A Visit to FDR’s Home in Hyde Park Finds Good History of Grave Times

Like them or not, FDR and Eleanor, emblems of determination and optimism, have lessons for us today.

A few weeks ago, I was driving back to Vermont on Sunday morning from New York after visiting four art fairs, among them the Armory Show. I’d passed the signs pointing to Hyde Park, Franklin Roosevelt’s home in Dutchess County, a hundred times over the years yet hadn’t visited since, I believe, the early ’70s. This time, FDR’s voice rumbled through my head. I thought, “I have nothing to fear but getting home late for dinner.” In August, I’d visited the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s impressive home near Nashville, and James Knox Polk’s house museum in Cumberland in Tennessee. “Why not do it?”

What we call Hyde Park isn’t Roosevelt’s home — that’s called Springwood — but a village about halfway between New York City and Albany. Springwood was the summer residence of James Roosevelt, FDR’s father, who bought the land and a mongrel Italianate–Shingle Style house in 1867. The Roosevelt family, rich from New York City and sugar refining, had a summer estate in the village of Hyde Park since around 1810. The Springwood estate, under the rule of James and FDR, grew to 1,500 acres as they bought adjoining parcels along the Hudson River.

As landscape architecture, Springwood’s anchor is the main house, which FDR expanded around 1915 to accommodate his family, which included his mother, who held a life estate in the whole kit and caboodle, his wife, Eleanor (1884–1962), and their six children, and he redesigned the façade in Georgian Revival style. There’s a huge stone barn and dairy building next to the main house. It was one of FDR’s projects, along with commercial forests cultivated under his direction, starting in back of the main house. FDR projected the place not as an estate for rich city grandees but as a working farm.

Val-Kill, a hundred-or-so-acre estate within the estate, is known as Eleanor’s retreat. Originally the family’s favorite picnic spot and swimming hole, it was developed in the ’20s by FDR and Eleanor as a very mini English village with a stone house and buildings where crafts such as furniture were made and sold. Eleanor lived there after FDR died.

“I hate waw, Eleanor hates waw, and I hate Eleanor,” my father would roar in mock impersonation of FDR (1884-1945), whom he despised. Val-Kill is a gas-fumes-era Arts & Crafts boutique project. I skipped it. Eleanor looms large at Springwood and the FDR museum in particular. I pulled into the parking lot at the Hyde Park site thinking that she was an insufferable, rich, left-wing scold but left thinking a good bit better of her.

There’s a small garden near Springwood where FDR and Eleanor are buried. Yes, the Scottish terrier Fala is there, too, along with Chief, the family’s German shepherd.

Then there’s the gray FDR presidential library and museum, also near the main house. It’s fascinating. When the building opened in 1940, inaugurated by FDR himself, it was unusual. He was the first president to plan a comprehensive home for his archives and legacy. FDR was profoundly moved by history, especially American history, and he knew presidential records and archives were almost always dispersed when a president left office. He wanted his to be concentrated in one place. Today, the museum and archives house 17 million documents. It’s run by the National Archives. The main house (Springwood), the land, Val-Kill, the stone barn, and the gardens are owned and run by the National Park Service.

I visited Springwood first with a small tour led by a park ranger. She was very good, informational, inviting, serious, and, in terms of content, short and sweet.

The main house has the presence of FDR — the furniture, carpets, and pictures are mostly as FDR and Eleanor left them. It’s decorative accretion, since the family lived there for so long, and deeply autobiographical. FDR loved ships from childhood and was assistant secretary of the Navy during the First World War. The art is mostly ship paintings and prints starting from the Napoleonic Wars, many of British naval battles. His childhood stuffed-bird collection is there as well.

It’s spacious but not palatial. The rooms are filled with cushy chairs, Oriental rugs, family portraits, oak paneling, marble fireplaces, and books that give an enveloping Edwardian feel but aren’t packed. After speaking to our group for about 15 minutes, the ranger let us wander through the first floor. I fastened on FDR’s library, which is the main room in the house. A well-done ramp with low, nonreflective glass barriers protected the space and objects but immersed us in rooms where history happened.

This was FDR’s home, where he retreated to fight polio, visited often while governor of New York, celebrated election victories, and hosted George VI in June 1939. It was less than three months before the Germans invaded Poland, launching Europe into war, and the first time a British monarch had ever visited America. FDR famously hosted the royals to a hot dog roast.

There’s minimal interpretation and no art of any great significance. It’s an ambiance, and an effective one. FDR’s polio has only two references: one of his four wheelchairs, sitting unobtrusively in the library, and an elevator, originally for transporting trunks to the second floor and now tucked under the main oak staircase, converted for FDR’s travel between floors. He had to be carried up the front steps to enter the house.

We got very good access to the upstairs. When I visited the Hermitage, the guided tour was too controlling for my taste. The tour guide was fine but spoke about things we couldn’t see, as views into the rooms were narrow, and the glass barriers were an unwelcome mediation. The NPS at Hyde Park got the balance right.

