Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  It took the Johannes–Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelts a little longer to advance from trader to merchant prince. Isaac’s cousin James, after service with the Revolutionary army, founded Roosevelt & Son, a hardware business on Maiden Lane that swiftly expanded into building supplies. When James’s grandson, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, was head of the firm, it imported most of the plate glass that was used in the new homes being built in the prospering nation. Cornelius’ chief distinction was his wealth; he was listed among the five richest men in New York. His son, on the other hand, the first Theodore, retired from business early in order to devote himself to civic activity and was one of the most esteemed men in the city.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century the Roosevelt family was one of the oldest and most distinguished in the United States. Its men had married well—a Philadelphia Barnhill, one of whose ancestors arrived with William Penn; a Yankee Howland, whose family had arrived on the Mayflower; a Hoffman of Swedish-Finnish descent, one of the richest heiresses in Dutchess County; and one of the Bullochs of Georgia. The Hudson River Roosevelts led the leisurely life of country squires and Johannes’ clan was building its country houses, stables, and tennis courts along the north shore of Long Island.

  Conscious of having played their part in the transformation of New York from a frail Dutch outpost into a cosmopolitan city and of the country from a handful of seaboard colonies into a continent-spanning imperial republic, the Roosevelts had a firm sense of their roots. While most of them had changed their church affiliation from Dutch Reform to Protestant Episcopal, they remained faithful churchgoers and believers in the Protestant ethic, which sanctified a ruthless competitive individualism on the one hand and, on the other, the love and charity that were the basis of the family’s strong sense of social obligation. Standards of honor, conduct, and manners—the caste marks of the old-stock upper class—were further bred into the Roosevelt sons at Groton and Harvard. They went on to become bankers, sportsmen, financiers, and, in two cases, president of the United States. The Roosevelt women, however, were essentially private individuals concerned with supervising large households and launching their daughters into fashionable society. With a few notable exceptions, they led lives of genteel conformity and escaped public notice—until the advent of a girl who was to become known as First Lady of the World.

  I

  CHILDHOOD

  AND

  YOUTH

  1.ELEANOR’S FATHER

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS BORN ON OCTOBER 11, 1884. ANNA Hall Roosevelt, her mother, died when she was eight and her father, Elliott Roosevelt, when she was ten.

  “He was the one great love of my life as a child,” Eleanor wrote about her father almost forty years after his death, “and in fact like many children I have lived a dream life with him; so his memory is still a vivid, living thing to me.”

  Seeking to give some shape and meaning to his brief existence, she called him a “sportsman.” He was that, but as one contemplates the promise of his early years, it is the pathos of wasted talents, the stark tragedy of an enormously attractive man bent on self-destruction that reaches across the decades to hold us in its grip.

  Elliott’s brother Theodore became president of the United States, one of its outstandingly “strong” chief executives. What made Theodore resolute and Elliott weak? It was a question the many who loved Elliott sought to answer all their lives, for the pain of Elliott’s death remained in their hearts to the end of their days, such was the spell this man cast over those around him.

  It was her father who acquainted Eleanor Roosevelt, his gravely gay Little Nell, with grief. But he also gave her the ideals that she tried to live up to all her life by presenting her with the picture of what he wanted her to be—noble, brave, studious, religious, loving, and good.

  The story of Eleanor Roosevelt should begin with him.

  Elliott Roosevelt was the third of four children born to Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha Bulloch. They were a remarkable group. Of Anna, the oldest, born in 1855, whom the family called “Bye” or “Bamie,” her niece Alice was to say, “If Aunty Bye had been a man, she would have been President.” Theodore Jr., born in 1858, was followed two years later by Elliott, who was called “the most lovable of the Roosevelts.” Corinne, the youngest, born 1861, called “Conie” or “Pussie” by her brothers, was described by Clarence Day, whose family’s Madison Avenue brownstone adjoined Corinne’s in the 1880s, as “a dignified but lively young lady who . . . knew how to write poetry, turn cartwheels and stand on her head.”

  A childhood friend, recalling the family, spoke of their “gusto,” “explosions of fun,” “great kindliness and generosity of nature,” their “eager friendliness.” They were all unabashedly demonstrative in their affections. “Oh! my darling Sweetest of Fathers I wish I could kiss you,” a thirteen-year-old Elliott wrote. His southern grandmother’s outbursts of affection were so embarrassingly effusive, they were called her “melts.”

  Their mother, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt, was a flirtatious southern belle whose dark hair glowed and whose complexion seemed to young Corinne like “moonlight.” A vivacious hostess, a spirited and daring horsewoman, she made as lively an impression on New York society as she had on the ante-bellum Savannah society of the early fifties. In the years after the Civil War, Martha Roosevelt was among the five or six gentlewomen of such birth, breeding, and tact that people were “always satisfied to be led by them,” acknowledged Mrs. Burton Harrison, one of New York’s smartest hostesses.

