Nancy Cook was born on August 26, 1884, in Massena, New
York. She attended Syracuse University, where she became
an avid
supporter of woman's suffrage and campaigned for protective
labor legislation for women, the abolishment of child
labor,
and world peace. After graduating in1912, she moved to
Fulton, New York, where she taught art and handicrafts
to high school
students from 1913 to 1918. At Fulton, she became reacquainted
with Marion Dickerman,
whom Cook first met in a Syracuse boarding house for
students.
The two women would become lifelong partners, living together
almost their entire adult lives, sharing a life dedicated
to politics, education, and progressive reform.
When World War
I erupted, Cook's respect for Woodrow
Wilson's vision overcame her strong antiwar sentiments
and she, with Dickerman, threw herself into war-related
activities, especially working with the Red Cross and for
the Liberty Loan drive. As Dickerman later recalled,
she and Cook
really believed this was a war to end wars and
make the world safe for democracy." In early spring 1918,
the two women traveled to London to assist the women-staffed
Endell Street Military Hospital and "scrub floors or perform
whatever other chores were required."
(1) Within months, both women had become nursing
orderlies in overcrowded critical care units and Cook,
after
only twelve days of training, had begun to make artificial
limbs for soldiers disabled by the war.
New York women had won the right to vote while Cook and
Dickerman were abroad. When they returned to Fulton, they
were stunned to learn that the progressive Joint Legislative
Conference had nominated Dickerman to challenge an antiwoman-suffrage
Republican leader in the state assembly. Cook managed Dickerman's
unsuccessful bid for the New York State Assembly so skillfully
that despite Dickerman's defeat, Cook's organizational abilities
drew the attention of party leaders determined to increase
the Democratic women's vote. Cook, who had never been fond
of teaching, quickly left the profession when Harriet Hay
Mills, chair of the Women's Division of the New York Democratic
Party, asked Cook to join her staff. Cook would serve the
party as executive secretary of the Women's Division for
nineteen years, playing key roles in Al
Smith and Franklin
Roosevelt's gubernatorial and presidential campaigns.
Cook met ER first over the telephone, when Cook urged ER
to headline a fund-raising luncheon Cook was coordinating
for the Women's Division. ER accepted, even though she had
never given a speech before that large an audience. They
met face to face after the luncheon when ER sought Cook
out to give her a bouquet of violets. She then invited Cook
and Dickerman to visit Hyde Park that summer.
Soon Cook and Dickerman became frequent guests of the
Roosevelts, often joining them for picnics on the estate
grounds. By
1925, the three women, with FDR's great encouragement,
built
Val-Kill,
a stone cottage on the banks of the FallKill creek. Cook
and
Dickerman made Stone Cottage
their home and Cook, an expert woodworker, made all the
cottage furnishings. Towels, linens, and various household
items were monogrammed EMN, intertwining the three women's
initials. In 1927, Cook helped start Val-Kill
Industries, whose day-to-day operations she would
manage until the business closed ten years later. When
ER became
committed to redeveloping Arthurdale,
West Virginia, she asked Cook to work with the subsistence
homestead program. Cook and ER oversaw the interior needs
of each Arthurdale house while Cook temporarily administered
the furniture and woodworking projects of Arthurdale's
Mountaineer Craftsmen's Cooperative Association.
Yet, as close as the three women had become, rifts were
developing. Thrilled with FDR's victory, Cook and Dickerman
could not appreciate ER's great anxiety over moving into
the White House. By late 1933, as ER's responsibilities
introduced her to a wider world and her interests and friendships
expanded, she had less time to spend with Dickerman and
Cook. ER's world expanded as Cook and Dickerman's shrank.
By 1936, when Val-Kill Industries dissolved, ER moved
out
of the Stone Cottage she shared with Cook and Dickerman
and had the factory building remodeled for her private
space
where she could entertain without imposing on or involving
the two women.
In the summer of 1938, ER and Cook had a serious
disagreement, "a long and tragic talk" in which
the friends "said things that ought not to have
been said."
(2) By October 1938, their friendship had
dissolved. ER felt that they "had no difficulties
in previous years" because she "had no objection
to"
Cook and Dickerman's "wishes." Now that she did,
she thought the women did not respect her opinion.
(3) Furthermore, as Blanche Cook argues,
ER resented Dickerman's inference that she and Cook
had helped create ER. Although Cook remained close
to FDR, her future involvement with ER involved
only
Christmas and birthday gifts. The legal disentanglement
of their relationship would take most of 1939. The
emotional toll was just as great. As Malvina
"Tommy" Thompson wrote ER's daughter Anna,
never before had she seen ER turn "her face to the
wall." (4)
In 1947, Cook and Dickerman sold their interest in Val-Kill
to ER and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Cook lived
until her death on August 16, 1962.
Notes:
- Kenneth Davis, Invincible
Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts
Based on the Recollections of Marion Dickerman (New
York: Atheneum Press, 1974), 6.
- Ibid., 152.
- Eleanor Roosevelt to Marion
Dickerman and Nancy Cook, December 29, 1938, AER Papers,
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
- Quoted in Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor
Roosevelt: Volume Two, 1933-1938. (New York:
Viking Press, 1999), 530.
Sources:
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One,
1884-1933. New York: Viking Press, 1993, 319-327.
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two,
1933-1938. New York: Viking Press, 1999, 136-7,
360-2, 526-37.
Davis, Kenneth . Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait
of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollections of Marion
Dickerman.
New York: Atheneum Press, 1974, passim.
Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin. New York:
Signet Press, 1971, 623-7.