Franklin’s interest was revived, and later that autumn when the social season was under way he came down from Harvard for some of the debutante parties. Although Eleanor nowhere mentioned his presence at the social affairs that were such “agony” to her, her name began to appear in his diary with increasing frequency. He noted that she was at the horse show, and two weeks later, when he was again in New York for Christine Roosevelt’s dance, his diary read “Lunched with Eleanor.” And before he went to Hyde Park for Christmas he shopped with his mother until 3:30 but then slipped away for “tea with Eleanor.”
After Christmas week in Hyde Park and New York he, too, was invited to Washington for the New Year’s festivities, and stayed with Mrs. Cowles. She was “Cousin Bamie” to him, and he was one of her favorites in the younger generation. He went to afternoon tea with Alice at the White House and noted in his diary that Eleanor was staying with Alice. At the New Year’s Day reception, he and Eleanor stood in the “inner circle” and watched with fascination the thousands filing through the White House to shake hands with the president, who afterward went out for his customary canter “as fresh as a daisy,” according to the papers. They all dined with the president, and then “to theatre and sit near Eleanor.” “Very interesting day,” the young man commented in his diary.2
A month later, Eleanor was among those his half brother Rosy invited to celebrate Franklin’s twenty-first birthday, an affair that Franklin described as “very jolly!” At the end of the school year in June there was a house party at Hyde Park, and Eleanor’s name began to appear in Sara Roosevelt’s journal as well as in her son’s diary. “Muriel [Robbins, Franklin’s cousin, also called Moo], Eleanor and her maid, Franklin, Lathrop Brown and Jack Minturn came yesterday. Mary Edmund and young Hollister came to dine. Had singing after dinner.”3 They all walked to the river “in the rain,” Franklin recorded, dined with the Rogers, who were next-door neighbors, played tennis and blind man’s bluff. It was a long week end. Eleanor arrived on Saturday, and Franklin took her to the train on Tuesday.
He then dashed back to Cambridge to pick up his diploma. He had obtained it in three years but planned to return to Harvard to do graduate work and, what was more important to him, to run the Crimson, of which he had been elected president. His degree in his pocket, he boarded the Half Moon, the family’s sixty-foot schooner, in New Bedford, raced her off Newport and then sailed her back to Hyde Park. Again there was a house party which Eleanor, accompanied by the inevitable maid, attended, along with those whom Sara described as “my six young people.” They sailed, dined on board the Half Moon, went on a hay ride, took the cliff walk along the river. A week later Sara noted in her journal that everyone had had tea with Eleanor at Tivoli, but if she suspected that Franklin’s interest in Eleanor was becoming serious, she said nothing, not even when, before going abroad July 24, he invited Eleanor to come to Campobello after he returned. She arrived on August 28, and on September 3 Sara noted, “Eleanor left at six with her maid. We took her to Eastport, on the Half Moon.” A more perceptive observation was made by Mrs. Hartman Kuhn of Boston, whose red-shingled, green-shuttered summer home was next to the Roosevelts’ at Campobello. When Franklin and Eleanor announced their engagement fifteen months later, Mrs. Kuhn wrote Eleanor that she could not pretend to be surprised: “The first summer at Campo I saw most clearly how Franklin admired you. . . . ”
Few saw that that admiration was turning to love. Already Franklin was a man who masked his deepest feelings in debonair banter, preferring to gain his way by diplomacy and charm rather than by frontal assault. Indeed, many of his contemporaries belittled him as being all shining surface and artifice. Young Corinne Robinson taxed him with lacking conviction and laughingly called him “hypocrite” and “feather duster.”4 His Oyster Bay female cousins did not consider him a great prize in the matrimonial sweepstakes. “He was the kind of boy whom you invited to the dance, but not the dinner,” said Alice; “a good little mother’s boy whose friends were dull, who belonged to the minor clubs and who never was at the really gay parties.”5 But this was said years later when envy and politics had sharply divided the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park clans.
