#presidential collections
President Roosevelt himself took this photograph of Daisy Suckley in the White House as she went through various papers, February 10, 1942. (Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)
This post was written by Keith Muchowski, an Instruction/Reference Librarian at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn, New York. He blogs at thestrawfoot.com.
Margaret Suckley was an archivist at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York from 1941 to 1963. But she was much more than that.
“Daisy” Suckley, as she was known to friends and family, was born in Rhinebeck, New York in 1891 and grew up on Wilderstein, the family estate on the Hudson River not far from the Roosevelts’ own Springwood in Hyde Park. This was a small, rarefied world and in the ensuing decades Daisy saw sixth cousin Franklin’s rise to prominence. She eventually became one of his closest friends and confidants, sharing the good times and the bad with the country’s only four-term president. Ms. Suckley was there for Franklin in the 1920s when he was struck paralyzed from the waist down with polio, knew him during his years in Albany when he was New York governor and he became a national figure, attended the presidential inaugural in 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression, offered a discreet and comforting ear during the dark days of the Second World War when, as commander-in-chief, he made difficult and lonely decisions affecting the lives of millions around the world. Finally, Daisy was one of the inner circle present in Warm Springs, Georgia when the president died in April 1945. Roosevelt was inscrutable to most—some called him The Sphinx—but if anyone outside his immediate family knew him, it was Margaret “Daisy” Suckley.
Ms. Suckley (left) in Roosevelt’s private office at the presidential library with actress Evelyn Keyes, and Library Director Fred Shipman. Ms. Keyes is holding the album-version of Ms. Suckley’s book The True Story of Fala, October 31, 1946. (Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)
There were perks to being Roosevelt’s close friend. The two enjoyed picnics and country drives. Both loved to dish the gossip about Washington politicos and the Hudson River Valley families they had known for decades. Daisy helped President Roosevelt design his Hyde Park retreat, Top Cottage. She enjoyed the “Children’s Hour” afternoon breaks when Roosevelt would mix cocktails for himself and his friends to unwind. There were getaways at Shangri-La, the rustic presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains known today as Camp David. She attended services at Hyde Park Church with the First Family, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth when the royals visited in 1939. It was she who gave him Fala, the Scottish Terrier to whom he was so attached after receiving the pooch as a Christmas gift in 1941.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood at a podium on the grounds of his family home in Hyde Park and dedicated the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library on June 30, 1941. He was still in office at the time, having won re-election to an unprecedented third (and eventually fourth) term seven months previously. Roosevelt clearly believed that libraries and archives were themselves exercises in democracy in these years when fascism was spreading around the world. Ever the optimist even as World War Two raged in Europe and the Pacific, Roosevelt declared “It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith. To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.” Then he quipped to the two thousand gathered about this being their one chance to see the place for free.
Roosevelt had been an unrepentant collector since his earliest boyhood days, with wide-ranging interests especially in naval history, models ships, taxidermy, philately, books on local history, political ephemera, and—probably above all—anything related to the Roosevelt clan itself. His eight-years-and-counting administration had already produced reams of material via the myriad alphabet soup New Deal agencies that had put millions of Americans to work during the Great Depression. It was becoming increasingly obvious in that Summer of 1941 that the United States would likely become entangled in the Second World War; as Roosevelt well understood, that would mean even more documents for the historical record.
Presidential repositories of various incarnations were not entirely new. George Washington had taken his papers with him back to Mount Vernon after his administration for organization. Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, and even Warren G. Harding had versions of them. Nora E. Cordingley (featured in a March 2018 Women of Library History post) was a librarian at Roosevelt House, essentially a de facto presidential library opened in 1923 at Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace on Manhattan’s East 20th Street whose papers and other materials eventually moved to Harvard University’s Houghton and Widener Libraries. What was new about Franklin Roosevelt’s creation was its codification of what is today’s presidential library system. Roosevelt convened a committee of professional historians for advice and consultation, raised the private funds necessary to build the library and museum, urged Congress to pass the enabling legislation, involved leading archive and library authorities, and ultimately deeded the site to the American people via the National Archives, which itself he had signed into being in 1934.
