We spent Monday in the Hudson River Valley. In 1978, I spent
a few weeks at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library under a grant from the Eleanor
Roosevelt Association, doing research on the State Department and Soviet
policy. As soon as we decided to make this trip, I knew that I wanted to return
to this beautiful valley which had helped to shape my professional life.
Nothing is ever the same, of course, and much had changed,
but now, older and no longer a scholar of American foreign policy, I spent the
day with Sharon touring my own back pages.
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| The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, much as I remember them, at least on the outside |
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| Springbrook, the family home, where FDR was born and where he returned as often as he could |
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| The sitting room. Note the wheelchairs. What Roosevelt sought to obscure, his disability, the birthplace and museum deal with quite openly. |
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| Roosevelt as a young man, "the squire of Hyde Park" |
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| The bed in which FDR was born, in 1882, and where his beloved mother Sara, died. |
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| Roosevelt's boyhood rooms. As each of his sons became the oldest then living in the house, they succeeded to this room |
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| The room that Franklin and Eleanor chose for themselves after they were married |
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| The room Eleanor retreated to |
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| Sara's room |
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| Eleanor and Franklin's gravesite |
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| Inside, the building is nothing like what I recall. The museum is now state of the art, and I did not see the library |
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| A wonderful summation of the New Deal |
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| Eleanor Roosevelt's Stone Cottage, built in 1926 as a retreat for herself and three friends. FDR helped design it. |
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| The cottage is a wonderful evocation of craftsman style |
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| Val-Kill was built to house local crafts and industry, a social experiment that ran for a decade. In 1936 Mrs Roosevelt had it converted as a larger residence. |
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| ER's main sitting room and office. |
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| Dining room at Val-Kill |
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| And now for something different. Down the road, the Vanderbilt estate. I recall walking the three miles from the FDR Library to the estate and being stunned not so much by the grandeur of the house . . . |
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| as the beauty of the view. It was nice to see, thirty eight years later, that I had not embellished it |
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| Rosa and Sharon call on the Commodore |
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