Remembering the House FDR Built (Well, His Mother Did)
NEW YORK — Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin stood in a place she had described in her most recent book.
Posted — UpdatedNEW YORK — Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin stood in a place she had described in her most recent book.
“This was where he crawled,” she said.
“He” was a middle-age man, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The place was the library in the Manhattan town house where he struggled to regain the use of his body — by literally crawling on the floor — after he was all but paralyzed by polio in 1921, when he was nearing 40.
Goodwin was there because of something that happened years later: Roosevelt sold the town house to Hunter College for $50,000. On Tuesday, during a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the moment the Roosevelts handed over the keys, Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter, called it “surely the real estate bargain of the 20th century.” (Maybe, maybe not. That amount, in today’s dollars, would be $726,000, far less than a town house on the Upper East Side would probably go for now. One in the next block is on the market for $24.5 million, according to the real estate site Trulia.)
Then she called Goodwin to the stage for a conversation with Harold Holzer, director of Roosevelt House, now the headquarters of Hunter’s public policy institute. They talked about presidential character and how personal setbacks had prepared four presidents to lead the country — Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, his distant relative Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, the subjects of the book, “Leadership in Turbulent Times.”
“My guys,” Goodwin called them.
As she noted, the house made several appearances in “Leadership in Turbulent Times.” In one passage, she wrote that after FDR was stricken with polio, “he would ask to be lifted from the wheelchair and set down on the library floor so that he could further exercise his back and arms by crawling around the room.”
She said she had pictured Roosevelt in the library in the mansion of his family’s estate in Hyde Park, New York. But the book described the library in the Manhattan townhouse as the rehearsal room for Roosevelt’s appearance at the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in 1924.
By then, Roosevelt, a rising star in Democratic circles, had progressed from crawling on the library floor to measuring the distance he would have to cover at the Garden — and trying to walk that far. She wrote that he crossed the library “toward the imaginary podium” while gripping his 16-year-old son James’ arm.
Roosevelt’s practice paid off at the convention, where he made it to the lectern, gripping it the way he had gripped his son’s arm and flashing a triumphant smile. “Twelve thousand voices exploded with admiration,” Goodwin wrote, “even before his speech had begun.” Roosevelt delivered the famous “happy warrior” speech nominating Gov. Al Smith of New York. But after 103 ballots, the nomination went to John W. Davis, who lost the election in a landslide to the Republican candidate, Calvin Coolidge.
The townhouse was commissioned in 1906 as a Christmas present for the future president and his wife from his mother, Sara. She sent them a sketch of a town house on note paper, smoke spiraling from a chimney, and wrote, “Number and street to be decided.” Before long, she bought two brownstones on East 65th Street, between Madison and Park avenues, and demolished them.
The new town house that was completed a couple of years later looked pretty much like the one on the card. There was one doorway. But there were two residences inside. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lived in one. His mother — her mother-in-law — lived in the other. “Everyone out there who thought they had mother-in-law problems,” Raab said in 2012, after Hunter renovated the house, “this probably trumps anyone’s story.”
After Sara Roosevelt’s death in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt had wanted $60,000 for the house but reduced the price $10,000, to $50,000, under pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt, who wanted it to go to Hunter and feared that the school could not afford the higher sum. Hunter then made plans for the Roosevelts to attend a ceremony in November 1943 marking the change in ownership. Holzer said Eleanor Roosevelt went by herself because a wartime strategy conference forced a change in the president’s schedule. “When FDR was supposed to be at Hunter to hand over the keys,” he said, “he was instead on the USS Iowa, steaming to Tehran, for a conference with Churchill and Stalin.”
On the way, there was a close call when a U.S. destroyer accidentally fired a torpedo in the direction of the Iowa. Holzer said the Iowa managed to maneuver out of the way, and later, when the torpedoman on the destroyer was court-martialed, the president intervened, sparing the sailor a long prison sentence.
Goodwin looked awe-struck as she stood in the room with the fireplace that Roosevelt sat in front of when he gave a radio talk after the 1932 election. Holzer said that talk was a precursor of the famous fireside chats, the first of which was broadcast soon after his inauguration in March 1933.
In the library, Goodwin looked at a poster of the “Franklin D. Roosevelt for President Club” with the signatures of, among others, the members of Congress who had supported Roosevelt in 1936.
Holzer, the Roosevelt House director, said there was an extra signature on the poster — Lyndon B. Johnson’s. He was not actually a member of Congress in 1936. He was elected to his first term in the House in 1937.
That did not stop Johnson from grabbing a pen and signing the poster, apparently on a visit to the White House, Holzer said.
Goodwin laughed.
“That is the best Johnson story,” she said. “He manages to inject himself into the past.”
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