Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (11 page)

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT WORKED
hard at her marriage, trying to be a loving wife to Franklin and a devoted daughter to Sara. Neither task came easily. Sara’s presence had hovered over the newlyweds’ ship as they steamed to Britain on their honeymoon, and it tracked them across the Continent. Franklin still felt the responsibility for his mother’s happiness he had inherited upon his father’s death—a responsibility Sara did nothing to diminish. Now Eleanor, partly from a desire to become one of the Delano clan, and partly, no doubt, from considerations of self-defense, committed herself to being the daughter her mother-in-law had never had. “Dearest Mama…,” she wrote Sara, who had arranged the details of the journey, “Thank you so much, dear, for everything you did for us. You are always just the sweetest, dearest Mama to your children, and I shall look forward to our next long evening together, when I shall want to be kissed all the time.”

Not a week passed that Sara didn’t receive multiple letters from the newlyweds—long letters relating all but the most intimate details of the honeymoon. From London to Paris to Venice to St. Moritz and down the Rhine the travelers proceeded, informing Sara of their progress—and being informed, in turn, of Sara’s progress preparing the house they would live in upon their return. It was on East Thirty-sixth Street, just three blocks from Sara’s own house. Franklin gave not the slightest hint of wanting to provide for Eleanor himself; on the contrary he wrote his mother, “We are so glad that it is really through you that we get the house…. It is so good that you take all the trouble for us.” He closed this letter with words that may have revealed more than he intended: “Ever your loving infants.”

Besides tending to Sara back home, Franklin and Eleanor visited many cousins, uncles, aunts, and family friends and acquaintances scattered about Britain and France. They saw the Whitelaw Reids in London, where Reid was now the American ambassador. They had lunch with Sidney and Beatrice Webb (“They write books on sociology,” Franklin said of the Fabian couple) and tea with Beatrice Chamberlain. They stayed with some Delanos in Paris and traveled for a time with Bob Ferguson, a British Rough Rider comrade of Theodore Roosevelt’s. Eleanor caught up with old teachers at Allenswood, unfortunately not including Marie Souvestre, who had recently died.

Especially in England they were treated like aristocracy on account of their last name. “We were ushered into the royal suite, one flight up, front, price $1,000 a day—a sitting room 40 ft. by 30 ft., a double bedroom, another ditto and a bath,” Franklin wrote from London. “Our breath was so taken away that we couldn’t even protest and are now saying, ‘Damn the expense, wot’s the odds’!”

The final weeks of the honeymoon coincided with Theodore Roosevelt’s successful mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, for which he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Everyone is talking about Cousin Theodore, saying that he is the most prominent figure of present-day history,” Franklin wrote, with vicarious pride. He told Sara they would be home soon. “You know how we long to see our Mummy again.”

Eleanor found the voyage home difficult. She wasn’t the sailor her husband was, and she sorely feared disappointing him. The outbound journey had been suspiciously easy, with fair weather and calm seas the entire way. But the return was a trial, despite conditions hardly more severe. On landing she learned the reason: she was pregnant. “It was quite a relief,” she wrote. She had worried not simply about being unable to keep up with Franklin as a traveler. “Little idiot that I was, I had been seriously troubled for fear that I would never have any children and my husband would therefore be much disappointed.”

Aside from the morning sickness, the pregnancy went smoothly. She suffered the ordinary first-baby jitters, magnified in her case by not previously having spent time with infants. “I had never had any interest in dolls or little children, and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” The nurse she hired to assist her turned out to be no help. The woman was young and scarcely more experienced than Eleanor. “She knew a considerable amount about babies’ diseases, but her inexperience made this knowledge almost a menace, for she was constantly looking for obscure illnesses and never expected that a well fed and well cared for baby would move along in a normal manner.” Yet Eleanor was too timid to complain. “For years I was afraid of my nurses,…who ordered me around quite as much as they ordered the children.”

Sara offered assistance but on her own terms. She set up Eleanor and Franklin’s first house, and when their family outgrew that she built them another, on East Sixty-fifth Street—adjacent to her own new house, with rooms that opened into the matching rooms of her house. Eleanor had no say in the design or decorating of her house. She might have asserted herself but didn’t. As a result she felt the independence she had learned from Marie Souvestre slipping away. “I was growing very dependent on my mother-in-law, requiring her help on almost every subject, and never thought of asking for anything which I felt would not meet with her approval.” In later years she reflected on Sara: “She is a very strong character, but because of her marriage to an older man she disciplined herself into gladly living his life and enjoying his belongings, and as a result I think she felt that young people should cater to older people. She gave great devotion to her own family and longed for their love and affection in return. She was somewhat jealous, because of her love, of anything which she felt might mean a really deep attachment outside of the family circle.”

Eleanor was usually charitable in her assessment of others’ motives, and she may have given her mother-in-law more benefit of the doubt than Sara deserved. But whatever the wellsprings of Sara’s omnipresence in the lives of Eleanor and Franklin, it ultimately provoked a breakdown. “I did not know what was the matter with me,” Eleanor wrote, “but I remember that a few weeks after we moved into the new house in East 65th Street I sat in front of my dressing table and wept, and when my bewildered young husband asked me what on earth was the matter with me, I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.”

