When Franklin returned to Harvard that fall, the Crimson was his major interest; he devoted enormous amounts of time to it. By the spring of 1903, he was managing editor and in line to become president (editor in chief) for the 1904 fall semester. Taking the position would require his staying at Harvard for a year past his June 1903 graduation.30
Roosevelt’s college transcript has never been released, but it is generally accepted that he collected gentlemen’s Cs. He sought recognition and prestige through Harvard’s complex and hierarchical club life rather than through grades. His ultimate goal was selection for Porcellian, the famous club that had extended honorary membership to his father, but its sixteen active members passed him over. He never understood why and resented the omission for the rest of his life. Although it is tempting to view the incident as a source of his later democratic politics, his only quarrel with the club system was more probably its failure to give him its ultimate recognition.31
On the surface, he remained genial, unruffled, and eminently clubbable. He was already a member of Hasty Pudding, the famous theatrical club, and would be elected to membership in Alpha Delta Phi (“Fly”), the Signet Literary Society, and the Memorial Society (guardians of the history of Harvard). He served as librarian for Hasty Pudding and Fly, buying collectible books for both, as well as rare volumes for himself and his mother. On top of this, he led a busy social life of lunches and dinners in Boston with family friends, numerous trips back to Groton, faithful attendance at Harvard home football games, and weekend excursions here and there.32
Of all the social occasions, the most memorable surely was a long weekend in Washington just after New Year’s Day, 1902. He was one of many guests attending a gala ball at the White House marking the social debut of Alice Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s glamorous and vivacious daughter. Even more important to Franklin were two meetings with the president and a memorable lunch with Cousin Bamie.33
In the midst of all this, he found time for charitable activities. He made periodic visits to the Groton Missionary Society’s St. Andrews Boys Club in Boston, where he taught classes and officiated at games. He also was a member of the Harvard Social Services Society. To all indications, he did useful, if superficial, work in the spirit of upper-class Christian charity but never began to think of the problem of poverty as endemic to a social system that had to be changed. He also made a public splash by heading up a committee to provide relief for South African Boers, confined to concentration camps after their military defeat by the British. The effort raised a meager $336 but won him fulsome commendation in the Boston Globe.
Well-prepared and smart enough to produce undistinguished but passable work with relatively little effort, he stayed afloat academically. Declaring a major in history, he took courses in the “softer” humanities and social sciences. Consciously or otherwise, he passed over opportunities to study under some great minds, among them Josiah Royce and George Santayana, the eminences of the most distinguished philosophy department on the North American continent. Abstract and systematic thought held little appeal for him.
Relatively nontheoretical and fact grubbing, history was an attractive major taught by a distinguished faculty. Perhaps the most notable was a visiting professor from the University of Wisconsin with whom Roosevelt took a course in the spring of 1904—Frederick Jackson Turner. Taking a Caribbean cruise with his mother, he missed about a third of Turner’s course on the history of the American West. Nevertheless, he could not have avoided Turner’s central ideas: westward expansion had been the driving force behind the development of the United States; the end of a discernible frontier line in 1890 marked a new and potentially critical period in which America was likely to become a nation more like the European industrial countries, characterized by intensified class conflict and uncertain economic growth. Roosevelt could not have imagined that these arguments would have policy resonance thirty years later as he began his presidency in the depths of the Great Depression.
During his three years as an undergraduate, free to study whatever appealed to him, he pursued a curriculum composed heavily of history, English, and government courses. In one of them he wrote a paper titled “The Roosevelts of New Amsterdam.” Heavily genealogical in content, it praised the “democratic spirit” of his ancestors but provided little evidence of such sentiments. The assertion revealed his developing political sensibility.34
He was not uncritical of TR’s actions but, by and large, expressed his reservations privately. He especially disapproved of his cousin’s interference in the anthracite coal strike of 1902, which had cast the coal operators—Roosevelts and Delanos among them—as arrogant plutocrats unwilling to negotiate a square deal with their men. He was also wary of Ted’s expansive claims to presidential power: “His tendency to make the executive power stronger than the Houses of Congress is bound to be a bad thing, especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds him in office.” The comment was shrewdly predictive of the presidency of William Howard Taft, if not of Franklin’s own tenure in the White House a generation later.35
Such measured criticism aside, Theodore was irresistible. His political passion and raw energy appealed to a vast constituency. His conviction that American society required significant, but not revolutionary, change stirred the impulses of youth. In 1904, Franklin cast his first presidential vote for his famous Republican relative.