Next, I went to the museum. It’s big but filled with good storytelling, photography, and artifacts. FDR’s family was from the grandee class with spacious homes, support staff, and enough old Dutch frugality that nothing got tossed. There’s lots of material about FDR’s childhood, the early years of his marriage to Eleanor, a good one since she was Theodore Roosevelt’s niece, and his rise in New York politics in the Teens, his service in Wilson’s cabinet, and his time as James Cox’s running mate in the 1920 election.

The museum doesn’t start there, though. It starts with a wall-mural photograph of a smiling FDR. Warren G. Harding had movie-star dash but died quickly, Calvin Coolidge was the first radio president but, as Alice Longworth noted, “looked like he was weaned on a pickle,” and Herbert Hoover photographed grimly since, as we know, depressions are depressing. FDR was the most photographed president, a radio but also a newsreel president, and ebullient. The exhibition starts with the wall mural and a line from one of his speeches. We test progress, he said, “not by whether we add abundance to those who have much but by whether we provide enough to those who have too little.”

Then we go directly to “in 1932, the nation lived in fear.” There’s a blowing-wind sound effect that, I think, is effective. I’m not writing a critique of the New Deal itself but how the museum conveys its themes. The wall texts and graphics do a good job in describing the moribund economy FDR inherited. It itemizes the many causes of the Great Depression without imposing a written-in-stone cause since economists and historians still dispute what happened and why. There’s a good balance between photographs and text on the one hand and, on the other, a ten-minute documentary-style video on farm prices, too much credit, and irrational exuberance in the stock market.

“Hoover blew the whistle, Mellon rang the bell, Wall Street gave the signals, and the economy went to hell,” one piece of campaign ephemera tells us. There’s a panel on the February 1933 assassination attempt on FDR, and Hoover’s diary entry of a meeting he had with FDR the day before he took office, in which he wrote, “He was very badly informed and has comparatively little vision.”

Having set the stage for the New Deal, the galleries move back in time to FDR’s early history. It works because it focuses on polio. It was those days on Campobello Island– in 1921 and at age 39, when FDR got polio — that forged him in steel to tackle the country’s terrible state. Here’s where Eleanor comes alive as a character. She kept his name in the spotlight, helped him fight despair, immersed herself in adult polio, a little-known condition, and coaxed him step by step. Physical disability was associated with mental disability, and FDR’s condition wasn’t well known. Eleanor was part of the hiding game. In 1924, FDR nominated Al Smith for president at the Democratic convention. In 1928, FDR won as governor of New York.

Good history is both facts and personalities. The two seemed much more symbiotic and simpatico than I imagined, and in his fight for functionality, Eleanor is more of a healing presence than I expected.

There are multiple Roosevelt presidencies. There is lots of material on the early days of the New Deal but also on the 1937 Roosevelt recession, his plans to pack the Supreme Court, charges of authoritarianism, and the 1940 election, when FDR won a third term. A headline blaring “WAR” from December 8, 1941, is the start of yet another epoch. The story of FDR and the war isn’t so much the story of battles, though there’s some of that, but of optimism and determination.

It’s also the story of the atomic bomb and the nuclear age. There’s a letter, one of many juicy bits from the archives, from Albert Einstein to FDR, dated October 11, 1939. Einstein was well known then but not internationally famous. In it, he explained to FDR what an atomic bomb was and told him that the Germans were already working on one. FDR very quickly established what became the Manhattan Project. In 1944 and into 1945, FDR was engaged politically in ways that led the United Nations to be founded on firmer ground than the League of Nations.

In terms of tying up loose ends at the end of his life, FDR reached back to the League’s troubles, to correct them. He wasn’t much of a political philosopher, but if he were one, he would’ve been a Wilsonian. Part of Wilson’s cabinet, an up-and-comer, passionate about new-world orders, FDR seems sentimental, nostalgic, and naïve. The U.N. is an embarrassing failure, but how could it not be?

There are so many good things and disturbing ones, too. There’s FDR’s Oval Office desk with all of his knickknacks, and there’s Eleanor’s extensive FBI file, mostly surrounding her civil-rights work in the ’50s. And there’s good, provocative material on FDR’s health when he ran for president in 1944. Many understood that he was a dying man. Most either ignored it or covered it up. A tougher stand by the museum would help instruct people today on the abuses of secrecy. Overall, though, it’s a story of optimism and determination that’s best told. A discerning visitor can learn also about an era that, for better or worse, continues to have an impact on ours.

It’s altogether — house, museum, and archives — a serious place well tended by good historians. Many new books continue to be written on both the New Deal and the war. New archives and diaries still emerge. That’s inevitable since the times were so grave. On fronts such as the 1944 campaign and what FDR could have done to stop the Holocaust, the museum gives lots of good material, recommends further reading, and asks “what do you think?” I liked that.