Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  Mr. James and his Republican friends generally agreed on one point. Leadership in one’s community was a gentleman’s duty. Otherwise, politics was not a gentleman’s business. He refused requests to run for Congress or the state legislature and even declined a diplomatic appointment from President Cleveland.

  The Calvinist values James had learned as a child persisted. Thrift, hard work, and character, he declared in a talk to a church group, determined success in life. Only the poorest of the poor—the denizens of the Lower East Side in New York or the East End of London—born without a chance, living in squalor by necessity, were deserving objects of charity. It should come not simply from the rich but from those no more than a step or two above them, for with charity came redemption. This was classic Calvinism, characterized by a moral sense that all classes shared a common humanity. Mr. James’s charitable works gave life to his admonitions and surely transmitted to his offspring some sense of the Best People’s obligation toward the lower classes.10

  James and Rebecca had hardly passed their fifteenth anniversary before her health broke. On August 21, 1876, her heart gave out. She was buried in the St. James Church cemetery at Hyde Park. After a long period of mourning, James began to look for a new wife. He was initially attracted to Anna (“Bamie”) Roosevelt, the daughter of his fourth cousin and great friend, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. An appealing and sympathetic young woman, she was, alas, less than half his age. As nicely as possible, she rejected his proposal.

  Shortly afterward, at a small dinner party held by Bamie’s mother, James met Sara Delano. Warren Delano’s seventh child, she had been introduced to society in January 1873, at the age of eighteen, a striking and attractive young woman, just two inches short of six feet tall, her fair skin contrasting fetchingly with her dark brown hair and eyes. Like Bamie, she was half James’s age. He was immediately smitten. Sara, not yet having received a proposal from a wealthy young man and uncomfortably close to being an old maid, was attracted to him. Warren Delano, a longtime friend and business associate, swallowed whatever doubts he may have had. James was a good man. He possessed an abundant competence. Sara was willing to accept him as a husband. They would live just a few miles away.11

  The pair married on October 7, 1880. He was fifty-two, she twenty-six. They took an extended honeymoon in Europe. By the time they returned home ten months later, she was well along in her first and only pregnancy. In later years, she would claim that their son was “a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all.” Genetically or otherwise she passed along her father’s characteristics of enterprise, daring, and a strength of will that verged on the domineering.12

  The boy to whom she gave birth with such difficulty was a product of generations of intermarriage among elites. He could claim relationship to several Mayflower passengers, eight former presidents, and two future ones. He was distantly linked to Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and a seven-year-old English aristocrat named Winston Churchill. Both his mother and father were related by marriage to the Astors. From an early age he would have a strong awareness of his membership in these two large and important extended families.

  The boy was also a product of two centuries of Calvinist piety, thrift, and capitalist enterprise on both sides. He, however, would be neither pious, nor thrifty, nor a capitalist enterpriser.

  With James’s consent, Sara decided the child would be named after one of her uncles, Franklin Delano. On March 20, 1882, he was thus christened at St. James Church. One of his godfathers was Elliott Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and soon-to-be father of a daughter named Eleanor.13

  Franklin’s parents stood at the center of a stable and carefree world. Rosy, functionally more an uncle than a half brother, was a frequent presence, as was his son, “Taddy,” three years older than Franklin. The Delanos came often; their estate, Algonac, was almost a second home. Despite his large, supportive family, however, in some ways Franklin’s childhood was lonely. Without siblings, he lacked the constant companionship of other youngsters his own age. As a young man, he would make it clear that he wanted to father a large family.14

  Franklin’s early upbringing combined an ethic of responsibility with a sense of authority and leadership. In the company of other children, he tended to have a take-charge attitude. Years later, Sara recalled that he organized his playmates and was always prone to issuing commands. “Mummie,” she remembered him saying, “if I didn’t give the orders, nothing would happen!”15

  James and Sara appear to have been exemplary parents, providing abundant personal contact and affection, along with order and structure. Young Franklin always had a nurse, but Sara breast-fed, bathed, and dressed him regularly. “I felt,” she commented years later, “that every mother ought to learn to care for her own baby, whether she can afford to delegate the task to someone else or not.” Indeed, she was perhaps excessively dutiful about this. At the age of eight and a half, Franklin would remark in a letter to his father, “Mama left this morning and I am going to take my bath alone.” In the mode of the time, he wore dresses until he was five. For a few years Sara frequently dressed him in kilts, which she called his Murray suits after a late-medieval Scottish ancestor, John Murray, the Outlaw of Fala Hill. The Murray costume gave way to sailor suits that recalled the Delano family’s maritime heritage. When Franklin was four, he, on a pony, and his father, on a horse, began regular morning horseback rides around the estate, masters of all they surveyed. They sledded and ice-boated in the winter, sailed in spring and summer.16

  Another male role model entered Franklin’s life as he moved toward young adulthood. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (“Teedie” to the family at that time) had become a national figure—New York legislator, US civil service commissioner, New York City police commissioner, author of a torrent of books, and a prominent naturalist. Vigorous and outspoken, Ted, increasingly known as TR, was an exciting model of Victorian masculinity.

