Handsome Sara (Sally) Delano was twenty-six, half as old as James Roosevelt, a widower of quiet dignity, when they were married in 1880. The marriage united two of the great Hudson River families, but the disparity in their ages had caused some astonishment in society, an amused surprise that had been reflected in a letter that Eleanor’s father wrote home from London in 1880.
The sly old chap took great pleasure as indeed “Aunt Sara” (they passed for my Aunt and Uncle) did also, in relating to me the incidents and course of The Love Affair. When he slipped off before breakfast while he used to visit us in the country and say it was for his a.m. walk, the gay young dog went to post billets to his fair mistress. But truly they are a devoted couple and very kind to me.
The Delano family lived at Algonac, a stately brown and buff Victorian mansion with wide lawns overlooking the Hudson at Newburgh. Sara was born in 1854, the seventh child in a brood of eleven—six boys and five girls. Three years later her father, having lost his first China-trade fortune in the panic of 1857, returned to China to make “another million.” This time it took him six years, and in 1862 he sent for his family, and Mrs. Delano and her children, including eight-year-old Sara, embarked on the square-rigger Surprise for the 128-day voyage. After their return to the United States at the end of the Civil War, Warren Delano invested his new wealth judiciously in coal and other securities; Sara’s share of the legacy at his death was over a million dollars.3
Warren Delano was a patriarch, and everyone in his large Algonac household gave him unquestioning obedience. That was the custom of the times, said Sara later. But the Delano children went beyond custom: they were sure their father was infallible and knew best about everything. If her father frowned upon a young man, said Sara, that was the end of him, and she even permitted her father to help her with the letter so telling the gentleman. Perhaps James Roosevelt, twice her age, reminded her of her father, and perhaps that was a strong part of his attraction for her.4
James was a seventh-generation Roosevelt. His grandfather, born in 1760, also named James, had been the first of the Jacobus line to settle on the Hudson, after an attempt at gentleman-farming in Harlem had to be abandoned because of its rocky soil. The elder James died in 1847—“a highly respectable gentleman of the old school,” wrote Philip Hone—and his son Isaac (1790–1863) completed his family’s withdrawal from New York—and from public activity. Isaac was an eccentric. He attended Princeton and obtained a medical degree at Columbia, but never practiced because he was unable to stand the sight of blood or human pain. He turned instead to botanical research and led a secluded country existence in Dutchess County.
His son James (1828–1900), Franklin’s father, was more enterprising. He went to Union College and then for two years did the Grand Tour, at one point in the turbulent year of 1848 even enlisting in Garibaldi’s Red Shirts, who were then besieging Naples. But a siege can be a tedious affair, and James soon returned to the States. After attending Harvard Law School, he devoted himself to his investments and to cultivating a life of dignified rural amenity on the Hudson in the manor style of the British nobility, whom he much admired. He made several bids for great financial power by putting together mergers in coal and railroads, and even though the mergers failed his fortune was large enough to enable him to sustain the leisured life of a Hudson River gentleman at Springwood, his 1,000-acre Hyde Park estate. “English life to perfection,” said Ward McAllister, who passed through Hyde Park and was enchanted with the avenue of old trees, the little village church, the gracious estates, and well-appointed houses.
Not the least of Hyde Park’s English flavor came from James Roosevelt himself, a tall man with mutton chop whiskers who was rarely without his riding crop. He bred trotters and built a famous herd of Alderneys that he crossed with Jerseys and Guernseys.5 He took the cure annually at a German spa, hunted in Pau, shot grouse in Scotland, and as a patriarch was among those who decided who belonged in New York society. While declining to take part in politics as not quite gentlemanly, he fulfilled a squire’s obligation to the village, where he was a member of the Democratic caucus, belonged to the Volunteer Fire Company, was warden and vestryman of the church, and served as town supervisor. And as president of a small railroad he was entitled to take his private railroad car, the “Monon,” to any part of the country. Such was the man and style of life to which Sara Delano happily accommodated herself.
James’ first wife, Rebecca Howland, had died in 1876, and their son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt (“Rosy”), was a river grandee much in the mold of his father. Rosy and Sara were the same age but it was the widower who courted her, and in her eyes James Roosevelt was a delightful gentleman—high-minded, courteously persistent, and well descended. They worshiped the same household gods, had the same convictions about education and manners, noblesse oblige, and honor. They shared a love for the tranquil, secluded life of Hudson Valley and agreed that its old families, to most of whom they were related, embodied and defended the precious old standards in which they had been bred.
Warren Delano was not at all pleased with his daughter’s choice. Although he was fond of the Hudson River squire—“the first person who has made me realize that a Democrat can be a gentleman”—he felt that James was too old for Sara. But this time she would not be swayed by his wishes, and on October 7, 1880, they were married at Algonac in a ceremony that, according to a New York paper, was witnessed “by a small number of the best representatives of New York Society.” That afternoon they drove the twenty miles to Hyde Park, and by evening Sara, installed as mistress of Springwood, contentedly set about giving her husband the worshipful devotion and care she had bestowed upon her father—and removing all traces of her dead predecessor, Rebecca Howland.
