Peabody had forbidden “fagging” (the practice in British private schools of Winston Churchill’s day whereby underclassmen were virtual slaves to the older boys). But bullying existed at Groton, and young Franklin got his share of it. He never mentioned this in letters home, possibly for fear of upsetting his father. In fact, he was so good-natured about the bullying that the other boys soon left him alone.
Franklin was a slender, somewhat awkward youth, generally unfit for football or even baseball. But he earned a varsity stripe for being the manager of the baseball team. His biographer Geoffrey Ward writes that Roosevelt was so embarrassed about his inferior athletic ability as an adolescent that as an adult “he felt compelled to lie about it,” claiming he’d been “quite a boxer” at Groton, and also that he’d broken his nose twice on the football field.
Politics in those days was generally considered an unworthy calling by the society classes. But Peabody believed strongly that Groton men should change that impression for the better and become involved in government service. “If some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land, it won’t be because they have not been urged,” he said. To that end, Peabody introduced an obligatory debating class. The subjects up for discussion ran the gamut from international to national to local affairs, and the debates were spirited. Franklin once took on the subject of a transpacific canal through Nicaragua, a project dear to his father’s heart, owing to the fact he had made heavy investments in the company aiming to build it.*47
As rector, Peabody continually preached to the students on the subject of “impurity,” by which he meant sexual activities of any description. He warned them to conduct themselves with only the highest rectitude around girls. Franklin took Peabody’s confirmation class, which was held after school in his home; in 1898, after turning sixteen, he was confirmed into the Episcopal Church. He also became a member of the Groton Missionary Society, which did good works with the elderly and the poor and conducted evening services in churches around the county. Franklin soon became the society’s organist, and he managed to negotiate a quartet of hymns out of the instrument, which by his own admission were “pretty fair.”8
In summertime, the Groton Missionary Society put on a charity camp at New Hampshire’s Lake Asquam, where Franklin taught swimming, canoeing, and sailing to poor boys from Boston and New York. It was his first real exposure to the squalor bred by life at the bottom in the nation’s large cities and was undoubtedly an absorbing experience for both the campers and the Groton boys on the “faculty.” It was also one of the ways Peabody sought to eradicate the snobbery he so much despised among the well-to-do.9
That same year, the Spanish-American War broke out. Franklin in his later years liked to boast that he and a fellow Grotonian tried to run off and join the armed services, but according to biographer Ward this, too, seems to have been a fabrication. It is Ward’s opinion that Roosevelt as an adult recounted the so-called adventure of his youth not as it was but “how he wanted it to have been.” His cousin Teddy, however, did in fact go off to the war with his famous Rough Riders and charged up San Juan Hill—a feat that propelled him into the governorship of New York that same year and later to the White House itself.
By 1899, Franklin’s final year at Groton, he had come a long way from the bewildered, frightened boy who’d entered the school four years earlier. He was tall—six feet one inch—and fine looking. His grades were middling but he had developed a rhetorical flair and manner that could make him seem warm, suave, and prepossessing, although some classmates characterized him as contrary, artificial, and insincere. He was made a prefect—a high honor—and put in charge of helping the younger students, who seemed to look up to him.
In the spring, Franklin won a starring role in the senior class play, W. S. Gilbert’s The Wedding March. But he turned bitterly against Endicott Peabody after failing to be selected as a senior prefect, the school’s highest honor. During Easter vacation his mother tried to comfort him over the perceived slight, but to no avail. All his life, he was fiercely loyal but also had a long memory—and those who went against Franklin Roosevelt did so at their peril.
At graduation he was awarded the Latin Prize, then headed for Harvard. “I can hardly wait to see you,” he wrote his mother, “but feel awfully to be leaving here for good.” And then he was gone.
