The Three Graces of Val-Kill

by Emily Herring Wilson

  When Eleanor, Marion, and Nan moved into the cottage, they could not remove themselves from Eleanor’s family. Franklin and the children complicated their lives in ways that they seem not to have considered. Even after the children were adults, Eleanor was still a mother, perhaps with a greater sense of duty to try to make up for what she had felt was her neglect in earlier years. She rushed to their bedsides when they were sick; visited their houses, spread out across the country, to get to know their families; sent them money when they needed it (which they often did); and tried to be available whenever they turned up and to keep their father informed of their latest decisions (he was often unavailable). Despite her disappointments, she accepted their divorces (she encouraged Anna’s love affair with John Boettiger, whom Anna later married) and her new daughters-in-law. Increasingly, Anna became closer to her mother, but the boys turned more often to their grandmother, who continued to supply them with cars, money, and houses. (Sara’s gift of a house as a wedding present for Anna and Curtis Dall—without telling Eleanor—hurt Eleanor deeply.)

  Marion and Nan were aware of the dramas always going on in the Roosevelt family. Looking after young boys on a camping trip, however, had been easy compared with trying to keep up with willful adults. Years earlier, Marion and Nan as partnered women had simplified their lives even as they made a deliberate choice to be a couple without children, a relationship that lasted for a half-century. Eleanor assumed that Marion and Nan could look after each other. Her children could not. So, as Eleanor’s and Franklin’s public lives became more complicated, Marion and Nan had reason to feel unsettled. They were living close to one of the great unfolding stories of American political life. The future was still uncertain, and how future events would affect them in terms of being able to live normal lives remained to be seen.

  Eleanor could never quite persuade herself that she had done enough to help the less fortunate, which is why she seldom had leisure time. She was not reluctant to pick up hitchhikers and bring them home. Eleanor regularly invited troubled New York City boys from the Wiltwyck School across the river. One of them, Claude Brown, grew up to describe in Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) the “lady with the squeaky voice” who welcomed him and his Wiltwyck schoolmates to her picnics. And not only did Eleanor and Franklin have a large family that produced many grandchildren, but there were also the children of Eleanor’s friends and of staff members and neighbors. Nan’s pictures show the swimming pool full of local children, whose parents kept their own scrapbooks of the occasions. Whether you were the chauffeur or the cook or the gardener, you were part of life at Val-Kill.

  Marion especially, and Nan too, loved to invite children of nearby families over to sit on their patio and play with their dog, Dean. They took the children for walks, told them stories, and helped them with their lessons. Marion and Nan were very good “aunts,” and when the Roosevelt boys rebelled at having Marion as their tutor, it was not for want of love on Marion’s part. Rebellious boys often do not like to be made to do their lessons. Marion and Nan initially knew very little about bringing up children and nothing about Eleanor as a mother. They learned how to be easy with the two younger boys, gamely keeping up with their adventures. And they tried to follow the adult children’s lives and marriages. Eleanor’s family was a complicating factor. She expected loyalty to her adult children, no matter how often she herself privately despaired of their behavior. And if Marion and Nan took the children’s side in some dispute, Eleanor could bristle with jealousy.

  One wonders how much Marion and Nan came to understand about Eleanor and motherhood. Did they praise her for the children’s successes or blame her for their failures? How often were they overwhelmed by Eleanor’s large family and unsure what their roles in it were supposed to be? The children wandered down on weekends to swim in the pool. Sometimes Brud and John spent the night at the cottage. Once Brud was late for lunch, and Marion waited for him. When he finally got to the cottage, he explained breathlessly that he had just seen a calf born. When he asked if that was the way babies were born, Marion said, “Pretty much.”3 She and Nan understood that boys would be boys. They once overturned Marion’s boat in the water. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t refuse to let them use it afterward. Was Eleanor as lenient? Did Marion and Nan compete with her for the children’s attention?

