The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  A southern millworker was asked why he so admired FDR: “Because,” he said, “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.”

  Roosevelt’s enemies felt just as strongly as his admirers. Some called him “That man in the White House” because they could not bear even to say his name. Many of those among whom he’d grown up or gone to school denounced him as “a traitor to his class.” When someone unwisely mentioned FDR in the presence of J. P. Morgan Jr., whose father had earlier done battle with the president’s cousin Theodore, Morgan is said to have exploded, “God damn all Roosevelts.”

  Whether Americans were for Roosevelt or couldn’t stand him, they were fascinated by him and by his family and by the life they led at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and beyond it. “You know how it was when Uncle Ted was [in the White House?]—how gay and homelike,” FDR had remarked to a relative not long after he moved in. “Well, that’s how we mean to have it!”

  No president’s family had ever received such incessant coverage—though the picture it presented was always incomplete.

  When guests filed into the formal dining room at the White House, they always found the president already seated at the head of the table. No one was to see him being wheeled down the hall.

  He was so skilled at drawing a visitor’s attention away from his immobility, so welcoming and so vigorous in his gestures, that some came away from the Oval Office convinced that he’d risen to greet them when he could not possibly have done so. Even some of those who knew him best were fooled, convinced by his ability to appear unruffled by his handicap that his crippling really did not affect him—and therefore need not alarm them. Rex Tugwell, for one, wrote that FDR was “never bothered by polio.”

  To ensure that the public at large was not alarmed either, the Secret Service became expert at installing and removing special ramps to allow the president to enter a building without anyone seeing him being carried. And when the White House imposed rules on how he could be filmed and photographed, few complained, at least at first: no images of FDR in his wheelchair or getting in or out of cars were permitted; no visual record was to be made of the arduous effort it took him to move just a few feet. Photographers who defied the rules—including ordinary tourists—had their film confiscated by the Secret Service.

  Most Americans understood that their president was “lame.” His battle with polio—a battle he was often said to have “won”—was known to nearly everyone. But the extent of his disability came as a revelation to newspaper correspondents newly assigned to the White House, who saw the president wheeled into a room for the first time.

  The journalist John Gunther remembered the “shock” he felt at once seeing the president carried in the arms of two burly aides: “he seemed, for one thing, very small.”

  Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, had orders to turn away all reporters’ questions about the president’s disability. “It’s not a story,” he’d say, and that was supposed to be that.

  In part because of White House reluctance to comment about the president’s paralysis, rumors about his health proliferated, including one persistent story that polio had somehow left him deranged so that he had to be institutionalized from time to time at Warm Springs. Once, after Mrs. Roosevelt had finished a speech in Akron, Ohio, a woman in the audience asked, “Do you think your husband’s illness has affected your husband’s mentality?”

  “I am glad that question was asked,” the first lady said. “The answer is yes. Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.”

  On December 31, 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt began a newspaper column called “My Day.” It appeared six times a week in newspapers all across the country and provided a forum for her political views and an almost hour-by-hour account of all the things she was doing. Readers wrote that it made her seem like a family friend who lived next door.

  But she made little mention of the domestic difficulties of her five children. There would eventually be nineteen marriages among them.

  James served for a time as his father’s assistant, despite charges that he was using his position to further his own business interests; stress-related ulcers eventually forced him out of the West Wing.

  Anna, who had married early to get away from the tensions within her family, divorced Curtis Dall in order to marry John Boettiger, a newspaperman covering the White House.

  Elliott, named for Eleanor’s troubled father, was troubled as well: he refused to attend college, rarely stayed in one place for long, and used his famous name to get ahead in a series of speculative businesses.

  Franklin Jr., who inherited his father’s looks and charm, earned a reputation at Harvard as a playboy.

  And John—who had only been five when his father developed polio and virtually vanished from his life—did what he could to avoid the spotlight, working quietly for a time as a clerk at Filene’s Basement in Boston.

  “One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a President,” FDR once said. “It’s a terrible life they lead.”

  Her children’s troubles often enveloped Eleanor in the depression that haunted her all her life. “If anyone looks at me I want to weep,” she told Lorena Hickok after one of her children made unwanted headlines. “I get like this sometimes. It makes me feel like a dead weight and my mind goes round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run and I can’t and I despise myself.” Her frequent travel made headlines, inspired cartoons, and benefited a host of causes, but it proceeded in part from a need to outpace despair, just as her uncle Theodore had sought to outpace his own demons. “When one isn’t happy,” she told a close friend, “it’s hard not to live at high speed.”

