The Three Graces of Val-Kill

by Emily Herring Wilson

  One of Eleanor’s closest friendships in the White House was with the young journalist and political activist Joseph Lash, her bridge to young voters, and the woman he married, Trude Pratt. When she first met Joe in 1939, when he and his compatriots were called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Eleanor was fifty-five years old and in her second term as First Lady. She understood that Joe and his friends were naïve and harbored leftist sentiments, but she did not run away from them or mind being branded a communist herself, as many liberals were. Joe was thirty and newly a partisan of FDR as director of the Youth Division of the National Democratic Committee—though FDR himself was angered by Joe’s rude questions when Eleanor invited them to the White House. Eleanor loved Joe’s youthful idealism, and he became a very close friend of hers, later in a position to become a leading Roosevelt scholar. Joe’s (and his wife Trude’s) close contacts in New York and Val-Kill put him in a position to know and see Eleanor’s life in ways no others had been privileged. His interviews with some of her contemporaries are also invaluable historic documentation. Eleanor trusted him to tell the story as he knew it. His access to her history thus made him one of the most important Roosevelt scholars in a relationship that began with a unique friendship. Joe certainly took advantage of his opportunities, and it might be said that Eleanor took advantage of him. He benefited from knowing the president’s family, and she benefited from the devotion of a young friend, more admiring of her than her own sons.

  13: ARTHURDALE

  Nothing we ever learn in this world is ever wasted and I have come to the conclusion that practically nothing we do ever stands by itself.—Eleanor Roosevelt

  In the first one hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, excitement was in the air. Change was promised, and those who had suffered the most were encouraged to believe that the government would provide them with a better life. No one took more seriously the needs of the most desperate Americans than Eleanor Roosevelt. Hick kept Eleanor up-to-date on conditions with her nightly letters during her travels. She was especially horrified by the filth and squalor of the mining village at Scott’s Run in West Virginia. She asked that Eleanor go see for herself. Immediately, Eleanor was at the wheel of her roadster and on the way to bring help.1

  Eleanor kept readers of her “My Day” columns informed about her trips, alone or with friends, to see the first New Deal resettlement housing project near Morgantown, West Virginia. The trips required her to leave Washington on a night train, to fly on small planes in all kinds of weather (which never bothered her), and sometimes to drive alone along the narrow winding mountain roads, arriving in the dark to rush to a meeting waiting for her in the community center. She sometimes took meals in the homes of some of the residents. She came to know them by name and to care about their households. She cared more about the community that grew up, called Arthurdale for the family that sold the farm to the federal government, than any other single government program, reflecting as it did her concerns that something be done to provide housing, education, and jobs for the poorest Americans, already suffering from the squalid conditions of mining villages.

  Hick, no stranger to childhood poverty, had been disturbed by the way families were living no better than animals in Scott’s Run, named for the sewage stream (the only source of water) flowing through the center of the community of shacks. Eleanor had seen bad conditions in the New York City settlement houses where she volunteered after returning from school in London, and once during their courtship she had taken Franklin to see for himself. He was shocked, he said, never having known people lived that way, an impression that began to change the way the young man, considered to be something of a lightweight, looked at the world. FDR had already known that helping the neediest was going to be the focus of his first government programs, and at the top of the list was housing. As soon as Eleanor had seen Scott’s Run she came home to tell FDR, and at the end of every trip to West Virginia and other federal housing projects she reported to the president on any progress being made. From the beginning many businessmen objected to federal appropriations for what they saw as the responsibility of the private sector, and if the mines failed and the miners lived in poverty, they expected the situation to be corrected by business interests—though starting factories in West Virginia mining towns was unlikely. Their ideas sounded good to some listeners, but Eleanor Roosevelt never kowtowed to the wealthy, and she seized the day. It wasn’t going to be easy—there was a high incidence of illiteracy, the geography of the region was rough, and farming was unsuccessful in many of the rock-bound areas. And Eleanor’s efforts to integrate blacks and Jews into the community of West Virginians met with stout opposition from some of the locals.

  Eleanor always wanted to go into the homes of families she knew in Arthurdale to check on a sick child or to sit in the kitchen while a mother knitted and talked about the family. She insisted that the homes have indoor plumbing, electricity, and a stove—luxuries many families had never known. She immediately involved Nan, who had proved how much she knew about building things in her efforts at Val-Kill, putting her to work starting a crafts shop and a forge and helping design the interiors of the houses, with Eleanor often paying her out of her own pocket. The First Lady took others with her to Arthurdale, enlisting the financial help of her great friend Bernard Baruch, who supported her despite FDR’s growing impatience that not enough progress had been made to resist the howls of the Congress. Eleanor did not care about a congressman’s objections. The image she saw of a child sheltering a pet rabbit so that it would not be eaten for supper never left her. A record of her travels to the West Virginia resettlement project alone was enough to show that she was unsparing in her own efforts to do everything she could. As soon as she was back in the White House, she began calling government offices to ask what they could do.

