Eleanor and Franklin (65 page)

Her first grandchild was born in March, 1927. “Such a 36 hours as we have had!” Eleanor reported to Franklin. Anna had her child at her mother's house.

everything was prepared but we waited all day. It wasn't hard and the new way is marvelous but it was long and tedious for the child. However, after an active second night the young lady appeared at 5 A.M. The boys will tell you about her. She weighs 7½ pounds, her eyes are blue, so far her hair is black, her mouth large, her ears very flat. Anna is tired but sleeping a lot. . . . Mama is thrilled.
³³

Sara wrote her son she was

sorry the young grandfather could not be here for the great event. Eleanor sat all last night with Anna and came to my room this morning perfectly dressed and her hair perfect as if she had just left the dinner table! I think she is a wonder!

Sara never reconciled herself to the new order of things—Eleanor's living her own life, Franklin's mixing the search for recovery with continued activity in business and politics, Franklin and Eleanor's unwillingness to interfere in the lives of the children as she had in theirs. “I wish you could read Mama's last letter to me,” Eleanor wrote Franklin in exasperation.

She is afraid of everything in it! Afraid of your going over bad and unfrequented roads, afraid I'll let the children dive in shallow water and break their necks, afraid they'll get more cuts! She must suffer more than we dream is possible!
³⁴

Franklin had less patience with his mother than Eleanor. “I have seen a strong man struggle half his life for emancipation from the gentle but narrowing control of his mother,” Eleanor wrote in the “Ethics of Parents” article, “and achieve it in the end only through what seemed heartlessness and entire lack of consideration.” After a surge of annoyance and anger, Franklin's good nature and jollity reasserted themselves. He had his problems with Sara, but there was not the tension between Franklin and his mother that there was between Eleanor and Sara. Perhaps he sensed that the struggle was over him, but in any case he tried to stay out of it. He would sympathize with Eleanor, and then would add, “I have always told you that if you give Mama an inch she will take an ell.”
³⁵
Eleanor's letters were full of her difficulties with Sara: “Mama has done nothing but get in little side slaps today.” “Mama was awful last Sunday and made us feel each in turn that we'd like to chew her up.” Sara, like her son, would be horrid one moment and surprised that all was not forgiven and forgotten the next. She considered the two houses on Sixty-fifth Street “absolutely comfortable and well planned and nice in every way” while Eleanor was looking at cooperative apartments so that they might move after John went to Groton.
³⁶
Sara criticized Eleanor's clothes, posture, taste,
and activities one day, and the next praised her extravagantly. “Eleanor is a wonder, so busy, and so sweet and so amiable all the time.”

That is what she really thought—but jealousy often warped her judgment and reactions. “Your library will have no chintz covers,” Eleanor indignantly wrote Franklin,

because Mama told me she could make it attractive in half an hour and everyone liked her house better than mine and we had all the things to make a nice room only it needed taste, so I told her to go ahead and do it. Later she said she never liked to interfere so she didn't think she would and I said nothing would be done so I think you'll probably return to have to do it yourself! If it weren't funny I would probably blow up but I shan't.
³⁷

A week later she was still stubborn. “It wouldn't cost much to put slip covers in the Library, but I'm just obstinate after Mama's remarks and it is either done by her or not at all!”
³⁸

Eleanor could be stubborn with Louis, too, and not only over the issue of Prohibition. “It has been so hot that the furnaces have been let out in the house and in consequence a cold wave has swept in from the West and taken unfair advantage of us,” he wrote his chief in Warm Springs.

I expect to spend the balance of the springtime sitting around 49 East 65th Street in my overcoat with a quilt over my shoulders, for I rashly suggested to your Missus that one hot day did not make a summer and in consequence, as you can easily guess, 20 below zero would not let her admit that she was wrong by having the furnaces started up again.
³⁹

30.
A LIFE OF HER OWN

E
LEANOR
'
S BEST DEFENSE AGAINST
S
ARA WAS TO GET AWAY FROM
her, and by June, 1927, when she was writing Franklin that she “simply couldn't stand” staying at Hyde Park with Sara, she had a place of escape when Franklin and the children were not there, a place that she could share with her friends without having to negotiate with Sara whether it was all right for them to come. Sara was perfectly polite, always cordial, but she resented Eleanor's new friends. Rosy, whose reactions were much like Sara's, wrote Franklin, “Hope your Parlour Socialists are not living too much on the fat of the land with you, against their principles!!”
¹

Eleanor knew how the family felt about her friends, and when Franklin began to talk about a swimming pool near the Big House at Hyde Park, she persuaded him to combine it with a cottage that she, Nan, and Marion wanted to build beside the Val-Kill brook. “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,” Franklin wrote Elliot Brown,
²
a friend from his Navy days whom he asked to supervise the project.

“We used to go up to Hyde Park for weekends and take the boys,” Marion recalled.