Her diaries reflected the sedate, patterned existence into which she slipped without, if one is to judge by what she wrote there, pang or travail.
We drove to church in our new Victoria. In the afternoon James rowed me down to Rosedale. We hung our new water colors. The neighbors all have been to see us . . . so we are busy returning a visit or two each day which gives an object for our drives. James keeps busy. He goes to town at least once a week and has school meetings, etc. I always go to the train with him and go for him again so he is not so long away from me. James is too devoted to me.
If their life together was not as bland as these entries suggest, if the realities were different, the code under which she had been reared would have obliged her to pretend otherwise. It would have been an affront against form and manners to have acknowledged the truth if the truth were unpleasant. This same attitude would be bred into her son Franklin. “If something was unpleasant and he didn’t want to know about it, he just ignored it and never talked about it. . . . I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough it would settle itself.”6 James adored her and she leaned on him, endowing his every action with an almost cloying significance. Yet she was no Grandma Hall, satisfied to be cherished, protected, and helpless; she was a woman of dominating will and active mind. When James died she assumed management of Hyde Park and, over her son’s protests, kept it as a gentleman’s estate rather than farming it as a business. She astutely used the money she had inherited to bolster her position as matriarch. It was perhaps an ideal marriage: she was wholly reverential, always deferred to her husband’s wishes, and had everything her own way.
In 1882 the circle of her contentment was complete. A son, Franklin, was born. From then on her diaries reported equally on the doings of “dear James” and “darling Franklin.” Franklin’s was a happy boyhood. His parents doted on him, and as the first grandchild in the vast Delano clan (a cousin having died) he was petted and made much of by aunts and uncles. His father loved “riding and driving, sailing and ice-boating, skating and tennis” and could not wait to have his son join him as a companion in these interests. Whatever the boy wanted, he was given. A pony? As soon as his legs were long enough to straddle its back. A boat? He had the use of his f
ather’s yacht the Half Moon, a Campobello sea captain to teach him how to handle it, and a twenty-one footer of his own. A gun? His father handed him one at eleven. There were the neighboring Rogers boys and Mary Newbold for him to play with, trees, cliff, and a river in which to test his mettle, and a succession of nurses, governesses, and tutors to serve and instruct him and for whom he could do no wrong. He did not require strict handling, his mother said, because “instinctively” he was “a good little boy.”7 When he developed an interest in birds, he was encouraged to begin a collection, as he was with stamps. And the wishes and interests that his parents did not anticipate or were reluctant to grant, he learned to obtain by charm and persuasion. What is impressive is the steadiness and professionalism that he brought to these occupations. His interest in birds resulted in the most complete collection of Dutchess County birds in existence; his philatelic interest so impressed his Uncle Fred Delano that Fred turned over his albums to his young nephew, and their combined collection became one of the world’s most famous.
In later years Franklin said, “All that is in me goes back to the Hudson.” His boyhood world was ordered and harmonious, his childhood secure, happy, and protected—so different from Eleanor’s storm-tossed early years. “He never saw ugly moods or emotions,” Sara’s biographer wrote on the basis of what Sara told her. “He was never the inwardly shrinking victim of conflicting interests, envenomed jealousies or ill-tempered words.”8 If anything, he was overprotected. “Much of his time, until he went to Groton, was spent with his father and me,” Sara wrote, and though she disagreed with the assessment, there were “many people who pitied him for a lonely little boy, and thought he was missing a great deal of fun.”9 Geraldine Morgan, a Livingston from Staatsburgh who called herself a tomboy, said that Franklin was unable to make the Hyde Park baseball team recruited from the great houses; that, because he spent so much time with his mother and father, he found it difficult to play with the other children; and that the children who knew him felt sorry for him.10 In the little memoir My Boy Franklin, Sara insisted that she had never tried to influence young Franklin against his own tastes and inclinations, and yet she also disclosed that it was only “eventually” that she had allowed his golden curls to be shorn, and that when, at the age of five, he had become melancholy he had “clasped his hands in front of him and said ‘Oh, for freedom’” when she asked him why. She had been genuinely shocked.
That night I talked it over with his father who, I confess, often told me I nagged the boy. We agreed that unconsciously we had probably regulated the child’s life too closely, even though we knew he had ample time for exercise and play.
The training and discipline of young Franklin were left to Sara, who had forceful opinions on the kind of man she wanted him to become. “Never, oh never,” she confessed later, had it been her ambition for him that he should become president. “That was the last thing I should ever have imagined for him, or that he should be in public life of any sort.” She had only one goal in mind for him:
that he grow to be a fine, upright man like his father and like her own father, a beloved member of his family and a useful and respected citizen of his community just as they were, living quietly and happily along the Hudson as they had.11
If the role of a country squire ever appealed to young Franklin, he was opened to larger ideals, different styles of life, and new heroes when he entered Groton in 1896. His cubicle at Groton was austere and cramped compared to his quarters at home, but it was his own and he loved it. The school’s headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, was a stern and exacting disciplinarian, but his influence upon young Franklin was, next to his parents’, greater than anyone’s. Dr. Peabody’s repeated theme, inside chapel and out, was service, particularly public 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 would say.
