America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  His son James was more a rebel than an eccentric. He married twice. His first wife was Rebecca Howland, and this was considered a respectable union. Breaking the son-naming pattern and adding a new, Roosevelt fillip to it, their only son was named James Roosevelt Roosevelt, who came to be known as “Rosy” Roosevelt. When Rebecca Howland Roosevelt died in 1876, her widower made a second marriage that was considered less respectable, to Sara Delano. There was nothing wrong with the Delanos, of course, except that she was twenty-six and her husband was fifty-two, twice her age. Even that might have been acceptable if Sara had not been exactly the same age as her husband’s son, Rosy. It was whispered that Sara was more interested in Rosy than she was in his father. In any case, James and Sara Roosevelt’s son was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sara became passionately devoted to her only child and ignored her husband. Mother and son made long and frequent journeys to Europe, leaving James Roosevelt behind.

  James Roosevelt’s older son, Rosy, was also rebellious. Having married, quite properly, Helen Astor, he had a son, James IV, and then divorced his wife—the first divorce in the family—and proceeded to marry an English barmaid named Betty, which was a scandal because Betty was obviously a “commoner.” Though many members of his family refused to accept Betty, Rosy and Betty’s was a long and happy marriage.

  Rosy’s son James was less fortunate. He became involved with a young woman who, it was said with confidence, was no better than a streetwalker. When he insisted on marrying her, he was both disowned and disinherited by his father, and his marriage, unlike his father’s, was not a success. Still, this James was not as unhappy as he might have been. His mother left him a nice share of her Astor millions in a trust fund that yielded him an income of sixty thousand dollars a year, though he ignored this windfall. After his streetwalker returned to the pavements, he became a recluse and lived in an abandoned garage in the Bronx. When his trust officers asked him how he intended to spend his income, he told them it was none of their business. Certain members of his family, knowing he was rich, tried to befriend him and lure him back into the Roosevelt fold, but he told them to leave him alone. When he died, just in case they might have been remembered in his will, his relatives gave him an expensive funeral, “as would befit a Roosevelt.” But when his will was read, all his millions were left to the Salvation Army.

  Aunt Laura Delano, Sara Delano Roosevelt’s youngest sister, was also a little “different.” Having been jilted by a lover who had left her to marry one of her other sisters—there were eleven Delano children in that generation—she had become a spinster, and invited a distant unmarried female cousin to live with her in spinsterhood. Theirs became a lifelong, passionate relationship. Though they quarreled frequently and bitterly, there were always tearful reconciliations. As Aunt Laura Delano grew older, her oddities grew more pronounced. She dyed her hair a bright purple and developed a fixation that the end of the world was at hand. One morning she awoke to find the skies unnaturally dark. Her maid explained that a solar eclipse was taking place. But later Aunt Laura appeared at the family breakfast table, dressed in her finest traveling costume, gloved and hatted and carrying her jewelry case. “Despite what they say,” she announced, “this is clearly the end of the world. I have dressed for the occasion. I have my jewels and I am ready to go to heaven.”

  But of all the troubles that have seemed to plague the Roosevelt family, perhaps the most baffling is the longstanding enmity that existed between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their mutual cousin, the famously sharp-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth. As children, Alice and Eleanor—they were the same age—had been the closest of friends. Alice had been a bridesmaid at Eleanor’s wedding (accepting the invitation, Alice had written, “It will be too much Fun!”). And yet, during FDR’s White House years, Alice had only the most rude and caustic things to say about the couple residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She enjoyed comparing her own father’s robust physique with Franklin Roosevelt’s physically handicapped one, and once declared that FDR was “dragging the whole country into the wheelchair with him.” At parties, she performed hilarious, and cruelly accurate, imitations of Eleanor Roosevelt, mimicking Eleanor’s fluty voice and somewhat lisping speech. Fluttering her hands helplessly about her, Alice would say, “Oh, dear me, we never did know what to do with these big flippers, did we!” Once, having heard of these performances, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Alice Longworth to demonstrate one for her. Wickedly, gleefully, Alice launched into one of her imitations. Whether Mrs. Roosevelt was hurt or amused by Alice’s act she was too much a lady to let on.

