Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (6 page)

Franklin’s infancy was unremarkable in certain respects. Weaned at twelve months, walking at sixteen, he was neither precocious nor slow. His first words were “Mama” and “Papa,” apparently in that order; he added “Mamie” for the nurse who tended to the less appealing aspects of child rearing. Nurses and nannies weren’t unusual among families of even modest means in New York in the Gilded Age; the millions of immigrants who poured into America during the latter half of the nineteenth century included hundreds of thousands of girls and young women willing to work for little money and remain till they found husbands. Helen McRorie, Franklin’s nurse, had more experience than most in her occupation; Sara insisted on the best. And Helen had more help than most nurses. James and Sara Roosevelt employed several servants: a housekeeper named Elspeth McEachern (called Tiddle by young Franklin and thereafter by the rest of the family), a cook, a butler, a gardener, a horseman, multiple maids, and casual laborers as the work required. James Roosevelt was a gentleman farmer, which meant that the actual farming at Springwood was done by the hired men.

Sara bore James no other children, almost certainly, considering the ease with which she conceived Franklin, by her choice. Consequently Franklin grew up without live-in siblings, half brother Rosy, Sara’s contemporary, having long since left home. But he never lacked for people about the house. In fact, in keeping with upper-class custom in America at the time, he saw more of the help than he did of his parents. Sara and James refused to let the responsibilities of parenthood impinge on their active social lives. They entertained their Hudson Valley neighbors and were entertained in turn. They dropped down to New York City, sometimes taking Franklin—and his nurse—and sometimes leaving them home. Franklin naturally was included on the regular summer visits to Sara’s ancestral home near New Bedford; she insisted that he learn to cherish his Delano roots.

In his adulthood, hearers would sometimes wonder where Franklin Roosevelt got his accent. He didn’t sound like a New Yorker, not even a Hudson Valley Knickerbocker. He didn’t sound like a New Englander, despite the summers spent among the Delanos. He
did
sound rich, but this was as much a matter of tone and timbre—the self-confidence of one who expected the world to treat him well—as of pronunciation. And most other rich Americans sounded little like Roosevelt.

He sounded vaguely British, which made sense in terms of his upbringing. As a child and youth, Franklin Roosevelt spent almost as much time in Britain and continental Europe as in America. Before his fifteenth birthday he traveled eight times to Europe; each visit lasted months, and the eight together accounted for years of the period of his life when he was mastering language. His closest companions during much of this time were the Ulster natives Mamie and Tiddle, which perhaps intensified the British influence on his patterns of speech.

The trips started early. Franklin wasn’t yet three, in the fall of 1884, when James, Sara, Franklin, Mamie, and Tiddle crossed the Atlantic to England, where Franklin, Mamie, and Tiddle remained—at Tunbridge Wells—while James and Sara proceeded to France and Germany. After several weeks at various spas, Franklin’s parents came back to England and the family spent the winter there. They didn’t return to America until the spring, more than half a year after embarking.

Subsequent journeys followed a similar pattern. James, already suffering from the heart ailment that would kill him, found particular relief at the spa at Bad Nauheim, north of Frankfurt. His and Sara’s visits to Nauheim became annual affairs, and until Franklin went off to school, at the advanced age of fourteen, he often accompanied his father and mother. He spent enough time in Germany to acquire moderate proficiency in the language—a facility he put to good use decades later. Like his mother and her generation of Delanos, he became as comfortable at sea as on land and as familiar with the countries of Europe as with his own.

F
ASHION IS OFTEN
cruel, but few fashions ever blighted so many lives as the one precipitated in America by the 1886 publication of
Little Lord Fauntleroy,
a novel for children and especially their mothers by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The English-born Burnett spun a story of an American boy who discovers that he is really an English earl and has to learn to play the part. The story prompted American mothers to imagine similar strokes of fortune touching their offspring and to dress their lads in readiness. Velvet suits with lace collars became the uniform of the scions of the aspiring classes; barbers despaired as the boys’ locks were allowed to grow past the ears to the nape and shoulders. The fact that real earls-in-waiting and barons-to-be didn’t dress this way had scant effect on the phenomenon in America, which like most fashions assumed a life of its own. Compounding the trauma for the victims was the simultaneous emergence of comparatively convenient photographic technology, which meant that their moments of mortification were frozen in silver gel for posterity.

Photographs from Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth year show him in full Fauntleroy regalia. In one a wool cap perches atop his auburn locks, and patent boots keep the wind from his shins. In another his hair falls uncovered across his shoulders and down his back, and a silk sash wraps his waist. He appears happy, with a blooming cheek, a steady gaze, and a nose remarkably well defined for a child so young.

