by Susan Quinn
At the Hall family town house in New York, Eleanor was surrounded by turmoil. Her aunt Pussie shut herself in her bedroom for days on end, weeping over disappointments in love, and her uncle Val arrived periodically from Tivoli “to go on a real spree.”
Eleanor’s decision to marry Franklin Roosevelt, her fifth cousin once removed, came at this time of diminished confidence and domestic confusion. “Though I was only nineteen,” she wrote later, “it seemed an entirely natural thing and I never even thought that we were both rather young and inexperienced.” Her grandmother asked her if she was sure she was really in love. “I solemnly answered ‘yes,’ and yet I know now that it was years later before I understood what being in love was or what loving really meant.”
Franklin was an enthusiastic amateur photographer in this period, and he took admiring photographs of Eleanor. In one, she sits tall and composed in the stern of a rowboat, her lovely hands folded, her beautiful ash blond hair piled high, her large eyes wistful. Franklin must have perceived Eleanor’s intelligence and enjoyed her ability to listen and sympathize. Eleanor was also Theodore Roosevelt’s niece, which added to her appeal for the ambitious Franklin.
Within a year of her debut, Eleanor was engaged to Franklin. They married two years later, and she became pregnant with her first child a year after that. “For ten years,” she wrote, “I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one.” From 1906, when Anna was born, until World War I, her life revolved around her duties as a mother to five children and a political wife whose only job was to smooth her husband’s path. Her mother-in-law ruled at home, and she depended heavily on the expertise of nurses.
In Washington, Eleanor watched without protest as her husband partied and flirted with other women. Eleanor’s cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth enjoyed telling the story of one Washington night when Eleanor looked particularly foolish. At around 10 p.m., she left a lively party, only to arrive home and discover that she had no key. Six hours later, FDR arrived with friends, in high spirits, and found Eleanor sleeping on the front step. She hadn’t wanted to disturb the servants, she explained, or return to the party. “I knew you were all having such a glorious time, and I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”
Eleanor worked hard, no doubt too hard, at being the conscientious wife. “I still lived under the compulsion of my early training. . . . I looked at everything from the point of view of what I ought to do, rarely . . . what I wanted to do.” She was “appalled by the independence and courage” of less dutiful women. When her husband came out in favor of women’s suffrage, she was “somewhat shocked.”
But then Eleanor began to shake off the constraints of the dutiful wife role. In her memoir, she attributes her transformation to the war, and to her discovery that she could be effective as a volunteer. The usual round of teas, luncheons, and dinners no longer seemed possible in a world of so much suffering and need.
She began to spend long days volunteering: organizing the Red Cross canteen, knitting and encouraging others to knit, serving coffee and sandwiches to the troops at Union Station. She visited the wounded and the shell-shocked in hospitals. She raised money to build a recreational center for the wounded. She also learned to drive so that she could participate in the Red Cross motor corps. “All my executive ability came into play,” she wrote.
Another reason for Eleanor’s new independence was the discovery, in 1918, of Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer, a betrayal that demonstrated the limitations of trying to be the dutiful and selfless wife. This revelation surely contributed to what Eleanor called “the budding of a life of my own.”
Back in New York, after the painful Washington years, Eleanor began to spend time with a group who represented the path not taken: college-educated women who had worked for women’s suffrage and who, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920, were involved in educating and empowering the new female electorate. For Eleanor, who hadn’t even been sure of her position on suffrage, these women were a revelation.
Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read were “partners,” a phrase that friends understood to mean they were a loving couple. If they had a sexual relationship, they probably didn’t name it or talk about it. Homosexuality was viewed in the wider world as both shocking and criminal. But among Eleanor’s political friends, such lifetime liaisons were common.
Several evenings a week, she took the Fifth Avenue coach from the Roosevelt town house on East 65th Street to the unconventional home of Esther and Lizzie in Greenwich Village. In the house on 65th Street, there was virtually nothing Eleanor could call her own—her mother-in-law, Sara, had purchased every stick of furniture and supervised the hanging of every picture and drape. Even though the house on West 11th Street belonged to her friends, it felt much more like home.