The academic advisors, archivists, and library professionals at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library were all important, indeed crucial, to the professionalization and growth of both the Roosevelt site and what would become the National Archives and Records Administration’s Office of Presidential Libraries. However, Roosevelt understood in those early that he also needed someone within his museum and library who knew him deeply and understood the nuances of his life and long career. That is why he turned to Ms. Suckley, securing her a position as junior archivist in September 1941 just months after the opening. The library was very much a working place for the president, who kept an office there, where—unbeknownst to museum-goers on the other side of the wall—he might be going through papers with Daisy, entertaining dignitaries while she looked on, or even making decisions of consequence to the war. Ms. Suckley worked conscientiously, even lovingly, in the presidential library, going through boxes of photographs and identifying individuals, providing dates and place names that only she would know, filling in gaps in the historical record, sorting papers, and serving in ways only an intimate could. The work only expanded after President Roosevelt died and associates like Felix Frankfurter and others donated all or some of their own papers. The work also became more institutionalized and codified. Other Roosevelt aides took on increasingly important roles after the president’s death in 1945. More series of papers became available to scholars in the 1950s and 60s as the Roosevelt Era receded from current events into history. Through it all Daisy Suckley continued on for nearly two more decades until her retirement in 1963.
Margaret “Daisy” Suckley lived for twenty-eight more years after her retirement, turning her attention to the preservation of her ancestral home there on the Hudson but never forgetting Franklin. In those later years when reporters, historians, and the just plain curious curious showed up at Wilderstein and inevitably asked if there was any more to tell about her friendship with Franklin Roosevelt she always gave a wry smile and demure “No, of course there isn’t.” After her death at the age of ninety-nine in June 1991 however a trove of letters and diaries was found in an old suitcase hidden under her bed there at Wilderstein. A leading Roosevelt scholar edited and published a significant portion of the journals and correspondence in 1995 to great public interest. While it is still unclear if there was every any romantic involvement between Franklin and Daisy—as some have speculated for decades—the letters do provide a deeper, more nuanced portrayal of their relationship and show just how close the two were. Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been The Sphinx to many, hiding his feelings behind a veneer of affability and bonhomie. To his old neighbor, distant cousin, discreet friend, loyal aid, and steadfast curator Margaret Suckley, he showed the truer, more vulnerable side of himself.
Ms. Suckley later in life at Wilderstein, 1988. (Photo: FDR Presidential Library & Museum)
Further reading:
Hufbauer, Benjamin. “The Roosevelt Presidential Library: A Shift in Commemoration.” American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 173–193.
Koch, Cynthia M. and Lynn A. Bassanese. “Roosevelt and His Library, Parts 1 & 2.” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, vol. 33, no. 2, Summer 2001, Web.
McCoy, Donald R. “The Beginnings of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives, vol. 7, no. 3, Fall 1975, pp. 137-150.
Persico, Joseph E. Franklin & Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherford, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life. Random House, 2008.
Ward, Geoffrey C. Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley. Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
This post was written by Keith Muchowski, who is an Instruction/Reference Librarian at the Ursula C. Schwerin Library, New York City College of Technology (CUNY), in Brooklyn, NY. He blogs at thestrawfoot.com. Keith also provided the image above of Nora E. Cordingley’s 1931 naturalization card.
Nora E. Cordingley died on March 14, 1951. The name may not be familiar, but Ms. Cordingley was active for three decades in one of the most significant projects in presidential librarianship: the collection, preservation and dissemination of the letters, papers, and hundreds of thousands of other items related to the short, strenuous life of Theodore Roosevelt. When the twenty-sixth president died on January 6, 1919, his family, friends, and close associates formed the Roosevelt Memorial and Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Associations. One of the first moves of the RMA and WRMA was purchasing the East 20th Street site upon which Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858, and where he lived until his early teens. The groups also bought the neighboring lot where young Theodore’s uncle, Robert B. Roosevelt, resided. Roosevelt House, as it was originally called, opened to great fanfare on October 27, 1923, what would have been Theodore Roosevelt’s sixty-fifth birthday. The institution had two missions: to be a museum & library and to serve as something of a center for American Studies. Ironically however one of Roosevelt House’s most important players in these years was not American, but Canadian: Nora Evelyn Cordingley.
