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, 1943–1962; and Eleanor, the Years Alone.
Absolutely essential to our understanding of Eleanor Roosevelt is the monumental three-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook. We are all in Cook’s debt for her years of research and travel, as well as for her readable prose style, and her wise understanding of Eleanor, her friends and family, and American history. For readers who can’t travel to Hyde Park to read documents in the FDRL archives (with new ones being digitized every year), Cook has provided an invaluable service in quoting from so many letters in these three volumes.
I admire especially the research and writing of Geoffrey C. Ward, recommended to me by my son, and I have read closely his two biographies of the early years: Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 and A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, 1905–1928. A remarkable book, Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship of Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley, edited by Ward, gives a personal perspective of FDR I have not found in other books. I enjoyed with millions of other viewers Ward’s collaboration with Ken Burns on the PBS documentary The Roosevelts, as well as the published text. I also found helpful The Woman behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, by Kirstin Downey, and Perkins’s own memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. Another favorite book of mine is A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway, 1904–1953, edited by Kristie Miller and Robert H. McGinnis. Doris Kearns Goodwin is a spellbinding writer, and she has brought her genius for storytelling to No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.
There are many good essays about Eleanor Roosevelt. I recommend especially “Biographical Sketch” by William H. Chafe and “ER and Democratic Politics: Women in the Postsuffrage Era” by Susan Ware, published in Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt, edited by Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman; also Allida Black’s comprehensive introduction in the 2012 Penguin reprint of Tomorrow Is Now.
Susan Ware has brought her focus as a feminist historian to bear upon the life of Eleanor Roosevelt in a timely and visionary way. Ware’s book that has meant the most to my understanding of the way single women lived is Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics. I am especially indebted to Ware for helping me make contact with Dewson’s great-niece, Virginia Bourne, and her husband, Standish, so that my husband, daughter Sally, and I could visit the family home in Castine, Maine, where Eleanor, Marion, and Nan had been guests.
Among other biographers I admire is Kenneth S. Davis, who combines a unique literary style with meticulous research. The book I found most useful of his is FDR: The New York Years, 1928–1933. Davis is also the historian who first made use of oral history interviews that Mary Bell Starr conducted with Marion Dickerman for the Columbia Center for Oral History, which were the main primary sources for the writing of this book. Parts of those long interviews together with his own interviews with Marion Dickerman became the basis for Davis’s book Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollections of Marion Dickerman, which includes many of Nancy Cook’s photographs and movie stills. It rightly is dedicated to Nancy Cook. I have gone back and forth between those two sources as a way of recognizing the work of both Starr and Davis, who so many years ago thought to interview Marion Dickerman, the last surviving member of the “Three Graces.”
Nan’s family members Gary and Bonnie Cook in Massena, New York, gave me access to photographs and clippings I otherwise would have missed. Several Roosevelt family members and friends have been especially kind. Edna Gurewitsch talked with me on the phone several times about the friendship that she and her husband, Dr. David Gurewitsch, shared with Eleanor Roosevelt and gave me the best advice: to trust my own in
stincts. Her book Kindred Souls: The Devoted Friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. David Gurewitsch shows us how Eleanor lived in the last years of her life in the New York brownstone she shared with the Gurewitsches. Eleanor’s granddaughters Ellie Roosevelt Seagraves and Nina Roosevelt Gibson were generously forthcoming in sharing their memories of their beloved grandmother, always interested even when I was asking questions they have answered over many years. Talking on the phone and e-mailing with them were some of the highlights of my research. One of the first people I met in the Roosevelt circle was Malvina “Tommy” Thompson’s niece and Eleanor’s goddaughter, Eleanor “Ellie” Zartman, whom I visited in her home in Maryland, introduced by her friend, the poet Judith Bowles.
Finally, any scholar or reader wanting to know more about the Roosevelts should go to the excellent website of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, which offers a virtual tour of exhibits and has thousands of documents and photographs already digitized and free and open to the public. Many staff members have been unfailingly helpful in answering numerous questions, making copies of requested documents, and pointing me in the right directions. An especially memorable evening at Hyde Park was the night my family and I heard Geoffrey Ward speak at the Wallace Visitor and Education Center. The motor trips to Hyde Park for me and my husband were made possible by our able drivers and boon companions, our daughters, Sally and Julie.
My favorite Roosevelt resource is the Val-Kill site itself, both Stone Cottage and the house (the renovated furniture shop) that is the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. In addition, the site’s website provides a fine virtual tour of the house itself. There is an excellent exhibit in Stone Cottage and a guided tour of the house Eleanor called home until her death in 1962.
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 18