If Franklin ever felt Sara’s presence to be a burden, he didn’t say so. And doubtless her demands weighed less on him, who had outlets beyond the household for his energies and emotions, than they did on Eleanor, who could never escape her mother-in-law. Yet whatever his own perception of Sara, he offered little sympathy to Eleanor. “He thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while,” Eleanor recalled. Then he left her to cry alone.

T
HERE WERE OTHER
occasions for tears. The first baby, Anna Eleanor, born in 1906, was followed by a son, James, in 1907, and a second son, Franklin Jr., in 1909. Franklin Jr. was the biggest of Eleanor’s babies and appeared the most robust. His parents and grandmother fussed over all three and took the standard precaution among the well-to-do of clearing out of the city during the unhealthy summer season. They typically sojourned at Hyde Park before heading to Campobello. Eleanor would take the children by train; Franklin would gather a group of male friends and sail up the coast in the
Half Moon II,
the successor to his father’s boat, which had been destroyed when the naphtha tank exploded. Eleanor never quite understood the appeal of these boys’ weeks out. “They always told me what delicious things they had had to eat on the boat. Apparently their idea of perfection was a combination of sausages, syrup and pancakes for every meal, varied occasionally by lobster or scrambled eggs. My husband was the cook as well as the captain, and was very proud of his prowess.”

Franklin was an accomplished sailor, but even the best boatmen meet trouble now and then. Some of Eleanor’s cousins, the Parishes, were coming to Campobello to visit, and Franklin and Eleanor sailed the mile to Easton to greet the evening train. On the return the compass light failed, and Franklin replaced it with a lantern. Meanwhile a thick fog set in, requiring Franklin to navigate by compass alone. The crossing took longer than usual, but at first he attributed the delay to the slow speed he was keeping on account of the fog. Suddenly a passenger in the bow shouted “Hard aport!” and Franklin veered over just in time to miss crashing into a dock at the village of Lubec, far off course. Mystified and chagrined, he recharted the course. A few minutes later another warning call came from the bow, and Franklin had to maneuver frantically to keep the boat from grounding on a small island he hadn’t expected. More confused than ever, he checked the compass, then rechecked it, before finally realizing that the lantern was made of steel that was deranging the compass. He removed the lantern and thereafter read the compass by match light, and eventually brought all to safety. “Never again were we able to induce Mrs. Parish to attempt a trip to Campobello,” Eleanor recalled.

The summer of 1908 proved an exception to the Hyde Park–Campobello routine. One-year-old James had contracted pneumonia that spring, and Eleanor was leery of subjecting him to the chill and damp of the Bay of Fundy. Besides, she wanted to stay close to regular medical care. So the family rented a house at Seabright, on the New Jersey coast. The quarters were cramped by comparison with what they were used to, but James recovered in the sun and salt air.

The following year Franklin Jr. was the one who caused the greatest concern. The family stopped at Hyde Park en route back from Campobello to New York City. Eleanor and Franklin went ahead to the city, only to learn that the three children had caught the flu. Little Franklin, just six months old, was the worst off. Eleanor fetched a doctor from New York and returned to Hyde Park; the doctor declared that the baby’s heart had been affected and insisted that he be taken to a hospital in New York. Hospital care in such a case consisted of little more than watchful waiting, and though cause for hope appeared now and again, the baby died in early November.

Franklin was saddened, but Eleanor was consumed with self-reproach. “I felt he had been left too much to the nurse and I knew too little about him, and that in some way I must be to blame. I even felt that I had not cared enough about him…. I made myself and all those around me most unhappy during that winter. I was even a little bitter at my poor young husband who occasionally tried to make me see how idiotically I was behaving.”

4.

T
HOSE WHO KNEW
F
RANKLIN PROFESSIONALLY DURING THIS PERIOD
—in particular his fellow law clerks, with whom he spent hours every day, sharing confidences and dreams—realized he wasn’t long for the law. “I remember him saying with engaging frankness that he wasn’t going to practice law forever,” Grenville Clark recollected years later. “He intended to run for office at the first opportunity…. He wanted to be and thought he had a very real chance to be president.” Roosevelt sketched the route, which drew liberally on the experience of his kinsman in the White House. “I remember that he described very accurately the steps which he thought could lead to this goal,” Clark continued. “They were: first, a seat in the State Assembly, then an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy…and finally the governorship of New York. ‘Anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be President with any luck’ are about his words that stick in my memory.” Roosevelt said all this most matter-of-factly, in a way that compelled respect if not outright admiration for his audacity. “I do not recall that even then, in 1907, any of us deprecated his ambition or even smiled at it as we might perhaps have done. It seemed proper and sincere; and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.”

It was a stretch even so. Simply entering politics was unusual for one of Roosevelt’s class. Theodore Roosevelt had shocked his family and friends by taking the plunge a quarter century earlier; a godfatherly type told him that politics was grubby, low, and rough, and its practitioners were not those with whom gentlemen associated. “I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class,” Theodore Roosevelt recalled. “I intended to be one of the governing class.” Franklin did, too, following Theodore’s example.

Yet Franklin’s course was, if anything, harder than Theodore’s had been. Theodore’s people were Republicans, the relatively respectable party in New York. Franklin’s folks were Democrats, the party of Tammany Hall. Defection appears never to have occurred to Franklin; consequently any political career he commenced would have to struggle against, surrender to, or otherwise take account of the most storied and arguably the most corrupt political machine in America.