by FDR
From the White House, Uncle Theodore wrote Eleanor that only in married life is “the highest and finest happiness to be found. I know you and Franklin will face all that comes bravely and lovingly.” To FDR he wrote:
Dear Franklin,
We are greatly rejoiced over the good news. I am as fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter; and I like you, and trust you, and believe in you. No other success in life—not the Presidency, or anything else—begins to compare with the joy and happiness that come in and from the love of the true man and the true woman, the love which never sinks lover and sweetheart in man and wife. You and Eleanor are true and brave, and I believe you love each other unselfishly; and golden years open before you. May all good fortune attend you both, ever. Give my love to your dear mother.
Your aff. cousin Theodore Roosevelt61
The wedding was set for March 17, 1905, and Franklin asked Endicott Peabody to preside. “It would not be the same without you,” he told the rector. Eleanor requested Uncle Theodore stand in for her father and give the bride away. TR was delighted. He suggested that the wedding be held “under his roof” at the White House and insisted on handling all the arrangements. That was TR’s style, but it was more than Eleanor and Franklin had bargained for. It was eventually agreed that the wedding would be held in New York under Grandmother Hall’s auspices on a date when the president could attend. March 17—Saint Patrick’s Day—was the first available.
Before the wedding, Franklin and Eleanor took time to attend Uncle Theodore’s inauguration. In November 1904 TR had defeated his Democratic opponent, the conservative Alton B. Parker, chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, by 2.5 million votes—a landslide in which Franklin cast his ballot for the Republican ticket.62 Addressing the annual Jackson Day Dinner of the Democratic Party in 1938, FDR said, “My father and grandfather were Democrats and I was born and brought up as a Democrat. But in 1904, when I cast my first vote for president, I voted for the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, because I thought he was a better Democrat than the Democratic candidates. If I had to do it all over again, I would not alter that vote.”63
On March 4, 1904, Franklin and Eleanor sat just behind the president and his family at the east front of the Capitol and heard TR’s characteristic call for vigor and effort, “without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away.”64 Afterward they went to the White House for lunch with the president, watched the parade with him, and went to the inaugural ball that evening in the atrium of the old pension building.
The wedding was held in the twin town houses of Eleanor’s great-aunt, Elizabeth Livingston Ludlow, and her daughter, Cousin Susie (Mrs. Henry) Parish, at 6–8 East Seventy-sixth Street. The formal drawing rooms of the two houses opened into each other and could accommodate two hundred guests, an elegant yet understated New York setting often used by the family on ceremonial occasions. Outside, on Fifth Avenue, the Saint Patrick’s Day parade wound its way northward, the Ancient Order of Hibernians filling the air with “The Wearing of the Green.” Moments before 3:30, the clatter of carriage horses signaled the arrival of the president, top-hatted and buoyant, a shamrock in his lapel, to give the bride away. As the orchestra commenced the wedding march from Lohengrin, Eleanor’s six bridesmaids descended the circular staircase. Each wore a white silk gown, its sleeves embroidered with silver roses, with a demiveil and three silver-tipped ostrich feathers (the Roosevelt crest) in her hair. The six ushers wore tie pins with three Roosevelt feathers depicted in diamonds. Franklin and Lathrop Brown, his Harvard roommate who was standing in for Rosy as best man, wore formal morning attire.65 The bride’s satin wedding gown was covered with Grandmother Hall’s rose-point Brussels lace, which Eleanor’s mother had worn at her wedding. Her veil was secured with a diamond crescent that had belonged to her mother as well. As fate would have it, March 17 was also Anna’s birthday.
When Reverend Peabody asked, “Who giveth this woman in marriage?,” TR answered emphatically, “I do!” Hands were joined, rings and vows exchanged, and the rector pronounced Franklin and Eleanor man and wife. The president reached out to kiss the bride. “Well, Franklin,” he exclaimed, “there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.” TR then strode off to find the refreshments and the guests followed in his wake. Franklin and Eleanor trailed along. “We simply followed the crowd and listened with the rest,” said Eleanor.66 TR had upstaged the stars of the wedding and stolen the audience. Even the cutting of the wedding cake failed to attract many onlookers until the president was persuaded to come and get a slice. As TR’s daughter Alice observed, “Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”67
* Eleanor’s cousin Alice, who was the same age yet far more worldly, reports trying to impart the facts of life to Eleanor, but “I almost came to grief.… She suddenly leapt on me and tried to smother me with a pillow, saying I was being blasphemous. So I shut up and I think she probably went to her wedding not knowing anything about the subject.” Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 57 (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
Eleanor was not alone in her naiveté. Corinne Robinson Alsop, ER’s younger cousin, remembered having once been kissed by a boy in the stable of her family’s home in Orange, New Jersey. “It frightened me to death, and I discussed with my intimate friends whether I would immediately have a baby.” Alsop Family Papers, Harvard University.
