In 1949 she gave up her apartment in Washington Square to move to the Park Sheraton Hotel.
We [i.e., Mrs. Roosevelt and Elliott] moved yesterday to the hotel and are nearly settled. I am entirely in order and our sitting room is in order but Tommy and the office are not yet settled. She isn’t happy about it yet, but will be, I think, when she is settled and finds as I hope she will that it is less strain and less work when we are here.6
There were changes at Val-Kill. Having purchased 1,100 of the 1,365 acres that FDR had owned at his death, she and Elliott went into partnership, “and we are going to farm the land on a commercial basis.” She paid the estate $87,000 of which $50,000 came out of her own capital and $37,000 was financed through a mortgage which Elliott undertook to service as his contribution to the purchase price. “As you see,” she wrote her other children,
I have made no gift to Elliott. . . .I write you this so that you may clearly see that you will get from the estate all that you would probably have received in any case, and in addition to make it clear, that Elliott is putting in all he makes so that you will not think any extra gifts have been made to him.7
Elliott had a 75 per cent interest in Val-Kill Farms and Mrs. Roosevelt 25 per cent. Elliott did things on a large scale, and in the heyday of the farming operation there were 40 dairy cattle, 100 beef cattle, 30 brood sows, 2,500 laying turkey hens, and several hundred acres that had been planted by FDR to fir and spruce. “Where it seems wise, we shall continue the Christmas tree plantations which he started, and shall sell Christmas trees just as he did.”8 The trees were the only profitable crop, Elliott selling them in December at a dollar a tree. “I am doing things,” she explained to a close friend,
in endorsing this film [The Roosevelt Story] and financing the place & farm & helping Elliott with a book of his Father’s letters that may cause criticism. I’m letting Jimmy go ahead on a film & with his book & will help him by not interfering though I know all will cause criticism but I surmise Elliott has to be established & encouraged to become secure. Jimmy needs to make more money to give his wife the security she demands & if I can help without doing anything I think wrong, the criticism doesn’t bother me. . . .The sooner I can live in dignified obscurity at H.P. the happier I will be.9
Elliott lived in the top cottage. The Stone Cottage by the pool was used for guests, Mrs. Roosevelt having brought out Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. “I am afraid the many children we have with us in the summer were too much for their peace and quiet,” she informed Henry Toombs, who had drawn up the plans for the cottage in 1925. “When Elliott came into the place, it became more difficult,” was Marion Dickerman’s explanation. “One day Nan and I looked up and said, ‘When will we go?’” Mrs. Roosevelt bought out their interest of $17,000. “Dear Eleanor,” Nancy Cook wrote, “I am leaving the keys in an envelope for you. . . .If you are home before we leave we will come over to see you and say good-bye. Affectionately.”10
Elliott was a restless soul, much like Mrs. Roosevelt’s father—in and out of a succession of ventures, often immature and reckless, and like him, too, possessing a sweetness and warmth that caused people to remark that he was “the most lovable” of the Roosevelt boys. Mrs. Roosevelt was fiercely loyal to all of her children, but Elliott had a special claim on her affections.
“If Elliott were not at Hyde Park I could not live there, in fact I would not want to.”11 That was saying a great deal about her gratitude to Elliott, for Val-Kill was home and sanctuary, the place to which she was ready to withdraw if public life became intolerable. That seemed a possibility at times in the postwar years. No nastiness or insinuation was out of bounds for columnist Westbrook Pegler. “If people want to believe that sort of thing,” she said after the appearance of one such column, “there is nothing to be done.” So far as she was concerned, she was perfectly content to retire from public life to the country. She did the public things, but the ones that really mattered were her personal relationships and they could not be affected by such attacks.12
She had always liked what Andrew Jackson had written about his much maligned wife: “A being so gentle, so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor.” In 1948, the wife of Earl Miller, the handsome state trooper, now a retired naval commander, who had been FDR’s bodyguard in Albany and had become one of her closest friends, named her as correspondent in a suit for divorce. “Mummy,” Franklin Jr. said to her, “if I am going to represent you in this action, I have to know everything.” With a smile, she reassured her son: “In the sense that you mean, there was nothing.” If the action went to trial it would, nevertheless, create a sensation and perhaps make it impossible for her to continue in public life. She accepted that possibility calmly, but her sons were upset, saying it would destroy them politically. That threw her into the deepest of depressions. But scandal was averted when a compromise settlement was reached between Earl and his wife and the papers were sealed.13
Because she viewed Val-Kill as a place of retirement, it meant a great deal to her that Elliott made his home there. There was little she would not do if he pressed her hard enough. She even agreed to sit for a portrait commissioned by Elliott from his friend Douglas Chandor. It was so good that the price jumped fivefold in the course of the painting, which so incensed her that she startled the Charles F. Palmers during a visit to Val-Kill by using the word “darn” about the bill Chandor had sent Elliott. She would not permit Elliott to pay the higher price, she announced, although he wanted to do so. She would not permit anybody to pay such a price for her picture. It remained in the painter’s possession until Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson arranged for its purchase so that it might be hung in the White House.
