Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  Anna Hall’s grandmother, Elizabeth Livingston, the granddaughter of Chancellor Livingston, eloped with Edward H. Ludlow, a doctor. Imperious and strong-willed, she made her young husband give up his profession because she did not like a doctor’s hours. He went into real estate where values were booming and in the period after the Civil War became the city’s most respected realtor. That did not soften his wife’s disdain for those who carried on the world’s business. Once when some business associates came to see him at their house on fashionable Fourth Avenue, she stormed into the parlor, turned off the gas, and announced, “Gentlemen, my husband’s office is on lower Broadway.” They retired in confusion.

  Eleanor remembered her great-grandmother as a very old lady whom she, her Aunt Maude, and Grandma visited regularly on Sundays. One Sunday Grandma Hall was ill and Eleanor and Maude went alone. The old lady refused to accept their explanation for Mrs. Hall’s absence and told them to go right back and summon “Molly,” which they did. Mrs. Hall dutifully got out of bed. When one of Eleanor’s cousins, who was also the old lady’s granddaughter, inherited some blue Canton china, she asked her father why so many pieces were missing. “Well, my mother used to throw the plates at my father and myself and so a good many of them were broken,” he explained. When Mrs. Ludlow wanted something or felt irate, she banged the floor with her cane, which Eleanor remembered as a very long one. “I was terrified of her,” Eleanor later said, adding half in amusement, half in admiration, “she was character.”

  A picture of this iron-willed lady shows a plain but strong mouth, and if the upper half of her face is covered, the mouth and chin are those of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  She and Edward Ludlow had two children—Edward, “the gentlest of men,” and Mary, who was mild, submissive, and beautiful. Both married children of Valentine G. Hall.

  The senior Valentine Hall was an Irish immigrant. He settled in Brooklyn and by the time he was twenty-one had become a partner in one of the largest commercial houses in the city and had married his partner’s daughter. The firm—Tonnele and Hall—enjoyed “unlimited credit” throughout the world. “He had remarkable business ability,” his contemporaries said, and before he was fifty retired from business “with a large fortune” that included considerable real estate from Fourteenth to Eighteenth Streets along Sixth Avenue. He lived another thirty-five years but contributed little to civic welfare except for his support of religious enterprises.

  His son, Valentine G. Hall, Jr., was a gentleman of solemn dignity who, after some sowing of wild oats and a period of penitence that included attending a theological school, assumed his place in society and executed its obligations and those of his church with punctilious regard. He did not go into business but lived the life of a leisured gentleman. He fathered six children—four daughters and two sons, Valentine and Edward; the Ludlows said he was good for little else. That was not his opinion of himself. In 1872 instead of building a larger town house, he built Oak Terrace at Tivoli, next to the house of his brother-in-law.* Its finest room was the library, presided over by a bust of Homer. There, together with a resident clergyman whom he supported, he pursued his interests in the classics and in theological doctrine.

  Valentine Jr.’s preoccupation with theology gave a puritanical tone to Tivoli life that was unusual for the Hudson River gentry. He was troubled by man’s innate depravity. “I awoke this morning about half-past seven,” he wrote in his journal when he was twenty-seven. “Instead of getting up immediately as I should have done, I gave way to one of my many weaknesses and lay instead until the clock struck eight building castles in the air. Oh! how much time, precious time, we waste in worldly thoughts.” His austere ways reminded a neighbor of “one of the olden Christians,” and the family clergyman later wrote that “no one could ever forget the morning and evening devotions, the Sunday afternoon recitation of favorite hymns.”