  The children adored her. To Elliott she was “his sweet little China Dresden” mother, and Bamie spoke glowingly of “darling little mother’s exquisite beauty.” She told stories better than anybody, said Corinne, and her way of describing things was inimitable. Many of these stories were about her “little black shadow,” a slave she had been given at birth. She was, however, completely helpless when faced with the smallest everyday task. She was habitually, almost compulsively tardy, and household accounts were a mystery to her. Even when they were very young, her children felt protective toward her, and Theodore Sr. insisted that Bamie, when she was fourteen, take over the reins of the household.

  Mittie’s Savannah friends later said that the younger Theodore “got his splendid dash and energy” from his southern mother, but the children themselves never doubted that it was from their father that they inherited their zest for life and love of people. The male Roosevelts were solid, industrious, worthy Dutch burghers, and—also in the Dutch tradition—they were a humorless, sobersided lot. But Theodore Sr., who belonged to the seventh generation of American Roosevelts, was also blessed with vivacity and tenderness, and in him there began to emerge that special blend of grace, vitality, courage, and responsibility that is called charisma and that his contemporaries found irresistible.

  A big, powerful, bearded man, he moved easily and comfortably in the worlds of Knickerbocker society, business, philanthropy, and civic enterprise. Her father, Corinne said, was “unswerving in duty . . . yet responsive to the joy of life to such an extent that he would dance all night, and drive his ‘four-in-hand’ coach so fast . . . that his grooms frequently fell out at the corners!” When Bamie came out in the winter of 1873–74, she had a hard time getting her father—he was then forty-two—to go home from a dance, and he was so popular that she felt like a wallflower.

  Theodore Sr. was only twenty-nine when the Civil War broke out, but in deference to the feelings of his wife, whose grandfather had been the first post-Revolutionary governor of Georgia and whose brothers served with the Confederacy, he bought a substitute and limited himself to noncombatant work with the Union armies. Even though this was of sufficient importance to earn him the friendship of Lincoln and a lifelong intimacy with John Hay, the fact that his father did not enlist in the Union fighting forces remained a sore point with young Theodore.

  The Confederacy was a living presence in the Roosevelt household. Mittie’s sister Anna—later Mrs. James Kin
g Gracie—the children’s beloved Aunt Gracie—lived with them in New York during the war, as did Grandma Bulloch, and the three women did not hide their passionate southern loyalties, on the occasion of one southern victory, a family legend has it, even breaking out the Confederate flag. The two Bulloch brothers were not included in the post–Civil War amnesty and settled in Liverpool as exiles. From then on, the family never went abroad without visiting Uncle Jimmie and Uncle Irvine in Liverpool.

  Theodore Sr. was the son of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, in whose stately house on Union Square Dutch was still spoken on Sundays. It was he who shifted the family firm into banking and investment. When Cornelius died in 1871, he left ten million dollars to his four sons.

  Theodore headed the plate glass division of Roosevelt & Son, but after the Civil War he devoted more and more time to philanthropy and civic enterprise and finally withdrew from business altogether. He was one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History, helped start the Orthopedic Hospital, contributed substantial amounts to charities, took a continuing interest in the Newsboys’ Lodging House, and led a Mission Class for poor young men.

  Public concern for poverty, social welfare, and reform were something new in the elder Theodore’s days, as indeed unemployment, slums, and the exploitation of children were new. Fashionable New York, then centered on lower Fifth and Madison Avenues, was only a stone’s throw from the tenements on the East Side and the squatters’ shanties on the West Side, but most of the wealthy were content to keep them out of sight and out of mind. “At a time when most citizens of equal fortune and education” were not willing to accept any responsibility for reforming and philanthropic enterprises, Theodore “was always engaged in them,” commented a colleague in many of those undertakings.

  He was not content to serve on boards; he needed to be actively involved with those he sought to help. In the Newsboys’ Lodging House he knew the boys by name and was familiar with their histories, and whenever he came they would gather round and he would question each one as to what he was doing and would “give him advice and sympathy and direction.” He often brought his children with him, and they remained interested even after his death; one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s earliest memories was being taken by her father to the Newsboys’ Thanksgiving dinner. Theodore Sr. had a special feeling for children, was full of tenderness when speaking to them, and could not bear the thought of their being shut up in institutions. He had what he called a “troublesome conscience,” a burden or a blessing of which his granddaughter Eleanor also would complain.

  First and foremost, however, Theodore Sr. was a family man fully involved in the upbringing and education of his children. It was a matter of deep concern to him that Theodore Jr., Bamie, and, later, Elliott suffered from ill health and handicaps which, if not corrected, might seriously limit their activities. The most acutely afflicted was Bamie, who suffered from a curvature of the spine, while Theodore Jr. was sickly and asthmatic. It was largely for Theodore Jr. that the upstairs back of the house was transformed into a large play and exercise “piazza” so that he could build himself up on the exercising devices. The equipment was also a source of joy for the other children, especially Elliott, who quickly became the leader in their youthful sports and won all competitions.