* FDR’s resolve was reinforced by the behavior of his nephew Taddy (James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Jr.), the son of Rosy and Helen Astor. Almost three years older than Franklin, Taddy dropped out of Harvard in 1900 to marry Sadie Messinger, a habitué of the Haymarket Dance Hall in New York, better known by her trade names, “Dutch Sadie” and “Sadie of the Tenderloin.” The press had a field day (to the chagrin of the Roosevelts and Astors); Rosy tried to have the marriage annulled, but Taddy, who had just turned twenty-one and come into half ownership of his late mother’s Astor legacy, held tight. After a brief stay in Florida, Taddy and Sadie returned to New York, where they took two rooms over a garage in which he repaired automobiles. They remained together until Sadie’s death in 1940. Taddy never touched his legacy and on his death in 1958 left his millions to the Salvation Army. FDR blamed Taddy for bringing on James’s fatal heart attack in 1900. “One can never again consider him a true Roosevelt,” he wrote Sara. “It would be well for him not only to go to parts unknown, but to stay there and begin life anew.” FDR did not see or speak with Taddy again. Letter, FDR to SDR, October 23, 1900, FDRL.
* Bamie, whose real name was Anna (Bamie was short for “bambino”) was born in 1855; TR in 1858; Elliott in 1860; and a fourth child, Corinne, in 1861.
* With the exception of a brief period during the Civil War, there was no federal income tax until 1894, when a Democratic Congress amended the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act to provide for a general tax of 2 percent on incomes above $4,000 (28 Stat. 509, 553 [1894]).
The following year, a sharply divided (5–4) Supreme Court struck down the income tax as unconstitutional. Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust, 157 U.S. 429 (1895). “We are reversing one hundred years of error,” said Chief Justice Melville Fuller, speaking for the Court. Fuller’s reference was to the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions in Hylton v. United States, 3 Dallas (3 U.S.) 171 (1796), and Springer v. United States, 102 U.S. 586 (1881), both of which would have sustained the tax. As a result of the Court’s decision in Pollock a federal income tax was not instituted until after adoption of the Sixteenth (“Income Tax”) Amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
* After FDR was elected president in 1932, Elliott Roosevelt Mann and Katy wrote Eleanor to congratulate her. ER replied, “I was very interested to receive your letter and to learn that you were named after my father.… I shall hope sometime to see both you and your mother.” No invitation was ever extended, nor was any further correspondence from the Manns answered by ER. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 65n. (New York: Viking Penguin,
1992).
* James Kearney, an early biographer, suggested that when Eleanor wrote This Is My Story in 1937 she deliberately emphasized the unhappy aspects of her childhood because she wished to identify with the “agonizing insecurity and aspirations of American youth in the thirties.” Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: The Evolution of a Reformer 6 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).
* Sitting opposite the formidable Marie Souvestre, then in her seventies, was considered the place of honor. According to ER, “The girl who occupied this place received [the headmistress’s] nod at the end of the meal and gave the signal, by rising, for the rest of the girls to rise and leave the dining room.” Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 26 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
FOUR
ALBANY
Frank, the men that are looking out of that window are waiting for your answer. They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.
—ED PERKINS (DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN OF
DUTCHESS COUNTY) TO FDR, 1910
FDR LED A PERILOUS LIFE as a first-year law student. His classmate General William Donovan, who headed the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, later said that Roosevelt’s most prominent characteristic at Columbia was his “daring”—a remarkable observation from a man who won the Medal of Honor leading New York’s “Fighting Sixty-Ninth” in the Meuse-Argonne.1 What Donovan meant was that after Groton and Harvard, Franklin had enormous confidence in himself—perhaps overconfidence—and he never let law school interfere with his personal life.
