The Three Graces of Val-Kill

by Emily Herring Wilson

  When Anna was born to Eleanor and Franklin in 1906, Sara was delighted and immediately took charge of her—as she did of the children who followed. Four of Eleanor and Franklin’s six children (a son died in infancy) were born in New York houses outfitted by Mama, and all were brought to Hyde Park for family occasions.

  Sara and Franklin made significant additions to Springwood, both to accommodate his large family and to create a more imposing residence for a man with presidential aspirations, and by 1915 the house had thirty-five rooms. The third floor was for the children, with bedrooms and a nursery as well as a playroom and separate bedrooms for the nurse and governess. The estate bore the imprint of Sara and Franklin—her snuggery, his library; her music room, his study; her farm (with homegrown foods for the table), Franklin’s fields and trees. Eleanor later complained that she had no say-so in the household, was not allowed in the kitchen, and learned nothing about how to manage a house and a family. At first, however, she was compliant and grateful, and unwilling to confront Mama or Franklin.

  In New York City, Sara Delano Roosevelt built twin townhouses—one for Franklin and his family at 49 East 65th Street, and one for her next door at number 47 (not an unusual arrangement for wealthy Manhattan families). Interior doors on three floors allowed Sara to appear whenever and wherever she chose. At Hyde Park, Eleanor, Franklin, and the children lived under one roof in Sara’s house. Wherever they lived, Eleanor (and Franklin) understood that Sara believed that a house should be run for the man. And she believed that Eleanor and Franklin’s children belonged to her. All their lives, when they wanted something, they would look toward their grandmother, who claimed that she was their real mother—and indeed, they often spent more time with Sara than with their own mother and father. And the children, like Franklin, thought of Hyde Park as home. Eleanor felt like a visitor.

  •

  Eleanor and Franklin had been deeply in love when they honeymooned at Springwood, but in 1918 her discovery of Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer, her young social secretary, changed her feelings (apparently Eleanor destroyed Franklin’s courtship letters to her after the discovery). Eleanor had read Lucy’s love letters to Franklin when she unpacked his suitcases after he returned from his U.S. military operations overseas during World War I, confirming her worst suspicions about her husband’s frequent absences from her over the past year. The affair had taken place in Washington, D.C., when Franklin was assistant secretary of the navy and Eleanor and the children were at the Roosevelts’ house on Campobello Island. The fact that Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore’s daughter and Eleanor’s cousin, encouraged the somewhat clandestine relationship and that others knew about it as well in the gossipy circles of Washington deepened the humiliation. Eleanor was devastated, but the marriage would endure. Sara may have cast the determining vote on that by threatening to cut Franklin out of her estate if he left Eleanor. Franklin wanted to get past the crisis as quickly and as silently as possible, and Springwood, even with a rowdy family of young children, was big enough for a man and his wife to maintain some distance from each other.

  In 1921 an even more dramatic turn of events changed the Roosevelts’ lives yet again: Franklin was stricken by polio in the summer home on Campobello Island, and everything, included Springwood, had to be modified to suit the needs of a man in a wheelchair. Eleanor moved out of the second-floor bedroom that she and Franklin had shared and into a small bedroom between his and Mama’s. Eleanor could explain in the months immediately following the change that Franklin needed physical therapists and valets to be in and out of his room at all hours, but she never returned.

  How the move to another bedroom reflected Eleanor’s needs is less clear. Her adult children believed that she no longer wanted to sleep with their father, but children’s knowledge of their parents’ sex life is speculative. What is clear is that she changed the way she lived at Springwood. Leaving altogether was never an option. The Hudson River Valley was Eleanor’s to love as much as it was Franklin’s and Sara’s. She traveled the world, but she always came back to the valley. She did not want to live far from home.

  •

  Eleanor’s roots in the Hudson River Valley were as deep as Franklin’s. Like Sara Roosevelt, Eleanor’s maternal Grandmother Hall had a New York City house and migrated from the city to her 1872 estate, Oak Terrace, north of the river town of Tivoli, twenty miles up the Albany Post Road from Hyde Park. In 1892, after her daughter Anna’s death, Grandmother Hall took in Eleanor—whom they called “Totty”—and her younger brother, Hall. “There are sad memories as well as happy ones,” Eleanor later said of those years, “but I shall never know any place, or any house as well as I know that one.”2 The house at Tivoli was a mansion with many rooms and servants, but unlike Franklin’s home at Hyde Park, it was a dark place. Grandmother Hall prayed a great deal in a household made unruly, and sometimes dangerous, by the reckless behavior of her alcoholic sons. Grandmother Hall passed along her strict puritanical views and strong sense of duty to her granddaughter.