Ms. Cordingley was born in Brockville, Ontario on January 23, 1888. She came to New York City to attend Queens College, from which she seems to have graduated around 1910. Cordingley was a student in the first class of the Library School of The New York Public Library in 1911. The NYPL’s new initiative was not a library program as we know it today, but more a vehicle to train para-professionals who would go on to work in various support services. (The New York Public Library program lasted fifteen years. It was merged along with the New York State School at Albany to become part of Columbia University’s new School of Library Service.) Somewhere in these years—the chronological record is unclear—Cordingley, her parents, and her sister settled in Tuckahoe just north of New York City in Westchester County. Cordingley worked as an assistant in the library of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The work was probably unrewarding, but in all likelihood it was through this position that she got her break, for it happened to be at the Metropolitan Life Tower at 1 Madison Avenue and 23rd Street that the Roosevelt Memorial Association opened its headquarters in 1919. It was there in 1921 that the RMA offered Ms. Cordingley a job as a cataloger with the Bureau of Roosevelt Research and Information.
Memorial officials had been collecting material even in these years before the House opened in 1923. By 1921, the year she hired on, the RMA had gathered nearly 15,000 individual items. The items were as disparate as the life they represented and included many of the over 100,000 letters that Roosevelt penned, various editions of the nearly three dozen books he authored, positive and negative political cartoons that captured his unique physical bearing and caricaturist’s dream of a visage, scrapbooks, political campaign ephemera, speeches, a vast film archive, and much more. One must remember that this was something of a new and original enterprise; presidential libraries did not exist at tis time and would not for another two decades when another Roosevelt, Franklin D., created the first one at his home in Hyde Park. The Theodore Roosevelt Collection only grew after the opening of the house in 1923. Assessing the RMA’s work in 1929, a decade after its founding, Director Hermann Hagedorn told an audience at the American Library Association conference in Washington D.C. that a New York Public Library official had informed him that Bureau of Roosevelt Research and Information was the largest library dedicated to one individual in the United States. The work continued into the 1930s. Meanwhile, Ms. Cordingley became became a naturalized American in 1931. In 1933-34 she served as chairperson of Museums, Arts & Humanities Division of the Special Libraries Association.
After twenty years on East 20th Street the Roosevelt Collection moved to Harvard’s Widener Library in 1943. When the collection relocated, so did Ms. Cordingley. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and continued her work. She gave an address on the rarities within the collection at the Bibliographical Society of America conference in January 1945. One of her many projects in these years included assisting with the organization and eventual publication of Roosevelt’s correspondence. Starting in 1948, the Harvard Library, Roosevelt Memorial Association and Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a project to edit and annotate Theodore Roosevelt’s 150,000 letters. Harvard University Press published volumes one and two of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt in April 1951. These were the first installments of what would eventually be an eight volume undertaking. About 10% of Roosevelt’s total output—nearly 15,000 some odd letters—were eventually published in the set over the next several years. Sadly, Nora was not there to see any of it. Nora Evelyn Cordingley died of a heart attack in her office in Harvard’s Widener Library on March 14, 1951.
Bibliography:
Cordingley, Nora E. “Extreme Rarities in the Published Works of Theodore Roosevelt.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 39, no. 1, 1945, pp. 20-50.
Hagedorn, Hermann. “Building Up the Roosevelt Memorial Collection.” Bulletin of the American Library Association, vol. 23, no. 8, 1929, pp. 252–254.
Roosevelt Memorial Association: A Report of Its Activities, 1919-1921, Roosevelt Memorial Association, New York, 1921.
