Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  Anna and Elliott belonged. They and their friends set the fashion in dress and manners, and the anxious ones knocked at their doors. Anna’s graceful beauty and charming manners were everywhere acclaimed. “Fair, frail and fragile, and therefore a good illustration of beauty in American women,” a society columnist rhapsodized. Her father’s discipline had not been in vain. He had insisted that she and her sisters walk regularly in the country with a stick across their backs held in the crook of their elbows, which had produced an unmistakable bearing. “The proud set of the head on the shoulders was the distinctive look of the Halls,” recalled Mrs. Lucius Wilmerding, whose mother was a close friend of Anna. When Town Topics took the young ladies of society to task for their stoop and slouch compared to the “superb” carriage of English girls, it excluded Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt from its strictures and recommended her as a model.

  Mr. Peter Marié, writer of vers de société and a great beau, was noted for the beautiful women at his entertainments. No greater compliment could be bestowed upon a lady than to have Mr. Marié request a photograph from which he would have some well-known artist paint a miniature for his famous collection. Anna’s beauty was accorded this gallant tribute: she was one of his “brilliant creatures.” Robert Browning was so taken with her beauty that he came to read to her while she was having her portrait painted during a summer she and Elliott spent in the Engadine.1

  When Anna and her friends launched the Knickerbocker Bowling Club it became the fashionable thing to do. While the well-turned-out coaches of other women promenaded in Central Park, she and her friends jogged an extra three miles up semirustic Riverside Drive to the Claremont Restaurant for afternoon tea. She was among the women who inaugurated the series of dances at Sherry’s, when the “swells” decided that the Assemblies and Patriarchs’ Balls had ceased to be select. She was, to use the phrase of one of her contemporaries, “tuned to a ballroom pitch.”

  She loved the cotillions at eleven and supper at midnight, the Tuesday Evening Dancing Class, the evening at the opera, the annual kennel and horse shows, the amateur theatricals, the polo and tennis matches, the meetings of philanthropic boards, and all the other occasions that constituted a New York season. While a few emancipated spirits considered conformity to society’s pleasures and disciplines bondage to a “chain of tyrannical trifles,” for Anna Hall Roosevelt they were the very substance of a happy, contented life.

  Anna was proud of her handsome husband who was one of society’s great gallants. His haunts were the Knickerbocker Club and Meadow Brook, his pleasure a fast game of polo, the cross-country steeplechase, the hunt ball, and the horse show. A young lady’s cup flowed over, said Daisy Harriman, when she was asked down to Meadow Brook. “All New York aped the English,” Mrs. Harriman said of society in the eighties, especially so in the annual Coach Parade, when the swells in green coats and gray top hats, with lovely ladies gracing the boxes of their four-in-hands, would make the circuit of Central Park. Elliott was a mainstay of this ritual, which ended with dinner at the Brunswick, its dining room festooned with whips, whiffletrees, and coach horns. John Sargeant Wise, son of a well-known Whig politician from Virginia, said that Elliott was “the most lovable Roosevelt I ever knew,” adding that “perhaps he . . . was nothing like so aggressive or so forceful a man as Theodore, but if personal popularity could have bestowed public honours on any man there was nothing beyond the reach of Elliott Roosevelt.”2

  In New York, Meadow Brook, Bar Harbor, and Newport, Anna and Elliott gave themselves to a strenuous, fun-loving life. “We play our polo matches on Monday, and Saturday next we go out on Mr. E. T. Gerry’s yacht the ‘Electra’ to see the race tomorrow for the Goelet Cups. We dine, dance, play tennis, polo, sail, swim and live in the open air all the time. It will do you lots of good,” Nell assured his “dearest Bye,” urging her to join them.

  And this letter from Anna to Bamie described their summer:

  34 Catherine Street

  Newport

  Dearest Bamie,

  I want to write you just a few lines in answer to your letter. We arrived here on Saturday & spent until Monday with the Wilsons. Of course I was in bed all day Sunday with one of my headaches. Elliott went everywhere though, & they were awfully kind and made things as pleasant as possible for us.