  James and Sara gave Franklin about anything he wanted—a dog, a pony, a gun to shoot local birds, money to have the specimens stuffed and mounted, a display cabinet for them, expensive cameras and photographic equipment—and indulged him in whatever collecting whim he developed, whether naval prints or stamps. But entitlement demanded responsibility. Franklin had to take care of his dog and pony, use his gun responsibly, kill only one example of each bird species, and employ his camera to document family life and travels. More generally, mother and father taught him that life was about work and achievement, not idle pleasure—that much of the Calvinist ethic remained alive and well.

  Travel was a regular part of life. The winter social season required a residence in Manhattan—first a town house on Washington Square, then one on Forty-Ninth Street, and finally an apartment in the Renaissance Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Third Street. To escape the summer heat, the family retreated to a large vacation cottage on the Canadian island of Campobello, just off the coast of Maine. There, in the Bay of Fundy, James, Franklin, and numerous guests sailed the family schooner Half-Moon.

  Many years included an extended trip to Europe, accompanied by two or three servants. Such cosmopolitan mobility ultimately gave Franklin a greater firsthand knowledge of continental Europe than of the continental United States. Mostly vacation, the trips also provided an opportunity for James to pitch investment in the Nicaraguan canal project to wealthy acquaintances. Some time in England was mandatory. On at least one occasion, the Roosevelts visited the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir, with James riding to the hounds in the annual hunt.17

  Franklin accompanied his parents on their stay in Washington in early 1887. James brought him to the White House to meet President Cleveland. As they prepared to leave, the president heaved his considerable bulk out of his chair, walked over to the boy, patted him on the head, and said in what must have been a weary voice, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the United States.”18

  Until age four
teen, Franklin was educated almost entirely at home, one-on-one, by a succession of seven governesses and tutors. They were competent to superior teachers, instructing him in a wide range of topics—French and German, Greek and Latin, history (ancient and modern), religion, science, mathematics, geography, and literature—and prepared him excellently for the elite schools he would later attend.19

  The boy’s only experience with public schooling came in Germany when he accompanied his parents in the spring of 1891 on one of their annual trips to the spa at Bad Nauheim. Sara sent her nine-year-old son to a Stadtsschule. “I go to the public school with a lot of little mickies and we have German reading, German dictation, the history of Siegfried, and arithmetic,” he wrote to two of his cousins. “I like it very much.” The term lasted only six weeks. Franklin’s language seems to indicate that he found it and his schoolmates mostly amusing.20

  By then, Franklin understood that his father was in Bad Nauheim because he was unwell. James had suffered a heart attack in late 1890. The best physicians could do no more than advise treatment at a spa. So he took the waters year after year, invariably feeling better after a month of relaxation and warm baths. In reality, of course, his condition slowly worsened. Until the very end, however, he was not an invalid. He continued his horseback riding until his final weeks, ten years after his first attack.21

  It is hard to say how his father’s slow decline affected Franklin. His mother may have told him, or perhaps he simply sensed, that James required peace, quiet, and special consideration. His parents were the two people of consequence in his life. He tried hard to please them—concealing a broken tooth, for example, to avoid spoiling an outing or, on another occasion, hiding a nasty cut on his forehead to avoid upsetting them. He was far less solicitous of the feelings of others.

  As his mother would admit, despite her depiction of him as practically the perfect boy, he was a prankster. The pranks were relatively harmless. He inflicted perhaps the most consequential on his first full-time tutor at Hyde Park, Fraulein Reinsberg, a high-strung German woman. Slipping into her bedroom, he put effervescent powder into her chamber pot. When she used the convenience in the middle of the night, the resultant bubbling and hissing sent her screaming down the hall. Mr. James discerned that Franklin, who was eight or nine years old at the time, was probably behind the incident. When the boy confessed, his father, convulsed with laughter, told him to consider himself spanked and sent him away. Fraulein Reinsberg left the Roosevelts’ employ in mid-1891 and eventually suffered a nervous collapse. In later years, Franklin recalled her as the governess he had driven to the madhouse. Two years later, Sara wrote of a successor, “Poor little Mlle Sandoz had such an upset tobogganing that she came home . . . quite black & blue. Franklin seemed to think it rather a joke.”22

  The servants put up with Franklin’s misbehavior, perhaps feeling that he needed a good spanking, perhaps dismissing his antics as minor and amusing. There was a dark side, of course—a sense that one’s employees were there to be abused. Still, what might have been perceived as insufferable brattiness was mitigated by an intense charm. Years later, Sara recalled asking their beloved Scottish head housekeeper Elespie McEachan if “our boy” had been misbehaving. The housekeeper responded, “They tell me that he has faults, but I can not see them.”23