  Was it simply politics that caused Alice to act that way—the fact that most of the Hyde Park Roosevelts had been Democrats, while the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were for the most part Republicans? Was it the old rivalry between the two branches of the family, which was essentially based on the fact that the Hyde Park Roosevelts had more money? “Oh, my dear, you don’t understand at all,” Mrs. Longworth said to the author not long before her death. “You see, when I was growing up, we were taught that we were Roosevelts. We were filled with family hubris up to here,” and she raised her hand high above her head. “And then, out of absolutely nowhere, sailing down the pike, came—Franklin.”

  But this does not seem an entirely satisfactory explanation. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not come exactly out of nowhere. He came, splendidly, out of Groton and Harvard, and before his crippling illness had been a fine and handsome figure of a man. “His eyes were too close together,” Mrs. Longworth snapped. Then she added, “Franklin was the sort of boy you invited to the dance, but not to the dinner.”

  Within the family, it had always been said that Alice had simply been envious of Eleanor and felt that, in terms of husbands, Eleanor had made the better catch—a catch that Alice would have dearly loved to make for herself. Alice Longworth’s husband, Nicholas, after all, had risen no higher in public life than to become speaker of the House of Representatives. Alice had long enjoyed disparaging her Cincinnati in-laws (though the Longworths were very much of that city’s aristocracy), describing her husband’s family as “hopelessly provincial Midwest boobs.” Alice Longworth’s husband had died leaving her a meager estate. Franklin Roosevelt had died leaving his wife a reasonably rich woman.

  But Mrs. Longworth vociferously denied that envy had anything to do with her hard feelings. “I’ve heard that sort of thing over the years,” she said, “and it’s simply not true that I would have liked to have married Franklin. His eyes were too close together! I begged Eleanor not to marry him for just that reason! I’ve even made a tape recording, which can be played after I die, in which I state absolutely, once and for all, that I never once considered setting my cap for Franklin.” Then she added, “As far as I’m concerned, my father is the only Roosevelt who really belonged in the White House.”

  And yet, in terms of the Franklin Roosevelts’ marriage, Alice Longworth was known in the family to be a troublemaker. During the White House years, when Mrs. Roosevelt was traveling extensively for Franklin, serving as her husband’s legs, Alice Longworth and her friends kept careful tabs on the president, noting when he stayed out late, whom he seemed to be paying special attention to at parties—and seeing to it that any news which would imply that the president was seeing other women got back to Eleanor. Could this unhelpful activity over fourteen years’ time be based on nothing more than the proximity of a pair of presidential eyes?

  Years earlier, at Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s wedding, where Alice had served as a bridesmaid, her father had come as a guest and as president of the United States. At the reception that followed, the press had been invited in and immediately descended on the president and his pretty, quick-witted daughter. While Alice preened and posed and the flashbulbs popped, the bride and groom found themselves standing all alone in a far corner of the room, a receiving line of two with no one to receive.

  But later, with FDR in the White House, the tables had been turned on Alice. Now Eleanor was the first
lady of the land and one of the most photographed women in the world. Eleanor had succeeded in making Alice feel she had been reduced in status to a second-rate Roosevelt, and it stung—just as plain, old-fashioned, ordinary envy always stings.

  And yet perhaps it is comforting to know that even an old, aristocratic American family—one filled with hubris up to here—can be subject to the same woes and torments, the same base and petty emotions and motivations, as ordinary mortals are. This is part of the image that, for decades, the members of the British aristocracy, up to and including the royal family, have managed to project: that here is a group of reassuringly ordinary people going about the business of daily living and trying to cope with the problems of life as they arise. This stance of ordinariness may go a long way to account for the durability and longevity of the British class system. But the trick is to appear to be socially awe-inspiring at the same time. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, and one that some families manage better than others.