Some of the Delanos had their own theory to explain Alice’s spitefulness. “Alice was angry about Franklin’s choosing Eleanor,” Franklin’s cousin Laura Delano maintained. “That’s always in the picture. She was angry because she didn’t catch him.”6 In the course of researching this book, when the author asked Mrs. Longworth about this, her expressive face registered incredulity, alarm, and horror, not wholly unmixed with interest, as if her very active mind were examining the story for all its possibilities. “I liked him, of course,” she finally said, but he was too “prissy,” too much of “a good little mother’s boy” for her. And since she was not entirely persuaded that the interviewer believed these protestations, Mrs. Longworth told the Washington Post that she had “tape recorded her denial, so that future generations can hear in her own voice and words just how absurd she considers such a suggestion to be.”7
No other contemporary of Eleanor, Alice, or Franklin confirmed Laura Delano’s intriguing theory; on the contrary, everyone was skeptical of it, but they also disagreed with the Oyster Bay portrait of Franklin as a mollycoddled lightweight. “They exaggerate” was the dry comment of a contemporary who went to the same balls, attended the same football games, moved in the same social circles, and was Republican in her sympathies.8 As an undergraduate, Franklin led a strenuous social life in Boston and New York and suffered from no lack of invitations to dinners as well as dances. His diary was sprinkled with the names of young ladies with whom he teased and flirted, and when the news of his engagement to Eleanor was disclosed more than one young female heart must have fluttered with regret. No, he could pick and choose, and his choice of Eleanor showed that beneath his surface gaiety there was seriousness and a life plan. “We used to say ‘poor Franklin,’” Alice Longworth acknowledged. “The joke was on us.”
While neither his mother nor his friends seemed to perceive the strength of his feeling for Eleanor, she, persuaded of her plainness, refused to believe it. He had stayed on at Campobello after she left, a good part of the time in the company of Evelyn Carter, daughter of the governor of Barbados, who made no secret of her interest in him. From Campo he went to Oyster Bay to stay with the Emlen Roosevelts; Alice Parker, an attractive debutante whom he had seen in London, was also a guest. And Miss Carter turned up again at Lenox while Franklin was visiting Mrs. Kuhn before returning to Hyde Park. But if these dalliances caused Eleanor to wonder about the young man’s intentions, she should have been reassured by her overnight stay at Hyde Park on her way back to Tivoli from Groton, where she had left Hall. Franklin took her on a long ride through the woods in the morning and in the afternoon on a drive in the dog cart. Their talk was intimate and relaxed. She told him of her worries about “the Kid,” as she called Hall, and he spoke of his plans for the Crimson and his indecision about whether to enroll in the law school or the graduate faculty. She must have sensed that he was eager to please her, for he left for Cambridge the next day, ushered at the football game, and then went immediately to Groton so that he could report to her that “the Kid” was getting on “finely” and was “much liked.” No matter how devoted he was to Groton, he hardly would have left Cambridge the week end that he was preparing, almost singlehandedly (since most of the staff was not yet back), to get out the first issue of the Crimson if the had not wished to impress the young lady in Tivoli with his thoughtfulness.
She, too, was interested, even to the point of being a little jealous, as her first letter to him after his return to Cambridge reveals, but she was also on guard for a rebuff.
[Oct. 3, 1903]
Tivoli
Friday
Dear Franklin
Many thanks for your note & the “token from the sea,” which I think I should have sent to someone else however, don’t you?
Hall wrote me that he had seen you a
t Groton last Sunday. It was kind of you to look him up when you must have had so much to do. I hope he is all right. I can’t tell much from his letters.
Did you have to work very hard on the “Crimson”? I hoped someone would turn up to help in the end.
I am so anxious to hear what you have decided to do this year & also whether you can come here on the 16th. I am hoping that you will be able to get down & of course I would like you to come back here after the game on the 17th if Cousin Sally does not mind & you are willing to stay in this quiet spot.
Please don’t do anything you don’t want to do however as I shall quite understand if you decide to go to Hyde Park instead of coming here.
Is the address on this right?
Yours in haste,
Eleanor Roosevelt.
