Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  By that time, Olmsted and Vaux were able to exert enough influence to build this park closer to Olmsted’s “crafted wilderness” ideal, although it must be noted that Vaux, for all his love of Victorian buildings, made this his personal credo: “Nature first, second, and third—architecture after a while.” In Prospect Park they together achieved a masterpiece considered by many to be the pinnacle of their careers. Today, as then, both of their New York City parks boast picturesque bodies of water upon which one can inexpensively row a boat in the middle of a bustling metropolis, preferably with a loved one nestled in the stern (referring to the aft region of the boat, not the beloved’s anatomy). That fact alone makes them a most charismatic destination in my book. Is that redundant?

  One note of contention, however, that forever rankled Vaux was that Olmsted had been awarded the title of architect in chief at Central Park. I suppose his ire stands to reason, since Vaux was officially the architect of the pair while Olmsted had no formal training in that field whatsoever. Although this was representative of the rancor that colored much of their time together, they still shared a mutual artistic passion anchored in a deep bond of loyalty and respect. All well and good, as long as they weren’t required to see each other for more than a few minutes at a time. Even so, Olmsted always humbly recalled that their partnership was Vaux’s idea to begin with. “Without him,” Olmsted remarked, “I should have been a farmer.”

  On the domestic front, Olmsted had rather fallen into a marriage with his brother’s widow, Mary, after the untimely death of his brother, John. With the widow, Olmsted also inherited a pair of sons in his nephews Owen and John. Apparently, he felt that the stringent guidelines under which he demanded his parks be shaped were also appropriate for the formation of a young man.

  In an endless upbraiding (a form for which he was famous—his resignation letter to the Central Park Commission logged in at forty-one pages), Olmsted admonished the headmaster of Owen’s boarding school with incessant instruction, detailing all the skills he thought imperative in a young man’s matriculation, including: “To saddle & bridle a horse. . . . To ride, drive, pack, clean, feed, bleed & physic a horse. . . . To rescue drowning persons. . . . To ford a river. To kill animals without cruelty; to preserve meat. . . . To make slight repairs in & run a steam engine safely. . . . To preserve clothing from moths.” While Colonel Roosevelt (as well as one Ron Swanson) might have heartily approved of these directives, it’s hard to imagine a school conducting some of this curriculum without losing a few of the runts, but perhaps that’s just exactly where the source of Ron and Theodore’s rugged preference would lie.

  Despite Olmsted’s attempts, his other stepson/nephew (and employee), John, also turned out to be a bit of a ne’er-do-well, as evidenced by a couple of poignant (and typically interminable) letters to the lad. On his way to tour Europe, John probably had just enough time on the ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean to read the instructions sent along by his stepfather, Uncle Frederick; writing that was “to be read over and committed substantively to memory while at sea, re-read in London and again in Paris.” Olmsted veritably deluged him with guidance, rife with lists of parks, castles, cathedrals, and estates that John should digest, as well as scores of acquaintances of Olmsted’s by whom John might meet with some advantage in knowing.

  Above all, his stepfather urged him: “Everywhere examine closely and accurately all small architectural objects adapted to park-work.” Seems pretty straightforward, right? I wouldn’t think he needed to go into further detail. Wrong: “—pavilions, lodges, entrances, chalets, refreshment stalls, bridges, conservatories, plant-stands, fountains, drinking fountains, lamps, flagstaffs, seats, railings, parapets, copings, etc.” As though John would see a chalet and not realize it would be included under the heading “architectural objects”? All this, and Olmsted still had to add “etc.” to the end of the list? Isn’t that Latin abbreviation usually employed so that one might curtail a long list? It turned out that our sweet Frederick had some control issues.

  In 1874, Olmsted received a commission to design a park for the Canadian city of Montreal. In 2014, I met Daniel Chartier, who served the resultant Mont Royal Park as the chief landscape architect, early one morning at a coffee shop at the base of the city’s small, central “mountain,” where he whipped out an 11" × 17" book the thickness of a Chicago Yellow Pages (ask your parents).

  I had been steered in his direction by Central Park’s Sara Cedar Miller, and it turned out that she could not have turned me on to a more ideal Olmsted freak. Mr. Chartier, a trustee of the National Association for Olmsted Parks (NAOP), was an absolute treasure trove of Olmstedian lore and philosophy. He walked me through the massive book he had compiled on the history and ongoing development of the Montreal park, and I was nothing short of delighted by his enthusiasm. After so much reading of the dusty history of these historical figures, it was so refreshing to feel the heart of Frederick Law Olmsted beating with a robust rhythm in a living person.

  Daniel, quite excited that this strange bewhiskered American wanted to know anything at all about the man who had inspired his own life’s work, began to fulminate, in very enjoyably broken English (my French is for merde), about Olmsted’s legacy. “A park is for more than air and exercise, it is poetry!” he insisted. “Olmsted understood the charm of natural scenery, the genius loci. Please make sure that is in your book.” Done, sir. This phrase, meaning “genius of place,” combined with Mr. Chartier’s passion, brought Olmsted home for me in a way that I hadn’t previously considered. It also happens to be the title of another one of my excellent sources for this chapter: Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, by Justin Martin.