* * *
FRANKLIN SPENT THE SUMMER before Harvard at the Roosevelt compound on Campobello, where he played endless rounds of golf and sailed his father’s new yacht Half Moon II (the original Half Moon had been destroyed two years earlier in an unexplained explosion while being towed up the Hudson). Roosevelt also attended the teas, parties, dinners, and dances that formed the social life of the island’s elites.
His father, James, was not faring well with his heart condition. He was well enough to ride a new horse given to him by Sara but had to be assisted in mounting it by the stable hands. He took only one long trip on Half Moon II, when the family sailed up the Bay of Fundy to New Brunswick. But it made him so tired that Sara feared the strain was too much.
Worse, a scandal developed in James’s family that was deemed by some relatives as the proximate cause of his death. James’s son Rosy had produced a grandson by his wife, the former Helen Astor. Three years older than Franklin, he was known as “Taddy,” and though he was a half nephew to Franklin, he and his younger sister were treated more like cousins. It was in him where the scandal lay.
From an early age Taddy was “different” than other children. It was as if he were born under the wrong star. He was almost hopeless in schools, including Groton, where he continually embarrassed Franklin with his peculiar behavior. Somehow he managed to get into Harvard, where he was promptly expelled for failing to show up for classes. Following the death of his mother, he was set to come into a huge Astor inheritance when he reached his majority—but in the meantime, he proceeded to squander his considerable allowance on whisky and women in New York’s infamous Tenderloin district.
Informing his father that he intended to spend the summer on a sailing cruise with a friend, Taddy instead continued his self-destructive tendencies by marrying a Hungarian hooker and sometime dancehall girl named Sadie Messinger and moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side. When his father got wind of this development, he found that Taddy had lied about his age on the marriage license and promptly contacted his lawyers. Armed with two attorneys, Rosy appeared at the door of Taddy’s apartment threatening to have the marriage annulled, and a large row ensued.
The upshot was that the newspapers had found out about the marriage, and the tabloids went into convulsions of spurious rectitude. A blizzard of unseemly headlines announced the union of the scion of the Roosevelt and Astor families to a known prostitute.
Everyone was scandalized, but none more than James, who prized his privacy and family name above all else. Reporters arrived at his office wanting a statement. The sordid headlines continued. James had two mild heart attacks and seemed to be growing weaker. Franklin wrote his mother from Harvard, “I do not wonder that it has upset Papa, but although the disgrace to the name has been the worst part of the affair, one can never again consider [Taddy] a true Roosevelt. It will be well for him not only to go to parts unknown, but to stay there and begin life anew.”*510
On December 8, 1900, about a month after the scandal broke, James Roosevelt died, and Franklin and his mother Sara began a lifelong closeness that rivaled that between Winston Churchill and his mother Jennie after she became a widow. Sara remained well-off, with an estate of many millions. She was forty-six and still a handsome woman. But now, in what would soon become a bone of contention, she focused nearly all of her vast energy and emotion on her only son.
* * *
AT HARVARD, ROOSEVELT and a roommate occupied a four-room suite in Westmorly, an exclusive residence hall apart from the shabby rooms on Harvard Yard where most of the students li
ved. It was luxurious only in comparison with where he’d lived at Groton. But he and his roommate furnished it nicely, gamely adorning the walls with Groton team photos and pennants and other mementos of the old boarding school. Sara took a house near the campus to be close to him.
Like many of his former Groton classmates, Roosevelt settled at Harvard for a “gentleman’s C” so far as scholarship was concerned. Instead, he concentrated on his social life and on getting to know as many people as he could, possibly as a prelude to a political career. His one ambition seemed to be getting chosen for the Crimson, the school newspaper. He was, and he became its editor after three years of apprenticeship.
