Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  New York, too, was changing from the quiet city Eleanor had known as a child. It was now Greater New York, a teeming metropolis of 3.5 million people, and the population was still surging upward as immigration, almost wholly from eastern and southeastern Europe, approached a million a year. “More money,” the city departments cried. The budget would soon pass the hundred million mark, the editorials warned, while Fusion Mayor Seth Low bewailed the unreasonable limitations that Albany placed upon the city’s borrowing powers.

  It was a divided city. Jacob Riis had called his book on the subject, published in 1890, How the Other Half Lives. A decade later the split was deeper. There was the New York of Eleanor’s family and friends, whose resplendent homes along Fifth Avenue now stretched from Washington Square to the upper Eighties. Concentration of wealth was “the outstanding feature of American economic life” in the new century, and on Fifth Avenue it was reflected in the French châteaux, Rhine castles, and Italian Renaissance mansions that replaced the old brownstones.

  The other face of New York was the huddle of East Side slums, where two thirds of the city lived in 90,000 tenements, most of them of the gloomy “dumbbell” type in which ten out of the fourteen rooms on a floor were windowless. The male head of the household earned $600 a year, for which he worked a ten-hour day, six days a week. Children and women were “sweated.”

  These were the ugly realities raising portentous thunderheads over the glitter and elegance of Fifth Avenue when Eleanor returned. But the omens, if more menacing, were not new; what was new were the reforming impulses that could be felt everywhere, especially among women, whose position was changing. The women’s rights movement had made enormous strides since 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton had launched it. When she died, just as Eleanor returned, she was no longer a figure of mockery, and some even called her “the greatest woman the world has ever produced.” Even Theodore Roosevelt, who was not yet a convert to women’s suffrage, called her death a loss to the nation.

  By the opening of the new century, American women had broken out of their traditional sphere.

  When I read in the papers and heard in the Club that a dozen women of great wealth were standing along Broadway handing bills and encouragement to the girl shirtwaist strikers of last winter, I was not a bit surprised. Nowadays I can hardly go to a reception or a ball without being buttonholed by somebody and led into a corner to be told about some new reform. It is perfectly amazing, this plague of reform, in its variety, in its volume and in the intensity of earnestness with which it is being pushed.4

  Some well-born women went further. Charlotte Perkins Gilman challenged members of her sex to seek “economic independence” and to use their economic power for social reform, not simply to salve their consciences by charitable donations. When Professor Vida Scudder of Wellesley advocated “a new Franciscanism” and appealed to students to go into the slums and staff the growing settlement-house movement, a few New York debutantes responded. Mary Harriman and Nathalie Henderson enrolled in Barnard to study economics and sociology and then launched the Junior League, one of whose purposes was to assist the settlements.5

  Eleanor returned to the United States feeling that she was on the threshold of life, ready to be swept up by such an undertaking. After three years under Mlle. Souvestre’s influence, she was open to the reforming currents that were in the air, and she wanted to go on with her education.

  But society decreed that at eighteen, young girls who “belonged” came out. The debut was a tribal ritual, “the great test,” the society columns cruelly proclaimed, of a young girl’s social talents.6 The approaching rites filled Eleanor with dread, but it never occurred to her not to comply—a resolve that worried Mlle. Souvestre. Her letters cautioned Eleanor against permitting society to “take you and drag you into its turmoil. Protect yourself,” she urged.

  Give some of your energy, but not all, to worldly pleasures which are going to beckon to you. And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought-after-women at a ball or the woman best liked by your neighbor at the table, at luncheons and the various fashionable affairs.7

  But society, echoed by her Hall relatives, decreed that her first obligation was to be introduced. So Eleanor prepared for the ordeal.