  The 1920s was an extremely busy decade for the Roosevelts, and it is no wonder that the children felt neglected by their parents. Eleanor and Franklin were often out of town, and the children were left with Granny, which was a good thing for them because she was affectionate and constant, if overindulgent. Why a mother gets blamed for neglect and a father does not is a book unto itself. The boys became increasingly quarrelsome with one another, and Eleanor tried to stay out of the way. Franklin tolerated their dinner-table discussions with great jocularity. Eleanor must have left the table in anger and tears on more than one occasion. She wrote Marion and Nan that the boys made her feel stupid when she tried to discuss a subject they thought she knew nothing about. During a lunch with Rose Schneiderman and Maud Swartz at Campobello, Eleanor had spoken freely of her interest in trade unions. Later she wrote Marion and Nan, “I was left as I always am with the boys, feeling quite impotent to make a dent. . . . [They] regard me as a woman to be dutifully and affectionately thought of because I am their mother, but . . . I hold queer opinions [that] can’t be considered seriously as against those of their usual male environment!” Rose later wrote in her autobiography that Eleanor was “a born trade unionist.”4 Marion and Nan were often at such family dinners and heard the discussions. If they defended Eleanor, neither Marion nor Eleanor ever said so.

  On an evening at the dinner table at Springwood in 1929, as Marion described in her interview many years later, there was a disagreement with Mama because Eleanor announced her intention to take the younger boys and drive with Marion and Nan in their own car on a European tour. Sara thought that mode of travel was unacceptable for the governor’s wife. When Brud said that if his mother drove she would probably land them in a ditch, Eleanor left the table in tears, and FDR sent the boy to apologize to his mother. Eleanor returned and then agreed that Nan and Marion would take their Buick and she would rent a car and driver, satisfying her mother-in-law and casting a shadow over the trip. Marion reported the disagreement in an interview, but she did not say that she followed Eleanor out of the room to wipe away Eleanor’s tears. Instead, Marion said, “Brother paid very dearly for that remark. Eleanor could be very hard.”5 Marion and Nan were privy to the innermost workings of the Roosevelt family, which put them at both an advantage and a disadvantage. They had reason to feel like insiders; at the same time, they were wary of making someone angry and risking their favored places.

  As far as we know from what Marion said, she generally did not take Eleanor’s side in arguments. She was inclined, however, to defend Franklin and Granny. Indeed, Marion’s remembrances are curiously lacking in sympathy for Eleanor. It is Franklin’s good humor, courage, and broad-mindedness that Marion singled out for special commendation. (This attitude is frequently borne out in interviews with Marion cited in Kenneth Davis’s Invincible Summer.) She applauded, for example, Franklin sending Brud to apologize to his mother for insulting her and telling him to bring her back to the table. Perhaps Marion and Nan knew to leave well enough alone. Or perhaps that night was one of the times when Eleanor went back to the cottage and spent the night talking with Marion and Nan, being consoled there.

  Marion’s relationship with the boys reached a turning point in the summer of 1929 on the trip to Europe. Brud was celebrating his fifteenth birthday, and John was thirteen. The women’s ages did not much matter—the boys thought they were all the same: old (Marion was thirty-nine; Eleanor and Nan were forty-five). The problem was that the teenage boys had three “mothers” along—not exactly a formula for an easy family vacation.6

  Eleanor angrily acceded to Granny’s demands and rented (and paid for) a fine car and chauffeur
to travel with Brud and John through Europe; Marion and Nan had their car shipped over to drive themselves. All travel with family is challenging, and Eleanor had already been unnerved by Mama’s insistence that they travel first class as befitted the family of the governor of New York. The journey thus started out on a false note for Eleanor. (The first steps in a trip usually set the stage, don’t they?) As the trip progressed, Marion played up to the boys, until finally Eleanor agreed to let Marion celebrate Brud’s birthday (17 August) by having him drive alone with her in her car, with Eleanor, John, and Nan going in the other car.

  Marion remembered the trip as adventurous. The boys themselves seem never to have spoken of traveling with Marion and Nan, although usually they were asked only about their parents. They argued and fought all along the way, which unsettled Eleanor. Marion simply remembered it as the normal behavior of active boys, and she never lost her love for young Franklin. She did arrange a magical evening in which she hired a boatman to take the group to Mont St. Michel as the tide came in. It was close to a religious experience for the three women. They remembered Eleanor having had read Henry Adams’s Mont St. Michel and Chartres aloud to them at Campobello.