After taking his bachelor of arts degree at Harvard’s 1903 commencement, he talked his mother into letting him celebrate his achievement somewhat as had his father—with a trip to Europe sans parental supervision. It was no grand tour, just a month in England and Switzerland with Charles Bradley, a Harvard friend, but it was his first major travel without his mother. Sara broke into tears as she saw him off on the White Star liner Celtic. He sent her a note to be taken back ashore by the harbor pilot: “Don’t worry about me—I always land on my feet—but wish so much you were with me.”36
Actually, being on his own was the real purpose of the trip, and he never came close to losing his footing. He found London invigorating, but the special highlight was a visit to the Roosevelts’ old friend, Sir Hugh Cholmeley of Easton Hall, and a day excursion to Belvoir, the great house of the Duke of Rutland, whom he encountered riding on the grounds at the age of eighty-seven. Sir Hugh was an expansive and generous host, treating his young visitor to tennis, fishing, bridge, billiards, sumptuous dinners with fine wines, and “some port of about A.D. 1800 that made me almost weep for joy.” Taken to a large house party and cognizant that the English seldom made introductions, he “walked up to the best looking dame in the bunch & said ‘howdy?’” Switzerland’s beautiful scenery failed to match the pleasure of mingling with the English elite.37
Roosevelt returned to Harvard in the fall as a graduate student in history, but his real major was still the Crimson. Its sole editorial writer, he revealed a lot about himself, especially when he admonished the incoming freshman class, “It is not so much brilliance as effort that is appreciated here—determination to accomplish something.” Perhaps because Jake Brown managed the football team, he devoted editorial after editorial to calling for student support, school spirit, and team effort. He also crusaded for better walkways in Harvard Yard and strong fire-protection measures in the shabby university dormitories. An effective manager, he provided lubricant for his authority in the form of a weekly staff “punch night.” “In his geniality,” one of the staffers recalled, “there was a kind of frictionless command.”38
Presidency of the Crimson made Roosevelt’s reputation at Harvard, establishing him as a notable of the class of 1904 (of which he considered himself a member, his 1903 AB notwithstanding). He ran for one of three positions as class marshal but lost to a club ticket. He did, however, win election as chairman of the class committee.
As at Groton, his college years had not been without accomplishment, but neither had they given him everything he wanted. He surely h
ad more friends than enemies, but some acquaintances had doubts that foreshadowed those of future critics. Was there phoniness behind all that surface geniality? Did his demeanor reveal him as a lightweight? Did his lack of athleticism denote a certain lack of masculinity? Teddy Robinson’s sister, Corrine, called him “the handkerchief box young man,” after the drawings of pretty boys that typically adorned such containers. His substance lurked behind a facade that appeared intentionally designed for concealment.
Groomed as a leader, Franklin revered the example his cousin, the president, had set. He was intent on establishing an independent life, yet deemed it important to preserve his close relationship with his mother. He would spend years juggling these ambitions.39
Chapter 3
Eleanor and Franklin
Marriage, Family, Job, 1904–1910
The Franklin Roosevelt who left Harvard in the summer of 1904 was twenty-two years old, immature emotionally, and still dependent on his mother. Withal, he was highly intelligent, possessed great charm, and harbored large ambitions underneath a lightweight exterior. He hungered for marriage, several children, wide popularity, and, driven by the example of Cousin Theodore, political acclaim.
As an only child, Franklin had limited experience in dealing with women his own age. In addition, he had to juggle any romantic prospects with a mother emotionally disinclined to share him with another woman. His first love may have been Alice Sohier, a beauty from a prominent Boston family. The two met during Roosevelt’s freshman year at Harvard and saw each other frequently until she embarked on an extended European tour in the fall of 1902. Whether he actually proposed marriage is uncertain. As she recalled it, he told her he had been lonely without siblings and wanted to father a large family. “I did not wish to be a cow,” she commented years later. (She would marry in 1910, have two children, and divorce her husband in 1925. After Roosevelt became president, she was outspoken in her scorn for him and his politics.)1
Roosevelt escorted other girls to parties but found himself increasingly drawn to one who seemed unlikely: Eleanor Roosevelt, daughter of his deceased godfather, Elliott Roosevelt. On November 19, 1903, he told his mother that the previous Saturday he had asked Cousin Eleanor to marry him, and she had accepted. He had not the slightest understanding that he had proposed to an emotional train wreck.
Two and a half years younger than Franklin, Eleanor was living proof that birth to wealth carried no guarantee of psychological well-being. Her father, Elliott, by common consent the most charming of all the Roosevelts, had also been ineffectual, an alcoholic, and a philanderer. Elliott cherished his daughter, who returned his affection and always remembered him as the brightest star of her youth. Eleanor’s mother, the beautiful Anna Hall, hailed from two of the great families of New York, the Livingstons and the Ludlows. Cold and distant, she called her quiet, insecure, and inhibited daughter “Granny” and once told her, “Eleanor, I hardly know what’s to happen to you. You’re so plain that you really have nothing to do except be good.” Anna Hall died of diphtheria in December 1892. Eight years old, Eleanor went to live with her grandmother, Mary Ludlow Hall, and saw her increasingly unstable father only rarely. In August 1894, Elliott Roosevelt died in a drunken accident.2
Eleanor spent five years with her grandmother, who despite her wealth was unable to provide much love. She had no regular playmates, was periodically terrorized by a harsh French nurse charged with her care, and experienced periods of depression, which she called “Griselda moods” after a patient and obedient but badly mistreated character in Boccaccio’s Decameron. The moods foreshadowed a behavioral characteristic that would plague her own marriage: the sublimation of anger and self-doubt into passive aggressiveness.
