Margaret Suckley biography

Synopsis

Biography

Margaret “Daisy” Lynch Suckley was born on December 20, 1891, at the Wilderstein house in Rhinebeck, in New York’s Hudson Valley. Wilderstein (“wild man’s stone,” in German) had been in the family since 1852, when Margaret’s grandparents, Thomas and Catherine Suckley, built the 35-room Italianate villa. Margaret was the fifth of seven children born to Robert Bowne Suckley and his wife, Elizabeth Philips (Montgomery) Suckley. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania from 1912 to 1914, but her mother forbade her from graduating, presumably due to traditional views of a woman’s role in society. During World War I, Margaret served as a nurse’s aide at a military hospital on Ellis Island.

Suckley met Franklin Delano Roosevelt sometime in the 1920s. She was a sixth cousin who shared the same aristocratic upbringing as he. The two became good friends, and in 1933 Roosevelt invited Suckley to his first inauguration. Thereafter, she was a regular visitor to the White House, and he would visit her when he was at his home in Hyde Park, New York.

Suckley raised Scottish terriers, and in 1940 selected a particular one that she named “Big Boy.” She trained the dog to behave and do tricks such as “roll over,” “sit up” and “jump.” In November of that year, Suckley gave the dog to FDR as a gift. He renamed the dog “Murray the Outlaw of Falahill” after a Scottish ancestor. Before long the name was shortened to “Fala.” Suckley later co-wrote a children’s book entitled The True Story of Fala, which told the story of life in the White House through the eyes of a dog.

Fala became the subject of a short-lived political scandal during the 1944 presidential campaign, when Republicans accused the president of spending millions of dollars to have the Navy rescue the dog after it had been left behind on one of the Aleutian Islands during a presidential visit. Roosevelt made light of the incident during a campaign speech, when he said, “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.” The scandal was quickly defused.

In 1941, Suckley took the position of librarian for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, working with the president and organizing and selecting documents to be kept at the library. During World War II, Suckley was a frequent visitor to the White House and accompanied Roosevelt on his frequent trips across the country. After the president died in 1945, she continued her work at the library until she retired in 1963. After her retirement, Suckley returned to Wilderstein and lived there until her death of congestive heart failure at age 99 in 1991. She was just six months shy of her 100th birthday.