19. Anna Roosevelt Cowles to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 11 December 1923, Anna Roosevelt Cowles Papers, letters, folder 7, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Chapter Three
1. MD oral history, CCOH. The name “Val-Kill” comes from the Fall-Kill Creek. We understand that the Dutch pronounced Fall-Kill “Val-Kill.” The name “Stone Cottage” was never used at the time ER, MD, and NC built it, though it was sometimes referred to as “the stone cottage.” The National Park Service now uses that name to distinguish the two main buildings—the stone cottage and the renovated shop next door that is now the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. When ER converted the factory into her home and used the stone cottage for her children and grandchildren, she called them the Val-Kill Cottages. After FDR died and MD and NC left, ER considered the whole place Val-Kill and the whole place her home. This chapter is based largely on the long interviews with MD, both at CCOH and in Davis’s Invincible Summer. I have also consulted Davis’s notes for the interviews in the Kenneth S. Davis Papers at Kansas State University.
2. Quoted in Davis, Invincible Summer, 35.
Chapter Four
1. Sara Delano Roosevelt’s journey to Campobello is described in Ward, First-Class Temperament, 593. Sources on Campobello include Nowlan, Campobello; and Klein, Beloved Island. Elen Knott’s books and her descriptions of her summer home at Lubec, Maine, and my visit with my family to Campobello informed much of my appreciation for this region.
2. Lash, Love, Eleanor, 67–68.
3. Nina Roosevelt Gibson, e-mail to the author, 16 January 2015.
4. Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves, e-mail to the author, 12 November 2015.
5. Quoted in Gurewitsch, Kindred Souls, 48.
6. Journal entry date 18 July 1925, quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, 93.
Chapter Five
1. Pearson, Historic Structure Report. Important, neglected information in this chapter shows how much FDR was involved in the construction of the cottage: receipts are in the FDR Papers Pertaining to Family, Business, and Personal Affairs, 1882, 1945, series 4: Financial Papers, 1903–43, box 60, FDRL. In addition to the principal source for this chapter—the interviews with MD—I have studied several publications from the National Park Service. Among them are Pearson, Historic Structure Report; Lisa Nowak, Cultural Landscape Report for Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, vol. 1 (2005); and Emily Wright and Katherine B. Menz, Historic Furnishings Report/Eleanor Roosevelt/Val-Kill (1986).
2. The letter is in the FDR Papers Pertaining to Family, Business, and Personal Affairs. All other information about the costs of the construction is from this file.
3. Ward, First-Class Temperament, 736–37.
4. MD oral history, CCOH.
5. ER to FDR, 12 April 1926, FDRL.
6. In 1952 the Hammer family purchased the Roosevelt property at Campobello Island and later donated it to the United States and Canada. Hammer’s company also handled Roosevelt estate sales. MD oral history, CCOH.
7. Several engagement books, diaries, and address and dinner books, which yield little information on activities in the early years at Val-Kill, are housed within AERP, most still in their original bindings. ER’s primary schedule materials are currently contained in boxes 4 and 10, AERP. I am grateful to Kirsten Carter, digital archivist at FDRL, for describing these materials to me.
8. I am indebted to Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves for this insight.
9. ER to MD, 18 May 1926 and 27 August 1925, MDP.
10. Sara Delano Roosevelt to FDR, 2 April 1926, FDRL.
11. Miller and McGinnis, Volume of Friendship, 160.
12. ER to MD, 18 May 1926, MDP.
13. ER to MD, 14 August 1925, MDP.
14. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 342.
15. Ward, First-Class Temperament, 755.
Chapter Six
1. ER to FDR, 26 April 1926, FDRL. Pearson, Historic Structure Report, was especially useful in writing this chapter. For my understanding of so many aspects of Stone Cottage and Val-Kill I am especially grateful to Franceska Mascali Urbin, supervisory park ranger at the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Sites; and Frank Futral, curator, Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites.