  The social season did not begin until November, and Eleanor spent the intervening months at Oak Terrace in Tivoli. It was a sobering experience. After the protected surroundings of Allenswood, she was suddenly brought face to face with “the serious side of life.” It was lonely at Tivoli. Aunt Maude, closest to her in age, was now settled in her own house and was leading a very gay life that was the talk of the society columns. Aunt Pussie, Eleanor reported to Mlle. Souvestre, was involved in “worldly excitements.” She was as temperamental as an artist, and when she was at Tivoli she was likely as not to be depressed and would refuse to speak to anyone. And then “she would emerge perfectly delightful and bright and happy as a May morning.” The whole family, added Eleanor, who had become quite impatient with her aunt, “had been through a wringer wondering what was the matter and then nothing.”

  Pussie was quite attached to Hall, Eleanor’s eleven-year-old brother, and considered him her child. Eleanor wanted Hall with her although she felt bad about it, she wrote Mlle. Souvestre, because it made her aunt so sad. Mlle. Souvestre consoled her. It was hard for Eleanor to be faced with such problems so soon, but Mademoiselle was pleased that Hall had elected to go with Eleanor. Since Pussie was so busy with society and her gentlemen, the headmistress thought she would easily forget these “regrets of a sentimental character.”

  The loneliness of Tivoli could have been borne, even when Hall was staying with his Oyster Bay cousins, if it had not been for Uncle Vallie, whose alcoholism was a never-ending nightmare to Eleanor. He would stand at a window with a gun and shoot at members of the family as they crossed the lawn so that they had to take shelter behind the trees. Vallie was often joined in his escapades by his younger brother even though Eddie was now married to the beautiful Josie Zabriskie. Her Allenswood classmate, Leonie Gifford, came to stay with Eleanor, but throughout her visit Eleanor was on tenterhooks. The strain was too much, and she decided that she could no longer invite friends to Tivoli. Two young men, Duncan Harris and Charley Draper, dropped in unannounced and were baffled by her desperate maneuvers to keep them from having a drink with Vallie, who they knew was entertaining the current amateur doubles champions that day.8 Only once did she depart from her “no guests” rule, and that was when she invited young Franklin Roosevelt, who knew the situation at Tivoli well enough not to be frightened off by Vallie’s sudden eruption. Of the visit, Franklin noted in his Line-A-Day diary, “Vallie has been exemplary—I seem to have a good effect on him.”

  The spectacle of her two uncles losing control of themselves instilled in Eleanor, she said, “an almost exaggerated idea of the necessity of keeping all of one’s desires under complete subjugation.” She warmed to vitality but disliked abandon, especially the maudlin behavior induced by alcohol. When people let themselves go in that way, she turned rigid and cold. The intensity of her reaction to her uncles was undoubtedly fed by the repressed knowledge of her father’s behavior, something that she could not acknowledge but which, after Pussie’s outburst the summer before, must have been close to the surface of consciousness.

  Between Vallie and Pussie, she had a “liberal education” that summer in how people who were emotionally unstable “can make life miserable for the people around them.” She began to have an understanding of what her mother had suffered, although it did not alter her feelings toward her father.

  After the new school term began at Allenswood, Mlle. Souvestre wrote Eleanor that she was sorely missed at the school. “There are many new girls with us,” Mlle. Souvestre wrote. “As is their custom, the English girls pay no attention to them and leave them alone. You would have known how to act so that they would have felt at eas
e and happy in conditions so different from their usual life.” What a “great void” your departure has created, Mlle. Samaia wrote her. “Tell me when the big season starts in New York,” Mlle. Souvestre demanded.

  For Eleanor, the coming of autumn only increased her dread of her debut and her first winter in society. Would her Roser-class schoolmates still see her as a girl apart? Would there be the whispered “she has no father or mother, she is so pathetic,” or would she be able to repeat her Allenswood triumph and establish a place for herself in New York?