  Elliott’s match will come off tomorrow. The Harvards beat the Westchesters on Wednesday. Every one seems to think that Meadow Brook will beat them though. Elliott is very much excited over it, & is playing very well. We have been to the Casino every morning watching the tennis matches. . . . I suppose this is the gayest week here, but I do not care much for it. I liked Bar Harbor much better. The air there is bracing & then you always got to bed early. The life here is too much like New York. This afternoon I am going with Mrs. Vanderbilt to some teas. This evening we dine with the Whitneys & then Elliott is coming home.

  I may go to the Kernochan ball for half-an-hour, but doubt it. I am not feeling my best and am on my back—which accounts for this being in pencil.

  Last night we had a very jolly spree. First we dined on the Morgan’s yacht after a delightful sail to Bristol & then drove home by moonlight on the coaches. There were three coach leads. . . .

  On Monday they play in pairs at polo & if Elliott loses on Monday or Wednesday we will go up the Hudson on Thursday, but if not we will stay for the final game on Saturday.

  I shall be delighted to reach Tivoli and see them all. I really feel quite homesick here . . . [rest of letter missing].

  There were times when Elliott was full of large plans—to get wealth “for his little wife’s sake,” to become active in Republican politics, to pull together and publish his notes on India. But his will was as weak as his hopes were high, and the attractions of society and sports quickly reasserted themselves.

  In the summer of 1884 Anna was pregnant, and, always of frail health, she often felt unwell and had to rest a great deal. The family was anxious, all the more so because in February of that year Theodore’s wife, his adored Alice Lee, had died two days after giving birth to baby Alice. It had been a time of double tragedy in the Roosevelt household, for their beloved mother, Mittie, had died only a few hours earlier. “There is a curse on this house,” Elliott cried as he opened the door to Theodore, who had rushed down from Albany; “Mother is dying and Alice is dying too.”

  Anxiety grew as Anna’s confinement approached, and there was general relief when, on October 11, a baby girl was delivered—without complications. Though Elliott and Anna had wished ardently for a “precious boy” and the little girl was “a more wrinkled and less attractive baby than the average,” to her father she was “a miracle from heaven.” Anna and Elliott named their first-born Anna after her mother and Bamie, their favorite sister and sister-in-law, and Eleanor after her father who had been called “Ellie” and “Nell.” Between her parents’ disappointment that she was not a boy and the death threat that her advent into the world had represented to her mother, Eleanor, in a sense, came into the world guilty and had to reinstate herself.

  As usual, Bamie was on the scene being helpful. From the time of the older Theodore’s death, the family had turned to her at moments of crisis. Elliott in particular relied on “the busy Bye” to set his “little world to rights.” It was Bamie who notified members of the family, including Aunt Gracie, who immediately replied:

  Bamie’s telegram at 11:30 this morning brought us the joyful news. I am overjoyed to hear of itty girl’s (not itty “precious boy jr”) safe arrival and just long to have her in my arms. How well I remember when I held you darling Ellie for the first time. My heart beat so I could hardly hold you! And you were so rosy and so beautiful! Kiss Anna for me.

  Eleanor—she never called herself Anna Eleanor except in official documents and in signing checks—was born into a secure golden world in which significant or even ominous events around the globe were hardly noticed—or, if they were, they seemed remote and without relevance to the lives of her parents a
nd their friends.

  The foreign cables in the newspapers of October 11, 1884, reported the growth of the empires whose dissolution would occupy so much of the agenda of Eleanor’s final years at the UN. Egypt, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire when her father had sailed up the Nile in a dehabeah in 1873, was coming under the rule of Great Britain, and, at the request of the khedive, it was reported, British troops were in the field seeking to suppress the “wild and fanatical” forces of El Mahdi. The same column of foreign notices reported that Paris had heard that “Chinese bands” had been driven off from “Western and Southern Tonquin.” “My fleet is closely watching the coast,” General Brière de l’Isle reported to Paris. “I assume immediate command of the troops and am about to leave Hanoi.” In India Elliott had questioned the universality of the western concepts of right and civilization in defense of which the white man was allegedly assuming his burdens. But gradually he had lost interest in the rights and wrongs of imperialism, and his social ties were now aligned with the propertied classes of western Europe, especially of England.3