  Meanwhile, Marion was struggling to keep an exclusive private girls’ school in New York City going, and Nan was running the Democratic women’s office in New York City and the furniture shop in Val-Kill. Both of them made time to go with Eleanor when they could. The roads that ran between Washington, New York, and Val-Kill were long and dark, and Eleanor traveled them without fear. Since the time she had met Clarence Pickett, executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, for her first visit to Arthurdale, she had seen the good that could be done by such organizations and the ways in which FDR’s New Deal programs could help. When she met many of the families, she give them her heart, soon to be followed by her money and advocacy. For years she kept in touch with them, returning yearly to hand out diplomas to the high school graduates and inviting her Arthurdale friends to the White House. Arthurdale represented a forgotten world, and Eleanor would not stand by and do nothing. But the homestead projects, in West Virginia and elsewhere, began to attract more critics than friends.

  •

  There were some critics of Arthurdale within FDR’s administration, especially Harold Ickes, FDR’s secretary of the interior, and many in Congress thought the project was a waste of money. Public hearings and newspaper reports criticized the lack of progress in constructing houses. Indeed, Eleanor and Louis Howe made many mistakes in their rush to tackle the overwhelming needs: the first fifty houses were prefabricated and were inadequate for the site, it was difficult to get a safe water supply, and efforts to start factories failed. Despite all their efforts, very few jobs were created for former miners. In the end, the opposition was virile—the project was “communistic,” Mrs. Roosevelt was a “publicity-seeker,” and she was accused of promoting her own furniture industry at Val-Kill by linking it to the furniture industry Nan had started at Arthurdale. Hick regarded such charges as “Republican-inspired” and, as with other criticisms of the First Lady, she let the public outcry bother her more than it bothered Mrs. Roosevelt. All Eleanor had to do to regain her sense of optimism was to go to Arthurdale, visit in the homes where she knew the families, and be honored at receptions in the community center, where
she enthusiastically took part in the square dancing. Often residents would meet her at the train station and give her a motorcade down the rutted roads to Arthurdale, where residents lined up on either side to wave to her. The children felt that she belonged to them. But congressional opposition won out, and in 1947 the last of the federal funds were cut off, and homes and community buildings were sold to private ownership.

  The first Arthurdale homesteaders were the best advocates: from a hovel to a house was utopia. As one said, “We went to bed in hell and woke up in heaven.” In 1947 they purchased their homes from the federal government and built a community for themselves around the schools and buildings. Despite the many bureaucratic failures and financial losses, Eleanor insisted that the proof of success was in the lives of families who for the first time had homes and land of their own. When she returned to Arthurdale, the families surrounded her with love as she asked about children by name, visited in their houses, and looked at their scrapbooks. “She was,” one of the residents remembered, “the dearest woman I ever knew. She always thought about others.”2

  Today the past is preserved as Arthurdale Heritage, Inc., and the community is on the National Register of Historic Places. Many of the buildings have been restored, homeowners take pride in their houses, and staff and volunteers stage regular programs for visitors. One of the photographs on display shows Eleanor Roosevelt square dancing. Children thought the wife of the president of the United States visited every school and home.

  The path from the White House to Arthurdale, West Virginia, ran through Val-Kill at Hyde Park, New York, where Eleanor and Nan first worked together to start a furniture factory to create jobs. In a stone cottage three women learned the importance of a home of their own. Her own rich background did not keep Eleanor from caring about how poor people lived; in fact, she seemed driven to know, and Marion and Nan, especially, cared too and struggled to keep up. No one seemed to have the energy of Eleanor Roosevelt, and once she went on the road to see for herself, there was no stopping her.

  14: CHANGE COMES TO VAL-KILL

  We kept house in the cottage, and Eleanor kept house in her cottage, and then we all were over at the big house quite a bit, but we had ours separate.—Marion Dickerman

  Eleanor’s move to Washington, D.C., distanced her from Marion and Nan both physically and emotionally, but she also made choices for herself that distanced her even more. In 1932 she rented a third-floor walkup from Esther and Elizabeth at 20 East 11th Street in Greenwich Village. She would use it until 1945 as an escape from the White House, although she and Tommy took bags of correspondence to be answered while they were there. At the apartment Tommy typed Eleanor’s first “My Day” newspaper column for daily syndication (31 December 1935), and it drew more than a thousand letters a week from her readers, most of them women. She invited Earl Miller and her brother, Hall—each increasingly restless—to use the apartment when either needed a place to stay in the city. Although it was a hideaway for Eleanor, the cozy new apartment with Tommy and Esther and Elizabeth nearby also competed with Val-Kill as a sanctuary.

  By the summer of 1936 Eleanor was spending less and less time at Val-Kill and asking Nan to host Eleanor’s family and friends in the guest room. Perhaps Eleanor never verbalized it, but Nan and Marion realized that she had shifted the focus of her life someplace else. Springwood was more welcoming now because Sara and her staff entertained presidential parties, and Sara recognized that Eleanor was essential to her son’s success. FDR left Washington by special train for Hyde Park whenever he felt he could get away.1 At his home in the Hudson Valley he experienced rest and happiness that he found nowhere else. Meetings with his White House advisers were more relaxed, and his staff had adapted themselves to working at Springwood. The locals had to contend with the guard stations on the Albany Post Road, but life at Hyde Park was not much disrupted for the president himself.