  In the Roosevelt household religion was seen as the affirmation of love, charity, and compassion; in the Hall household at Tivoli it was felt that only a ramrodlike self-denial was acceptable to God. Religion was also used to justify domestic tyranny. Valentine Hall, Jr., was a despot who had little intellectual respect for his wife. He had married her when she was quite young and had always treated her like a child. He alone decided the education, discipline, and religious training of his children. He did not even permit his womenfolk to go into the shops to choose their own clothes. He ordered dresses to be sent home where they were strewn around the parlor, and the women were allowed to make their choices. At Tivoli youthful spirits constantly rubbed against externally imposed standards. While the Roosevelts welcomed “joy of life” as the greatest of heaven’s gifts, the Halls considered pleasure of the senses to be sinful and playfulness an affront to God. As the Hall children grew up, their instincts were often at war with their moral precepts, and they had an especially strong sense of duty and responsibility.

  Anna Hall’s education, except for religion and manners, was sketchy. A great deal of attention was given to correct posture, dancing, and the social graces; one’s debut was more important than the cultivation of one’s mind except for a smattering of language, literature, and music. A scrapbook that Anna kept on a trip to England and Ireland the summer before she made her debut contained photographs of the accepted shrines of the culturally refined—Sir Walter Scott’s study, Abbotsford Abbey, Holyrood Palace, Windsor Castle. The poems that she transcribed into her exercise book were by the approved poets of the period—Longfellow, Browning, Owen Meredith—and she preferred those that pointed to a moral and suggested a rule of conduct.

  The same exercise book contained the beginning of a story she had written. Its language was conventional and its emotions stereotyped, its setting in a British castle suggesting the fascination that British titles had for girls in the 1880s—a form of escape both romantic and decorous. Its theme was the redemption of a dissolute London aristocrat by an equally aristocratic girl of nineteen. High-minded and self-controlled, Anna turned naturally to a man of ardor and bravura, even if he was weak.

  When Anna was seventeen her father died without leaving a will, which meant that the properties had to be administered by the court. Valentine Hall had never taught his wife how to budget and to keep accounts. Mary Hall, who knew nothing about disciplining her children since that had been her husband’s prerogative, was left with four daughters and two sons between the ages of three and seventeen. Anna, the oldest, was “the strongest character in the family, very religious”; she “took hold and tried to control the family.” But since she was also the most beautiful, she was married within three years of her father’s death.

  In the brief but strenuous New York season of 1881–82 Anna was acclaimed as one of society’s most glamorous women. “She was made for an atmosphere of approval,” a friend said, “for she was worthy of it. . . . Her sweet soul needed approbation.” Elliott’s courtship provided just that, for where she was reserved and circumspect, Elliott was demonstrative and ardent.

  It was the springtime of the year, the springtide of their love; their hope was high and their dreams radiant. Elliott introduced her to his Newsboys and she began to do volunteer work at the Orthopedic Hospital. Gallant messages arrived accompanied by flowers and proposals that they ride or dance or boat or dine together. On Sundays there were the church parades along tree-shaded Fifth Avenue past the fashionable residences, the young men top-hatted, the girls elegant, stopping to chat, while horses and carriages jogged northward toward Central Park.

  For the wealthy, the New York of the eighties was gracious and society a self-contained little island of brownstones that stretched from Washington Square to Central Park along Fifth and Madison Avenues, with a few Knickerbocker hold-outs at Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Square—the “Second Avenue set,” Elliott called them. Almost everyone to whom Elliott doffed his hat was connected in some way to either the Roosevelts or the Halls.

  Anna and Elliott’s courtship was ritually decorous.

/>   “My dear Mr. Roosevelt,” wrote Anna in her strong, precise handwriting,

  Thank you many times for your very pretty philopena present. I think it was wicked of you to send me anything, yet I must tell you how much pleasure it gave me. I would try and thank you for your note, but feel it would be useless. Let me only say that I fully appreciate your kindness.

  Hoping soon to see you, Believe me

  Monday, March 12th.

  Yours very sincerely,

  ANNA R. HALL

  11 West 37th St.

  And a note from Elliott, impatient to shorten the hours away from her, greeted his “dear Miss Hall” at breakfast.

  It will be, I hope, so delightful an afternoon that I will be at the hospital at half after four instead of five, it being so much more pleasant an hour for driving than the later.