  The foreign cables also noted briefly that “the outrages against the Jews in Morocco have been stopped.” New York society had little sympathy for an anti-Semitism that expressed itself in physical brutalities and political repression, but it was nevertheless openly anti-Semitic. Attendance at the Patriarchs’ balls at Delmonico’s was falling off, Town Topics, the self-styled “Journal of Society” noted, adding that the chief beneficiaries of these entertainments now were “the Hebrews,” who arranged their own festivities for the days following a Patriarchs’ ball so that they could take advantage of the lavish decorations the Patriarchs left behind. Even so enlightened a woman as Mrs. Winthrop Chanler could write of a Jewish friend that “she seemed to descend from prophets rather than from money lenders.” Elliott and Anna shared New York society’s bias against immigrant foreigners generally, and against the eastern European Jews particularly.

  Politics, except on the highest levels of government and statesmanship, was not an occupation for gentlemen in 1884. Theodore’s willingness to run for assemblyman in the “brownstone” district—in Eleanor’s day it would be known as the “Silk Stocking” district—distressed some members of the family. “We felt that his own father would not have liked it, and would have been fearful of the outcome,” Cousin Emlen said. “Uncle Jim, Em and Al bitterly opposed to my candidacy of course,” Theodore had noted in his diary in 1881, but Elliott stood by him like a “trump.” Elliott even joined his brother in going into the Twenty-first A.D. Republican Club.

  The chief item in the newspapers that October, and Theodore’s major preoccupation, was the close of the Cleveland-Blaine campaign. Theodore was not happy with a presidential candidate whom he regarded as a special-interests jobber. He had opposed Blaine at the Chicago convention and until a few weeks before Election Day had managed to avoid campaigning for him. But in the end, to the distress of the Reformers, he chose regularity and stumped for Blaine. Presumably Elliott, who, like his sisters, followed his brother in political matters, voted for him, but Anna’s side of the family found Grover Cleveland’s honesty as well as conservatism more than satisfactory. And, indeed, a substantial part of high society voted for Cleveland. A few days before Eleanor was born Grandfather Ludlow was quoted as saying: “I have been a Democrat for years and will probably vote for Cleveland, but I am not a politician. . . . ”

  The Roosevelts had all been Democrats before the Civil War but became firm Lincoln Republicans during the war. So did Valentine Hall, although a little less staunchly, motivated by economic self-interest as well as patriotism. A friend who came in after dinner just before the 1864 Lincoln-McClellan race ended announced that he had sold all his stocks. Valentine Hall considered that stupid. “He should have held on until after Lincoln’s election,” he thought. Everything would go up. He scared another friend with the warning that if McClellan were elected, the Democrats would surely repudiate the debt. But Valentine Hall did not wholly approve of Lincoln, either. When the president sent in a general to take charge of riot-ridden New York, he thought the action “despotic.” As for Lincoln’s political associates, their pockets were “filled too.” He prayed, worried about his health, and though in his twenties, bought a substitute in order to escape military service, as many gentlemen did.

  The Oyster Bay Roosevelts stayed Republican, but the Dutchess County branch reverted to the Democratic party. One Roosevelt who voted for Cleveland was the gracious squire of Hyde Park.

  Cleveland was the first Democrat to occupy the White House since 1860, but his policies differed little from those of his Republican predecessors. Not until Theodore became president did either Republican or Democrat assert the national interest in any way that angered the rich and privileged.

  The Cleveland victory saw the final suppression of the Negro vote in the southern states. “Let the South alone,” William E. Dodge, New York capitalist, Grant Republican, and close friend of the elder Theodore, had urged in 1875, and that is what Republican administrations did, beginning with President Hayes, for whom the elder Theodore had worked hard. By 1884 the South had nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments insofar as they applied to Negroes, and white supremacy was effectively re-established.