  But such happy moments were few. When the summer ended and the women and boys came home, Eleanor said she would never do it again; and indeed, it was the friends’ last trip with the boys. The demands the trip placed on their friendship were heavy—three women not in complete agreement about how to handle teenage boys, and Marion eager to have her own special experience with Brud on his birthday. Eleanor was left feeling like a spoilsport, a role she sometimes assigned herself. Eleanor later took her grandchildren with her on various world trips, and they were enchanted. By then Eleanor was full of confidence as a famous traveler, and the children treasured the special time with their grandmother. So perhaps the journey in 1929 was not really wasted time—Eleanor’s mistakes with her own children led her to play a more confident role with her grandchildren.

  After Marion and Nan had moved to Connecticut, Eleanor’s son John and his wife, Anne, and their children lived in the cottage. When their first two children, Nina and Haven, contracted polio (1952), they were moved next door to their grandmother’s house, where she insisted that they be cared for by her doctor, David Gurewitsch. Nina became especially close to her grandmother and to Dr. Gurewitsch, who continued to treat her after they moved to New York City. She especially remembered summer visits to Val-Kill and the time her grandmother took her and numerous cousins for a picnic on the nearby estate of a Livingston relative (Eleanor was kin to the Livingstons on her mother’s side of the family; one of the most famous was Robert Livingston, a member of a wealthy Hudson Valley family and a signer of the Declaration of Independence). When Eleanor knocked on the Livingstons’ door, Mrs. Livingston shouted, “Go away, Eleanor!” “I so well remember the veiled surprise on my grandmother’s face,” Nina said, “but, never one to be daunted by small inconveniences; we were to have our lovely picnic regardless of Mrs. Livingston having forgotten that she had invited us in the first place.”7 They drove down a dirt road toward the river and found their own picnic spot. And thus a lesson about not being “daunted by small inconveniences” surfaced in memory more than a half-century later.

  10: VAL-KILL INDUSTRIES

  The cottage was not an end in itself.—Eleanor Roosevelt

  Val-Kill was not just a weekend retreat. It was an accommodating community where women could meet and talk over a range of interests. The three friends worked together on a number of significant projects, and they started early. In 1925 Eleanor, Marion, and Nan, along with Elinor Morgenthau and Caroline O’Day, took over a mimeographed bulletin from the New York Democratic Women’s Division with its office in New York City and turned it into a monthly magazine, the Women’s Democratic News.1 All the women at one time or another suggested topics, wrote articles, and served as editors. They soon encountered interference, especially from Louis Howe, who liked to run things for FDR’s benefit, so they learned to do it all themselves—to make up a dummy, proofread, and take it to press. Eleanor proved to be a successful fund raiser, selling ads to support the publication. Each of the women wrote columns under her own byline, describing their various activities. The favorite feature was a regular article from one of the women called “Trooping for Democracy,” which was about their travels to organize local Democratic chapters in the state.

  In her November 1925 column Caroline O’Day wrote to readers, “When politics is through with us we are retiring to this charming retreat that is now rearing its stone walls against the beautiful cedars of a Dutchess County hillside. Here we mean to embark on an absolutely new enterprise.”2 This is a rather mysterious comment because there is no other evidence that Caroline ever intended to live at Val-Kill (her papers have never been archived). She was a delegate to Democratic Party national conventions and was active in many of the same women’s organizations as Eleanor, Marion, and Nan. She shared Eleanor’s peace sentiments and carried them further—she was an ardent pacifist. Her most ambitious undertaking still lay ahead in 1934, when she would be elected to Congress as an at-large New York representative. She would serve four terms. She and Marion, who looked somewhat alike with their long, serious faces and dark dresses, were close friends and often met for lunch when both were in the city.