In the summer of his freshman year Franklin and his mother sailed once more to Europe, unwilling to bear the memories of Campobello or Hyde Park without James. They spent time in Germany, Switzerland, and Norway, where they met the German kaiser, who was vacationing there on his yacht, the Hohenzollern, surrounded by half a dozen warships of the imperial German navy. Franklin and his friend Frances Pell were invited to go aboard, along with some other passengers. Sara, watching through binoculars, was thrilled when the kaiser turned to look as her son passed by with the tall and beautiful Frances on his arm. Afterward, Franklin returned with a pencil he had stolen from the emperor’s desk that was “authentically dented by the imperial teeth.”11
In Paris in early September, newspapers carried the story of the shooting of President William McKinley by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Later that week, the Roosevelts sailed for home. Aboard ship, on September 14, they received word that McKinley had died of his wound. It was shocking news—the more so for the Roosevelts, because Franklin’s cousin Theodore was now president of the United States.
Back at Harvard, Roosevelt languished in a kind of academic malaise, getting by but mostly working on the Crimson. He did, however, enroll in a famous course by visiting professor Frederick Jackson Turner on the history of America’s westward expansion. Turner speculated that since the first expansion had ended about 1890, the United States would likely become more like European countries, locked in their borders with heavy class conflicts and strained economic growth: the very conditions that Franklin Roosevelt encountered when he was sworn into the U.S. presidency at the height of the Great Depression.
Also at Harvard, Franklin engaged in various charity programs, in one instance raising several hundred dollars for the wives and children of the South African Boers, whom Winston Churchill was presently fighting. Many of the Boer women were being held by the British in concentration camps to keep them from supplying their husbands in the Boer army.
Franklin’s chief regret at college was in not being elected into Porcellian, Harvard’s most exclusive eating club—possibly, in the estimation of his biographer Frank Freidel, because of the scandalous behavior of his nephew, Taddy. But his bitter reaction to the slight provides a window into his provocative political career.
* * *
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR Franklin had been seeing a beautiful, prominent Bostonian girl named Alice Sohier. But when he informed her that, being an only child himself, he wanted at least six children she turned him down. “I did not wish to be a cow,” she remarked much later, following her divorce from her husband after having two children.12
Whether this left Roosevelt on the rebound is open to speculation but, shortly after the Sohier romance ended, he accidentally ran into his second cousin Eleanor Roosevelt on a train, an event that developed into a lifelong marriage.
Eleanor was not unattractive, but she characterized herself as “plain.” She was certainly the product of an unhappy childhood. Two years younger than Franklin, she was the daughter of the alcoholic Elliott Roosevelt, Franklin’s godfather and TR’s brother, who was killed in a drunken accident in 1894 when Eleanor was nine years old. Her mother, no paragon of parenthood, had died from diphtheria two years earlier. She had once told her only child, “Eleanor, I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You’re so plain that you have nothing to do but be good.” As Roosevelt biographer Alonzo Hamby put it, “He had not the slightest understanding that he had proposed to an emotional train wreck.”13
Orphaned Eleanor went to live with her maternal grandmother, whose alcoholic daughter heaped further abuse on the child. She had no playmates and was plagued by depressions. This Cinderella-like existence ended in 1899, when, at the age of fourteen, Eleanor was sent off to the exclusive Allenswood boarding school near London. There, she came under the supervision of its headmistress, Madame Marie Souvestre, a charismatic nonconformist freethinking lesbian.14
Mme. Souvestre took a special interest in her American charge and developed in Eleanor a sense of self-worth where before there had been only self-doubt. On summer trips to small towns in France and Italy, Eleanor was exposed to social classes beneath her own and taught by Mme. Souvestre that these ordinary people had worth and self-respect, just like the well-heeled socialites to whom she’d always been exposed. Eleanor stayed at Allenswood until her grandmother called her home to make her debut on her eighteenth birthday. By then she had absorbed the knowledge and many of the attitudes of Mme. Souvestre and carried these in her persona, though the scars of her earlier childhood also remained.15
Sara was thoroughly shocked when she heard the news of Franklin’s engagement. She expected that he would seek romance and marriage among the very top girls of society, and Eleanor, though certainly nowhere near the bottom, was more in the middle than the top. Sara immediately spirited Franklin away on a lengthy Caribbean cruise, but it did little to chill his ardor toward his cousin.