  Because of the Bulloch connection in Georgia, the Roosevelts always had a large circle of southern friends. And because of these southern ties, Elliott and Theodore were undoubtedly sympathetic with the restoration of white rule in the South, although as president, Theodore would shatter precedent and rouse the South to a fury by having Booker T. Washington as a White House luncheon guest.

  He was to shatter precedent as well by his enlightened approach to the rights of the workingman, and it was in the year of Eleanor’s birth that he began to question the interpretation of the laissez-faire doctrine to which he and most of the members of his class had always subscribed. In 1884 Samuel Gompers of the Cigarmakers Union took Theodore on a tour of the slum sweatshops, and the young assemblyman agreed to sponsor a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenements even though it violated his laissez-faire principles. And when the courts, quoting Adam Smith, invalidated his bill saying that they could not see “how the cigar-maker is to be improved in his health or his morals by forcing him from his home and its hallowed associations,” Theodore began to be aware, as he wrote later, that complete freedom for the individual could turn out in practice “to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak.” He would be the first president since Jackson to use the power of government against Big Business—in the 1902 coal strike.

  The trade-union movement in the eighties was in its infancy. Labor was cheap. The propertied wanted to keep it that way and rationalized their privileged position by arguing that any man worth his salt could improve his status. The day Eleanor was born, an Episcopal congress met in Detroit to answer the question Is Our Civilization Just to Workingmen? “Labor’s complaint is poverty,” said the keynote speaker, the Reverend Dr. R. H. Newton. “Poverty is the fault neither of the laborer nor of nature. The state crosses the path of the workingman and prevents him from making a fair fight. Labor fails to get favorable legislation; capital secures all it asks.”

  To the respectable and the upstanding, whether wealthy or not, this was “rot” and heresy. Their laissez-faire individualism was not troubled by the fact that at a time when half-a-million-dollar yachts and million-dollar mansions were being built, thousands of unemployed were looking for work, bread, and shelter, that the average income of eleven million out of the twelve million American families was $380 a year. They approved of industrialists like Pullman, who proclaimed that “the workers have nothing to do with the amount of wages they shall receive.” In 1893 they were relieved when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a 2-per-cent tax on income of $4,000 and over; a good friend and Roosevelt family adviser, Joseph Choate, had argued the case, denouncing the tax as “a communist march on private property.”


  “Unfair” taxes and the threat of the nascent labor movement may have invaded the after-dinner conversations of the men, but matters involving politics were of no concern to gentlewomen. Godey’s Lady’s Book, the widely read arbiter of feminine taste and interest in the 1880s, made it a matter of policy to avoid references to public controversy and agitating influence. In 1884 the closest it came to discussing a woman in public life was “Queen Victoria as a Writer.” Women’s suffrage had become an important issue, but it had no supporters in the Roosevelt family among either the men or the women.

  FAMILY LETTERS and recollections provide few glimpses of Eleanor’s childhood, yet they were obviously critical years. In Eleanor’s later portrayal of these years she emerges as a child who was full of fears—of the dark, of dogs, horses, snakes, of other children. She was “afraid of being scolded, afraid that other people would not like me.” She spoke of a sense of inferiority that was almost overpowering coupled with an unquenchable craving for praise and affection. She described her mother as the most beautiful woman she ever knew but also as representing cold virtue, severity, and disapproval, while her father embodied everything that was warm and joyous in her childhood.

  Her contrasting memories of her mother and father emerged in a brief account of her first visit to Hyde Park that she included among the explanatory footnotes to her father’s letters, in Hunting Big Game in the Eighties. On January 30, 1882, “a splendid large baby boy” (Sara Roosevelt’s description) had been born to the James Roosevelts. They asked Elliott to be one of the godparents of Franklin Delano, as they decided to name him.

  To see this godchild, Eleanor wrote, was the reason

  for that visit which I paid at the age of two with my parents to Hyde Park and I am told that Franklin, probably under protest, crawled around the nursery (which has since been our children’s), bearing me on his back. Also, I am told, that I was sent down at tea time to the library in a starched white frock and stood bashfully at the door till my Mother saw me and called “Come in, Granny.” She often called me that, for I was a solemn child, without beauty and painfully shy and I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth.4