Groton helped shape Franklin’s outlook, but it was not as liberating an influence on him as Allenswood was upon Eleanor. Because Franklin’s regard for Endicott Peabody equaled Eleanor’s for Marie Souvestre, the differences between headmaster and headmistress—not wholly to be explained by Groton’s being a school for boys and Allenswood for girls—are not without interest.
Mlle. Souvestre was an agnostic—indeed, she called herself an atheist—who insisted that no area of human belief should be immune from critical inquiry and objective study. The Reverend Peabody “was by nature a believer rather than an inquirer. Theological perplexities and subtleties simply did not affect him.”12 In politics, Souvestre frequented the great Liberal houses, was a friend of Beatrice Potter Webb and a follower of Harrison’s religion of humanity. Peabody was a conservative with an abiding faith in the status quo who shaped Groton into a splendid mechanism for instilling into the sons of the old-stock, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class the elements of a “manly Christian character” that would make them worthy and capable of ruling America. Souvestre sided with the oppressed minorities everywhere. Peabody believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, especially the English, and considered the Spanish-American War “the most righteous war that has been undertaken in this country.” Souvestre’s closest friends were in the artistic community and her library was adorned with avant-garde works. Peabody distrusted art and artists, and Groton boys with serious artistic interests had to hide them if they did not wish to be labeled outsiders. Souvestre was impatient with pupils who studied by rote and mechanically repeated what they had heard from her or had read in a book. Interest should motivate study, the rector agreed, but if interest was not aroused “the work should be done as a matter of duty.” Souvestre, a Dreyfusard was prepared to uphold the truth even if it meant undermining authority. At Groton “obedience came before all else”; rules and good form were upheld at the price of curiosity, sometimes of truth. In short, Peabody’s values were those of order, hierarchy, discipline, and power; Souvestre’s were those of heart, vision, and spirit.13
When Franklin left Groton he was attuned to the rector’s admonitions that Groton boys should go into politics and public service. But service to whom, politics for what ends? To uphold the established order, as the rector preached, or to change it in favor of the victim, as Mlle. Souvestre believed? Roosevelt’s answer in the great crisis of the thirties would be to conserve the system through the institution of change, a course that reflected the teachings of the rector tempered by those of Mlle. Souvestre as transmitted through Eleanor Roosevelt.
Sara’s hopes that her son would lead the quiet life of a country gentleman were undermined from another quarter—Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin’s enthusiasm as a boy at Groton and a young man at Harvard for “Cousin Theodore” was undisguised. Indeed, it was in connection with the Theodore Roosevelts that young Franklin showed that, devoted as he genuinely was to his mother, he could be as stubborn and determined as she. At the end of his first year at Groton (1897), while his parents were taking the annual cure at Bad Nauheim, Bamie wrote and asked whether Franklin could spend the Fourth of July week end with her at Oyster Bay. When his mother refused the invitation for him, he wrote back, “Please don’t make any more arrangements for my future happiness.” A few days later Theodore came to Groton to talk about his adventures as New York police commissioner—a talk that Franklin called “splendid”—and while there he also invited Franklin to Oyster Bay. The young man promptly accepted and wrote his parents: “I hope you will not refuse that too.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s compelling personality made a large impact upon the younger generation, and his influence was particularly felt at Harvard, which Franklin entered in 1900, where Theodore’s example counteracted the Gold Coast cult of “Harvard indifference.” He was a “great inspirer,” said Eleanor, and Franklin was one of those whose inclination to enter politics definitely matured under his influence. At Harvard, Franklin was a clubman, went out for the crew, and took a heavy schedule of courses, but he spent most of his time on the
Crimson, which he later said was probably “the most useful preparation I had in college for public service.”
An undergraduate paper that he wrote on the Roosevelts in New Amsterdam should also have warned his mother that he would go with her as far as he could but that he was independent, self-reliant, and thought for himself. To Sara, the Roosevelt and Delano family trees—which she knew in every detail and which she would frequently expound (in later years, much to the irritation and impatience of her daughter-in-law)—were the basis for her feeling of caste and exclusiveness. Franklin’s genealogical researches, however, had a democratic emphasis. In a sophomore essay, “The Roosevelt Family in New York before the Revolution,” he wrote:
Some of the famous Dutch families in New York have today nothing left but their name—they are few in numbers, they lack progressiveness and a true democratic spirit. One reason,—perhaps the chief—of the virility of the Roosevelts is this very democratic spirit. They have never felt that because they were born in a good position they could put their hands in their pockets and succeed. They have felt, rather, that being born in a good position, there was no excuse for them if they did not do their duty by the community, and it is because this idea was instilled into them from their birth that they have in nearly every case proved good citizens.14
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