Eleanor was a great favorite with Berge. He liked for her to wander down from the cottage to watch him work in the shop, which Marion described as “light and airy and filled with the pungent odor of wood.” Berge admired Mrs. Roosevelt, “so broad minded and so fair and square, an extremely intelligent personality.” He was especially impressed that she didn’t mind that he was a Republican.4
To this team Nan added Matthew Famiglietti, a friend of Landolfa’s from the vocational school, to manage the finishing room. Although the shop did hire local boys from time to time, the industry never was able to attract enough of them to fulfill the women’s hopes of keeping young men employed in the country. Although records are incomplete, at its highest level Val-Kill hired some eighteen employees.
In 1934, when the women decided to add weaving to their enterprise, they went to Asheville, North Carolina, to study the Biltmore weaving shop operated by Fred Seeley, who had taken it over when Mrs. Vanderbilt had given up her projects at Biltmore. Seeley had some twenty weavers who wove homespun, which they dyed with special natural dyes. Seeley gave the women a loom and also offered to provide instruction for anyone they wanted to send to learn as his guest. When they returned to Val-Kill, they discovered that Nelly Johannesen, a Swedish woman familiar with handicrafts who had opened a tearoom at the entrance to Val-Kill the previous year, was eager to learn to weave. When Eleanor told her about the opportunity to travel to Asheville, she wanted to go. It was a turning point in Nelly’s life. She learned to make cloth, including some used in making suits for the president. Her weaving enterprise was mostly independent of the furniture shop, but it gave an added attraction to Val-Kill.
Next, Val-Kill workers started a forge run by Otto Berge’s brother, Arnold. He and his two assistants turned out more than fifty items, mostly pewter—porringers, matchbox covers, plates, cups, cheese slicers, lamps, cups, inkwells, vases—everything stamped with the Val-Kill name. In all these ways—training craftsmen, producing quality products, and developing a center of activities in a rural part of the state—Val-Kill was an amazing success for much of a decade, during the most challenging economic times in American history. That four women without much business experience defied the odds against them is in itself a feminist story.
•
Val-Kill Industries started off going full steam. In addition to making the furniture for Stone Cottage, it was time to make furniture for Franklin’s new cottage in Warm Springs. Nan went to Georgia to consult with Franklin about what he would need and returned with plans to build Val-Kill pieces for him. Knowing FDR’s admiration for Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor, Marion, and Nan went to Jefferson’s home in Monticello and were impressed by a special chair and table Jefferson used when making his drawings. The table had a second top that could be turned so that Jefferson did not have to stand to see his plans from the opposite side. Nan realized that such a table and chair would enable Franklin to work in a similar manner, and she received permission to make special drawings so that she could reproduce both the table and the chair, which are now in the Little White House at Warm Springs. They also were allowed to borrow Jefferson’s music rack, which Nan used to design several reproductions to be used as magazine racks. In a visit to Campobello in the summer of 1936 Eleanor wrote in her 24 July “My Day” column about the pleasure of watching Miss Cook and Miss Dickerman rearranging what Eleanor called the children’s “old school room” with Val-Kill furniture.
Nan sometimes invited prospective Val-Kill furniture buyers to Stone Cottage to see Val-Kill furniture in an ideal setting that encouraged individuality. The women were willing to sacrifice some privacy in order to show off the furniture, and as a bonus buyers got to see the way the three friends lived. Visitors looking at the 1933 photograph of the living room at the stone house would probably have agreed that it was a room they would like to have in their own houses.
Elinor and Henry Morgenthau sent in a big order for furniture, as did Caroline O’Day; Sara Delano Roosevelt ordered tables for the James Roosevelt Memorial Library in Hyde Park. The shop also made furniture for the children’s room in the National History Museum in Buffalo. Throughout the 1930s, Eleanor, writing on White House stationery, ordered furniture, pewter, and small wooden pieces that bore the president’s seal, instructing Nan to send them as gifts to various family members and friends. There wasn’t a business like it in America; almost overnight the shop’s products, sponsored by the First Lady in the White House, were in the public eye.
