The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  Roosevelt takes time out to chat with the traveling press. He understood the importance of newspapermen as no president had before him. He made certain they had their own press room in the renovated White House, allowed them to interview him during his daily shave, parceled out important news on Sunday evenings so that it got big play on Monday mornings—and banished reporters who he felt had betrayed him to the “Ananias Club,” named for the New Testament figure struck dead for lying.

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  A Festival of Rejoicing

  The Democrats played into Roosevelt’s hands in 1904, nominating Alton B. Parker of New York for president, an able jurist but also, as the president said privately, “a neutral-tinted individual.”

  Roosevelt promised voters what he called a “Square Deal,” favoring neither capital nor labor, rich nor poor. “If the cards do not come to any man,” he said, “or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing.”

  By late October, a big Roosevelt victory seemed so likely that some of the big-time financiers who feared him scurried to write handsome checks for his campaign. Still, he worried he might not be elected president in his own right. “If things go wrong,” he wrote his son Kermit, “never forget that we are very, very fortunate to have had three years in the White House, and that I have had a chance to accomplish work such as comes to very, very few men in any generation; and that I have no business to feel downcast or querulous merely because when so much has been given me, I have not had even more.”

  Edith Roosevelt invited a few friends for dinner on election night—“a little feast,” she called it, “which can be turned into a festival of rejoicing or into a wake as circumstances warrant.” By seven thirty, it was clear that her husband would win by a landslide; it turned into the largest in history up to that time. “Have swept the country,” he wired a friend. “I had no idea there would be such a sweep.”

  At this moment of personal triumph—and without consulting anyone—he made the worst blunder of his political career. The Constitution said nothing about how many terms a president might serve. But because George Washington had refused to stand for a third term, none of his successors had dared try to break that precedent. Roosevelt could have argued that he would not really have had two full terms since he had shared his first with the assassinated William McKinley. But he viewed that as a mere technicality. “The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance, and not the form,” he told the press. “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

  As he spoke, Edith and Alice visibly flinched. At the pinnacle of his power, Theodore Roosevelt had made himself a lame duck. He himself quickly came to regret what he’d said. “I would cut my hand off,” he told a friend, “if I could recall that written statement.”

  “ ‘Terrible Teddy’ Waits for ‘The Unknown.’ ” Even the cartoonist, J. Keppler Jr., no admirer of Roosevelt, understood that his popularity in 1904 was so great that it didn’t much matter which candidate the Democrats sent into the ring against him.

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  In Keppler’s “The Good Old Days,” a frustrated TR—muzzled by his own pledge in the interest of what he called “civic decency” to stick to the custom that kept incumbent presidents from active campaigning—thinks back to 1900, when, as a vice presidential nominee, he’d been free to speak before an estimated three million Americans.

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  “Take Your Choice, Gentlemen.” Puck sought to make the presidential contest a choice between TR and militarism and Alton B. Parker and the Constitution.

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  Republicans march to an easy victory in Keppler’s “The Sacred Elephant.” Henry Cabot Lodge acts as Emperor Roosevelt’s mace bearer, carrying his Big Stick, while his vanquished enemies, including J. P. Morgan, seek to placate him with tribute.

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  “Always Incisive, Decisive and Precise.” Roosevelt’s election-night pledge not to run for a third term, even though he’d served less than two, was seen as a selfless act by his admirers. Roosevelt himself soon realized it had been a terrible mistake.

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  We Are Greatly Rejoiced

  On December 1, 1904, less than three weeks after Franklin Roosevelt had proudly cast his first presidential vote for his cousin Theodore, he and Eleanor finally announced their engagement. The newspapers paid most attention to the president’s niece. She had “more claim to good looks than any of the Roosevelt cousins,” one reported. Franklin was identified only as a member of the New York Yacht Club who had failed to be elected class marshal at Harvard.

  The year of secrecy about their relationship had been hard on both Franklin and Eleanor. They had had to meet without arousing the curiosity of friends or relatives—or talkative servants. And they could never be alone together. “Oh, boy dear, I want you so much,” Eleanor wrote after plans for one meeting had to be canceled.

  Franklin’s mother made things still more difficult. She promised her son she would “love Eleanor and adopt her fully when the right time comes,” but meanwhile she had looked for ways to keep them apart, even taking her son on a Caribbean cruise in the hope that he might get over his infatuation.

  Meanwhile, Eleanor had discovered the rewards of useful work. Like many debutantes of her era, she joined the Junior League and volunteered to teach immigrant children in a Settlement House—on Rivington Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she took her work seriously. She rode public transportation, worked overtime, and sometimes turned down invitations rather than miss a class.