  For some, the New York season began with the autumn ball at Tuxedo, but it was the sound of the bugle opening the horse show at Madison Square Garden that announced to the city that society was once more “at home.” Splendid animals pranced on the tanbark, and elegant folk thronged the boxes. One of the stalls belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s older half brother, James “Rosy” Roosevelt, who had married an Astor, looked Edwardian, worldly, and attractive, and was “a real honest snob.” The night the horse show opened James’s daughter Helen, who was engaged to Theodore Douglas Robinson, was there with him, as was Eleanor. “Two handsome members of the Roosevelt family,” reported the Herald, which omitted to note that young Franklin Roosevelt, down from Harvard, was also in the box that evening; he was an unimportant Roosevelt. The center of attention was Alice, who made several circuits of the Garden in a lovely white gown and the strikingly large hat that had already become her trademark, this one of white plumes.

  Although the newspapers noted Eleanor’s presence at the show and Franklin wrote in his diary, “Dinner with James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Helen Roosevelt Roosevelt, Mary Newbold and Eleanor Roosevelt at Sherry’s and horse show,” in her own account of her coming out Eleanor failed to mention the occasion. For her the pinnacle was still to be scaled.

  The big Assembly Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria took place on December 11. To New York society, said the New York Times, it is what “the Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace is to the fashionable world in London.” A debutante did not feel she had come out until she had curtsied to the patronesses who received the guests in the smilax-decorated foyer, had entered the great ballroom in her white gown and long white gloves, and had danced in the cotillion with a handsome young man.

  Almost all the debutantes considered the ball an ordeal—“ninety-nine per cent of us,” said Helen Cutting; “no, I would make that ninety-nine point nine per cent.”9 They all worried over what their peers would say about their gowns, their looks—above all, whether they would be asked by young men to dance. For Eleanor the evening was even more trying because of the inevitable comparisons with her mother’s splendid debut. The week before the Assembly, Town Topics had commented that Eleanor’s coming out recalled the brilliant days of New York society in the late eighties when Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt was one of its “leaders.” Society would be thinking of her mother and, she was sure, how far the daughter fell short of being a belle.

  She stayed in town that autumn with Pussie, who never let her forget that it was unheard of for a Hall girl not to be a belle at every party. Fourteen years after her debut Pussie was still much admired and much wooed, still had more partners than she could possibly accept for both the cotillion and supper. Both Pussie and Maude caused “raised eyebrows” in New York society; they “broke practically every rule that could be broken” but were always forgiven because of their great beauty and charm. Living with Pussie only added to Eleanor’s feelings of gloom and foreboding.

  There were five Misses Roosevelt making their appearance in society in 1902. Alice, who had come out the previous January with “the most gala White House ball since the days of Dolly Madison,” was coming to the Assembly, as were Christine, Elfrida, Dorothy, and Eleanor—all eighteen years of age. The town was talking about “the Magic Five” and twittering away over who was the prettiest, the most attractive, the most sought after. That Alice was the wittiest—not only among the debutantes but in society generally—was already agreed.

  The Assembly, according to Eleanor, was “utter agony.” She was adequately gowned in a Callot from Paris, but she knew no one and would have been totally ignored by the men, she claimed, were it not for Forbes Morgan, a suitor of Pussie’s, and Bob Ferguson, who was fifteen years older and had been devoted to her mother. They danced with her and introduced her to others at the ball, but she was not a popular debutante, she felt, and left as soon as she could, ashamed that she should be the first girl on her mother’s side of the family not to be a belle.

  Her agony, though real, was self-inflicted, and revealed more about the immense importance she attached to being a success than it did about how others regarded her. So far as looks were concerned, Town Topics commented rather cruelly, the Roosevelt girls were “interesting-looking, but they are not pretty.”10 And what constituted a “popular debutante”? Before going to the Assembly Ball, Eleanor had attended the largest of the dinners that preceded it, an elaborate affair thronged by young men and women given by the Reverend Dr. and Mrs. Morgan Dix for their daughter Margaret. Two days before the Assembly she was at Sherry’s for the dinner-dance given by the Emlen Roosevelts for their daughter Christine, and the day after the Assembly she attended the reception and small cotillion given by Mrs. Hilborne L. Roosevelt for Dorothy. The following week she went to a dinner and dance at Sherry’s for Gertrude Pell and assisted at Elsie Waterbury’s afternoon reception and supper. Before departing for Washington for New Year’s at the White House, Aunt Tissie took sixty of Eleanor’s friends to see Julia Marlowe in The Cavalier. After the play the elegantly begowned ladies and top-hatted young men went by omnibus to Sherry’s for supper and informal dancing. In Washington Eleanor was invited to all the big parties and went to most of them. In all, it was hardly the life of a “Miss Lonelyheart.”