Politics were the ostensible reason for Eleanor’s meetings with Esther and Lizzie, who for some time published a weekly newsletter called City, State and Nation. Together, they worked on solidifying and publicizing the work of the newly formed League of Women Voters. But politics were only part of it. Esther and Lizzie lived with a great deal of style. Lizzie was the more casual of the two: she had a strong, athletic body, and favored tailored suits with string ties, sensible walking shoes, corduroys, and knickers with high-laced hunting boots. Esther, on the other hand, dressed in patterned silks and satins and wore red velvet at Christmas.
Esther and Lizzie had a doormat at their country home in Connecticut emblazoned with the words “toujours gai” and a slogan over the door that read “give me beauty of the inward soul.” In their brownstone on West 11th Street they insisted on beauty: cut flowers filled the rooms, and elegant meals were accompanied by champagne. After dinner came the pièce de résistance for Eleanor: long evenings spent reading French poetry aloud, evenings that reminded her of her happiest girlhood moments listening to Mademoiselle Souvestre.
“Their interests played a great part,” she wrote later, “in what might be called ‘the intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt’ during the next few years.”
Eleanor’s journey toward independence was interrupted quite suddenly in the summer of 1921, during the family vacation at the Roosevelt compound on Campobello Island, off the coast of Maine, in Canada. On August 10, Franklin took the family out sailing, joined in putting out a forest fire they came upon, went for a swim in a pond on the island, then raced everyone back to the house; it was an exuberant day of activity that typified family life at Campobello. But the next day, one of FDR’s legs began to drag, and soon his entire body from the chest down became paralyzed. For a few terrifying days, no one understood what was wrong. A specialist diagnosed polio.
Life changed for everyone in FDR’s inner circle. Eleanor became a tireless nurse, soon joined by FDR’s devoted adviser Louis Howe. Sara Roosevelt, who was in Europe, rushed to the island as soon as she got the news. Everyone, she noted, was being “cheerful” by the time she arrived, so she joined in the charade. But there was nothing to be cheerful about. First there would be the agonizing trip, on a stretcher, in a boat, and then in a private railway car, back to New York City. Then there would be months in New York Presbyterian Hospital and more months in a back bedroom at the 65th Street town house, followed by a long stay in Hyde Park.
FDR worked hard to get better, exercising and trying out various treatments. But even though he developed great upper-body strength, he didn’t succeed in recovering the use of his legs. He discovered some things, however, that made him feel better. In 1924 he visited a run-down spa in Warm Springs, Georgia, with Missy and discovered he could stand nearly on his own in the warm buoyant water. After that, he visited Warm Springs frequently and hatched plans to expand and improve the place. He also loved to be out on houseboats in southern waters, fishing, drinking with pals in defiance of Prohibition, and moving about the deck by pulling himself along with his arms, free from the scrutiny of strangers. The sun and the
swimming and the tropical Florida climate seemed to do him good.
Eleanor had always been a poor sailor, and her letters to her friends from Florida were testimony to just how little she enjoyed life on the houseboat. Writing to a friend from Key West, she reported that Franklin was loving it “as much as ever,” while she was sleeping on deck with a “large bottle of Citronella” to keep off the mosquitoes. At one point they were marooned in a swamp with a failed engine. The citronella had not worked: she had so many mosquito bites on her face that she looked as if she had smallpox. She found Florida “queerer each year” and didn’t understand why people would want to settle there, and she had no patience whatsoever for the “lazy life one leads” on board a boat. She was happy to leave and make room for Missy.
After the early months, when she was involved in nursing and encouraging FDR, Eleanor’s life diverged more than ever from her husband’s. While he was relaxing in the sun, she began, with Louis Howe’s encouragement, to spend more and more of her time working for Democratic causes: writing, campaigning, and even speaking.