Following his wedding on Saint Patrick’s Day, he and Eleanor departed for Springwood and a week’s honeymoon. That contributed to the seventy-three absences FDR recorded his first year and helps explain why he initially failed two of his seven courses (contracts and civil procedure). “It certainly shows the uncertainty of marks,” he wrote Sara. “I expected much lower marks in some of the others and failures in one, and thought I had done as well on the two I failed as in those I passed with B.”2 A Columbia professor saw it differently. Franklin, he said, had little aptitude for the law and “made no effort to overcome that handicap by hard work.”3 After studying haphazardly over the summer, FDR took makeup exams in contracts and civil procedure and easily passed both. His final grades were three Bs, three Cs, and a D, which placed him roughly in the middle of his class.4
FDR’s attitude toward law school was similar to Ulysses S. Grant’s view of West Point: it was a hurdle but should not be taken too seriously. At West Point, Grant—who also had enormous confidence in himself—read novels instead of field manuals and spent his free time painting in the studio of his art professor. At Columbia, FDR led an exhausting social life and wrote doggerel about his instructors:
REDFIELD ON BLEATING*
BAH! BAH! BAH!
We are little bored sheep
That have lost their way
Bah! Bah! Bah!
Gentlemen lawyers off on a spree
Wrong from here to eternity
God ha’ mercy on such as Redfield
Bah! Bah! Bah!
During the summer between first and second year, Franklin and Eleanor undertook a second honeymoon in Europe, much as James and Sara had done twenty-five years earlier. In England they dined with Whitelaw Reid, a longtime Hudson River neighbor and publisher of the New York Tribune, who had just taken up his duties as ambassador to the Court of St. James. In Scotland, visiting friends of Eleanor’s parents, they had dinner with Sidney and Beatrice Webb. “They write books on sociology,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “Franklin discussed the methods of learning at Harvard with the husband while I discussed the servant problem with the wife.”5 While in Scotland the honeymooners were asked to open a village flower show. Franklin did the honors. He was fortunate, he said, “in having had a Highland nurse, so that I passed my early years with kilts on the outside and oatmeal and scones on the interior.” With a perfectly straight face FDR went on to tout the advantages of American vegetables: “Instead of water, we cook them nearly always in milk, and this, of course, makes them more nutritious, besides bringing out the flavor.”6
From Scotland the couple went briefly to Paris, and from there to Milan, Verona, and Venice. Then the Dolomites, Switzerland, and the Black Forest. Their continental excursion lasted more than three months: Eleanor, Baedeker in hand, resolutely examining the monuments and masterpieces of Europe; Franklin, enjoying himself at the expense of one and all. In Venice, Eleanor pronounced the Titians on display “not among his best.” Franklin loped ahead through the galleries of what he called the “Academica de Belly Arty” (Accademia dei Belle Arti) briefly perusing the paintings—“chiefly indecent infants sitting or falling off clouds—or sacred apostles trying to keep the sun out of their eyes.”7 In Cortina, Eleanor went to bed early and FDR attended the hotel dance alone. To Sara he wrote, “The hotel maids, cooks, and some of the villagers did a Schuhplattler—the native dance. It beats a cake walk and a court quadrille all to pieces.… I danced with Mme. Menardi [the proprietress], and talked to the cook and smoked with a porter and had the time of my life.”8
In St. Moritz they stayed with Aunt Tissie and her husband, Stanley Mortimer, who summered there regularly. Then back to Paris for an extended stay with Aunt Dora (Sara’s sister) and Uncle Paul Forbes, who had made the City of Light their permanent home.9 They were entertained by Cousin Hortense Howland, a sparkling Parisian who was the sister-in-law of FDR’s father, James, by his first marriage, and whose salon was described by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. “You would have laughed if you could have heard Mrs. Howland flatter Franklin,” wrote Eleanor.10 While in Paris, Franklin and Eleanor had their fortunes told by a French clairvoyant. “E. is to inherit a fortune,” FDR wrote Sara, “and I am to be President of the U.S. or the Equitable, I couldn’t make out which.”11 Harvard friends seemed to be everywhere. One evening Franklin and his classmates took Eleanor and Aunt Dora to a naughty French farce. Eleanor was shocked. “I confess my Anglo-Saxon sense of humor was somewhat strained,” she remembered.12
