Prof. Hamilton's Diary: April 23, 1935
Two visits to Roosevelt's Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia
As Professor Hamilton has written nothing in his diary again today, I’m going to write about two trips I recently made to President Roosevelt’s home in Georgia, the Little White House.
Roosevelt first came to Warm Springs almot 100 years ago, in October 1924, having heard about a young polio patient who had regained the ability to walk after swimming and exercising in the mineral-fed pools of the Meriwether Inn. George Foster Peabody, a Harvard classmate who owned the inn and grounds in what was then called Bullochville, Georgia, urged him to come for a visit.
That October, he chugged into town on the train with his wife Eleanor, his private secretary Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, and his valet, Roy Jones. The rural Deep South was not enjoying the benefits of the Roaring Twenties and the Coolidge Prosperity. Warm Springs was ten miles from the nearest paved road, with limited electricity, indoor plumbing and phone service. Jim Crow laws kept the African American people in abject poverty, and it wasn’t much better for the white people. Eleanor went home to New York after a few days, but her husband stayed for three weeks, exercising in the pool each day and loving the effect of the warm, bouyant water on his paralyzed legs.
Eventually he bought the place from Peabody and established the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to operate a dedicated polio rehabilitation center. Hundreds of patients came there for therapy and orthopedic surgery, and to revel in the “Warm Springs Spirit” that gave them hope and a better outlook on life.
In 1928, he was elected governor of New York and in 1932 he was elected president. But even as president he returned to Warm Springs a couple of times a year, where he resided at the small cottage he had built for himself. Mrs. Roosevelt never got over her dislike of the place, so Missy LeHand served as his hostess during official visits. That’s her in the picture above sitting beside FDR, with a little boy on her lap.
Completed in 1932 prior to his election, it was quickly dubbed “The Little White House.” Which it was! FDR, 63, died there of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, a few short weeks before Germany surrendered and ended the war in Europe. (Missy had died nine months before of a stroke, age 47.)
I got valuable information about Missy LeHand from the staffs of the Little White House, which is operated by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the state agency that now runs the rehabilitation institute, which serves physically and mentally disabled people in Georgia. This led to my writing and publishing Missy’s biography, The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Partnership that Defined a Presidency. It is my favorite of the six nonfiction books I have written.
Not long after I wrote the book, I felt confident enough to impersonate LeHand, which I have been doing at museums, libraries, civic club meetings and other venues all over the East Coast and as far west as Texas for six years. I especially love teaming up with an outstanding FDR impersonator in Georgia, James Fowler, as we did last Saturday for audiences at the excellent museum at the Little White House.
James and I like to begin our performance by chatting about our experiences in Warm Springs, and then giving commentary while a park ranger runs a home movie taken in 1933 and 1934. You can watch it here yourself.
Here is what we looked like as ourselves at the April 12 commemoration.
The speaker at the commemoration was Haven Roosevelt Luke, a great-grandchild of FDR’s, who spoke passionately about his legacy. He focused on his 1944 state of the union speech, when he talked about how crucial relieving fear is to every form of security, from individual economic security to national security. Playing on those famous words from FDR’s 1933 inaugural address — “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”— Luke tied the fearful times of FDR’s long presidency — economic disaster, a whole world at war — to the culture of fear we live in today. History repeats itself, over and over again, and if we don’t pay attention, we commit the same mistakes.
Yes, I would vote for FDR again.
Incidentally, after completing The Gatekeeper, I was inspired to team up with a fellow writer, Kelly Durham, and pen a mystery series with Missy LeHand as the amateur detective, sort of a Nancy Drew of the New Deal. There are now five of these books, the latest being Murder on the Campaign Train, which takes place during the 1936 election season. They are fun to read and historically accurate. When we take flights of fancy — such as a kidnapping of Shirley Temple or Eleanor Roosevelt holding off the KKK at a Georgia prison — we always tell you what we made up. You can start with Shirley Temple Is Missing as a Kindle book for just 99 cents. Here’s the cover of Eleanor Roosevelt Goes to Prison, which has a painting of the Little White House on the cover. All of our covers are done by artist Jed Bugini-Smith
I'd vote for him too! Just like the opening song in "Al In The Family", "Mister, we could use a man like (Franklin Roosevelt) again!" So glad I got to visit the house on my visit back in 2019, as I had wanted to since I was a kid, and it did not disappoint. Loved the museum especially.
Check your date above…I, too, love to visit Warm Springs.