  One afternoon, when Franklin dropped by to visit, a little girl fell ill. Eleanor asked him to carry her home. He did and never forgot the sights and foul smells of the tenement in which she lived. “My God,” he told Eleanor. “I didn’t know anyone lived like that.”

  Eleanor loved her work, found fulfillment in helping others that she never found elsewhere. But she was willing to give it up for marriage, hoping to find in her husband a confidant and to find in his mother something like the loving mother she had never had. It was a bargain she would sometimes come to regret.

  As the months went by, Eleanor’s Oyster Bay cousins began to suspect the truth. “Eleanor and Franklin are comic,” one wrote after a chaperoned visit. “They [avoid] each other like the black plague and [deceive] us sweetly in every direction. … I would bet they are engaged.” His cousins liked Franklin— the president’s daughter Alice especially enjoyed his high spirits—but they also sometimes called him “Feather Duster” behind his back and would never be sure he was quite up to Eleanor.

  When the engagement was finally announced, TR wrote Franklin and expressed nothing but delight.

  Dear Franklin,

  We are greatly rejoiced. I am as fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter; and I like you, and trust you, and believe in you.… 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. …

  Give my love to your dear mother.

  Your affectionate cousin,

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Although the official announcement of her son’s engagement was still three months away, Sara allowed Eleanor to visit him at Campobello in August 1904. The month went “Oh! So quickly,” Eleanor remembered, and when she left the island, a neighbor told her, Franklin “looked so tired and I felt everybody bored him.”

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  Eleanor and her future mother-in-law. When the engagement was finally revealed, Alice Roosevelt Longworth thought it “simply too nice to be true,” but another cousin worried for Eleanor: “To have lived through such unhappiness and then to [plan to marry] a man with a mother like Cousin Sally … A more determined and possessive woman than I have ever known.”

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  Rivington Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Eleanor taught calisthenics and “fancy dancing” to the children of Jewish and Italian immigrants at the College Settlement House. When Franklin visited her there, her students gathered around to ask if he were her “feller”—an expression, she later said, “which meant nothing to me at the time.”

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  Eleanor’s official engagement portrait. The gossip sheet Town Topics reported that she was “attractive … unusually tall and fair,” with a “charming grace of manner that has made her a favorite since her debut.”

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  At Tiffany’s, “after much inspection and deliberation,” Franklin secretly purchased this engagement ring to give to Eleanor on her twentieth birthday, October 11, 1904, some five weeks before their engagement was to be announced. “You could not have found a ring I would have liked better,” she assured him. “I love it so I know I shall find it hard to keep from wearing it!” The large white diamond weighs approximately 3.40 carats.

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  The First Inauguration in the Family

  The president invited the newly engaged couple to join the rest of the Roosevelts at his inauguration on March 4, 1905. “Franklin and I went to our seats on the capitol steps just back of Uncle Ted and his family,” Eleanor recalled. “I was interested and excited but politics still meant little to me, though I can remember the forceful manner in which Uncle Ted delivered his speech.… I told myself I had seen an historic event—and I never expected to see another inauguration in the family.”

  Franklin never took his eyes off the president.

  Afterward, Rough Riders escorted TR to the reviewing stand for the inaugural parade. Cowboys and grateful coal miners marched past. So did Geronimo and a contingent from Harvard in caps and gowns. The president refused to take shelter from the icy wind and stamped his feet in time to the music. At the reception that followed he shook 8,150 well-wishers’ hands, still thought to be a presidential record.

  PRECEDING TWO IMAGES In this never-before-seen detail from a panoramic glass-plate image of TR’s inauguration, his worshipful young cousin Franklin can be seen peering over the crowd to see his hero take the oath of office.

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  A Royal Alliance

  Thirteen days after his inauguration, on March 17, President Roosevelt was to lead the St. Patrick’s Day Parade up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt chose that day to marry in a cousin’s parlor on East Seventy-sixth Street so that TR could be present to give his brother’s daughter away.

  “The wedding of Miss Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her cousin, took on the semblance of a National ‘Event,’ ” wrote a New York Times reporter who watched the guests arrive. “The presence of President Roosevelt, the bride’s uncle, Miss Alice Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt, and, as some rather enthusiastic if not discreet woman observed, the entire family in every degree of cousinship, made it very much like a ‘royal alliance.’ ”

  Alice Roosevelt remembered that “Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.” When the Reverend Endicott Peabody asked, “Who giveth this woman in marriage?,” the president shouted back, “I do!” Once Franklin and Eleanor had exchanged their vows, he slapped the groom on the back. “Well, Franklin,” he said, “there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.” Then he hurried into the room where refreshments were served and held forth for an hour and a half.

  The newlyweds were largely overlooked. But as they left, one of the guests exclaimed at how handsome the bridegroom was. Another answered, “Surprising for a Roosevelt.”