It was a heady time. Newspaper and magazine reporters enjoyed featuring articles about Val-Kill, highlighting the fact that it was a business owned by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and making small mention of the other partners. Eleanor often opened her house on East 65th Street in New York City to exhibit the furniture. There was a display store at 331 Madison Avenue (not coincidentally, the office of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee), and furniture was exhibited at the Bush Terminal Sales Building, the Macbeth Gallery, and the Elsie de Wolf shop. The fact that Val-Kill furniture was modeled on pieces from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and exhibited in art galleries reinforced its aesthetic importance. For nine years, from 1927 through 1936, Val-Kill sold to department stores, direct from the factory, through catalog sales, and at the annual New York City sale.
Although the American arts and crafts movement was in decline by the 1930s, there were still currents of interest, and Nan’s shop put Val-Kill on the map for its reproductions of early American furniture. Today Val-Kill furniture is as scarce as hen’s teeth, and collectors scour the Internet looking for butterfly drop-leaf tables, walnut gate-leg tables, a desk-on-frame, leather-upholstered Cromwell chairs, trestle tables, desks, chests, mirrors, dressing tables, and pewter. Some pieces are on public display today in Stone Cottage and at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, and the principal collector, Richard Cain, maintains an active website. At Val-Kill, Eleanor and Nan had become businesswomen with practical experience, although Nan’s focus was on the furniture itself. Any profits they made, and these were small, were returned to the business. Eleanor was not out to make money, but she liked what she could do with it. In her autobiography she explained that the money she earned writing and in radio work enabled her to do many things on her own. She used most of the money she earned to fund her favorite projects. When she began seeing what her money could do, the struggle to keep Val-Kill Industries going at anything like full capacity began to weigh on her.
Historians of the New Deal also point out that Eleanor Roosevelt’s experiences at Val-Kill led to her advocacy for national programs in arts and crafts that became part of the New Deal’s cultural outreach. She took Nan many times to the New Deal community in Arthurdale, West Virginia, the federal resettlement project that has been called “Eleanor’s Little Village,” where Nan gave instructions on starting a craft shop.5 Isabella Greenway, in the same year that Eleanor, Marion, and Nan founded Val-Kill Industries, founded Arizona Hut, where World War I veterans made furniture and their wives made needlepoint products to supplement their pensions. Isabella, like Eleanor, purchased herself most of the furniture made in her shop, and in 1930 she used much of it to open her new enterprise, the Arizona Inn in Tucson, which is family-operated today.
Although FDR is credited with having encouraged his “gang” to start a furniture factory to give employment to local boys and men to supplement their farm income and keep them from leaving for jobs elsewhere, those who worked at Val-Kill Industries did not think he ever took much of an interest in what they were doing. The idea, however, was consistent with FDR’s experiments to give employment to local workers. In this way Val-Kill Industries was a precursor to other New Deal projects. Although it closed after almost a decade, it deserves a place in women’s history at a time when few women had opportunities to become entrepreneurs.
11: THE TODHUNTER SCHOOL
Even in those days, you knew [Eleanor Roosevelt] was a grea
t woman.
—Anne Ward Gilbert
In 1927, five years after Marion had begun teaching English at the Todhunter School on New York’s East Side, she approached Eleanor with an idea that they go into partnership together and buy the school. The director at the time, Winifred Todhunter, had purchased the private school for girls in 1921 and renamed it; now she was ready to retire and return to her native England. She asked Marion, her vice principal, if she wanted to acquire the school, and Marion, who knew how important Allenswood had been to Eleanor when she was young, rushed to sound her out on that possibility. As an experienced administrator Marion knew a good teacher when she saw one, and she believed that Eleanor Roosevelt was a “natural.” Later in her White House press conferences for women, reporters admired the way in which Eleanor Roosevelt opened up the conferences for questions and answers, like a classroom.