  I trust that you can get through your work there by that time. Accept these few flowers and wear them for the little children to see. They say that the “lovely lady” always has some with her. Even the flowers are happier at being your servants I am sure.

  With regard I am

  6 West 57 St.

  Friday

  Faithfully Yours

  ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT

  According to Fanny Parsons, Anna and Elliott decided to become engaged at a Memorial Day house party given in the hope of encouraging just this event by lovely Laura Delano, the youngest sister of Mrs. James (Sallie) Roosevelt. The party was at Algonac, the stately Delano mansion overlooking the Hudson at Newburgh. The Roosevelt clan immediately welcomed the nineteen-year-old Anna with an outpouring of affection mingled with relief that as a family man with “something to work for in life,” Elliott might perhaps settle down.

  “He is such a tender, sympathetic, manly man,” Bamie wrote to Anna, that she, though older, had “ever turned toward him in many sad moments for help and strength.” Corinne, suffering from a “quincy sore throat,” scratched out a note in pencil to express her delight that Anna had made Elliott “so grateful and happy a man. He loves you with so tender and respectful a devotion, that I who love my darling brother so dearly, cannot but feel that you as well as he, have much to be thankful for.” Theodore wrote his “dearest Old Brother” that “it is no light thing to take the irrevocable step you have just taken, but I feel sure that you have done wisely and well, and we are all more than thankful to have so lovely a member added to our household circle.”

  Felicitations poured in, as did invitations to call. From Hyde Park, Elliott’s cousin James Roosevelt sent his “warmest congratulations,” adding, “Your Godson [F.D.R.] thrives and grows. I have just been teaching him now to climb a ladder in a cherry tree. Your Aunt [Sara] says—‘she will send you a line to express her congratulations.’”

  Elliott spent most of the summer in town, but on week ends he was at Tivoli and the whole “Tivoli crowd” along the Woods Road came to congratulate the couple. There were tennis and “jolly drives,” reading out loud and an evening of fireworks at the R. E. Livingstons’. Moving serenely through it all, reported Elliott to his mother, was his willowy Anna, wearing the magnificent “tiger claw necklace” that Elliott had made after his return from India.

  Weekdays in town were not all work. There were “all night talks” with Theodore and frequent dashes out to Hempstead to ride, hunt, and play polo. “The ‘Meet’ at Jamaica yesterday afternoon was a very pretty one and we had a glorious run,” Elliott wrote Anna. “Mohawk [his hunter] did grandly and gave me a good place in the first flight from start to kill.” Afterward they “dined quietly at the kennels,” and then Elliott sat “cosily over the big wood fire gazing into the flames and wishing for and thinking of my Sweet Heart.”

  “A jolly afternoon’s polo yesterday,” he reported a few days later. He was one of the best polo men at Meadow Brook, and his brilliance in this “emperor” of sports thrilled Anna, although she must have worried about the game’s hazards. “You will have to hurry up and marry me,” he warned her,

  if you expect to have anything left to marry. It seems to me that I get from one bad scrape into another. That beastly leg gave me so much pain that I went to the Doctor and I’m in for it this time, I’m afraid, not to get on a horse for a week and not to walk about more than is absolutely necessary. Oh! my! Poultices! Ointment! and three evenings alone by myself at 57th St. with my leg on a chair.

  Was he really in such a hurry to marry Anna? He was often melancholy that summer and had some sort of seizure at Tivoli. “My old Indian trouble has left me subject to turns like I had Monday from change of weather or some such cause,” he wrote Anna reassuringly. The trip down on the train had been “pretty bad,” he confessed, but “Herm Livingston and Frank Appleton were on board and very kind so I pulled along very well.”

  Anna was troubled by his sudden depressions. “Please never keep anything from me,” she pleaded with him, “for fear of giving me pain or say to yourself ‘There can be no possible use of my telling her.’ Believe me, I am quite strong enough to face with you the storms of this life and I shall always be so happy when I know that you have told and will tell me every thought, and I can perhaps sometimes be of some use to you.”

