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By Root 2000 0

by margins ranging from 50 to 1 in 1932 to 16 to 1 in 1944—a result significantly different from Hyde Park and Dutchess County, which he never managed to win.20 Georgians were open and friendly, FDR liked to say. He remembered their names and considered many of them his friends. He often ventured out alone in his Model T, pulling into farmyards to talk crops and cattle, parking in front of the drugstore, honking his horn and ordering a Coke, nosing into a hollow to buy corn liquor from the local bootlegger. “He was a man that could talk to you,” a farmer remembered. “He had sense enough to talk to a man who didn’t have any education, and he had sense enough to talk to the best educated man in the world; and he was easy to talk to. He could talk about anything.”21

Roosevelt also listened. The stories of low farm prices, failed banks, and rural poverty stayed with him into the White House. From the poor people of Merriweather County, Franklin learned what it meant to be without electricity and running water; for children to be without shoes and adequate clothing; for a simple grade school education to be beyond the reach of many who lived in the hardscrabble backwoods. Merriweather County raised corn and short-staple cotton, but drought, falling prices, and the boll weevil made it all but impossible to turn a profit. Farms were small, plowing was done by mules, not tractors, and mortgage indebtedness increased annually. FDR tried his hand at farming and experimented with cattle and timber, but without success. “It pleased him because it offered a challenge,” New Dealer Rexford Tugwell remembered. “But there was never a more dismal prospect than was offered by farming that ridge at Pine Mountain.”22

Warm Springs, on the other hand, more or less held its own. “You needn’t worry about my losing a fortune,” Franklin assured Sara. “Every step is being planned either to pay for itself or to make a profit.”23 The American Orthopedic Association approved Dr. Hubbard’s treatment program, and by the end of 1927 seventy-one patients had visited the resort. The number grew to eighty in 1928—as many as the facilities could accommodate—and the staff totaled 110.24 Warm Springs would not be free of financial worry, however, until FDR became president and the March of Dimes was organized, first to raise money for the foundation, then to aid polio research nationally.*

While Franklin toiled at Warm Springs, Eleanor found herself fully engaged teaching history, English, and current affairs at the Todhunter School for Girls on East Eightieth Street, just off Park Avenue. In 1927 ER, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook purchased Todhunter—an elite private school for daughters of wealthy New Yorkers—from its founder, Winifred Todhunter, who was returning to England. Dickerman became principal and Eleanor associate principal. Todhunter resembled Allenwood in its commitment to female achievement, and, like Marie Souvestre, Eleanor set the tone for the school.25 A naturally gifted teacher, she urged her students to challenge authority and, consciously or unconsciously, proselytized relentlessly for the social ideals of the Democratic party. “I am very anxious to send a class which has been studying with me … to see the various types of tenements in New York City,” she wrote her friend Jane Hoey, who directed the city’s Welfare Council. “I would like them to see the worst type of old time tenement. They need to know what bad housing conditions mean.”26

Eleanor became a role model for many of her students and urged them to assume responsibility for their lives. “In the future,” she said, “there will be nothing which is closed to women because of their sex.”27 For Eleanor herself, teaching at Todhunter represented enormous personal fulfillment. “I like it better than anything else I do,” she told The New York Times in 1932.28*

While FDR exercised at Warm Springs and Eleanor taught at Todhunter, a great deal of the responsibility for the children fell to Sara. When James was confirmed at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, it was Sara who stood