Few presidential homes are as simple or as evocative of their
famous residents as Franklin Roosevelt’s Little White House in
remote, tiny Warm Springs, Georgia. Built the year of his
presidential election, and celebrating its 80th anniversary in May,
the modest cottage is where FDR famously died at the height of his
glory on April 12, 1945.
Unlike very every other surviving presidential home (and I’ve
visited over 30), the Little White House is marvelously trapped in
time, essentially preserved exactly as FDR last saw it when he
expired from a brain hemorrhage. Even the exact same, aging paper
towels still hang in the kitchen, as does the same toilet paper in
FDR’s small bathroom.
FDR first came to Warm Springs in 1924, still a young man, but
recently crippled by polio. He thought swimming in the constantly
warm spring waters of the dilapidated resort might cure his
paralysis. Of course, it didn’t, though it did persuade FDR that he
felt better. He purchased the property, consuming much of his
small, inherited fortune, and transformed the former resort for
rich visitors into a hospitality center for child polio victims.
Ostensibly, his lengthy visits throughout the 1920s and 1930s
reshaped his upstate New York patrician views towards rural
America, especially as the Depression arrived.
In a car with hand controls specially provided by Henry Ford,
FDR freely drove around the picturesque Georgia countryside across
the years. Sometimes his passengers included visiting celebrities
such as Ford himself. Ever the politician, often FDR drove up to
farmhouses to introduce himself. Delightfully the docent in the
house when I visited on a beautiful spring day herself remembered
an FDR visit.
“He drove right up into our yard when I was 6 years old,” she
recalled. “While talking to my parents, he called us children over.
Of course we didn’t know who he was, but he gave us candy, which he
was known to do, so of course we remembered him after that.” As a
teenager later, she, along with many Warm Springs area residents,
often saw him about town and the countryside. But on the day his
corpse was escorted to the train station for return to Washington,
D.C., she was unable to watch because the high school stubbornly
stayed open. “We haven’t had a president like him ever since,” she
opined, asking that her views about the current president not be
shared.
Visitors enter the house through the tiny kitchen, still stocked
with a 1940s toaster and waffle maker. There are glasses used for
serving ice water to the Secret Service, and a note scrawled on the
wall by the final cook right after FDR’s death. The entrance
hallway has scratch marks on the front glass ostensibly from FDR’s
famous dog Fala. Each room is paneled with knotty pine, with
exposed ceiling beams. The main room, filled with maritime
paraphernalia, has a dining set made at Eleanor’s Depression era
craft shop at Hyde Park. FDR’s chair where he collapsed sits before
the stone fireplace, a card table in front where he had just signed
state documents. He was waiting for their wet ink to dry when he
announced a terrible headache and fell unconscious.
Controversially, he was hosting his former World War I era
mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, now herself a widow. She was
accompanied by her friend the Russian portraitist Madame
Shoumatoff, who was never able to complete from life her oil
portrait of the President. It’s available for viewing in the site’s
museum. As FDR lay dying, tended to by his physician, Rutherford
and Shoumatoff beat a hasty retreat back to Rutherford’s South
Carolina estate. Their presence might upset Eleanor, who naturally
had not forgotten her husband’s affair of nearly 30 years before.
But FDR’s two doting female cousins were also present on that last
day, and one of them would churlishly spill the beans to Eleanor
when she arrived to retrieve her husband’s body. The emotional
procession of FDR’s corpse through Warm Springs, most memorable for
the local musician tearfully playing Dvorak’s “Going Home” on his
accordion, became the start of a national pageant similar to
Lincoln’s funeral cortege.
The twin bed where FDR died is in a small bedroom right off the
main room. Visitors brush by FDR’s desk. The only portrait in the
room shows his long-time aide and speechwriter Sam Rosenman. A
small bathroom separates FDR’s room from Eleanor’s bedroom, often
used by other family members. A third bedroom on the other side of
the cottage was for FDR’s secretary, originally Missy LeHand, but
later Grace Tully, who was also present when he died. Two small
guesthouses also sit on the property, one used by dignitaries, the
other for servants. A few small guardhouses surround the wooded
property. The property entrance has a swiveling bump gate that cars
can push through.
There is no spectacular view from the unprepossessing property,
just pleasant Georgia woods. The home contrasts dramatically with
the more famous retreat at Berchtesgaden of Roosevelt’s chief
rival, Adolf Hitler. The German dictator’s bombastic Alpine mansion
looked out almost painfully on the stunning but severe German Alps.
Such a sweeping vista, patrolled by legions of SS guards, must have
only fueled Hitler’s monstrous grandiosity. Terrible crimes
affecting millions were plotted at Berchtesgaden, which was bombed
into oblivion by Allied aircraft near the war’s end. Hitler of
course, filled with resentment, died by his own hand in a dank
Berlin bunker as Soviet troops destroyed and overran the German
capital.
FDR died peacefully, within earshot of chirping birds, after
sharing witticisms with his admiring friends, in a humble but
charming cottage in the red clay Georgia countryside. He had led
the Allies towards victory over the Axis terror and lived just long
enough almost to see the spectacular destruction of his nation’s
enemies. FDR’s corpse was dispatched from the small Georgia village
with tearful simplicity, the local people conveying what admiring
millions around the world also felt.
To visit the Little White House is almost to meet FDR and to
step back into days when epic events unfolded as America’s longest
serving president slipped into eternity.