  Caroline must have been caught up in the free spirit of Val-Kill to make its existence so public. What holds our attention is the language itself: nowhere do we find Val-Kill more handsomely described. If we take her at her word, we must assume that she was thinking of it as a “retreat.” We can only speculate that the four women were considering living together, and that in itself suggests that they were thinking of the cottage on the Val-Kill as a place for women to live communally. Although Caroline was to spend nights there, she never made it the home that Eleanor, Marion, and Nan did. But clearly she thought about it, which is sometimes the way of a woman’s expansive and private dreams. Presumably, “the absolutely new enterprise” that she mentioned was Val-Kill Industries, the furniture factory that the women would build next door to the cottage. Caroline would go on to serve as a sort of “honorary” vice-president, contribute financially to the business, and write articles to publicize their efforts.

  Val-Kill Industries was meant to address a growing problem. Although the Great Depression was still several years away, there was already a pressing need in Dutchess County and other rural districts to provide jobs for young men to keep them from leaving their family farms, an ideal that was never very successful. Nan thought that perhaps the men could be trained to make high-quality reproduction American furniture; in time, women would be employed in the weaving shop. The colonial revival and arts and crafts movements had demonstrated a national interest in finely crafted furniture, and the three women saw an opportunity to exploit that interest, to create local jobs, and to help keep rural America intact. Val-Kill Industries would produce a decade of crafts that remain American collectibles.

  The shop at Val-Kill was a bold enterprise, with Nan as the “driving spirit” behind it.3 She had woodworking skills and loved to make things (Eleanor said, in a statement that is often quoted, that Nan could do “anything with her hands”), and Eleanor had the necessary contacts and was excellent at promoting others (an early brochure described the enterprise as “Val-Kill Shop, Roosevelt Industries, Hyde Park, New York”). The first sign of what Nan intended appears on early blueprints as a small workshop inside the cottage itself, but that limited idea was abandoned as Nan’s ambitions developed. Instead, the women built a separate two-story cinder-block building about two hundred feet from the cottage that would be expanded as the business grew. Although the women had shared equally in the costs of the cottage, Eleanor assumed the major costs of constructing the shop building, and Nan selected the equipment from New York suppliers. In search of furniture designs, Nan, Eleanor, and Marion went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to learn from the master curators of American design.
Morris Schwartz, an authority on restoring early American furniture, took a personal interest in the women’s plans and visited the shop several times to encourage Nan and her staff.

  Nan developed recipes for stains and an elaborate finishing process to give furniture a special sheen, and she sketched drafts for individual pieces that a part-time draftsman converted into blueprints and templates. She set out to hire the best wood craftsmen she could find, and her first three hires were exceptional. On Christmas Day 1926 she was able to persuade Frank Salvatore Landolfa to move from New York City and join the Val-Kill shop. He was an Italian immigrant from a family of cabinetmakers and woodworkers who had met Eleanor Roosevelt when he was a teacher in a vocational program in New York. He and Nan bought machinery and workbenches and set up the shop in early 1927. His first job was to make furniture for the cottage. To alleviate his misgivings about leaving behind his life in the city, Eleanor arranged for him to take a night class to learn to speak better English and provided him with room and board and driving lessons for a car she helped him purchase.

  The second skilled woodworker Nan hired was Otto Berge, a self-taught cabinetmaker who had come to Long Island from Norway in 1913. Nan interviewed him in New York City and hired him, and he came to work at the shop in the summer of 1927. He was especially proud of the chest-on-chest he made for the White House during the first year of FDR’s presidency. He regarded himself, not Nan, as the master craftsman and took great pride in quality craftsmanship. He did not think Nan was a skilled craftsman or even ran a good shop, but he did not complain to Mrs. Roosevelt, knowing that she would never think anything wrong about a friend. However, he was thrust into the middle of a conflict between Mrs. Roosevelt and Nan when Eleanor rejected frames that she had ordered as gifts because they were not made out of old wood from the White House, as she had requested. It was the occasion for a quarrelsome exchange of letters between Eleanor and Nan, who insisted that Berge had used old wood. When Mrs. Roosevelt returned to Val-Kill and discussed things with Berge, he told her that Nan had always known that the wood was new and that she had required him to make the frames anyway. In an interview years later, Berge described his dislike of Nan and his belief that he had opened Eleanor’s eyes to Nan’s failures. Whether or not Berge’s complaints, as documented in the interview, influenced Eleanor’s later decision to close the shop cannot be documented.