Eleanor’s political activism led to a new and important friendship with Nancy Cook, head of the Women’s Division of the New York Democratic Committee, and Nancy’s life partner, Marion Dickerman. Nan and Marion were in graduate school together at Syracuse University, and became partners not long after. Nan, curly-haired, boyish, and intense, was seven years older than Marion, who had a long, serious face with downturned eyebrows and mouth and was the quieter and more measured of the two. But both were women of action, passionate suffragettes who signed up for Red Cross duty in a London hospital during World War I. Nan, who was a gifted craftsperson, used her carpentry skills to fashion artificial limbs for wounded soldiers. The moment they returned from England, Marion was recruited by women activists to run for the New York Assembly on the Democratic ticket. She took it on and survived, despite vicious red-baiting and misogyny. Her Republican opponent won, but the challenge was successful in snuffing out his hopes for higher office.
Eleanor became bolder too, following Nan and Marion’s example. She ordered matching tweed suits with knickers for herself and Nan, much to the disapproval of her elders. One day she sat for hours with her knitting on the porch of a county chairman who was avoiding her, knowing he was inside and would eventually have to come out and face the music. In 1924, when Democrat Al Smith campaigned for governor against Republican Teddy Roosevelt Jr., Eleanor, Marion, and Nan rode around New York State in a car with a three-dimensional steaming teapot on the top. It was, she later admitted, a “rough stunt”—intended to associate Teddy Roosevelt Jr. with the Teapot Dome scandal, in which a member of Republican president Warren Harding’s cabinet accepted bribes in exchange for leases on oil-rich western lands. Eleanor described her cousin Teddy as a reasonably nice young man “whose public service record shows him willing to do the bidding of his friends.” Eleanor’s campaign against her own kin caused lasting resentment in the Teddy Roosevelt branch of the family. By the time Al Smith won the election, Eleanor, Marion, and Nan had become fast friends and frequent companions.
One fall day in 1924, the three of them were picnicking with FDR and younger sons John and Franklin Jr. on a stream called Val-Kill, about two miles from Springwood, the Delano/Roosevelt family mansion. Eleanor noted that her mother-in-law was about to close up Springwood for the winter, as she did every year, and move to the town house in Manhattan. She mentioned how nice it would be to have a country place to come to in winter after the big house was closed down.
FDR took up the idea immediately. The land they were picnicking on belonged to him, not his mother, he told the gathering, and he would happily lease it for life to the threesome of Nan, Marion, and Eleanor. They could build a year-round cottage of their own there, a place free from the formalities and obligations of the big house. The Val-Kill stream could be dammed to make a swimming pool, and the whole place could be called Val-Kill. Nan Cook drew up the first plans for Val-Kill cottage. But before long, FDR, who loved to design buildings, took over. He engaged Henry Toombs, a local architect, to plan a stone house in Dutch colonial style for “my missus and some of her political friends.”
A year and a half after the picnic where the idea was born, the stone cottage at Val-Kill was finished. On New Year’s Day 1926, everyone gathered in the airy living room, sitting on nail kegs around a makeshift table, to celebrate with a first meal. Even Sara Roosevelt was there. Franklin presented Marion Dickerman with a children’s book he had found, entitled Little Marion’s Pilgrimage, and signed it “from her affectionate Uncle Franklin. On the occasion of the opening of the Love Nest on the Val-Kill.”
In the early years, Val-Kill was a beloved place for all three women. Eleanor stayed there as often as she could, going over to the big house only for official duties. At Val-Kill, she was an equal partner in shared enterprises: working on political issues with Nan, as head of the Women’s Division of the New York Democratic Party, and on educational plans with Marion, who was about to take over the Todhunter School, with Eleanor’s support. Franklin came to visit, as did the children. But Val-Kill belonged to the threesome. Eleanor embroidered towels for the cottage with the initials EMN.