Miss Todhunter, an Oxford University graduate, had given the Todhunter School a reputation for progressive teaching that emphasized a college preparatory program as well as courses in the arts. Students, daughters of privilege, mostly from neighborhoods bordered by Park Avenue and Central Park, were enrolled from primary grades through high school. Although most of the other elite schools did not admit Jewish girls, Todhunter had a small number, including two who were elected by their classmates to head the upper and lower schools.1 The faculty were women with career ambitions, some of them graduates of the best colleges. One was Margaret Clapp, whom Marion urged to continue her graduate education. Clapp taught English literature at the Todhunter School for twelve years while working on her master’s degree, which she obtained from Columbia University in 1937. She went on to teach at City College of New York, Douglass College, Columbia University, and Brooklyn College. In 1949 she became president of Wellesley College, her alma mater. Marion was sometimes overlooked as sitting quietly in the corner (Frances Perkins said so), but she had a good eye for picking leaders.
Eleanor was thrilled to hear Marion’s proposal. She agreed immediately to form a partnership with Marion and Nan as the owners of Todhunter. (Nan’s partnership was in name only; her job was at the New York Democratic Women’s office and at the Val-Kill furniture factory.) The stationery was imprinted with the school’s new leadership:
The Todhunter School
66 East 80th Street, New York City,
Telephone: Rhinelander 6478
Honorary Principal, Miss W. A. Todhunter;
Principal, Miss Marion Dickerman;
Associate Principal, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt
There was no mistaking that last name. But if having Eleanor join the school meant a good deal to Marion, it also engendered some controversy because most of the girls’ families were Republicans, some with outright disdain for FDR’s politics. On balance, however, the Roosevelt name would give immediate distinction to Todhunter, and Marion was eager to make it happen.
Eleanor’s letter in response to Marion’s proposal about the school, written while she was with Franklin and his friends (unhappily) on the Larooco houseboat in Florida, revealed a good deal about Eleanor’s growing ambitions for what she might learn to do. She immediately addressed her concerns:
I think you ought to take the 1st place for the first year with the understanding that you have no financial responsibility. It will be easier for you to settle in that way & when Miss Todhunter and Miss Burrell [presumably Todhunter’s colleague] depart, then I’ll slip in & do all I can for you but I feel strongly that you have to find out gradually what I can do. The one or two afternoons a week sound easy & I’ll talk over the course with you but associate principals for the good of the school should have college degrees & I think I’d better be something less high sounding! I’d rather not have any financial consideration enter into the first year as I would consider that I was being paid in experience and the next year if we assumed joint financial responsibility then we could arrange some percent of profit after your salary & all expenses were paid. I think it will be quite thrilling for it is your gift & it would be a crime for you not to use it & I know you can make a great success. It is going to be such fun to work with you & Nan & you are dears to let me join in it all for I’d never have had the initiative or the ability in any one line to have done anything interesting alone!2
Eleanor taught the older girls, believing it was harder to teach young children, and she gave courses in American history, English and American literature, and current events. Her six years at Todhunter were some of the happiest of her life. “I like it better than anything else I do,” she told a reporter, this despite that after Franklin was elected governor in 1928 and again in 1930 she had to commute from Albany to the city two and a half days a week, which even she admitted was strenuous. When the legislature was not in session, she commuted from Hyde Park. She left by train Sunday night, went to Todhunter Monday, Tuesday, and a half-day on Wednesday, returned to the house on East 65th Street to catch up on other work, and took a train back to Albany in time to host an afternoon open house at the governor’s mansion. In her absence Missy LeHand, FDR’s secretary, was hostess at Albany and had everything ready for Eleanor to step in and serve as the governor’s First Lady. Often Eleanor and Marion made the trip together, catching up on school news. Although Eleanor had learned to drop off quickly for short naps when she was traveling, she frequently had to grade batches of papers.