  She should not worry, he replied. “I know I am blue and disagreeable often, but please darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.” And in Anna’s moments of doubt and despondency, Elliott comforted and cheered her: “Darling if you care to, we will read some of my favorite chapters and verses in the little Testament together.” He had carried that little book all around the world and it had been a “comforting and joyous though silent companion.”

  Mrs. Hall agreed to a December 1 wedding date. Would Anna really like diamonds for a wedding present, Elliott asked her as summer drew to a close, or would she prefer “a little coupe or Victoria?” He thought he could afford to buy one for her if she would find it useful and enjoy the driving.

  As the wedding day neared, Mrs. Hall, although happy for her “darling child,” could not help but feel anxious about entrusting her to this dashing young man, so different from her sternly pious husband. “I pray you and Elliott to enter your new life with your hearts turned to God,” she wrote her daughter on the eve of the wedding. “Go to him tonight before retiring and in His presence read your Bible and kneel together and ask Him to guide you both through this world which has been so bright to you both, but which must have some clouds, and dearest Anna and Elliott for my sake, and for both of your dear fathers’ sakes never fail to have daily prayers.”

  The wedding ceremony was at Calvary Church, two blocks from Elliott’s Twentieth Street birthplace. It was described by the Herald as “one of the most brilliant social events of the season. . . . The bride was every bit a queen and her bridesmaids were worthy of her.” The Herald’s account of the wedding ended, “It is the desire of the bride to be back by the 11th inst. in order to be present at the time of the Vanderbilt ball.”

  On their way south they stopped in Philadelphia, and Elliott promptly penned a reassuring note to Mrs. Hall.

  Your kind letter we received today and both your children, for I feel for Anna’s sake you will consider me one now too, are deeply and truly with you in the spirit of what you say. We both knelt before the Giver of every good and perfect gift and thanked him the source of perfect happiness for His tender loving kindness to us. Dear Lady do not fear about trusting your daughter to me. It shall be my great object all my life to comfort and care for her.

  * A family story which Eleanor told with amusement had it that when her Grandfather Hall needed more money to complete his Tivoli house he went to his mother who “would go to the wardrobe and rummage around” and emerge “with a few thousand dollars.” Eleanor thought that this harked back to her great-grandmother’s immigrant origins “because in Ireland it would be perfectly normal to keep your belongings in whatever was the most secret place in your lit
tle house. You would not deposit them in a bank, and this was what . . . my great-grandmother evidently had carried into the new world and proceeded to do.” Eleanor added that “as neither of her sons ever added to the fortune but both of them seemed well provided for, I think it is safe to say that the original immigrant great grandfather must have made a considerable fortune.”

  3.THE WORLD INTO WHICH ELEANOR WAS BORN

  AFTER HIS MARRIAGE ELLIOTT WENT TO WORK FOR THE LUDLOW firm, the city’s leading real-estate establishment. His earnings there supplemented the better than $15,000 annual income that he and Anna had between them. Their income did not permit a gold service or servants in livery drawn up in line in the English fashion as were to be seen at the more formal entertainments of such friends as Mrs. Astor and the Cornelius Vanderbilts. But, in an era when there were no taxes and wages were low, the young couple were able to maintain a well-staffed brownstone house in New York’s fashionable Thirties. Anna had her coupe in town and ordered her dresses from Palmers in London and Worth in Paris while Elliott stabled four hunters at Meadow Brook.

  The Elliott Roosevelts were among the gayest and most lively members of the younger set—the newspapers called them “the swells”—who pursued their pleasure in the great Fifth Avenue houses, at Meadow Brook, Tuxedo, Newport, Lenox, and the fashionable watering places of Europe. They were prominent members of New York society at a time when the merger between the old Knickerbocker families and the post-bellum barons of oil, steel, and railroads had already been accomplished, and, in emulation of Europe’s aristocracies, especially England’s, New York society had become a well-defined, self-conscious, codified hierarchy. It was, said Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, “a closed circle to which one either did or did not belong.”