FDR - Jean Edward Smith [135]
ELEVEN
GOVERNOR
Now what follows is really private. In case of your election I know your salary is smaller than the one you get now. I am prepared to make up the difference to you.
—SARA TO FRANKLIN, OCTOBER 2, 1928
FROM 1925 TO 1928 Franklin and Eleanor were together infrequently.1 The children were away, at either boarding school or university; Eleanor had begun her career teaching at the Todhunter School with Marion Dickerman; and FDR was in the South, either on the Larooco or at Warm Springs, Georgia, hoping to regain the use of his legs. Both remained in close contact with Democratic politics. Eleanor edited the newsletter of the Women’s Division (Women’s Democratic News), while Franklin continued his voluminous correspondence with party officials all over the country. In many respects ER operated as Roosevelt’s surrogate, but it was not always a frictionless relationship. “One of the great quarrels Eleanor had with her lot,” said Frances Perkins, “is that Franklin didn’t listen to her.… He liked her as a reporter, but when most men would have asked their wives what they thought, he didn’t.”2
FDR was genuinely fond of Eleanor’s friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman—whom he called “our gang”—and often assumed the role of a gracious and generous paterfamilias.3 They, in turn, were devoted to promoting his career and enjoyed the bonds of friendship established through Eleanor. It was Franklin, in fact, who originated the idea of a home for the three women on Val-Kill at Hyde Park, donated the land, and supervised the construction.
Dickerman remembered a wonderful Saturday afternoon in the late summer of 1924 when she, Eleanor, Nan Cook, and FDR were picnicking on the wooded banks of Val-Kill, two miles east of the Roosevelt house. ER noted that it was likely their last picnic of the year because Sara would soon close the estate for the winter.
“But aren’t you girls silly?” said Franklin. “This isn’t mother’s land. I bought this acreage myself. And why shouldn’t you three have a cottage here of your own, so you could come and go as you please? If you’ll mark out the land you want, I’ll give you a life interest in it, with the understanding that it reverts to my estate upon the death of the last survivor.”4
A deed was drawn up and witnessed by Louis Howe, and on August 5 FDR wrote a contractor friend of his, “My missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods and want, instead of a beautiful marble bath, to have the stream dug out so as to form an old-fashioned swimming hole.”5 The resulting retreat was far from a shack in the backwoods. It was agreed that the cottage should be built of fieldstone in the traditional Hudson River Dutch style. Franklin handled the design, paid for a proper swimming pool, and added a big gray stucco building at the rear in which Eleanor and her friends hoped to establish a furniture workshop.
FDR christened the finished house “The Honeymoon Cottage,” which was not far off the mark. Initially Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy slept together in a single, loftlike dormitory bedroom. Much of the furniture, made by Nancy Cook and her assistants, bore the women’s initials: E. M. N. Eleanor embroidered towels and linens for the cottage, likewise emblazoned E. M. N., and the three women received housewarming gifts of silver, crystal, and china engraved with their initials intertwined. Franklin frequently gave Eleanor presents for the cottage, especially plantings and picnic accessories. He inscribed a children’s book, Little Marion’s Pilgrimage, to Dickerman: “For my little Pilgrim, whose progress is always upward and onward, to the Things of Beauty and the Thoughts of Love, and of Light, from her affectionate Uncle Franklin.”6 He autographed