  Much the same as my wife, an exquisitely talented interior designer (and goddamn bombshell), can look at a room and conjure—with a few pieces of art, a rug, a love seat, and a couple of throw pillows—a work of such aesthetic genius as to astonish a clod like myself, Olmsted was able to look at a raw park site and envision just particularly the way it should be shaped; the specific story that could be told there in such a way as to bring the utmost pleasure to the visitor. As Mr. Chartier pointed out to me, Olmsted had an elemental knack for the richness of his work’s narrative: He comprehended on an almost animal level the value in a lovely open space viewed through the trees; a glade, or a clearing in the distance. When we as a species lived in the woods, open space brought with it a sense of freedom and safety, because there could be no lion or tiger hiding in that open space. Stands to reason.

  Daniel continued to regale me with the tastiest of exposition as we began to hike up the mountain. His fervor as we passed beneath a beautiful canopy of old and new growth confirmed a suspicion that I had long harbored: One could land a lot worse employment than to work in Parks and Recreation. As we meandered upon the main road for a spell and then cut straight up the hill on a rugged, rambling path, he pointed out the places that Olmsted’s vision had been realized as well as places it had been shortchanged. “A park is a work of art!,” Daniel proclaimed as I looked around me with a reverence that made it hard to disagree.

  “The long-term protection of a work of nature and art like the park of Mont Royal requires sustained dedication on the part of those responsible for its stewardship. . . . There needs to be a constant process of education at work by which each new generation of citizens comes to learn about the value of Mont Royal and the design that Frederick Law Olmsted created,” wrote Dr. Charles Beveridge, who is considered the greatest expert on Olmsted and his work. After enjoying the generosity of Sara Cedar Miller, Marie Warsh, Steve Bopp, and Daniel Chartier, and seeing the good work they have done and continue to do, I couldn’t agree more.

  7

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  Hey, it’s a woman!

  There are a great many Americans who deserve to be heralded for their gumption-riddled careers; patriots and trailblazers of one ilk or another, for whom I had not room in this book. M
any of those excluded are women, beginning with Pocahontas and Sacagawea, Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, Betsy Ross, Lucretia Mott, Jane Addams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and surprisingly, Davy Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier,” who reportedly (according to Sam Houston) had a “fetching holster.” Look it up.

  Here is an original thought that I just had, and you can feel free to quote me: History is written by the side that didn’t lose. That means that most of the history of Western civilization maintains a focus commensurate with the patriarchal domination of society, including a particular emphasis on the achievements of military and sports figures. Reading our histories, one can begin to wonder if there were even any women about, excepting the amount of coverage Ms. Crockett received for her heroic contributions at the Alamo.

  Judging by my own sturdy family in Illinois, or even the household of two that I share with Megan Mullally, the scarcity of recorded female influence upon the history of our population until the last century or so is a lot of bullshit. The women running the nation of my life, mainly my mother, her late mother, my aunts, my wife, and many of my stage managers, directors, writers, teachers, castmates, and woodworking peers, just for starters, have been powerful and gentle and beautiful and strong and vital. The long misrepresentation of what used to be known as “the weaker sex” is an egregiously offensive load of malarkey perpetrated by chickenshit men (like me) who were afraid their own contributions would be somehow diminished if they admitted to collaborating with ladies. We’ll tuck into that topic more substantially, but I wanted to mention it up front as we dive into the first lady of gumption.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884 to a family of swells who were extremely well-off financially, meaning she didn’t necessarily have to pull herself up by the straps of her lady boots, at least at first glance. However, although she and her family could afford the niceties of life, she experienced a poverty of another color, because she considered herself an ugly duckling in an era when physical beauty was somewhat relied upon to determine a young lady’s eligibility. In addition, she lost both of her parents and a brother by the time she was nine, adding depression to her already blossoming insecurity.

  She was thereafter raised in the household of her maternal grandmother, where she recalled her grandfather forcing the children to walk from the house to the road and back several times a day, with a stick across their backs in the crook of their elbows to improve their carriage. He was “a severe judge of what they read and wrote and how they expressed themselves. . . . The result was strength of character, . . . a certain rigidity in conforming to a conventional pattern.”

  Eleanor saw the positive effects of this training as well as the downside of strict conformity, and she found her escape in reading (another voracious reader) anything she could lay her hands upon, which proved to be tricky. Apparently, when she came upon subject matter that was beyond her knowledge and she asked the adults about it, the book would suddenly disappear. (Note to parents: There is no better way to make your child crave a forbidden item than hiding it away from them.) She would spend days hunting down the concealed books, which I imagine would be considered pretty tame by now. For example, she remembers it occurring with Dickens’s Bleak House. Good God, what I wouldn’t give to get my nieces to take a break from the Bieber chat rooms (or One Direction, or whomever the cute-boy pablum of the moment might be) and read some Dickens!