“Madame Roosevelt is becoming beautiful,” a Frenchman in Paris was reported by Time to have remarked, and the magazine’s explanation was the porcelain caps that had replaced the protruding front teeth that were broken in the automobile accident. That had had something to do with her “autumnal blossoming,” as Time described it. But the real explanation, her friends thought, was to be found in the quip that “after 50, every man is responsible for his face.”14
There was another strong attachment to Val-Kill. Tommy and Fala were happiest there. Tommy was fading and she knew it. “Tommy is exhausted,” she wrote as she was about to take off for Paris for the 1948 General Assembly. “I think this is the last time I can uproot Tommy, so I pray she will keep well and will get pleasure out of it.”15 Tommy began to break in a successor, Maureen Corr, Irish-born, Catholic, pert, and pretty, who came to them through an employment agency. Although Tommy persuaded Mrs. Roosevelt to let her accompany her to the 1951 Assembly in Paris, after the Christmas recess, it was Maureen who went, armed with much crisp advice from Tommy, including a “tipping schedule,” how to get checks cashed, and how to handle Mrs. Roosevelt’s funds. “I expected some kind of royalty,” Maureen said of her new boss, “and here was a warm, kind, embracing person. Her total simplicity was such a revelation to me, her lack of any feeling of self-importance.”
Back at Hyde Park, Fala was Tommy’s only consolation. The little Scotty owed his life to her. He had once been jumped by Elliott’s dog, the ill-starred Blaze, and severely mauled. Had Tommy not grabbed him up and lifted him to safety, he would not have survived. “Fala is still living, he is eleven years old but extremely frisky,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a writer who wanted to do a story about this famous dog.
Just yesterday he ran away and was gone with his grandson [Tamas McFala] for five hours. He has lived with me since my husband’s death. For a while after that he used to lie in the doorway where he could watch all the doors, just as he did when my husband used to come over to this cottage to make sure he was not left behind.
I have always made it a practice to take him over to the big house and grave when there was any ceremony. If he heard the sirens he would stand stiffly on his four, short legs, with his ears up, knowing I am sure, that this had something to do with him and his master.
Fa
la is still very dignified and while he is happy here with me, I do not think he has ever accepted me as the one person whom he loved as he did my husband.
He “has a special way of greeting Mrs. Roosevelt,” Tommy would add. “We call it his smile.”16
With the Big House turned over to the government, the center of gravity of the Roosevelt clan shifted to Val-Kill. It was a large family, numbering in 1952 in addition to her five children, eighteen grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, as well as assorted cousins of various degrees, nine daughters-in-law and ex-daughters-in-law to most of whom she was confidante, referee, and oracle and whose Roosevelt offspring often stayed with her at Hyde Park. Her brother Hall’s second wife, Dorothy K. Roosevelt, and her three daughters Amy, Janet, and Diana also made Val-Kill a stopping-off place whenever they came East. “She’s the best thing besides the girls that Hall left me,” Dorothy wrote her sister about Eleanor. Her children called her “Mummy,” her grandchildren called her “Grand’mère,” and her friends “Mrs. Roosevelt,” although a few who had known her before the White House years—such as Henry Morgenthau and Esther Lape—used “Eleanor” and Harry Hooker and Maude Gray called her “Totty.”
All of her sons, except John, were active in politics. All of them realized the value of their mother’s support. She was proud of Franklin Jr.’s successful entry into Congress in May, 1949, when he succeeded to the seat of Rep. Sol Bloom on Manhattan’s West Side. The day after he scored his spectacular victory against the Tammany candidate in a district that traditionally had been controlled by Tammany, she responded to congratulations at Lake Success from her fellow delegates with a radiant, “Wasn’t it a wonderful success?” It was “a fine beginning,” and she was glad “he didn’t have anything to do with Tammany. After all, he won despite Tammany, didn’t he?”17
There already was talk of his running for governor in 1950, and when he was introduced at political meetings in and around New York it was as a future president. He was not the only Roosevelt son thinking and being talked of in those terms. In California, James, who had been chairman of the state organization, was preparing to run for the governorship against Earl Warren, and Look magazine published an article by the chief of its Washington bureau, Richard L. Wilson, which it headlined:
TWO YOUNG ROOSEVELTS
RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE
*Both Have FDR’s Political Charm
*Both May Become Governors in 1950
*Together They May Upset Dewey and Warren
“It begins to look as if the Roosevelts can fill both places on the Presidential ticket!” Wilson reported a California politician as saying. “Yes,” his colleague answered, “but who can get a Roosevelt to take second place?”