  *Hone was mistaken; Isaac Roosevelt was the second president of the Bank of New York. The first was Alexander Hamilton.

  *This, at least, is the unlikely family tale passed on by Anna’s grandson, James Roosevelt, in his book, My Parents. Robert Burns died in 1796, and Anna Hall Roosevelt was not born until 1863. It was either a different poet, or Robert Burns was singing to her from his grave.

  PART TWO

  Brahmins, Knights of the Chivalry, and California Grandees

  14

  Knowing One’s Place

  There are certain American cities whose distinct traditions have had sufficient weight to shape and define the attitudes of their leading ciizens even to the present day. New York is not one of these special cities. Boston, on the other hand, is, and the emergence of the celebrated Boston Brahmins can be traced from the city’s earliest beginnings. As the historian Thomas O’Connor noted in a history of the city prepared for the Boston Public Library in 1976, “Like the priestly Brahmin class of the ancient Hindus who performed the sacred rites and set the moral standards, the new leaders of Boston society emerged as the self-styled ‘Brahmins’ of a modern caste system in which they were clearly the superior force.”

  When one thinks of Boston Brahmins, one’s thoughts fly immediately to such names as Adams, Saltonstall, Lodge, Gardner, and to Lowells, who speak only to Cabots, and to Cabots, who speak only to God. But there are other Boston families who are just as old, and in some cases older, and just as proud and even more public-spirited, than the Lowells or the haughty Cabots. Brahmin families would also include the Forbeses and the Codmans, the Coffins, Macys, Folgers, Wetmores, Starbucks, Winthrops, Derbys, Crowninshields, Perkinses, Parkmans, and Pickerings. The first Massachusetts Cabot did not set sail from the Isle of Jersey until 1700, missing the Mayflower by three generations, while such families as the Balches, Palfreys, Woodburys, and Conants were already prosperously settled in Salem when the first Endicott landed there in 1628.

  Before they called themselves Brahmins, of course, they were known as Puritans. Puritan Boston was settled by hierarchical, aristocratic, generally intolerant, and yet education-driven people. When John Winthrop arrived on the Massachusetts coast in 1630 to colonize the Shawmut Peninsula, it was with the promise that his followers would be permitted to practice their religion as they, and not King Charles I, saw fit. But Winthrop, as governor, quickly made it quite clear that he felt some Puritans were born to govern. Others were born merely to worship, while others were not even fit to call themselves Puritans at all. It took considerable pressure from voters in and around the Massachusetts colony to get Governor Winthrop to go so far as to make public the charter he had brought with him from England. Only when Winthrop finally, and very begrudgingly, did so did seventeenth-century Bostonians discover that they had been entitled to hold gubernatorial elections on an annual basis—an item in the charter that the governor had chosen to keep to himself. Though the term would not come into use until at least two hundred years later, Winthrop was the first Boston Brahmin.

  From the beginning, proper Puritans were expected to excel, both intellectually and financially. In 1647, legislation providing for a public school system was approved. For the elite, Harvard College had been established even before that, in 1636. Equal stress was placed on the importance of making money, and for the balance of the seventeenth century the Puritans prospered as tradesmen and artisans, providing, for a price, services for each new boatload of immigrants as it arrived. In so doing, Boston can be said to have invented the concept of the service industry in the United States. In the eighteenth century, Bostonians expanded the services they offered to the international scale, investing heavily in shipbuilding and overseas trade. Men named Hancock, Amory, and Faneuil made tidy fortunes from importing rum and spices from the West Indies, and even—though their descendants don’t like to be reminded of it—such luxuries as opium from the Orient. More than likely, it was to help rationalize and atone for such dubious, if very profitable, activities that the Massachusetts Temperance Society was organized in the 1800s.