2. MD oral history, CCOH.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ward, First-Class Temperament, 740.
6. From ER’s personal letter to Joseph P. Lash, 25 October 1941 in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 220.
7. There is factual evidence for the details of this scene. For example, a home movie as part of an exhibit at Stone Cottage today shows MD affectionately tousling NC’s hair.
8. Quotations are from Davis, Invincible Summer, 65.
9. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, cited in Ward, First-Class Temperament, 631.
10. Especially important for an understanding of FDR and Margaret “Daisy” Suckley is Ward, Closest Companion.
Chapter Seven
1. My evocation of what I imagine might have been ER’s visit to the cemetery is based on my own time at St. James Episcopal Church on the Albany Post Road in Hyde Park and my familiarity as an Episcopalian with the Book of Common Prayer. The Reverend Chuck Kramer at St. James has been a knowledgeable and lively e-mail correspondent, sharing his thoughts about ER’s religious life. I am grateful for that understanding. An interview with Reverend Gordon Kidd in EROHP also helps describe St. James and Mrs. Roosevelt’s church membership.
2. Visitors to Hyde Park usually begin their tours at Springwood, the Roosevelt “Big House,” which belonged to FDR and his mother and never felt like home to ER. But for our setting, we must take a two-mile walk or short ride on the eastern part of Hyde Park to Val-Kill, where the landscape is decidedly different, with fields, forests, gardens, stream and pond, Stone Cottage, and the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, where tours are given. A visit to St. James Episcopal Church and cemetery completes this important journey.
Chapter Eight
1. Quoted in Morris, Miss Wylie of Vassar, 134.
2. Martha Gellhorn interview, EROHP, 1.
3. Quoted in Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 1:222.
4. I am especially indebted to Jan Scholl for her interesting e-mails about the research she is doing on Martha Van Rensselaer.
5. Same-sex relationships within the home economics movement are examined in Megan Elias, “‘Model Mamas’: The Domestic Partnership of Home Economics Pioneers Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (January 2006): 65–88 (“a more perfect society,” 65).
6. Martha Van Rensselaer to ER, 4 April 1930, AERP.
7. Laura Shapiro, “The First Kitchen,” New Yorker, 22 November 2010.
8. Carrie Chapman Catt to Martha Van Rensselaer, 21 November 1925, Cornell University Library digital archives, Ithaca, N.Y.
9. Susan Ware observed that ER’s pattern was “to move on, imperceptibly, to new friends and new issues, leaving old friendships intact but without the centrality (at least to the other person) they had held earlier.” In this discussion Ware argues that “nothing ever matched the intensity” of ER and Molly’s friendship during the 1932 campaign and the early days of the New Deal (Letter to the World, 24).
10. Copies of the Dewson-Porter scrapbooks are housed in the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
11. Molly Dewson to ER, July 1936, AERP, quoted in Ware, Partner and I, 220.
12. Until we know more about the Lape-Read-Roosevelt friendship, we cannot know the whole story. When Lape becomes the subject of a deserving biography, however, its author will have the benefit of newly obtained papers of Esther Lape’s donated by two of Lape’s friends to Blanche Wiesen Cook for her third and final volume of her biography Eleanor Roosevelt (2016). They will go to the FDRL.
13. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 287.
14. Esther Lape, “Salt Meadow: From the Perspective of a Ha
lf Century,” Lape Papers, 78, FDRL.
15. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 280.
16. Cook gives the fullest analysis of anti-Semitism and the Roosevelts in Eleanor Roosevelt, vol. 2, chap. 16.
17. ER to FDR, 27 April 1928, FDRL.
18. In Love, Eleanor (115–23), Joseph Lash described his interviews with Earl Miller when Earl was seventy years old and living alone in Florida, where ER had sometimes been his house guest. Lash’s account is the closest we may get to understanding the relationship.
Chapter Nine
1. It’s Up to the Women was the title of a book ER published in 1933, her first. In 1927 she made a list of seven points in an unpublished article she called “Ethics of Parents,” including “have bigness of soul.” It appears in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 193.