  In early 1935, photographer Thomas McAvoy, working for Time magazine, obtained permission to take pictures of FDR in the Oval Office using a brand-new Leica camera that required no flash. The result was the first set of candid photographs ever taken of a president at work. In them, Roosevelt reads and reacts to correspondence, signs a law, confers with Marvin McIntyre and Missy LeHand, pauses to drink a glass of water, then goes back at it.

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Roosevelt’s portrait hangs in the kitchen of a Portuguese American family in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and a millworker’s living room in Greensboro, Georgia.

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  Time profiles four White House insiders: Louis Howe, Stephen Early, Missy LeHand, and Marvin McIntyre. The public seemed almost as interested in Roosevelt’s inner circle as it was in the president himself.

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  One of Roosevelt’s self-designed wheelchairs: the wheels were fitted to an ordinary armless kitchen chair so that FDR could use his powerful arms to shift to conventional seating without help. He used the wheelchair only to move from place to place and rarely stayed in it long. When a newspaper suggested that he was “confined” to a wheelchair he denied it: “As a matter of fact, I don’t use a wheelchair at all except a little kitchen chair on wheels … and solely for the purposes of saving time.” An ashtray slid out from the back for easy access.

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  A sailor snapped this rare image of FDR in his wheelchair aboard the USS Indianapolis in 1933.

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  Military guards watch as FDR is wheeled into a back entrance at the Naval Hospital on his way to visit Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who was recuperating from a heart attack, June 7, 1937. When this photograph, taken by Carl Mydans, appeared in Life, White House press secretary Stephen Early demanded that the navy bar photographers from its premises during presidential visits.

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  Trapped in his chair in full view of hundreds of spectators, unable to take shelter from a cold, steady rain, FDR endures an outdoor ceremony at the 300th anniversary of Harvard’s founding, 1936.

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>   ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES A temporary ramp constructed by the Secret Service so that the president’s car could drive up to the raised doorway for the funeral of House Speaker William B. Bankhead in 1940, and a permanent one, installed in the White House living quarters to accommodate the president’s wheelchair

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  H. A. Lucas, the porter aboard the president’s special railroad car, arranges the day’s newspapers in FDR’s paneled compartment for the run from Warm Springs back to Washington, 1938. Because the president had difficulty keeping his balance at high speeds, the engineer had orders never to exceed thirty-five miles an hour for fear of hurling him from his seat. Lost time was made up at night, when FDR was safely in his berth.

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  The Secret Service explains the ground rules for amateur photographers in advance of a presidential visit to Amarillo, Texas, in 1938.

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  The first lady, eager to get a firsthand look at underground working conditions in a coal mine, Bellaire, Ohio, 1935

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  The Roosevelts in a rare moment together on the lawn behind Springwood early in the administration

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  The L. C. Smith Super Speed typewriter on which Malvina Thompson, Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary, typed her boss’s columns and correspondence at Val-Kill

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  FDR and Anna Roosevelt Boettiger enjoy a softball game between White House newspapermen and a team fielded by the broadcaster Lowell Thomas, near Pawling, New York, 1935.

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  Franklin Roosevelt Jr. with the movie star Errol Flynn and his wife, Lily Damita, at a Washington hotel

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  Elliott Roosevelt and his mother at the Los Angeles airport, moments after she completed her first transcontinental flight, 1933. He had recently left his first wife and baby and was now intent on marrying again.

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  Clash of the Clans

  On Sunday, January 19, 1936, a major snowstorm blocked Manhattan streets and blanketed Central Park, but the president and his wife were determined to make it to the Museum of Natural History, where FDR was officially to open the new Theodore Roosevelt Memorial.

  The museum had been synonymous with the Roosevelt family since 1869, when Theodore Roosevelt Sr. helped raise the first funds for its construction. As boys, both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt had contributed birds and birds’ eggs to its collections, and TR had donated hundreds of additional scientific specimens gathered during his hunting and exploring expeditions on three continents.

  Both branches of the family were invited to share the platform.

  The White House had recently tried to tighten restrictions on newspaper photographers. All candid shots were now outlawed; only pictures of the president at the podium made from a tripod were to be permitted. In protest, New York cameramen refused to click the shutter, so the ceremony itself went unphotographed.

  It was an awkward occasion. The Oyster Bay Roosevelts sat on one side. The Hyde Park clan sat on the other, their smaller numbers supplemented by Daisy Suckley and a sprinkling of Delanos.