We were having a picnic and Eleanor said, “This is our last weekend because Granny is closing the house for the winter.” Franklin said “You girls are very foolish. Why don't you build a cottage for yourselves?” So we got to playing with the idea. Franklin then said, “if you mark out the land you want, I will give you a life interest with the understanding that it reverts to my estate with your death.” So we drew up a paper that Louis, Franklin, Nan, Eleanor and I signed.
³

Franklin, who had forceful views on the architectural style that was appropriate to the Hudson, decided the cottage should be made of fieldstone and he worked with Henry Toombs, the architect, on the plans. The bids the women received seemed exorbitant. Finally Franklin told them, “If you three women will go away, Henry and I will build the cottage.” On New Year's Day, 1926, the three women had their first meal there sitting on nail kegs, a crate being used as a table. The following spring Sara was writing her son that while she, Curt, and Anna were at the Big House, Eleanor and the little boys were at the cottage,

but they came over here for some hours today and tomorrow they lunch here. We three are invited for supper tomorrow at the cottage and they all lunch here on Sunday. Eleanor is so happy over there that she looks well and plump, don't tell her so, it is very becoming, and I hope she will not grow thin.
⁴

“The cottage is beginning to look sweet,” Eleanor wrote her husband, on “Val-Kill Cottage” stationery.
⁵
Nan and Marion lived there, but she used it often.

I was delighted after I took all to the train at five to go back and say goodbye (to Mama) and come over here for a quiet evening with Nan. I've written two editorials and three letters and we have had supper and the peace of it is divine, but we have to take the 10:05 down tomorrow.
⁶

The children loved the Big House, as did their father, but Eleanor never felt at home there. Even when Sara was away her spirit and presence were everywhere. “This house seems too queer without you,” Eleanor wrote her, “and there is no doubt in my mind but houses reflect the central spirit and are just empty shells without them!”
⁷

Nan's undertaking to build the furniture for the cottage evolved into a more ambitious plan to start a furniture factory nearby to produce authentic copies of early American pieces. Both Franklin and Eleanor shared a long-time concern with a better rural-urban balance, and with his encouragement Eleanor helped establish the shop “primarily . . . to carry out a theory . . . about establishing industries in agricultural counties to give men and boys a means of earning money in winter and something interesting to do.” Nan went to the
Metropolitan Museum in New York, to the Chicago and Hartford museums, and later to Monticello, to copy designs. Skilled Norwegian and Italian cabinet makers were employed to train the local boys. But Nan was the moving spirit here, hanging over her bottles and jars in search of the stain she wanted with the “passion of a medieval alchemist,” and every piece, after the stain was applied, was rubbed and polished until the wood had the texture of velvet. Eleanor put up most of the capital—out of her growing earnings from radio and writing, as well as some of the little money she had inherited.
⁸

As a first project, the women built the furniture for Franklin's new cottage in Warm Springs. “The furniture from the Val-Kill shop is a great success,” Franklin wrote. By the spring of 1927 they were ready for their first exhibition, which was held at the Roosevelt Sixty-fifth Street house. The price list ranged from $40 for “trestle-table, round” to $175 for a large maple chest of drawers. “The work is handwrought and beautifully finished in every detail and copied with exactness from genuine antiques,” said the
New York Times
.
⁹
Eleanor and Nan persuaded Abraham & Straus to send up buyers,

and though they say they only sell cheap furniture, they've ordered $610 worth and are making an exhibit of it. . . . I'm going to try Sloane's . . . and perhaps ask Grover Whalen if the Wanamaker shop in Philadelphia might be interested.
¹⁰

Their early brochures spoke of “Roosevelt Industries,” and Eleanor tried to interest the local women in weaving and other handiwork. She recruited women for a weaving class from the Hyde Park League of Women Voters and joined the class herself, but she did not have Nan's flair for design and craftsmanship. Her contributions to Val-Kill were those of executive, merchandiser, and inspirer.

Val-Kill Industries did not fully satisfy her need to do things herself, to develop skills of her own, to be useful professionally. In touch now with many professional women, she was bitter over her own inadequacies. “If I had to go out and earn my own living, I doubt if I'd even make a very good cleaning woman,” she said. “I have no talents, no experience, no training for anything.”
¹¹
So when Marion, who was teaching at and vice principal of Todhunter, a private school for girls in New York City, was offered a chance to buy the school, Eleanor said, “I have no more children at home. Why don't we buy it together?”
¹²
With the shining example of Marie Souvestre in the back of her mind,
she had always found teaching appealing. Franklin approved of the plan to buy the school and of Eleanor's decision to teach in it.

Her first efforts as a teacher evidently were disappointing. “I can't say I am set up by the exams my children did,” she wrote Franklin. “I only flunked one but the others were none too good.”
¹³
Yet when Marion asked her to take on a heavier schedule the following year she agreed.

She taught courses in literature, drama, and American history. Her drama course began with Aeschylus and ended with Eugene O'Neill, and her class in nineteenth-century English and American literature was equally wide-ranging. Notes for this class included biographical data on the writers she dealt with as well as remarks on their style and characteristics. She found her Allenswood notebooks quite useful. She was the moralist in literature; at that time it constricted her taste. She, Esther, and Elizabeth gave one night a week to reading French literature. Esther, on a trip to Paris, sent her André Gide's
Les Faux Monnayeurs
. The homosexual theme shocked her. “I read the book as the story of a sensitive relationship sensitively told,” Esther said. “She read it in terms of a forbidden subject. She couldn't bring herself even to consider homosexuality. Generally her reaction was not so final, but in this case it was.”
¹⁴

In her history class, she emphasized “the connection between things of the past and things of today.” Her examinations were given in two parts, one designed to test a knowledge of dates and facts, the other to encourage the girls to think for themselves. “Give your reason for or against allowing women to actively participate in the control of government, politics and officials through the vote, as well as your reasons for or against women holding office in the government.” “How are Negroes excluded from voting in the South?” “What is the object today of inheritance, income and similar taxes?” (Most of her students came from families of wealth and high social standing.)