2. ER’s grandson, Elliott’s son David B. Roosevelt, wrote in Grandmère about his memories and those of some of his cousins, making use of the FDRL archives. Nancy Roosevelt Ireland has been interviewed for television documentaries on the Roosevelts.
3. MD oral history, CCOH.
4. ER to MD, MDP, quoted in Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 1:329; Rose Schneiderman, with Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One, quoted in Beasley, Shulman, and Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, 475.
5. MD oral history, CCOH.
6. Ibid.
7. Nina Roosevelt Gibson, e-mail to the author, 29 July 2015. Also lively and informative is an interview with Nina Roosevelt Gibson in EROHP.
Chapter Ten
1. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media, provides the fullest account of ER’s efforts as a journalist.
2. Caroline O’Day, Democratic Women’s News, November 1925, New York Public Library.
3. The most comprehensive study of Val-Kill Industries is Futral, “Val-Kill Industries,” 21–39. Richard Cain, who grew up at Val-Kill, was a great help in sharing his memories and his knowledge of the products produced in the shop, including his own large collection.
4. A useful document is the Otto Berge oral history interview, Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites. The staff of the National Park Service generously made copies of this and other interviews about Val-Kill. Berge made clear his lack of respect for NC as manager of the factory and his respect for Mrs. Roosevelt.
5. A short but useful discussion of ER’s “taste for entrepreneurship” and the money she made as a freelance writer, lecturer, and radio personality is in Ware, Letter to the World, 35–37.
Chapter Eleven
1. Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 2:316. Boxes of materials in AERP and MDP offer detailed information about Todhunter and ER’s assignments. See Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, l:397–408, for the most comprehensive history of ER at Todhunter.
2. ER to MD, 7 February 1926, MDP.
3. Class notes, AERP, box 7.
4. Anne Ward Gilbert interview, 20 September 1978, EROHP.
Chapter Twelve
1. The digitized “My Day” columns at ERPP are an especially useful source of information on ER’s daily activities after 1935.
2. Lorena Hickok’s biography, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady, reveals this understanding of her important friend. In volume 1 of Eleanor Roosevelt, Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote about their relationship in some depth, raising the possibility that it was lesbian. Then in 2016 Susan Quinn made Cook’s conjectures more explicit in Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady. Nevertheless, the only certainty is that Lorena and ER wrote letters that expressed physical longing (their correspondence, left to FDRL, was unsealed in 1978), that they were lifelong friends, and that the relationship changed over time. A selection of their letters is in Streitmatter, Empty without You.
3. MD oral history, CCOH.
4. Davis, Invincible Summer, 107–8.
5. Smith, The Gatekeeper, offers the best understanding of the relationship of FDR and Missy LeHand.
6. ER to Malvina Thompson, 17 August 1943, FDRL.
7. Quoted in Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media, 137.
8. “Eleanor Roosevelt and Val-Kill: Emergence of a Political Leader,” permanent exhibit, Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, Hyde Park, N.Y.
9. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone, 237.
Chapter Thirteen
1. An excellent source of information about “Eleanor’s Little Village” is the Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. website, http://www.arthurdaleheritage.org/. Jeanne Goodman, executive director at Arthurdale, has been a helpful resource, meeting me for the annual New Deal Festival in the summer of 2016 at Arthurdale and later responding to my many questions. Most of the standard books about ER contain information about her interest in the New Deal resettlement project near Morgantown, West Virginia. Michael Golay, America, 1933: The Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Shaping of the New Deal (New York: Free Press, 2013), an account of Lorena Hickok’s journey across America to report to Harry Hopkins on the desperate conditions, provides background on Arthurdale.
2. Marilee Hall, “Arthurdale: First New Deal Planned Community,” Hudson River Valley Review 26, no. l (2009): 50.
Chapter Fourteen
1. Geoffrey C. Ward estimates that FDR returned to Hyde Park at least two hundred times during his presidency, likely more often (Before the Trumpet, 348).