  FDR confined his remarks to praise for what he called his boyhood hero’s “spirit of vital activity,” his lifelong battle to “transform politics from a corrupt traffic to a public service.” But New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, a voluble Independent who supported the New Deal, used the occasion to go after the Supreme Court, which had just declared the Agricultural Adjustment Administration unconstitutional and now seemed bent on demolishing everything the New Deal had done. If Theodore Roosevelt were still alive, La Guardia said, he would share Franklin Roosevelt’s frustration at the Court’s apparently unshakable conservatism.

  It was all too much for Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who spoke last, on behalf of Oyster Bay. He refused even to acknowledge the presence of his cousin, the president of the United States, and added to his prepared remarks about his father’s love of nature the charge that most of the eminent “gentlemen” who had just spoken so warmly of his father “had never fought alongside him but against him during his lifetime.”

  “The young Theodore showed who he is by making a very stupid speech,” Daisy Suckley wrote that evening, “and by not knowing enough to open it by addressing himself to the President and the other important people there. He almost certainly did it on purpose to avoid addressing his cousin Frank.”

  As the 1936 election year began, relations between Hyde Park and Oyster Bay were as frigid as the winter weather.

  Roosevelt, in a top hat, makes his careful way out of New York’s Episcopal Church of the Incarnation on the snowy morning of January 19, 1936. Because of the treacherous footing, a Secret Serviceman precedes him down the ramp in case he falls forward. When this picture was published in the New York Daily News, the caption explained that it had to be “snapped from half a block away”; photographers were allowed no closer, a stricture that led New York press photographers to refuse to cover the rest of the president’s visit to the city.

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  Invitation to the dedication of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, at which the Hyde Park and Oyster Bay Roosevelts were to appear together

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  The facade of the memorial itself. Six years later, an equestrian statue of TR, flanked by an American Indian and an African gun bearer, would be put in place at the foot of the stairs.

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  Theodore Roosevelt Jr. speaking at his inauguration as president of the National Republican Club in New York City two years before the museum ceremony. When this picture was first published, the caption writer for the Associated Press felt it necessary to identify its subject as “a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” a fact that cannot have pleased the man who had hoped one day to succeed his father in the White House.

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  New York schoolchildren surround a portrait of the man for whom the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial was named, 1936

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  A Rendezvous with Destiny

  On Saturday evening, June 27, 1936, FDR was driven onto the University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field in Philadelphia to accept his party’s nomination for a second term as president. More than 100,000 Democrats cheered as his car circled the field and stopped near the platform from which he was to speak. He was helped out of his car, grasped James’s arm, and started up the aisle. He spotted the aged poet Edward Markham in the crowd and stopped to shake his hand. Somehow, he lost his delicate balance and twisted. The knee lock on his left brace snapped open under the extra pressure. His leg collapsed. His bodyguard, Gus Gennerich, and Secret Serviceman Mike Reilly kept him from going all the way down, but James dropped his father’s speech, which scattered across the floor. Jim Farley and other aides did their best to block the crowd’s view.

  “There I was hanging in the air, like a goose about to be plucked but I kept on waving and smiling, and smiling and waving,” Roosevelt remembered. “I called to Jimmy out of the corner of my mouth to fix the pin.”

  “ ‘Dad,’ Jimmy called up. ‘I’m trying to pick up the speech.’

  “ ‘To hell with the speech,’ I said.… ‘Fix the god-damned brace. If it can’t be fixed there won’t be any speech.’

  “By this time I was mad clear through. …

  “I could feel Jimmy fumbling and then I heard the pin snap back into place. My balance was restored and my weight was lifted from poor Gus.”

  “Clean me up, damn it,” Roosevelt said.

  James gathered up the scattered pages, and the president resumed his rocking gait toward the podium, continuing to smile as if nothing had happened.

  By the time he got there, James had managed to put the pages of the speech back into the right order.

  “I was still mad when I began … ,” Roosevelt said. “It wasn’t until I reached the line about ‘economic r
oyalists’ that I knew I had them, and then I gave it to them.”

  These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. …

  Governments can err. Presidents do make mistakes. But the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

  Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

  There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

  Roosevelt’s Republican opponent was Alf Landon, the able but unassuming governor of Kansas, who had enlisted in Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose crusade in 1912. When Landon promised to retain useful elements of the New Deal, FDR summarized the Republican message in a speech laced with sarcasm.

  We believe in Social Security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them—we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.

  Frustrated, the Republicans changed tactics, accusing FDR of being a socialist in disguise. The Oyster Bay Roosevelts joined the attack. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. addressed the president himself in a Pennsylvania speech. “You have been faithless,” he said. “You have urged Congress to pass laws you knew were unconstitutional.… You have broken your sacred oath taken on the Bible.”