  After the exhausting New Year’s gaieties, Eleanor returned to New York for more dinners and private dances in the splendid mansions along Fifth Avenue. “Now comes the critical test of the winter as to who shall be left and who shall be chosen,” wrote the Herald, adding that a few debutantes—but by no means all—would be invited to the Astor ball, “the most important event of the winter season.” To be included on Mrs. Astor’s list meant distinction for the girl who had just made her debut. Eleanor was included, and she was also invited to all the so-called “small” dances—those presented by Mrs. Ogden Mills, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, the Elbridge T. Gerrys, the Whitelaw Reids. These entertainments usually began at eleven after the opera, and consisted of dancing until midnight, supper, a cotillion, and further dancing until early morning. Eleanor did not enjoy these parties and left as early as possible. That first winter, she said, society was the all-important thing in her life, but it nearly brought her to a “state of nervous collapse.”

  “She wasn’t a belle by any means,” recalled Duncan Harris. “She was too tall for most of the young men. But she was an interesting talker. And she was always gracious and pleasant.” Her contemporaries remarked upon her exquisite manners, and older men found her sympathetic and were impressed with her grave thoughtfulness. To her surprise, several times she found herself seated next to the host—but what did such victories matter? At eighteen she would have preferred younger, if less exalted, dinner companions. With men her own age, however, she was insecure and quick to consider them “fresh,” and she was overly “proper.” During her last month at Allenswood, Leonie Gifford’s brother had come to visit his sister, and the two Giffords, Eleanor, and Marjorie Bennett went for a walk in the common. She and Marjorie tossed a coin to decide who should walk with whom. “You walked with me,” Walter Gifford reminded her two decades later, “and when I congratulated you on winning the toss you very coldly told me you had lost it, which was rather galling for a 17-year-old male in a very high collar.”

  The winter over, she was glad to get back to Tivoli. “I only arrived at six last night and I’ve just finished my third book. I never quite realize when I’m away how much time there is for reading here.” Sh
e laughed over Charles Flandrau’s Harvard Episodes and The Diary of a Freshman but the third book, La Gioconda, “is just tremendous. . . . I suppose D’Annunzio meant to show that fate is inexorable and that one may sacrifice all and get nothing for it if such is our destiny. Certainly he did not show men in a very favorable light.” She made these comments in a diary she began to keep at the end of May, 1902, because, she wrote, she hoped to do “something which I will want to remember later on.” But she also had literary aspirations, and in the briefly kept journal she dramatized an encounter between her grandmother and the cook.

  “Do you know Totty I simply cannot get rid of the cook!” was the way Eleanor began the episode; “she simply won’t go.” Then Eleanor recreated the scene between her grandmother and the cook, Mary Ann—“the scene which had led up to this startling announcement.”

  G’ma. “Mary Ann, Mrs. K wants you to go back to her on Monday.”

  Mary Ann. “Sure Mam and I couldn’t think of such a thing (feeble attempt at protest from my G’ma) why should I be after leaving you when the young ladies are so nice and I’m quite completely settled for the summer. (Another attempt at speech on my G’ma’s part—unsuccessful of course.) Why now Ma’am I’ve been with Mrs. K’s sister, Mrs. B., and with her brother’s sister-in-law and with her cousin so it’s natural you know she should want me back but I told her when I was going I wouldn’t come back and you don’t think I’d be after laving you now?”