  Eleanor in her wedding dress. No photographs of the wedding itself have survived.

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  A newspaper notice of the Roosevelts’ wedding and their wedding certificate. Franklin’s headmaster at Groton, Rev. Endicott Peabody, performed the ceremony. The witnesses were Eleanor’s aunt and uncle, the president and first lady of the United States.

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  The newlyweds at Springwood, where they went immediately after the wedding. “My precious Franklin & Eleanor,” Sara wrote that evening. “It is a delight to write to you together & to think of you happy at dear Hyde Park, just where my great happiness began.”

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  Franklin designed the gold stickpins worn by his groomsmen; the three ostrich feathers of the Roosevelt family crest are inlaid with diamonds.

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  A Scrumptious Time

  Franklin and Eleanor’s honeymoon lasted more than three months. Wherever they went, they took turns writing home to Franklin’s mother, whom they both now called “Dearest Mama.”

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  Dearest Mama:

  Eleanor has been a wonderful sailor and hasn’t missed a single meal or lost any either.

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  The stewardess informed me … that my husband must be English, he was so handsome and had the real English profile! Of course it is a great compliment but you can imagine how Franklin looked when I told him.

  At Brown’s Hotel in London they were escorted to the royal suite because they were the president’s kin. Eleanor was embarrassed. Franklin was delighted—and eagerly photographed its splendor. “We … went to the Alcazar on the Champs Elysées,” Eleanor reported. “It was very funny and very vulgar, but as we couldn’t hear very much the vulgarity didn’t matter, and the crowd was most amusing.”

  From Venice, Franklin explained that “I had telegraphed ahead for an excellent gondolier [and we] went the whole length of the Grand canal. … I had expected to be disappointed … but the reality is far more wonderful than the pictures I had made.”

  PALACE HOTEL, ST. MORITZ

  We had a lovely day and Franklin climbed to the highest peak and took some photographs. … Even very near the top there were beautiful wild flowers and Franklin … picked a number of them and the wild jasmine smells sweeter than anything I ever had.

  Franklin assured his mother that he and Eleanor were having a “scrumptious time.” But there were private hints of strain as well. Eleanor grew jealous when she chose not to accompany him up an Italian mountainside and he went anyway, in a party that included an attractive New York milliner who happened to be staying at their hotel. For his part, Franklin sleepwalked, suffered nightmares, and developed persistent hives.

  Eleanor poses for Franklin while holding his hat and consulting a tourist map in a Venetian gondola. “We saw churches until my husband would look no more,” she remembered.

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  A postcard from Eleanor to her mother-in-law pronounces the cathedral at Ulm, Germany, “very fine.”

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  Franklin snapped this photograph of the royal suite at Brown’s Hotel in London, to which the honeymooners had been assigned because of their illustrious surname. Eleanor was “horrified” at the expense and embarrassed to find that “in some way we had been identified with Uncle Ted.” FDR was delighted.

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  Eleanor’s maternal aunt “Tissie,” Elizabeth Hall Mortimer (left), and her two daughters surprised the honeymooners at their hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The Roosevelts would meet relatives and friends of their family all over Europe.

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  Franklin, haggard and suffering from hives, photographed by Eleanor, in the Papadopoli Gardens in Venice

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  A Mighty Good Thing

  From one of the last stops on FDR’s honeymoon, Osberton Hall, a British country house owned by old friends of his parents, he wrote excitedly to his mother, “Everyone has been talking about Cousin Theodore, saying that he is the most prominent figure of present day history, and adopting toward our country in general a most respectful and almost loving tone.”

  Everyone was talking about the American presiden
t because he had just succeeded at something no other statesman had dared attempt: helping to end a conflict that threatened to disrupt the balance of power in the Pacific. For two years, Russia and Japan had been at war over which would dominate Korea and Manchuria. Russia had found itself on the losing end. Japan occupied Korea, took Port Arthur and Mukden in Manchuria, and sank most of the czar’s fleet in the battle of Tsushima. But its victories had been won at a fearful cost.

  Theodore Roosevelt persuaded both sides to send representatives to a conference near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August of 1905. Before talks began, he invited them aboard the presidential yacht, provided a stand-up lunch so that no one could claim he’d been slighted by the seating arrangements, and proposed a toast to which he insisted there be no responses, asking “in the interests of all mankind that a just and lasting peace may speedily be concluded.”

  Then he worked behind the scenes to hammer out the agreement that came to be called the Treaty of Portsmouth. Each side could claim some kind of victory: Russia abandoned all claims to Korea; Japan dropped its demand for payment for the costs of the war; the disputed island of Sakhalin was split in two. Roosevelt’s friend and frequent critic Henry Adams declared him “the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.”