“That’s easy,” the politician replied, “Mother will decide.”18
The timetables of aspiring young politicians, including her sons, amused Mrs. Roosevelt. A fatalist, she never considered a race for office won until the votes were counted. Within the family she could be cool, objective, and bluntly, if lovingly, realistic about her sons’ political aspirations. “You are better off out of politics,” she told Elliott in 1950. “You will only get into a jam.” In the winter of 1949–50 she smilingly tempered her sons’ ambitious blueprints with reminders that it was they, not she, who had loudly wanted for president in 1948 a general with whom they were now disenchanted as it had become clear that his sympathies were Republican. It was Mother whom James enlisted to try to gain Truman’s remission for his 1948 apostasy. She saw Truman. He was in a mellow mood. She came away with the impression that he would not oppose James in the primary—perhaps even support him.19
It was she, also, who told Franklin Jr. that it was too early for him to think of the governorship. When there had been such talk at the time of his election to Congress, her reaction had been a spontaneous “Gracious, let him start being a good Congressman first,” and that continued to be her advice to him in 1950. The politicians also advised him not to be in too much of a hurry, but for their own reasons. They wanted to tame him first. They wanted to be the ones who decided when he made his next move upward. In 1950 the organization nominated Walter A. Lynch, a Catholic, to run for governor together with Lehman, who ran for re-election as senator. Franklin Jr. ran for re-election to the House.
James, however, did get his chance at the governorship in California. Truman, although he did not support him in the primary, kept hands off, and James won. But the race against Warren was tougher. So unconditional was her support of her children that Mrs. Roosevelt even campaigned for James. It was only natural that a mother should speak on behalf of her son, Gov. Earl Warren, James’s opponent, gallantly replied. She returned from California persuaded that “much of the attitude that he isn’t going to win comes from the Pauley crowd who have not been willing to give any money and spread the word that he has no chance.” When Truman, as the race drew to an end, issued a statement endorsing James’s running mate, Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was in a close contest with Richard M. Nixon for the Senate, and failed to make a simultaneous endorsement of James, she almost resigned from the United Nations, even though James’s race by that time was viewed as hopeless. She resented also that Truman, in his speech to the UN General Assembly, had not mentioned FDR. She would not accept reappointment, she said. Edith Sampson, her alternate, was perfectly capable of handling her job. Her friends were startled by the depth of her feeling. “Why punish the UN because of what the President did in California?” one of them protested, and another came away from the encounter distressed at her failure to separate her loyalty to her children from her role as a public servant.20
It was an old vulnerability. One of the threatening letters she had received at the height of the Cardinal Spellman controversy was from a New Hampshire Democrat, a state employee, and vice-commander of the Catholic War Veterans. He hoped some day to have the honor to vote for Franklin Jr. for president, he wrote her, but she had lost him many Democratic votes by her opposition to federal aid to parochial schools. Her reply had been firm, almost indignant:
whether it defeated my son for office at any level, I would stand for the things in which I believe. It would be unworthy of an American citizen to do otherwise. I shall in the course of his career take stands whether they help him to be elected to office or whether they defeat him.21
That was how she felt. Yet she also tried her best not to make life difficult for her politically minded sons by too intransigent a stand. Her willingness to have public funds used for the transportation of parochial school children could be justified on the merits of the argument that she advanced for this modification in her position, but it also coincided with a compromise federal school-aid bill that Franklin Jr. and Rep. John F. Kennedy drew up together.
“Jimmy is staying in California,” she wrote after the 1950 elections, when friends wondered whether he would now defer to Franklin Jr.’s political aspirations,
but he hasn’t said a word about whether he means to stay in politics or not. Franklin, junior, was re-elected easily and I hope he is going to make a good record for himself.22
She usually presided over the ingatherings of her family at Val-Kill with a benign, matriarchal calm, writing out the menus, making the table order, serving the food herself from a hot plate or a side table. The larger the family party—and in the Roosevelt household the line between family and friends was always blurry—the better she liked it. While children and friends milled in and out of the various rooms of the cottage, having drinks, exchanging political gossip, disputing loudly, she was always an oasis of calm. Strangers present at an argument among the Roosevelt children often thought they were about to commit mayhem on each other. “Plenty of variety but basically a great deal of unity,” Mrs. Roosevelt would reassure her guests and herself.
There was much teasing back and forth. Maude Gray, still a striking woman whose tinted red hair reminded one small child of “a witch,” was a great jollier. “Totty” should marry Mr. Baruch, Maude said; o
ne week of coping with Eleanor’s energy would kill him off and then Eleanor would have his money to pay off Anna’s debts (which were much on her mind at that time) and for all her good works. Harry Hooker, whose birthday was being celebrated at Val-Kill that week end, spoke of how often he had wept upon Mrs. Roosevelt’s bosom, although he being her lawyer was supposed to be the one to give the advice and comfort. “Isn’t it nice Totty that you have a bosom to weep upon?” She would smile, enjoying her friends’ enjoyment of such sallies, but only occasionally contributing herself. Elliott and Franklin Jr. remonstrated with her for having appeared to give official approval to an article about her by John Reddy, an associate of Anna’s. She should not do that again, they sternly admonished her. “I need the publicity,” she said with a look of sweet innocence. “Yes,” someone was heard to remark above the guffaws, “two eskimos at the North Pole haven’t heard about you.”23
One evening, all of her sons were at Hyde Park, “all of us arguing passionately on ideas, all of us trying to talk at once, even the wives becoming so interested that they could not help but join in!” Instead of talk about a new car or a new fur coat they argued about socialized medicine and inheritance taxes, and while she joined in she also observed the development, the changes in point of view, the growth in intellectual powers of her children. “We separated after 11 o’clock so stimulated by each other’s company that I doubt if any of us went to sleep for hours.”24
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