Throughout the trip Franklin teased Sara about his and Eleanor’s purchases and the money they were spending. From London he wrote that they stayed in the Royal Suite at Brown’s Hotel for £1,000 a night (actual cost £36). In Paris he reported buying “thousands of dollars worth of linen.… Eleanor got a dozen dresses.… I am getting Eleanor a long sable coat and a silver fox coat for myself.” From Venice, “3 or 4 old tapestries and a Tintoretto—the latter in his best style.… Also an old library—about 3000 books—and had them shipped to London.” Back in Paris, “I got some Rembrandt engravings and a cunning little sketch by Claude Lorraine.” At one point he suggested they were planning to expand the trip into a tour around the world—“It is only a step or two.” At another he suggested buying the woodwork and mosaic floor tiles from an old Venetian palace: “It can be got for about $60,000. If you care to have it cable me.”13
From Europe the newlyweds pressed Sara to find a house for them, preferably the rental property of their Dutchess County friends the Drapers, at 125 East Thirty-sixth Street—just three blocks from Sara’s Madison Avenue address. “It is just the right situation and size for us,” wrote Franklin. “Our one hope is to hear very soon that you have got it for us. It would be so nice to feel that all is settled before we return.”14 Eleanor wrote Sara, “you are an angel to take so much trouble about the house, but I am glad you are going to see it and I do hope you will take it if it is possible.”15 When Sara replied that she had taken the house for two years, Eleanor was delighted. “We are so glad and think you have done wonders for us. It is very nice that the work can be begun before we get home … and we will get settled so much sooner than if we waited to choose a house on our return.”16
The Draper house was temporary. At Christmas 1905, Sara informed Franklin and Eleanor that she was building a town house for them. “A Christmas present from Mama—number and street not yet quite decided.” The following year Sara bought an expensive plot on East S
ixty-fifth Street just off Park Avenue and hired a well-known architect, Charles A. Platt, to draw plans for two adjoining houses—one for herself and one for Franklin and Eleanor—similar to the Ludlow-Parish houses on East Seventy-sixth Street. The drawing rooms and dining rooms of the two houses opened into each other, there were connecting doors on the upper floors, and a common vestibule. Construction began in the spring of 1907 and was completed the following year. Sara retained title to both houses, and upon her death in 1941 FDR sold them to the Hillel Foundation of Hunter College for a modest price.17
Franklin, who loved to design things, immersed himself in the construction of the houses and worked constantly with the architect, the builder, and the decorators. Eleanor was consulted but chose not to become involved. “Instead of taking an interest in these houses, one of which I was to live in, I left everything to my mother-in-law and my husband.”18 One evening shortly after they moved in, Franklin found his wife in tears. This was not her home, she sobbed. She had not helped plan it, and it was not the way she wanted to live. FDR was bewildered. Why hadn’t she said something before? he asked. They had gone over the plans together—why hadn’t she spoken up?19
As Eleanor recalled the incident, “he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.”20 FDR avoided further friction simply by refusing to recognize that a problem existed. That was a trait he would hone to an art form in public life. “If something was unpleasant and he didn’t want to know about it, he just ignored it and never talked about it,” said Eleanor. “I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough it would settle itself.”21
In the summer of 1909 Sara gave Eleanor and Franklin a second house—a thirty-four-room, three-story, seaside “cottage” nestled on ten acres of prime Campobello shoreline. The expansive house, constructed along the lines of the Arts and Crafts Movement, had been built in 1898 by the Hartman Kuhn family of Boston and stood next to the Roosevelt house, separated by a tall hemlock hedge. This time Sara transferred full title to Franklin: “a belated wedding gift,” as she expressed it. For Eleanor the house was a godsend, the first dwelling she felt she owned. Mrs. Kuhn had left all the furnishings, linen, crystal, and silver, and ER spent weeks rearranging things. “I have moved every room in the house around,” she wrote Franklin, “and I hope you will like the change.” Eleanor never tired of the place. “There was no telephone … no electricity,” she remembered. “There was a little coal stove on which you did all your cooking, and the lamps sometimes smoked, and you went to bed by candlelight. But it had great charm.”22*