Her struggles for self-worth bore fruit only after she enrolled in 1899 to Allenswood, an exclusive boarding school in Wimbledon Park, just outside London. Its headmistress, Marie Souvestre, was an educator of great renown and a presence in the lively intellectual life of turn-of-the century London. A charismatic and demanding teacher, as well as a freethinker and nonconformist, she may have had lesbian relationships with the two women who successively served as her main partners in her teaching ventures.3
Eleanor arrived at Allenswood a month short of her fifteenth birthday, tall, gangly, and full of self-doubt but equipped with excellent French, the school’s required language of instruction and social discourse. She alone among the new students could communicate fluently with the headmistress. Mademoiselle Souvestre all but adopted her and transmitted to Eleanor a sense of self-worth. They took summer trips, for which Eleanor made the arrangements, through France and Italy, staying in simple hotels, eating the food and drinking the vin de pays of ordinary people. In the process, Eleanor learned that social classes below her own had value and dignity. She also blossomed among the students. Her cousin, Corrine Robinson, who entered Allenswood during Eleanor’s final year there, recalled her as the object of numerous adolescent crushes, loved for her kindness, admired for her sophistication, and respected for her intelligence.
Eleanor was devoted to Mademoiselle Souvestre, but it is unlikely that their mutual affection ever reached a physical expression. In her letters, the headmistress, sixty-four when she first met Eleanor, always addressed her as “dear child”; she doubtless saw the girl as a protégé and hoped to impart to her an understanding of the wider meaning of life.
Eleanor wanted to remain for a fourth and final year at Allenswood, but her grandmother ordered her home for her eighteenth birthday and introduction to society in October 1902. The departure was hard. Her new life, the headmistress told her, would be difficult. She should enjoy the worldly pleasures it would bring but also “bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought-after women at a ball or the woman best liked by your neighbor at the table, at luncheons and the various fashionable affairs.” They corresponded for a time but never met again. Eleanor asked Mademoiselle Souvestre for a photo, which she kept at her desk for the rest of her life.4
When Eleanor returned to the United States, she had reached her adult height of an even six feet; she was neither unattractive nor a standout beauty. Having been abroad for three years, she had few friends of either sex and was installed in New York City with her featherbrained Aunt Edith (“Pussie”), a fading belle who reminded her from time to time of her failure to measure up to the Hall-Livingston standard of feminine desirability. A third of a century later, Eleanor would recall as “utter agony” the incessant balls and receptions, the relative inattention she received from young men, and the early departures.5
After the first distasteful months, she began to recover her equilibrium. Many younger girls in her set admired her much, as had her Allenswood schoolmates. Robert Munro Ferguson, an esteemed veteran of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, escorted her on social occasions and introduced her to a wide circle of acquaintances, many of them artists and literary figures. She also began to take charge of the care of her younger brother, Hall, who entered the first form at Groton in September 1903. With her grandmother and aunt financially unable to maintain their house in the city, Eleanor joined her godmother and maternal cousin, Susie Parish, and her husband, Henry, in their town house at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Sixth Street. Aunt Pussie stayed next door with Susie’s mother and Eleanor’s great aunt, Elizabeth Livingston Ludlow. The arrangements were at least marginally more congenial.
By then, Eleanor was firmly committed to achieving a sense of self-worth by doing good in the larger world. Making a crucial transition from charity to social work, she taught classes at the Rivington Street Settlement House in Manhattan’s crowded, sometimes menacing Lower East Side. She also became a member of the Consumers’ League, an organization primarily concerned with achieving decent conditions for female workers.
In the summer of 1902, she encountered her cousin Franklin on a train. It was their first meeting in th
ree and a half years and revealed an instant mutual attraction. She saw him at various events over the next several months as his interest in Alice Sohier played itself out. He in turn discovered the world of the Lower East Side as he learned about her Junior League work and social concerns. Invitations to Hyde Park followed—for Franklin’s twenty-first birthday party, for the celebration of his AB degree, and then for a week in Campobello. A pattern was emerging.
Sara missed it, probably because Eleanor’s seriousness and social concerns seemed much in contrast with her son’s determined lightness of manner. But Franklin had never been obvious. Since he had begun reassuring his parents that all was going well at Groton, he had honed his skills of manipulation and deception to a scalpel’s edge. Alice Sohier’s brittleness possibly cast Eleanor’s earnestness as appealing. Franklin’s attraction to her revealed a fundamental seriousness that his demeanor was calculated to conceal.
Franklin failed to see a certain lack of maturity and a paucity of the adult skills one expected of a prospective wife. Eleanor’s intelligence notwithstanding, she could not budget the allowance she received from her mother’s estate until Henry Parish showed her how to keep rudimentary accounts. She had not the foggiest idea of how to manage a household and no experience with the rearing of children. More than thirty years later, she described herself as “a curious mixture of extreme innocence and unworldliness,” possessing “painfully high ideals and a tremendous sense of duty . . . entirely unrelieved by any sense of humor or any appreciation of the weaknesses of human nature.” She also had, she recalled, “very high standards as to what a wife and mother should be and not the faintest notion of what it meant to be either a wife or a mother.”6
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