  Eleanor’s mother and aunts were attractive women of great personality, and her Hall relations believed that Eleanor had inherited from them her own particular family charm. As a young child she found her pleasures outside the decaying house—rising with Aunt Pussie before breakfast to row five miles down the river to pick up the mail and in the afternoons lying on the grass under a tree reading a book. Her summers at Tivoli fed Eleanor’s need for romance, especially after her father’s death from bouts of drinking and depression, when she needed to fantasize the father she called the love of her life. She could recall steamboat whistles, playing tennis, sledding, and horseback riding, and, when her grandmother allowed it, sometimes visiting her relations at Oyster Bay (the Theodore Roosevelt side of the family) and in mansions up and down the river. She loved the sounds of birds in the trees and frogs in the marshes; she loved weather and seasons, especially fall in the Hudson Valley; and she loved long walks. To the end of her life she would return to Tivoli, visiting relatives (her mother’s sister, her Aunt Maude, after marrying David Grey, returned to live some years at the old home place), taking her grandchildren to walk through the abandoned halls—able to feel beauty others could not see in the empty house.

  •

  About two miles through the woods from Springwood there is a place called Val-Kill, named for Fall-Kill Creek (Dutch for “valley stream”). Fall-Kill is an active stream, racing or meandering according to the weather. Val-Kill included the large Bennett farm, which Franklin purchased in 1911 and rented to tenants. The land on the other side of the rough bridge crossing the creek elevates slightly uphill to a plateau. After Franklin was crippled by polio, the hillside became a favorite picnic place where he could get away from the Big House for diversion and privacy, and he had rough roads cleared so that he could drive there in his car equipped with hand controls.3 Eleanor and the children often joined him for picnics on the hillside, and after a while Eleanor began to invite her two closest friends, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, whom Franklin liked. He did not mind if they saw his shrunken legs as he stretched out on a blanket. They were like family. Val-Kill would be the place where Eleanor, Marion, and Nan built a cottage for themselves.

  The Roosevelts lived differently from the local citizens, of course, but they were not like the family portrayed in Thomas Cole’s famous 1846 painting The Picnic, which shows ladies in long dresses and gentlemen in coats and straw boaters lounging or pouring wine, wicker baskets filled with food, a troubadour, and well-behaved children sitting quietly around their own picnic cloth near a clear lake with a boat and the Catskills in the background. Val-Kill bore little resemblance to the paintings of the Hudson Valley School; in fact, it could have been anywhere on a farm where there was a rickety bridge, a creek with thick marsh grasses at water’s edge, and a scattering of scrub trees and thickets.

  Nature manifested at Val-Kill in what Eleanor called the “drama of life”—a great blue heron, frogs calling, cedar
trees and vines, meadows, and ragged roads and trails. The setting was ideal—private but not remote. And there were good neighbors—not Vanderbilts and Astors but Johannesens and Smiths, men and women who did their own work and shared their vegetables and preserves. The distance in spirit between Val-Kill and Springwood was greater than the actual two miles, and some friends coveted Eleanor’s invitation to a Val-Kill picnic more than an invitation to the Big House.

  Near Springwood there is another special Roosevelt place: on Route 9, the old Albany Post Road, St. James Episcopal Church was Sunday home to the Roosevelts and other river families, as well as the families who worked for them. The church was founded in the early 1800s by congregants from Christ Episcopal Church in Poughkeepsie. James Roosevelt was senior warden most of his life. Sara, a Unitarian, had become an Episcopalian when she married James, and together they attended services, held in the chapel in the village in cold weather because there was no heat in the small church. Franklin had been baptized and confirmed at St. James and in 1907 was elected senior warden, to serve for the rest of his life. A stained glass window at St. James honors the memory of his father.