  The boy seems never to have been at a loss for a wisecrack, as when he wrote for Mademoiselle Sandoz about the Egyptian kings who starved their people “by jinks!” by the “quadrillions.” For a time during his twelfth year he signed his name backward (“Tlevesoor D. Nilknarf”) in communications to his mother. Such antics may have been a low-key protest against his highly structured life of tutoring, playdates, and meals for which one must dress appropriately. When vacationing with his parents at Campobello in September 1890, he demanded and received a day of freedom, took off on his own, and, as he or his mother recalled years later, returned in the evening dirty and hungry. The next day, he resumed the usual routine without protest. From a very early age, he had an astute sense of just how far he could stretch the limits.24

  Young Franklin possessed remarkable confidence and self-reliance. At the age of fourteen in London, when his mother and father were unable to accompany him, he insisted on traveling alone by train to the Nottinghamshire home of Cecil George Foljambe (Baron Hawkesbury), a noted ornithologist. He enjoyed the baron’s collection of mounted birds, had a fine visit with him, stayed overnight, and was more than a little annoyed when the great man insisted on having his housekeeper escort the boy back home. That same summer, he and his tutor, Mr. Dumper, employing Franklin’s impressive gilt-edged membership card for New York’s American Museum of Natural History, talked their way into its great British counterpart in London, although it was closed to host a reception by the prince of Wales. They went on to the Continent, where Franklin, speaking German and radiating a charming innocence, secured the lenience of ordinarily nonlenient local authorities when he and Dumper were detained for minor misdemeanors during a bicycle trip through the country.25

  By then Franklin was about to be removed from his comfortable, sheltered life and sent to boarding school at Groton, where he would enter the third form (ninth grade). In mid-September, as Sara described it, “we turned over to the headmaster there a white-faced little boy whose pride kept him from admitting that he carried a heavy heart and whose parents found the parting no easier to bear.”26

  Chapter 2

  Young Gentleman

  Schooldays, 1896–1904

  Thirty-six years after his parents left him at Groton to make his way without their loving supervision, Sara Roosevelt recalled that Franklin was “dry-eyed and resolute, if a little tremulous.” Relatively unformed, at an age awkward for all young males, he had to undertake a process of self-definition while coping with all the physical and emotional changes that accompany adolescence, and he had to do it as a new boy in a small, rigid society. The wonder is not that he found it difficult but that he was so successful.1

  Franklin’s parents wanted him to do well in school and emerge a gentleman of style and substance along the lines of his father, a leader to whom ordinary people naturally looked for guidance. Groton, in many respects, established the mold, producing a young man who would glide easily through Harvard, take his place among the nation’s elite, marry within his class, and undertake respectable, if unnecessary, employment.

  Groton was perhaps the most prominent of a number of exclusive boarding schools established to prepare the sons of America’s elite for entry into its best colleges while shaping leaders of high character and Christian fortitude. Explicitly based on England’s Rugby, the Massachusetts school was the personal creation of its rector, Episcopal reverend Endicott Peabody, who dominated the small, self-contained educational community he had founded.2

  Peabody envisioned a school that would realize the best ideals of the English system. He would brook no “fagging” (use of young boys to perform menial errands for the older ones), no flogging, and no snobbish class system among the students. Groton had six “forms,” or grades, the final one mimicking Harvard’s freshman year. His school would forge learned and moral young gentlemen from boys separated from indulgent parents and the diversions of urban life. Typically, they entered at age twelve and graduated at eighteen. The isolated campus—a little cluster of redbrick buildings two miles out of town—guaranteed a near total lack of distractions and enhanced Peabody’s dictatorial presence. The curriculum emphasized ancient history and classical languages. The purpose of education, Peabody asserted, was not to prepare children narrowly for an occupation but to “develop in them the powers and interests that will make them in later life the masters and not slaves of their work.”3

  Tall and imposing, with an impressive head of brownish-blond hair, and an overpowering speaker, the rector left a deep impression on parents, students, and donors. He established high expectations for his charges, set rigid rules of behavior, and sa
nctioned harsh punishments. William Averell Harriman, who entered Groton in 1904, described Peabody memorably in a letter to his railroad-magnate father: “You know he would be an awful bully if he wasn’t such a terrible Christian.” The boys listened to him preach every day, shook hands with him before bedtime every night, cringed at the thought of appearing before him for misbehavior, and welcomed the sympathetic attention of his wife, Fanny.4

  Franklin’s new quarters consisted of a six-by-nine cubicle with a bed, bureau, study desk, and pegs on which to hang his clothing. Three of its walls stopped well short of a high ceiling; a curtain, drawn across the entry, served as a door. A student’s day was long, busy, and closely monitored. Activity was constant, privacy minimal. The boys wore suits, stiff-collared shirts, black neckties, and glossily polished patent leather shoes. They were allowed spending money of only twenty-five cents per week and had to donate a nickel of it at Sunday church service.5

  There was little or no snobbery at Groton because most of the students came from rich families listed in local social registers. At school, moreover, they could not differentiate themselves by dress, possessions, or spending money. Size and athletic prowess became the main sources of distinction, and Peabody encouraged participation in team sports, which in his view built courage, determination, and group fealty. He considered football “the most spiritual of all games” and therefore special: “It makes a man eat plain food and keep early hours. It keeps back our growing tendency to indulge in luxuries. It inculcates obedience.”6