  Her grandfather Hall enjoyed the advantage of wealth that had been amassed by the hardworking previous generations of the family, so he did not feel the need to work himself. Eleanor wrote of the great lesson she observed when the family grew lazy in laboring to maintain their good fortune, and then watched that surplus slip through their fingers over the course of a couple of subsequent generations. Interestingly, she saw her relatives buckle down and reacquaint themselves with the ability to work hard for their bread, just as their forbears had once done. “It always amuses me when any one group of people takes it for granted that, because they have been privileged for a generation or two, they are set apart in any way from the man or woman who is working in order to keep the wolf from the door. It is only luck and a little temporary veneer and before long the wheels may turn and one and all must fall back on whatever basic qualities they have.”

  This sentiment seems terribly poignant to me today, what with the vast gulf that continues to grow between the wealthiest class of Americans and those who are “working in order to keep the wolf from the door.” When those who grotesquely profit from our corporations continue to grow financially fat by selling unhealthy products to the masses, or by overcharging us for pharmaceuticals, or by outsourcing so many millions of jobs that could be performed by staunch American hands, they seem to be forgetting that we are all in this together, and eventually they, or their children, will be made to rue all those flavors of corn-based snacks.

  The niece of Theodore Roosevelt must have begun to sense some of his doughty nature in her own genes, discovering her individual mettle through trips to the fields or the woods, where she would completely forget the passage of time by escaping into her reading. By the time she was fourteen, she had begun to sense that one could perhaps succeed without being considered the greatest beauty, as she then wrote in an essay: “No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face, all will be attracted to her.” It sounds like Dickens can do a body some good.

  Her confidence grew a great deal further when she was sent to Allenswood Academy, a private finishing school near London. Her instructor, Marie Souvestre, was a noted feminist thinker who encouraged her pupils to learn foreign languages and think for themselves. Souvestre taught that one should experience other cultures as deeply as possible, by enjoying their food, art, and local customs, but most important by understanding and speaking their native tongues, “because of the enjoyment you missed in a country when you were both deaf and dumb.” These lessons would prove extremely instrumental in Eleanor’s future as a diplomat with the vision to see all nations as one collective of people rather than as opposing teams in the grand arena of world politics.

  Although her confidence was bolstered by her teenage schooling, Eleanor was still very much a vestal virgin when it came to canoodling. Remember, this was at a time when using a person’s first name was considered the equivalent of a French kiss today. One did not allow a man to kiss one before becoming engaged to that man, at the risk of being considered an absolute slattern. Despite her high-minded clumsiness, Eleanor wrote, “I felt the urge to be a part of the stream of life, and so in the autumn of 1903, when Franklin Roosevelt, my fifth cousin once removed, asked me to marry him, though I was only nineteen, it seemed entirely natural and I never even thought that we were both young and inexperienced.”

  Eleanor and Franklin proceeded to move into a town house connected by only a sliding door to the residence of Franklin’s mother, Sara, whom, it should be noted, was outspoken in her opposition to their union. Although the young couple produced six children, Eleanor did not feel well suited to motherhood and was overshadowed by her mother-in-law in the child-rearing department. This arrangement, in which Sara openly commandeered control of both households, was miserable for Eleanor, and most likely her husband, Franklin, as well, but nobody possessed the gumption at that point to stand up to the overweening matriarch.

  Despite the apparently fecund marriage bed that produced those six kids, Eleanor sadly disliked having sex, stating to her daughter, Anna, that it was merely “an ordeal to be borne,” which makes me very glum. It’s tough enough these days, what with the kids casually “hooking up,” for two lovers to be honest and trusting enough to engage in sexy times that will satisfy both of their appetites and leave no feelings of inadequacy or vexation. Imagining the awkwardness of engaging in stiffly mannered copulation a hundred years ago, when it was considered indiscreet to even sign a letter with any other sentiment than “very sincerely yours,” makes me shudder wi
th discomfort.

  Despite her best intentions, Eleanor was somewhat out to sea when it came to child rearing. When I was young, growing up in the cornfields of rural Minooka, Illinois, our parents had the luxury of letting us run wild out-of-doors. My dad’s whistle was so loud that we could hear him call us for dinnertime even down at the creek near our house. Playing innocently in the sun, we had no idea how modern our lifestyle would have seemed to young Eleanor, who “had a curious arrangement out one of [her] back windows for airing the children, a kind of box with wire on the sides and top. . . . I knew fresh air was necessary, but I learned later that the sun is more important than the air, and I had [it] on the shady side of the house!”

  She slowly but surely learned to cook, eventually regaining some sense of control from her mother-in-law. When her husband, Franklin, was stricken with polio and lost the use of his legs, Eleanor finally won an extended battle with Franklin’s mother by convincing him to stay in politics and therefore remain vital and active, for his own sake as well as that of the nation. While vacationing in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, with the children, she realized that her young boys no longer had a mentor in the realms of adventure and sport, like swimming, fishing, and camping, and although she was not a swimmer herself, the onus was upon her to literally swim or else sink into the role of insufficient parent. Eleanor faced the music and wrote, “I would have to become a good deal more companionable and more of an all-around person than I had ever been before.”