They were married on March 17, 1905, at an Episcopal service in New York City (the Right Reverend Endicott Peabody presiding), in range of the din of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Among the several hundred fashionable guests was the uncle of the bride President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave his niece away in the absence of his deceased brother.
Sara, for her part, had decided to take Eleanor under her wing, for she knew what a wretched childhood she had endured. Eleanor “knew she had a ghastly childhood,” said a younger cousin, “but she didn’t realize how ghastly it was.” At the same time, there was a friction that would endure from then till Sara’s death, hinging on the attentions that Franklin would divide between the two women. Since James’s death in 1900, Sara had come to rely on Franklin for comfort and affection—and she wasn’t about to surrender those special treatments, marriage or no marriage.
Thus, when the couple returned from their honeymoon, a nearly four-month grand tour of Europe, they were taken by Sara to an Upper East Side town house—near her own and furnished completely by her—to begin their married life. Franklin studied law at the Columbia Law School. On May 3, 1906, a daughter, Anna, was born. Sara decided that her son’s town house was too small and commissioned the construction of two adjoining six-story town houses—one for her and one for Eleanor and Franklin—on Sixty-fifth Street between Park and Madison Avenues. Their house, once more, came with all the furnishings, causing Eleanor to complain to Franklin later that she “did not like to live in a house that was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about. And which did not represent the way I wanted to live.”
But Sara continued to dominate the lives of her son and daughter-in-law, creating holiday plans, hiring their servants for them, and buying clothing for their children. Their family continued to expand. By 1910 their children numbered three, and would have eventually been complete at six—the very number that Franklin had told Alice Sohier he wanted in his family—but for the tragic death of a son, Franklin Jr., who died of illness in 1909. (Coincidentally, perhaps, there were six children in Theodore Roosevelt’s family, the cousin whom Franklin idolized and emulated.) For her part, Eleanor once told her daughter, Anna, that “sex was a wife’s burden to bear.”16
Franklin was mostly bored by law school, and in fact he never received his doctor of la
w degree from Columbia. In his last year, he took and passed the New York Bar exam and left before graduating. He soon joined the Wall Street “white shoe” firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn as a $10-a-week clerk handling mostly small claims, wills, deeds, and the everyday mundane traffic of a novice attorney. In the meantime, he became heavily involved in the New York Yacht Club, while plotting a run for the New York State Senate in Hyde Park.
It was an uphill venture because the town’s district was fairly solidly Republican. But Roosevelt wasn’t about to shed his father’s Democratic politics for the GOP, even if his venerated cousin TR had ridden it into the White House. Traveling in a bright red Maxwell touring car, Roosevelt barnstormed his largely rural district, kissing babies, giving speeches, and glad-handing farmers, shopkeepers, and immigrants, all of whom he loudly proclaimed to be “my friends.” It was a lifestyle well suited to Roosevelt’s “confident extraversion” but anathema to Eleanor’s “puritanical insecurity.” She stayed home in Hyde Park and minded the children while he tooled around in his fire-engine-red convertible.17
Roosevelt ran on a platform that was more or less progressive for the day: opposition to the big-city machine politics of Tammany Hall and to bomb-throwing labor unions, and a pledge to bring honesty and economy to the state government. He was elected with 52 percent of the vote.
* * *
ROOSEVELT QUICKLY ASSUMED LEADERSHIP of a group of twenty-one Democratic state legislators to block the candidacy for U.S. senator of a Tammany Hall—backed political hack.*6 Along with their Republican colleagues, the votes of the twenty-one so-called insurgents were enough to derail the nomination. It was a bold action on the part of Roosevelt and the others, who stood to lose a lot regardless of the election’s outcome. The Tammany machine would not refuse to stoop to violence, fraud, or slander to ruin those who got in its way.
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