2. MD oral history, CCOH.
3. NC quoted in Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 2:532, from an undated letter from ER to NC, FDRL.
Chapter Fifteen
1. Quoted in Davis, Invincible Summer, 145.
2. Ibid.
3. MD oral history, CCOH. Quotations from MD in this chapter come from this oral history, unless noted otherwise.
4. Ibid.
5. Nina Roosevelt Gibson, e-mail to the author, November 8, 2014.
6. Nina Roosevelt Gibson, telephone interview with the author.
7. Malvina Thompson to Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, 11 July 1938, FDRL.
8. MD used the term “tragic talk” between NC and ER in her interviews with Kenneth S. Davis (Invincible Summer) and in the CCOH interviews. The most comprehensive discussion of the breakup of the friendship is in Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 2:530–37.
9. ER to Lorena Hickok, 19 January 1938, FDRL.
10. Quoted in Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 2:519–20.
11. ER to Lorena Hickok, 27 November 1933, FDRL.
Chapter Sixteen
1. Esther Lape, “Salt Meadow: From the Perspective of a Half Century,” Lape Papers, FDRL.
2. Quoted in Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 2:532.
3. ER to Esther Lape, 5 October 1938, FDRL.
4. ER to MD and NC, 29 October 1938, MDP.
5. ER to MD, 9 November 1938, FDRL.
6. Quoted in Davis, Invincible Summer, 156.
7. Quoted in ibid., 155.
Chapter Seventeen
1. This chapter is based on the transcript of the oral history interviews with Frances Perkins (1951–55, CCOH). A digitized transcript of the long interview with Perkins, with an easy search tool for finding topics within the interview, is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/perkinsf/.
2. Of special interest is Kirstin Downey’s biography of Perkins, The Woman behind the New Deal.
3. Anna Rosenberg to MD, 31 August 1938, FDRL.
Chapter Eighteen
1. NC to ER, 8 February 1938, MDP.
2. In scattered undated letters from ER during this period there is some evidence that NC was receiving radiation treatments, but the reason is not clear.
3. Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, 3:403–4.
4. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 643.
5. MD oral history, CCOH.
6. Davis, Invincible Summer, 166.
7. MD oral history, CCOH.
8. ER, “My Day,” 27 December 1944, ERPP.
9. Quoted in Edna Gurewitsch, Kindred Souls, 79.
10. A fuller explanation for the cause of Eleanor Roosevelt’s illness and death is given in ibid., 267–89.
Epilogue
/>
1. MD oral history, CCOH.
2. Adlai Stevenson’s memorial address is reprinted in various places, including at http://search.archives.jdc.org/multimedia/Documents/NY_AR55-64/NY55-64_ORG_058/NY55-64_ORG_058_1141.pdf (accessed 2016)
3. MD oral history, CCOH.
4. The story of ER’s visits to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., to draw comfort from the Adams Memorial is included in most biographies. In my visits to Rock Creek Cemetery, I, as others, felt the power of the shrouded figure. A biography of Clover Adams is Dykstra, Clover Adams.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival Sources
Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, N.Y.
Marion Dickerman Papers
Esther Lape Papers
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers Pertaining to Family, Business, and Personal Affairs
Roosevelt Family Papers, donated by the Children of Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Anna Roosevelt Cowles Papers
Author’s Interviews
Nina Roosevelt Gibson, e-mails, November 2014–November 2016
———, Salisbury, N.C., 10 February 2017
———, telephone interview, 10 November 2014
Edna Gurewitsch, telephone interview, 2014
Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves, e-mails, November 2014–March 2017
Oral History Interviews
Columbia Center for Oral History, Butler Library, New York, N.Y.
Marion Dickerman
Frances Perkins
Eleanor Roosevelt Oral History Project, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.
Marion Dickerman
Martha Gellhorn
Nina Roosevelt Gibson
Edna Gurewitsch
Reverend Gordon Kidd
Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves
National Park Service, Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites, Hyde Park, N.Y.
Otto Berge
Charles Curnan
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 20