  At Val-Kill, the energy had moved away from the cottage and outdoors to the crowded picnics. The comings and goings created problems for Marion and Nan, who lived in the path of it all. Eleanor often took her early morning walks on the trails alone because her frenetic schedule at the White House and her national travels left little personal time.

  Eleanor was ready for a change, and in the summer of 1936 she proposed to Marion and Nan that they take the cottage and she would renovate the shop next door as a home for herself with an apartment for Tommy. Her proposal was not intended to end the friendship. “We kept house in the cottage, and Eleanor kept house in her cottage, and then we all were over at the big house quite a bit, but we had ours separate,” Marion remembered. “That was terribly important from Nan’s point of view and we loved it. We did many, many things together, but that was the way it worked out.”2 As they divided up their common property Eleanor wrote Nan and Marion, “What is mine is thine.”3 But the center had shifted.

  As the shop renovations were nearing completion, Eleanor served notice of another change when she asked that Nan not move the furniture Otto Berge was making for her into her new home. Traditionally, she had depended on Nan to arrange her interiors. Now she wanted to direct where things would go: her books on the new bookshelves, photographs in her upstairs bedroom, a favorite chair and a bed on her sleeping porch. Along with her share of the linens and silver marked with the friends’ initials, Eleanor took a domestic routine of work and play from Val-Kill to her new home. Tommy’s suite of rooms on the first floor included an office where she and Eleanor worked and a living room where guests gathered for cocktails before dinner. (Eleanor herself did not drink, except an occasional glass of wine.) Marion and Nan were left to fill in the empty spaces in the cottage. They moved things around to suit themselves, but Eleanor’s absence became more deeply experienced.

  For a time, the two households existed side by side, less than two hundred feet apart, and Eleanor continued to invite Marion and Nan to picnics and parties. Marion and Nan watched from the margins the comings and goings of the Roosevelts’ many guests—they were not yet outsiders, but no longer were they in the most intimate inner circle either. FDR and Eleanor felt free to use Val-Kill as a picnic site for entertaining official guests, with political discussions conducted at the swimming pool and over lunch. When the prospect of World War II began to ravage Europe, relations with America were intensified, and FDR’s conversations with visiting dignitaries took on much greater significance. A picnic was no longer just a picnic: it was a time to solidify national interests. The fact that FDR found many of his women guests so charming added to the occasion. When Sara welcomed members of the royal families of England (the King and Queen of England visited in June 1939), the Netherlands, and Norway to Springwood, FDR also invited them to Val-Kill and to Top Cottage, which he had built uphill from Eleanor’s house for his retirement years. Nan’s new 16-millimeter camera recorded the famous people who swam in the pool in borrowed bathing suits Marion brought out from the bathhouse (she found one for Winston Churchill) and the women and men in formal dress who sat in the shade (among them Sara Delano Roosevelt, Queen Wilhelmina and her family, Queen Elizabeth and King George VI of England, Princess Martha and Crown Prince Olaf of Norway, and Frances Perkins, secretary of labor). Eleanor, Nan, and Marion dressed more formally now. It had been a decade since Eleanor had ordered knickers made like Nan’s to wear on their camping trips and their travels around the state. Now they often wore white dresses for picnics, Eleanor sometimes balancing her pocketbook on one arm as she roasted a hot dog. Nan wore her white dresses into the woodworking shop. Change had come to Val-Kill in many ways.

  The landscape had changed too, moving closer to a designed landscape that said “welcome.” The bridge and roads were improved. FDR planted more trees, especially northern white cedars. In 1935 the old pool had been filled in. A modern new pool built by the terrace near the cottage became a focal point for entertaining. On their side, Marion and Nan added patios and garden furniture. It seemed that Nan in particular was determined to put her sta
mp on the place while all about her the Roosevelts’ political cronies clamored for attention. One of the most pleasant additions was an orchard in the meadow across from the creek for raspberries, blueberries, grapes, apple and pear trees, and bee hives.

  Nan added formal beds and enclosed porches and a loggia. She planted for seasonal color, using not only native plants but exotics as well. There were flowering shrubs, boxwoods, and vines of beautiful wisteria, clematis, and the heavenly blue morning glories that were Nan’s favorites. Spirea, dogwood, mock oranges, and Eleanor’s favorites—tea roses and bulbs, especially snowdrops—colored the landscape. Eleanor especially enjoyed the cutting garden, making her own small selections of flowers to bring into her house. She wanted a natural, low-maintenance landscape around her, and the garden reflected her wishes with seasonal bulbs and annuals planted by Charles Curnan, who worked for the Roosevelts. In autumn Eleanor delighted in the goldenrods and black-eyed Susans that grew along the roadside. The rough natural setting that had been the private picnic spot for Franklin, Eleanor, and Nan became nothing fancy and yet, perhaps, the most famous political playground in America. A personal vision of three women and Franklin to give the women a place to relax had lasting consequences.