One of the happiest days of Eleanor’s Todhunter life was in the fall of 1932 when she took her first grandchild, Anna’s daughter, Ellie, to enroll in the first grade. Eleanor’s students were always on her mind—in letters to Franklin she complained when they weren’t doing well and wondered how as their teacher she could do better. Among the most distinctive aspects of her classes, for those whose parents allowed it, were visits to city courts and tenement districts, where the students spent hours listening and learning. She wanted to expose them to lives unlike their own and to make the government “real and alive” for them. Like Mlle. Souvestre of Allenswood in England, she demanded that her students think for themselves and not simply give back what they heard her say or what they had read in their textbooks. These field trips became the most memorable aspects of the students’ years at Todhunter. In addition to teaching, Eleanor met with students and parents and hosted lunches for school anniversaries. After FDR was elected president, she withdrew from the faculty, but she sometimes offered a class for graduates and their friends. As regularly as clockwork she arranged trips for Todhunter faculty and students to come to the White House and tour the Capitol.
Eleanor loved teaching, and she was very good at it. She taught small classes and gave the students a lot of personal attention, and they loved her. In the mornings Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Dickerman, robed in academic gowns, greeted the girls as they entered the building. Eleanor was both intellectually and emotionally engaged with the students, as dominant a figure as Mlle. Souvestre had been at Allenswood. She wanted to pass along the legacy of her great teacher, and she did. She had rigorous standards and was a tough grader. She challenged her students’ assumptions and prejudices, telling them, “Learn new things and see new things with your own eyes.” Her teaching had tapped into one of the “real springs of life.”3
Anne Ward (Gilbert) lived right across the street from the Roosevelts on East 65th, and she and her family were often asked over to dinner. When Anne enrolled at Todhunter School she studied history and drama with Mrs. Roosevelt. “She was absolutely fantastic—the way to learn, and the willingness to learn, and everything. And she was so vivacious. . . . I think anybody who had her as a teacher or as a friend learned so much and received so much from her. . . . She was always nervous, always shy, even when she was teaching. You could tell. She was very humble. . . . Even in those days you knew she was a great woman.”4 Anne also admired Marion Dickerman and insisted that she never saw any “hard feelings” between Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Dickerman. After graduating in 1928 from Todhunter, Anne continued to stay in touch with both women. After Mrs. Roose
velt’s death and the children’s sale of the Roosevelt property, Anne’s family auction business in Garrison, New York, handled an estate sale.
12: THE WHITE HOUSE
The more you live in a “gold-fish bowl,” the less people really know about you!
—Eleanor Roosevelt
After FDR’s election as president, Eleanor had decidedly mixed feelings. Glad for him that he had fulfilled his ambition, she nevertheless feared that moving to the White House meant giving up her own freedom. As she spent more of her time away from Val-Kill, Marion and Nan could not help her as often, and they were to feel the loss more deeply than Eleanor, who, after all, had much to attend to. She had become adept at managing a schedule that defies easy understanding even today.1 She found help in confronting her fears by stepping out on her own. She did this most effectively in the way she had learned to do, by quickly making a new friend—Lorena Hickok, called “Hick,” an Associated Press reporter assigned her during the last month of FDR’s presidential campaign. They were very different in background. Hick’s was working class, and she was a seasoned professional journalist. She knew the ways of newspaper people, and she could help Mrs. Roosevelt negotiate the terrain. Then, as they spent time together on the campaign trail, they began to share stories of their unhappy childhoods. Very quickly they recognized in each other the need for friendship. Perhaps the most astute “reading” of Eleanor Roosevelt at the time of FDR’s first term was Hickok’s immediate recognition (watching her expressions in public) that Mrs. Roosevelt was a “reluctant First Lady.” Sensing Eleanor’s vulnerability made it easy for Hick to know her needs. “Mrs. R.,” as Hick often called her, was open and generous. An intimate relationship began that was to change over time, but their loyalty to one another never wavered.2
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 12