Even before the cottage was finished, Nan had begun to talk about the possibility of a workshop where she could return to the carpentry she loved. She was intrigued by the idea of creating authentic reproductions of colonial American furniture. Soon the plan expanded into a project named Val-Kill Industries, which would produce furniture for the general public. Val-Kill Industries operated first out of a small shop in the cottage and later in a separate building on the property. Under Nan’s supervision, pieces were carefully turned, and joined with wooden pegs. Most were made in hardwoods and burnished by hand before being stamped with the Val-Kill hallmark. In the beginning, the women had the idealistic goal of employing local farmers in the off-season, thus discouraging flight to the cities. Ultimately, however, recent European immigrants with carpentry skills were hired to do the work. At its peak, the cottage industry employed as many as twenty people. Eleanor was in charge of marketing, and hosted a small exhibit of the finished pieces at her town house in Manhattan in the spring of 1927. FDR was among the project’s very first customers: he used Val-Kill pieces to furnish the Little White House at Warm Springs.
FDR had first visited Warm Springs with Missy in 1924, and eventually envisioned a whole complex of buildings to accommodate the presidential party and friends, as well as fellow polio victims seeking treatment and rehabilitation. Henry Toombs would also design Warm Springs, including FDR’s cottage, which became known as the “Little White House.” The modest clapboard cottage, with a porch in the shape of a ship’s prow, looked out over a stand of Georgia pines. A central living and dining room separated the two bedrooms: one for FDR and one for Missy. A connecting bath linked FDR’s bedroom to a tiny third bedroom that belonged to Eleanor. But Eleanor, when she did visit Warm Springs, preferred to stay in one of the other cottages on the campuslike property.
FDR loved Warm Springs: it was the one place in the world where he didn’t have to hide his disability, and where he could race around on the dusty roads in his hand-controlled Model T. Eleanor, on the other hand, went there reluctantly, most often for Thanksgiving. She preferred to be with her friends at Val-Kill.
The friendship between Eleanor, Marion, and Nan, which began in 1922, was at the center of all three women’s lives for a decade. The trio went on camping trips together, pitching a tent and savoring Nan’s cooking, prepared on a portable stove over an open fire. Because Nan and Marion seemed to have an easy rapport with her younger sons, Franklin Jr. and John, Eleanor often brought them along on the camping adventures. The three women spent time together in Campobello as well, boating, swimming, and reading aloud by the fire. In 1929, they even toured Europe together, with Franklin Jr. and John in tow.
On the surface, it looked as though nothing had changed in t
he spring of 1933. Eleanor went on vacation as usual with Nan and Marion, traveling through upstate New York and Vermont and Maine before crossing by boat to Campobello. But this time she made the trip with Nan and Marion in June, all while planning to repeat much of it with Hick in July. She wrote Hick that she now knew the prettiest roads and the best places to stop. She wondered if Hick would love Campobello as she did. “Hick dearest,” she wrote from Maine, “this has been the most glorious day, and the best of it you and I will be doing together next month.”
Even though Eleanor would be retracing her steps, the July trip with Hick was going to be very different. As close as Eleanor was to Nan and Marion, there had never been any doubt that they were the couple and she was the third person, caring but not committed. Eleanor’s relationship with Hick was different. Hick was wholeheartedly in love with Eleanor, and Eleanor, in her letters and in their times together, seemed to feel just as passionately about Hick. This was something new for a woman who had learned early to keep her “desires under complete subjugation.” Eleanor was usually uncomfortable with physical intimacy. She had long ago given it up in her marriage, and she rarely allowed it with her children. On this trip, she and Hick were going to be together as a couple, all day and all night. There would be no buffers—no friends, no relatives, and very few official appearances. Of all the many brave things Eleanor Roosevelt did over her lifetime, going off with Hick—and only Hick—on a three-week car trip may have been one of the bravest.
CHAPTER SIX
GETAWAY
ON THE FOURTH OF JULY 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt took a small fast boat out to the USS Indianapolis to play “Mrs. R.” one more time as the fireworks lit up the skies over the Potomac. Then she and Hick hopped into her Buick roadster and headed for upstate New York. From there, they intended to meander at their leisure in the mountains of New England, then cross the border into French-speaking Quebec, staying first in luxury at the Château Frontenac, then driving along dirt roads to explore the sparsely populated beaches and tiny fishing towns of the Gaspé Peninsula.