  At the same time, and probably for the same reasons, a certain sobriety and lack of showiness in terms of dress and style of living were cultivated as hallmarks of proper Boston Brahminism. Thrift was an important Puritan concept, and out of this grew the Boston notion that the best way to conserve a family fortune was to live only on the income from one’s income. In The Proper Bostonians, Cleveland Amory told the famous story of the Boston matriarch who was asked where she got her hat. “My hat?” she responded. “We have our hats.” That anecdote is now forty years old, but the Boston attitude toward hats remains very much the same today, and the hat, ageless and shapeless, still seems designed to suit any number of Boston heads on a wide variety of occasions, indoors or out. (To dress the hat up a bit, one can affix to it a little pin.) Boston’s late Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner—who, of course, was originally a New Yorker—shocked Boston by wearing diamonds in her hair, as well as, on occasion, a Boston Red Sox cap to the opera. Neither headdress was a proper Boston hat.

  Examples of this hatted species of Boston woman can usually be found lunching at the Chilton Club on Dartmouth Street, where members are expected to be properly married or respectably widowed. Unmarried or divorced women are acceptable as guests only if accompanied by a married or widowed mother, grandmother, aunt, or other close female relative. The Chilton Club has an almost pathological dread of being publicized or of having its interiors photographed. Once, when visiting Boston in the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt was invited to stay at the Chilton. Though she was not a member, an exception was made for the wife of the president of the United States. Mrs. Roosevelt, however, had the poor judgment to call a press conference during her visit, and the prospect of having its rooms invaded by a horde of reporters and photographers with popping flashbulbs sent a tremor of dismay throughout the club’s membership. In the end, Mrs. Roosevelt was required to hold her press conference on the club’s front steps.

  The nineteenth century was a difficult time for Brahmins, during which—despite their education—their tolerance of outsiders was severely tested and found seriously wanting. First, in the 1840s and 1850s, came the massive immigration of Irish from the Great Potato Famine, when the phrase “No Irish Need Apply” began to appear with increasing frequency in Boston’s Help Wanted columns. During this period, at the entrances to saloons as well as the fancier restaurants, signs were also posted that advised, “No Dogs or Irish Admitted.” This was the era, too, that saw the formation of many of the city’s prominent men’s social clubs—the Somerset, the Union, and the Tavern—which excluded Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and women. Even today, though the Somerset Club contains a special, if somewhat dowdy, basement dining room for women, women are required to enter the club through a special ladies’ entrance. Upstairs, in decidedly more elegant, Victorian surroundings, Boston’s Brahmin males have lunch or sip the Somerset’s special creation: the sweet martini, made with sweet vermouth instead of dr
y, which no one who has not grown up in Boston seems to appreciate. Here, the masculine Brahmin sumptuary code may also be observed—three-piece suit, usually dark; regimental-striped Brooks Brothers tie; dark Oxford shoes of balmoral or blucher design. Like its distaff equivalent, the Chilton, the Somerset offers overnight accommodations to members. Several years ago, the late Mrs. Abigail Adams Homans found herself in a taxi that could not navigate Beacon Hill in a snowstorm. She asked her driver to pull over to the Somerset Club, where she got out and requested a room for the night. The club’s steward demurred. It was club policy, he explained, that unaccompanied women could not be supplied with rooms. “Very well,” said Mrs. Homans, “I’ll go out and get my taxi driver to spend the night with me.” She got her room.

  Brahmins had long prided themselves on their tradition of public service and on their support of cultural and social welfare programs. But as antislavery sentiments and the abolitionist movement began to take hold in New England, the Brahmin response was to create the American Colonization Society. Under the auspices of this organization, wealthy Boston businessmen contributed large sums of money to be used to purchase the freedom of slaves from southern owners. The plan, however, was not to invite these newly manumitted blacks to come to live in, and enjoy, the socially conscious and liberated air of Boston; it was to pack them onto boats and ship them back to Africa.