“It is not so much brilliance as effort that is appreciated here,” wrote Franklin in his first editorial, addressed to the freshman class—the “determination to accomplish something.” He felt that with Eleanor at his side his own great dreams would stand a better chance of realization. “It was nice of you to write me,” Eleanor said in her next letter, “and you know quite well you need not apologize for writing about yourself. I should think history and political economy would be most interesting and much the most useful for you in the future and of course you are going to get an A.M.”
An indignant reproach in the same letter made it clear that this was more than cousinly advice. “What were you thinking of when you wrote not to tell me whether you could get down on the 16th and come to me or not?” she asked. She cared a great deal, even if convention prescribed that she betray no interest in him and even if her grandmother looked askance when she received a letter from a man. Franklin had not replied to Eleanor because he had wanted to find out first what his mother was planning for the week end of the Harvard–West Point game. Who was coming on the sixteenth, he had written her. “Are H. [Helen] Cutting, Eleanor and Moo [Muriel Robbins] coming to us?” Everything was arranged satisfactorily, and although it poured on the day of the game it was a joyful week end for Franklin and Eleanor. “Harvard wins 5 to 0,” he recorded in his Line-A-Day, “Eleanor and I catch train, others miss it, drive up from Poughkeepsie.” An unexpected participant in some of their gaieties was Alice Roosevelt, who that week end was a guest of the Ogden Millses at their estate a few miles up the Hudson at Staatsburgh; she came down, escorted by a young man, for tea.
“Cousin Sally [Sara Roosevelt] was very sad after you left on Sunday,” Eleanor reported to Cambridge, “and the only thing which cheered her at all was the thought of having you on the 3d all to herself.” The romance was flourishing. She now signed herself “Your affectionate cousin” and made her plans with his in mind. She had been invited to a party at the Levi Mortons’ and was unable to decide whether or not to go; however, “I think I’ll chance there being someone there I like and accept.”
She worried about his health. “I suppose you are hard at work now, but please be a little careful of your eyes, for it is really foolish to fool with them you know, and besides it worries Cousin Sally so when you are not all right. She spoke of it several times after you had gone.” But then, a little conscience-stricken that she might sound too schoolma’amish, she apologized. “I am afraid this letter has a good deal of horrid advice in it. Please remember, however, that you have told me I was ‘grandmotherly’ and don’t blame me too much!”
Grandmotherly! Do Prince Charmings fall in love with “grandmotherly” young ladies? Yes, if under his gay surface the prince harbors large ambitions that require a helpmate rather than a playfellow to bring them to fruition. “Even at that age,” recalled Isabella Greenway, who, as a debutante, took New York society by storm in 1904, “life had, through her orphanage, touched her and made its mark in a certain aloofness from the careless ways of youth. The world had come to her as a field of responsibility rather than as a playground.”9
Neither young Roosevelt was leading a monastic life. Franklin’s letters to his mother spoke of a “small dance” at the golf club, a visit to Beverly, a swimming party at the home of Alice Sohier, a Boston belle, week ends at New Bedford. Eleanor moved from one country house to another: one week end she was at Llewellyn Park, Cousin Susie’s estate in the fashionable Oranges; she spent another at Ophir Hall, the Westchester establishment of Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune and the father of Jean Reid, Eleanor’s associate at Rivington Street; and she accepted the invitation of Franklin’s cousin Muriel Robbins to attend the Tuxedo Ball. The Boston Brahmins had created Brook Farm; New York society had Tuxedo Park, a 600,000-acre country club community thirty miles from New York City whose “cottages” were casemented in the English style, whose clubhouse was staffed with English servants, and whose grounds were enclosed by a high fence to guard against intruders from the lower orders.