  The children’s education was centered in the home. Aunt Gracie taught them their letters and there was an occasional tutor, but it was their father who really opened up new worlds of learning for them. On picnics and rides, or before the fire in winter, he discussed authors with them and had them recite their favorite poems. He was a firm believer in the educational effect of travel, and when Elliott was nine took his whole brood on a twelve-month Grand Tour of Europe, and three years later on an even more extended and strenuous pilgrimage to Egypt, the Holy Land, southeastern and central Europe. The children were left in Dresden, where they stayed with German families for “purposes of board and instruction,” and where they remained for five months while their family’s new house on Fifty-seventh Street was being built. They were getting on in German grammar, Elliott wrote his father, adding “We have learned three pieces of German poetry.” But on July 4, he rebelled against the glories of German culture being preached day after day by Fräulein. “Don’t you think America is the best country in the world?” he asked his father. “Please, when you write tell me if we have not got as good Musick and Arts as the Germans have at the present time.” When in September, 1873, the Fifty-seventh Street house was nearing completion—though a hand-carved circular staircase had missed its connection on the second floor by three feet—the children set out for home.

  Upon their return Theodore Jr. was given a tutor to prepare him for Harvard. Elliott wanted very much to enter St. Paul’s, but he now suddenly began to suffer from severe headaches and dizzy spells. His father, feeling that health was more important than formal education, sent him abroad in 1874 and in 1875 south with a friend of the family who was a doctor in the hopes that two months of outdoor life and hunting would build up his constitution. He loved the shooting, but, he confessed to his “dear funny little Bamie,” he was also homesick. “Sometimes I long for Home—what a sweet word it is. I wonder what you all are doing this beautiful moonlit night. I can see you now. Conie and Thee home from dancing class and full of it have finished their storeys and are gone upstairs to study. Papa’s pet or the belle of New York is entertaining some friends in the parlor and Father is in his study. And Mother?”

  He was lonely, as his loving letter to his father written on his fifteenth birthday showed.

  Mar 6th 1875

  Saturday.

  My own dear Father.*

  I got your kinde “Father” like letter with Muzes to day oh! it was so nice to feel you had thought of me on my birthday. . . .

  Dear old Govenor—for I will call you that not in publick but in private for it does seem to suit you, you splendid Man just my ideal, made to govern & doing it so lightly & affectionately that I can call you by the name as a pet one.—its not such a long time since you were fifteen & any way as I was saying to Mrs Metcalfe today you are one of the few men who seem to remember they were boy’s once them selves & therefore can excuse pieces of boyish folly committed by their boy’s.

  Do you think it would be a good plan to send me to school again perhaps as I am not going to college I could make more friends there. I will do just as you think best, mon père.

  I gave you my plan of study in my last letter but I would just as leif study at school as at home for Thee is way behind or rather before me & perhaps although I don’t now I may in future years see it was best for me.

  I feel rich too in the prospect of my allowance, next first of January, it seemes a long way off.

  Are we going to Oyster bay next summer dont you think Thee & I could spunge on all of our uncles & you & have a sail boat. I know we could manage her & would not I think be likly to drown. My darling Father you have made me a companion & a very happy one I don’t believe there is any boy that has had as happy & free of care life as I have had.

  Oh. Father will you ever think me a “noble boy”, you are right about Tede he is one & no mistake a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. If you ever see me not stand by Thee you may know I am entirely changed, no Father I am not likly to desert a fellow I love as I do my Brother even you dont know what a good noble boy he is & what a splendid man he is going to be as I do No, I love him. love him very very dearly & will never desert him & if I know him he will never desert me.

  Father my own dear Father God bless you & help me to be a good boy & worthy of you, good by.

  Your Son.

  [P.S.] This sounds foolish on looking over it but you touched me when you said always to stand by Thee in your letter.

  E.R.

  When Theodore Sr. finally gave in to Elliott’s pleadings and allowed him to enter St. Paul’s in September, 1875, the boy’s happiness was brief. “I am studying as hard as I c
an,” he wrote his father on October 1, “and I think all my teachers are satisfied with me.” But after a letter full of casual gossip, he added an ominous postscript:

  Private

  Yesterday during my Latin lesson without the slightest warning I had a bad rush of blood to my head, it hurt me so that I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out, anyway the Doctor brought me over to his house and I lay down for a couple of hours; it had by that time recovered and after laying down all the afternoon I was able to go on with my afternoon studies. I lost nothing but one Greek lesson by it. It had left me rather nervous and therefore homesick and unhappy. But I am well now so don’t worry about me. I took some of my anti-nervous medicine, and I would like the receipt of more. You told me to write you everything or I would not bother you with this, but you want to know all about me don’t you?

  P.S. II Don’t forget me please and write often.

  Love from Ellie

  “Poor Ellie Roosevelt,” Archibald Gracie wrote his mother, “has had to leave on account of his health. He has ‘ever been subject to rush of blood to his head’ and while up here he exerted himself too much both physically and mentally. He studied hard and late. One day he fainted just after leaving the table and fell down. . . . His brother came up to take him home. . . . ”

  The various doctors who were consulted did not agree on the nature of his malady. According to some reports he had a form of epilepsy, but there is no other record of epilepsy in the family and the seizures of which we have accounts were too infrequent to fit such a diagnosis. Some doctors who have read this account have noted that Elliott’s seizures occurred when he was confronted with demands that evidently were too much for him and have suggested that they may have been, without Elliott’s realizing it, a form of escape.