Kati Marton by Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History

man,” Frances Perkins recalled. “Then they heard he had polio and he was dead, sofar as they knew …. He came to life and there he was. He looked so well that day … and his voice was strong. The man on the street just assumed … this fine fellow we thought was dead still lives.”
    Franklin applied himself to forcing his lifeless legs to walk again, seeking relief on a houseboat and in the soothing waters of Warm Springs, Georgia. Eleanor encouraged him to take his time, freeing him of any guilt about his long absences from the family. “Don’t worry about being selfish,” she wrote him. “It is more important that you have all you need and wish than anything else and you always give the chicks more than they need and you know I always do just what I want!”
    With a surge of energy, she formalized her independence from both Franklin and Sara. She moved into her own house. Val Kill Cottage was a modest stone house two miles from the Roosevelt mansion. Building it was Franklin’s idea, a sign that he was reconciled to her need for autonomy. “My Missus and some of her female political friends want to build a shack on a stream in the back woods …,” Franklin wrote to Elliot Brown, a friend whose help he enlisted on the building project. Privately, he referred to Val Kill as “Honeymoon Cottage” or “the love nest.” Indeed, Eleanor’s circle of politically active women—Nan Cook, Marion Dickerman, Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape—were lesbians. Next door to her new home, Eleanor built the Val Kill Shop, a furniture factory employing locals. She was putting into practice a theory dear to both Roosevelts: creating small industries in agricultural areas would keep farmers busy in the off-season and keep them on the land. But this was only the embryo of her expanding activism. Released from her old insecurities and inhibitions, it seemed there was nothing she would not try. She and her friend Dickerman bought the Todhunter School, a New York City private school for girls. Eleanor taught literature, drama and American history there.
    By 1928, after seven years of physical therapy and Eleanor’s tireless activism, Franklin was ready to accept the call from New York State Democrats to run for governor. “The demand for Mr. Roosevelt,” Walter Lippmann wrote, “came from every part of the state. It could not be quelled. It could not be denied. The office has sought the man.” Eleanor shrewdly deflected rumors that she was responsible for her long-absenthusband’s candidacy. “I never did a thing to ask him to run …. My husband always makes his own decisions. We always discuss things together, and sometimes I take the opposite side for the fun of the thing, but he always makes his own decisions.”
    Instinctively, she understood the public’s limited tolerance for a high-profile political spouse. Once the Roosevelts moved into the Albany Governor’s Mansion, Eleanor declared her political days behind her. “Now that my husband is actually back in active politics, it is wise for me not to be identified with any of the party committees,” she wrote in her letter resigning from the Democratic State Committee. It was not the last time Eleanor would underestimate both her love of politics or her husband’s need for her to stay in it.
    For a politician who was a prisoner of his wheelchair, particularly one determined that his infirmity go unnoticed, a trusted partner was essential. A politician must get out and listen to the people, letting them take his measure; Franklin could do this only in the most limited way. And thus his wife became his indispensable partner. “Walking was so difficult for him,” Eleanor wrote,
    that he could not go inside an institution and get a real idea of how it was being run …. I would tell him what was on the menu for the day …. I learned to look into the cooking pots on the stove and to find out if the contents corresponded to the menu; I learned to notice whether the