  Eleanor, a lifelong Episcopalian confirmed at the Church of the Incarnation in New York City, likewise attended services at St. James when she was at Hyde Park. She especially loved Christmas Eve, when she gathered up the houseguests and took them with her. Franklin and the children often had to be coaxed into going. Eleanor believed that the church had a place in an individual’s life, a belief sustained more by the ritual than by theology, and she cherished the intimacy and spirituality of the little church. Local housewives and shopkeepers and river families knelt together, though for a long time the river families maintained separate pews with nameplates on the entries. The Roosevelts occupied the third-row pew on the left, but if a visitor or member happened to be sitting there, Eleanor simply found another seat. The church continued to maintain the Roosevelt pew long after the old pew customs had lapsed. Eleanor faithfully paid her yearly church pledge, put several dollar bills in the collection plate at each service, and sang the hymns she had sung in Grandmother Hall’s home on Sunday nights. The rector knew her well, as did the other parishioners, and after church she sometimes spontaneously invited those who were alone to Val-Kill for lunch. Among the local members was Henrietta Nesbitt, a celebrated baker. Eleanor would order Henrietta’s famous doughnuts to be sent to Albany when Franklin was governor and later brought her to the White House as the housekeeper.

  The Book of Common Prayer contained the language and the services Eleanor had heard all her life. When the priest welcomed all to partake of the Holy Communion, intoning, “Lift up your hearts,” Eleanor and other worshippers responded, “We lift them up unto the Lord,” and met at the marble altar.

  Outside and a few steps away from the church is the graveyard where James and Rebecca, and later Sara, were buried side by side. Nearby is a small stone marking the burial place of Eleanor and Franklin’s fourth child, the first Franklin Jr. She never forgot the burial of her infant child and her horror at leaving him in the cold ground. If for no other reason than that, she could never move away from Hyde Park.

  Nearby Poughkeepsie, the Dutchess County seat, was an agricultural market town where locals gathered to shop. As a child riding the train with her grandmother, Eleanor loved the Poughkeepsie station, where a black man got on and peddled wares from a nearby café. The railroad station was on the west side of town with a view of the river and the industrial properties that lined its banks. Much of Poughkeepsie’s history is tied to the river, home to eighteenth-century sloops and nineteenth-century steamboats carrying passengers and commerce. Vassar College, two miles from the town, was founded in 1865 by Matthew Vassar, Poughkeepsie’s leading citizen. In later years Eleanor would meet students there and make close friends among the faculty women, many of whom shared homes off campus where good food and lively conversations reminded her of her beloved teacher, Mlle. Marie Souvestre, and her adolescent school days at Allenswood, a boarding school for girls in London. Vassar would give her some of the college experience she had never had.

  History had drawn the Roosevelt narrative map, and Eleanor would make her own place on it.

  2: NEW YORK CITY AND THE NEW WOMAN

  Miss Cook and Miss Dickerman and I had become friends in just the way that Miss Lape and Miss Read and I had been first drawn together through the work we were doing. This is one of the most satisfactory ways of making and keeping friends.—Eleanor Roosevelt

  When Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the crowded hotel ballroom in New York City in June 1922, many of the one hundred women present turned to look. Everybody recognized her from the newspaper accounts of her travels with Franklin when he had campaigned as James Cox’s vice president on the unsuccessful 1920 national Democratic ticket, and those who knew her watched the surprise register on the faces of those who were seeing her in person for the first time. She was so much more youthful than she seemed in her photos. Some wondered if her fur wrap had belonged to her mother-in-law, who was already seated near the front (it had). Although Eleanor was nervous about being the keynote speaker for the New York Democratic Women’s fund-raiser, she radiated a magnetic warmth that energized the room.1

  Preparing herself for her maiden speech to a large audience with high expectations of raising money had not been easy. Louis Howe, political mentor and close friend to both Eleanor and Franklin, was all for it. He had been working to build Eleanor’s interest and self-confidence, and they had spent hours on the national vice-presidential campaign trail talking in their train car. Her moods always registered on her face. Howe had commanded her not to laugh when she was nervous and to bring her voice down to a lower pitch. Now if she could only remember his advice: “Have something to say, say it, and then sit down.” In fact, Eleanor did not know what she wanted to say, and she was trembling with anxiety. “I did not know whether I could stand up,” she later remembered.2

  The stakes were high. Women had not yet become the ardent voters and party organizers that suffragists had hoped for, and if Miss Nancy Cook, the organizer of the program, not been so persuasive over the telephone, Eleanor would not have come at all. Perhaps she felt it was time to pay her dues—she had not decided she favored women’s suffrage until Franklin came out for it. There is nothing like a second chance to get it right after failing to be part of what was a historic movement. She confessed to her girlhood friend and bridesmaid, Isabella Greenway, that sometimes she wanted to “disappear & lead a hermit’s life for a year with only my husband & children & real friends to think about.”3 But that had been only a momentary reaction, which she had sometimes expressed as a wish to take a back seat—but only after she had fulfilled her obligations.