“I am glad you think I am going to enjoy the Tuxedo Ball,” she wrote Franklin. “I do not feel quite so confident as I haven’t seen any of my last winter’s friends in so long that I fully expect to be forgotten.” Did she go to the ball in order to prove to him that she was not too “grandmotherly”? “Tuxedo was great fun,” her next letter insisted, “and I only wish you had been there, though I don’t doubt you had a more restful time wherever you were, as we were up till all hours of the night, which nearly finished me.” She would be going up to the Mortons’ on the 3:30 train and if he did not have to go up earlier “it would be splendid to go up together.” There was a mild rebuke in this letter, one that would be repeated often in the future. “By the way do you know you were an ‘unconscionable’ time answering my last letter and you would not be hearing from me so promptly if I did not want you surely to lunch with me on the 14th.” Sara Roosevelt’s entry in her journal for November 14 indicated that the Morton week end had worked out as Eleanor had planned.
Got up at 7 and at 7:30 Franklin and Lyman came from Boston. After they had their baths, we all had breakfast and we all lunched with Eleanor at Sherry’s, also her cousin Mrs. Parish. We came up at 3:30 and Eleanor, Franklin and Lyman went up to Ellerslie to the Mortons to spend Sunday.
Ellerslie was another palatial country house, high above the Hudson at Rhinecliff, owned by Levi P. Morton, who had been governor of New York and vice president under Benjamin Harrison. The Morton girls were sophisticated and fun-loving, temperamentally closer to Alice than to Eleanor. “I am glad you enjoyed the Morton’s,” Eleanor wrote Franklin, “as I thought it very pleasant.” Her praise of the party was tepid, but her comments on a poem that Franklin had sent her on his return to Cambridge were much livelier. She thought it was “splendid” poetry, “but what ideals you have to live up to! I like ‘Fear nothing and be faithful unto death,’ but I must say I wonder how many of ‘we poor mortals’ could act up to that!”*
In mid-October Franklin invited her to Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game, after which he hoped to join her at Groton during her visit to Hall. She would accept, she replied, if Muriel Robbins and her mother also were going. Muriel’s brother Warren was at Harvard and they could chaperone her. On Saturday, November 21, Franklin wrote in his diary:
In town at 10:30 and Eleanor and I walk to the Library, see the pictures, and then walk up Beacon Hill. I out to lunch in Cambridge and lead the cheering at the Harvard-Yale game, 16–0, but our team does well. Show Eleanor my room and see them off to Groton.
The next day he followed Eleanor to Groton and spent the day with her, beginning with church in the morning and ending with chapel in the evening. During this visit to Groton he proposed to her. How he put it we do not know. Some biographers have written that he said, “I have only a few bright prospects now,” to which the nineteen-year-old Eleanor is said to have replied, “I have faith in you. I’m sure you’ll really amount to something someday.”11 This account leaves one dissatisfied. Another version seems more in character. According to this account, Franklin said that he was sure he would amount to something some day, “with your help,” and the surpr
ised girl replied, “Why me? I am plain. I have little to bring you.”12
Eleanor returned to New York trembling with excitement even though she was beset by questions. She found Franklin irresistible, but was he sure? Was she? What would happen to her brother Hall? What was her duty to her grandmother? And, as so often in her life, her joy was shadowed by tragedy. Her Great-Uncle James King Gracie had died, and her first letter to Franklin after the Groton week end first dwelt on that. “I am more sorry than I can say for he has always been very kind and dear to us and he and Aunt Gracie both loved my Father very dearly and so it is just another link gone.” She was worried, too, about her Aunt Corinne, for whom the death was a terrible blow and who was “almost crazy” with grief.
In spite of it all I am very happy. I have been thinking of many things which you and I must talk over on Sunday. Only one thing I want to tell you now. Please don’t tell your Mother you have to come down to see Mr. Marvin on Sunday, because I never want her to feel that she has been deceived & if you have to tell her I would rather you said you were coming to see me for she need not know why. Don’t be angry with me Franklin for saying this, & of course you must do as you think best. Ellen told me they were all coming down Saturday night by boat so you will have plenty of company. Please don’t get tired out this week & try to rest a little bit at Fairhaven. I am afraid this letter sounds very doleful, for I really am sorry about dear Uncle Gracie & the whole day has been a bit trying so please forgive me & the next will be cheerier & more coherent I hope! Goodnight,
Eleanor and Franklin Page 17
