Rowley - Franklin and Eleanor: an extraordinary marriage

I can honestly saythough Ill be thought biasedthat the best museum Ive ever visited, anywhere in the world, is the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, two hours north of New York City by train or car, in the beautiful Hudson valley. Its a large country estate, with several different dwellings, and it takes a whole day to go through it properly.

Theres the Big House, where FDR was born in an upstairs bedroom in 1882, and where he brought his bride, Eleanor, for the first week of their honeymoon in 1905. Although it belonged to his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR always regarded it as his true home. The house has been preserved as it was at the time of his mothers death in September 1941. In the front entrance you see a glass cabinet with some of the birds Franklin shot and stuffed in his adolescence. Scattered throughout the house are ornaments from China, where Sara Delano spent several years in her childhood, while her father made a fortune from the opium trade. There are naval prints and paintings of ships everywhere. The most imposing room in the house is the library, with its handsome wooden panels, vast bookcases, fireplaces, and magnificent views of the Catskill Mountains across the Hudson River. Not far from the house, near the stables, is the rose garden where FDR and Eleanor are buried, side by side.

A short walk away is the museum, a Dutch fieldstone building, which contains absorbing photos, letters, recordings, historical film footage, FDRs and Eleanors private studies, and FDRs 1936 Ford Phaeton, outfitted with hand controls. Eleanor Roosevelts cottage, Val-Kill, two miles through the woods in a minibus, looks from the outside like the factory it once was. Inside it is humbly cozy, a maze of guest rooms, looking out onto forest, the stream, and a pond. It was here that Eleanor entertained people from all walks of lifefrom annual picnics for underprivileged Negro boys from the Wiltwyck School for Boys to some of the most important world leaders of the time, including John F. Kennedy, Pandit Nehru, Marshal Tito, and Haile Selassie. The same guided tour takes you over rough winding roads to Top Cottage, one of the highest points in Dutchess County (inaccessible in winter because of the ice), where FDR liked to take tea with friends on the porch, enjoying the rustle of leaves in the breeze.

When I first went to Hyde Park, the summer after I moved to New York, I thought I already knew a lot about the Roosevelts. But as our cheerful little group drove from Saras gloomy cluttered Victorian mansion to FDRs simple stone dwelling among the dogwoods and pines, I became freshly fascinated by this couple and their remarkable lives. So, it seemed, was everyone else, since there were lots of questions, particularly about the Roosevelts relationship.

One person asked if there was a good book on the Roosevelt marriage. Nothing recent, the guide replied. She mentioned Eleanor and Franklin (1971) by Joseph Lash, a close friend of Eleanors; and Doris Kearns Goodwins No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), which focuses on the final five years in the Roosevelts forty-year marriage. There were plenty of books in the New Deal Store, she said, next to Mrs. Nesbitts Caf in the Welcome Center. It was sunset by the time I drove back to Manhattan, with the seed of my next book in my head.

This is the story of the Roosevelt marriageits evolution from a conventional Victorian family into the bold and radical partnership that made Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt go down in history as one of the most inspiring couples of all times. In the face of trials that would test any marriageFDRs domineering mother, the onset of FDRs polio, the strains of twelve years in the White House, the burden of leading the American people through the twentieth centurys most traumatic catastrophesFDR and Eleanor emerged triumphant. As president and first lady, they commanded respect at home and abroad. In the eyes of the free world, their partnership came to represent the ideals of Western liberal democracy. Were they not a model of equality, openness, and freedom of speech?

When I told the chief archivist at the FDR Library that I was researching the Roosevelt marriage, he remarked, A touchy subject. The marriage raised eyebrows in the Roosevelts lifetimes, and since Eleanors death details have emerged which makes it more controversial than ever. Was it a good relationship, or was it flawed, as most Roosevelt scholars seem to think? Did Franklin and Eleanor have affairs? Was Eleanor a lesbian?

It is astounding, when you think about it, that the Roosevelts marriage is still shrouded in mystery and secrecy. From March 1905, when the bride was given away by her fathers brother, President Theodore Roosevelt, until the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, at the beginning of his fourth term as president, this marriage was played out in the public gaze. FDR was the longest-serving president in American history, and yet even as the most famous couple in the nation, living under relentless scrutiny, the Roosevelts managed to maintain their un-orthodox private lives, keeping major details hidden from the public and sometimes from each other.

Surprisingly, the fresh material that has come our way in the past few years has had little impact on what I call the standard narrativeby which I mean the story most of us think we know. According to this version, Eleanors discovery of FDRs affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918 was a dramatic turning point, after which the marriage degenerated, with Franklin and Eleanor keeping up a gracious faade, all the while finding their escape in politics and close friends.

This, at least, is the basic plot, and beyond this, everyone takes sides. Some see Franklin as the long-suffering partner, while others claim it was Eleanor. FDRs partisans (usually male) paint a picture of Eleanor that is one-dimensional to the point of misogyny. Eleanor Roosevelts supporters (usually female) paint FDR as a slippery egotist. Just after Eleanors death, Martha Gellhorn, who as a young left-wing journalist was a frequent guest at the White House in the late 1930s, told Adlai Stevenson:

All the weeping for Mrs. R should have been done years ago, starting seventy years agoI always thought she was the loneliest human being I ever knew in my life; and so used to bad treatment, beginning with her motherand going right on that it did not occur to her to ask for anything for herself. Not everI never liked the President, nor trusted him as a man, because of how he treated her.

Bizarre though this sounds coming from Gellhorn (who had been married to the famously macho Ernest Hemingway), the ferocious taking of sides, as well as this view of the marriage as a kind of tragic compromise patched together by two lonely people, has lasted almost half a century.

I find this an absurdly conventional and condescending interpretation of one of the most interesting and radical marriages in history. In my view, the Roosevelts bond was political in every sense of the word: they were two politically astute people, very tough underneath their vulnerabilities, who knew exactly what they needed in order to do their best work. They were real radicals, in their different ways. Their courage and boldnessin their public and private liveswas remarkable. Their marriage did not evolve by itself; they consciously shaped the way it changed. It was a joint endeavor, a partnership that made it possible for the Roosevelts to become the spectacular and influential individuals they became. The extended family of close companions were not there to paper over the holes in the marriage; they were embraced as part of it. Both FDR and Eleanor had other intimate companions, other loves. They accepted this about each other. It was part of their generous spirit.