FDR - Jean Edward Smith [136]
The cottage became the focus of the women’s lives. Nancy and Marion retained their Greenwich Village apartment, but it was merely a place to stay during the week until they could go home to Val-Kill. For Eleanor, the life she now led came close to re-creating the rebellious feminism she had enjoyed under the tutelage of Mlle. Marie Souvestre at Allenwood. The swimming pool was always open to Franklin and his friends, and there was a special barbecue pit where he could grill his hamburgers, but Val-Kill was a woman’s world, a place where shared confidences became the rule, where Eleanor’s earnest sense of duty yielded to spontaneous and casual pleasures.
Sara accepted the arrangement with remarkable grace. “Eleanor is so happy over there that she looks well and plump, don’t tell her so,” she wrote FDR soon after Val-Kill opened.8 When she saw that her daughter-in-law was fully committed to her new life, Sara became an ardent supporter. She appeared with Eleanor at political luncheons and dinners, and became a patron of almost all of ER’s activities, whether they advanced Franklin’s political career or not.9
On one such occasion Sara hosted a luncheon Eleanor was giving for thirty-five board members of the National Council for Women in the double dining room on East Sixty-fifth Street. Among the guests was Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women. “I can still see the twinkle in Mrs. James Roosevelt’s eyes,” Bethune remembered,
as she noted the apprehensive glances cast my way by the Southern women who had come to the affair.
Then she did a remarkable thing. Very deliberately, she took my arm and seated me to the right of Eleanor Roosevelt, the guest of honor! I can remember too, how the faces of the Negro servants lit up with pride. From that moment on, my heart went out to Mrs. James Roosevelt. I visited her at her home many times subsequently, and our friendship became one of the most treasured of my life.10
While Eleanor settled in at Val-Kill, Franklin pursued his quest for a cure at Warm Springs, Georgia. He learned of the therapeutic effect of the thermal waters at the hill country resort during the Democratic convention in 1924. The Wall Street banker George Foster Peabody, a member of the New York delegation who wintered in Columbus, Georgia, told Franklin of the wondrous cures wrought by the warm mineral waters that bubbled from the earth. Peabody had recently bought the Merriweather Inn, a genteel ruin of a hotel that bordered the spring, and urged Franklin to go down and try the waters for himself.
FDR was initially unimpressed by the prospect, but during the summer of 1924 Peabody directed a stream of testimonials to Franklin that eventually piqued his interest. In October, he, Eleanor, and Missy went down to see for themselves. Eleanor stayed for a day, found the rigid segregation and tumbledown poverty not to her liking, and returned to New York to assist in the final days of Al Smith’s gubernatorial campaign. Franklin and Missy remained three more weeks.11
Roosevelt found the magnesium-laced waters astonishingly buoyant. Swimming in the warm Merriweather pool, he found that his unbraced legs would hold him upright and that by thrashing his powerful arms and shoulders he could move himself back and forth across the water. In his three weeks at Warm Springs he felt that he had made more progress than in the preceding three years. For the first time since August 1921 he thought he felt life in his toes and rejoiced at being able to stay in the water two hours at a time without becoming fatigued.12*
When Franklin returned to New York, he laid plans to purchase Warm Springs and convert it into an aftercare facility for polio victims. “I feel that a great ‘cure’ for infantile paralysis and kindred diseases could be established,” he told Sara.13 Eleanor fretted that Franklin was squandering his resources and lacked the patience to succeed at so ambitious an undertaking; Basil O’Connor