  Eleanor had never made a plan for what she wanted as a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law, and her life had been unexpectedly difficult. Like her Uncle Theodore, she could be seized by dark moods, but also like him she had the energy to fight through them. Then, being in the right place—New York City—at the right time, in the 1920s, by sheer pluck she decided to act. Perhaps she had reflected on the meaning of something that Isabella had said recently about their being at an age when “it was hard to mark time” (Eleanor was thirty-seven; Isabella, thirty-five). When troubles come in youth, Isabella had written her, “we are unable to see the whole truth & have abundant strength.” In older age, “we face up to it steadily and splendidly partly thro’ resignation & a sense of finish.” But now, Isabella observed about herself and Eleanor, “ours are the years when clear perception has come & with it the intense desire to live while we may.”4

  Eleanor and Franklin were both surprised when Eleanor developed a knack for politics and for bringing people together. Women found her easy to talk to and quickly saw her as a rising star in Democratic circles. Even some men found her easier to talk to than Franklin—she listened more intently to their ideas, and nothing seemed to surprise or offend her.

  Eleanor had begu
n making a life for herself during World War I when she worked with other Red Cross volunteers in Washington, D.C., and discovered that she loved the physical demands of long hours in a canteen with other women. Acting on her strong sense of duty helped her to alleviate her old feelings of helplessness. The nearly eight years she and Franklin had spent in Washington while Franklin was assistant secretary of the navy had been demanding. Franklin was gone most of the time in a flurry of social rounds, and Eleanor had given birth to John, her last child. Her volunteer work was constant, but Eleanor enjoyed it. The camaraderie with other women sustained her.

  Many women in the progressive campaigns of the 1920s were veterans of the suffrage and labor movements, and they knew how to work. Eleanor had met some of them in the New York City League of Women Voters and had been pleased when Esther Lape, one of the founders, and Esther’s partner, Elizabeth Read, had invited her to chair the legislative committee. Elizabeth, who became Eleanor’s attorney, spent time with her every week at party headquarters and at the apartment she and Esther shared in Greenwich Village, going over the Congressional Record to mark legislation that should be brought to the attention of league members. Eleanor, Esther, and Elizabeth were close friends for the rest of their lives. They were cut from the same cloth of upper-class New York City women with keen minds and an eagerness to embrace progressive causes together and express their own personal freedom. Nobody thought much, at least not openly, about the fact that Eleanor had been late in expressing support for women’s suffrage: veteran suffragists were forgiving. Those present in the room to hear her speak for the Democratic women could say with confidence that she was now one of theirs.

  •

  Eleanor’s work with the Democratic women was particularly important at a time when she was still trying to recover from the pain of her discovery of Franklin’s infidelity. In 1918 Eleanor had been devastated by her awareness of his romance, which put distance between Eleanor and Franklin they were never able to bridge: according to their children, when their father tried to reach out physically to touch her, she rebuffed his efforts; and Eleanor never trusted him again, nor should she have—he was to break his promise never to see Lucy Mercer again. He did see her: for his presidential inaugurations, at private White House dinners, and, ultimately, in Warm Springs, where Lucy was a visitor (among others) at the time of his death. When Eleanor was summoned from Washington to Warm Springs, she discovered that Lucy had been there with Franklin, hurrying away before she arrived. Eleanor’s confrontation with her daughter Anna was bitter when Anna admitted to having helped arrange her father’s secret meetings with Lucy. It took a long time, but Eleanor and Anna were finally able to repair their relationship and became closer as mother and daughter. Lucy had married, giving Eleanor reason to hope, if she was looking for it, that the marriage put an end to Franklin’s interests. But that was not to be the case. Although close friends like Esther Lape believed that Eleanor never stopped loving Franklin, she could not bring herself to forget.