Nor did he have any reason not to be happy. He was the center of the universe, as far as he knew. No siblings intruded upon his consciousness—Rosy visited but might as well have been of another generation. Several adults, starting with his parents but including the hired staff, apparently had nothing better to do than to meet his needs and indulge his whims. The world afforded ceaseless entertainment: pony and buggy and sleigh rides, tobogganing on the slopes above the Hudson, journeys by train and steamship to exciting cities and countries, stays in fine hotels and fancy houses.

Neither did his Eden tarnish with age. He avoided the typical childhood trial of starting school by the simple expedient of not attending school till he was a teenager. His parents engaged tutors to teach him his letters and numbers and the other prerequisites for a genteel existence. He rarely clashed with other children, for he spent most of his time among adults.

In one respect he may have been cared for
too
well. Most children in the nineteenth century, like most children for millennia past, were exposed to all manner of microbes at an early age. Many died of infant and childhood illnesses, but those who survived developed robust immune systems, able to cope with the mundane infections they subsequently encountered. Franklin Roosevelt, by virtue of his comparative isolation, missed out on some of this tempering. Not for years would the consequences become apparent, but when they did, they would be devastating.

Among his childhood toys were boats: model boats at first but eventually the genuine article. His mother and uncle told tales of the China trade and their round-the-world voyages on clipper ships; during the summer visits to New Bedford he haunted the wharves, clambered about the old whalers, and heard the wizened harpooners talk of their personal Ahabs and Moby Dicks. When he was nine his father purchased a sailing yacht (with auxiliary engine), the fifty-foot
Half Moon,
which Franklin immediately adopted as his own.

The vessel sailed out of New York harbor but coasted up to New Bedford and on around Cape Cod to the Gulf of Maine. At the north end of the gulf, where the estuary of the St. Croix River meets the Bay of Fundy, in Canadian waters but barely a mile from Maine, it dropped anchor at Campobello Island. In the 1880s a group of land developers began promoting the island as a summer getaway for wealthy Americans. The attraction was the weather—pleasantly cool even in the hottest August—but also the isolation. Summer was the unhealthy season in America’s burgeoning cities. Cholera and yellow fever weren’t quite the scourges they had been, chiefly due to improved sanitation, but these and other maladies still struck with frightening frequency. And even outside the cities, malaria laid thousands low in the steamy months of the year.

The James Roosevelts discovered Campobello Island the year after Franklin was born. Friends recommended it, James and Sara and Franklin visited it, and James and Sara decided to build a cottage there. Upon its completion, months at Campobello became a summer ritual for the family.

A central part of that ritual was sailing. Franklin crewed for his father until he was tall enough to see over the tiller, at which point he often took the helm. The winds in the Bay of Fundy could be daunting, even in summer, and the tides, among the highest in the world, challenged the sharpest sailor. Franklin thrived on the tests.

Sailing and the sea absorbed him. He consumed books about boats and the feats of great mariners. He doodled sloops and ketches in the margins of the work he did for his tutors; his earliest surviving letter to his mother—doubtless the first he wrote, as Sara saved everything—included a remarkably evocative rendering of three vessels under sail. He could scarcely contain his excitement while waiting for the
Half Moon
to be delivered. “Papa is going to buy a cutter that will go by naphtha”—for the auxiliary engine—“and we are going to sail in it at Campobello,” he wrote his aunt in the spring of 1891. When the family traveled to Germany that summer, he apprised his cousins of his favorite activities: “On this paper is a picture of the big lake on which we row, and Papa got me a great big boat and I sail it every day.”

E
NDICOTT
P
EABODY WAS
an American-born, English-schooled Episcopalian priest and the walking, breathing embodiment of the manly Christian virtues as they were understood in America of the Victorian age. He excelled at sports, especially boxing, and had faced down rowdies from his first pulpit, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. (He arrived not long after the infamous 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral, in which the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday exchanged lethal fire with Ike and Billy Clanton and their friends.) Besides improving his boxing skills, Peabody’s Arizona experience revealed a knack for fundraising; he frequented the saloons of the town in a successful effort to persuade the patrons to contribute to the construction of a proper church for the frontier diocese.

Upon his return to the East, he devoted this talent to the fulfillment of a long-standing dream to establish an American school for young men that would reproduce the best of English private education. It helped Peabody’s cause that his family was rich and well connected. His father was a partner of J. P. Morgan’s father, and his brother had married into the Lawrence family of Massachusetts. The Lawrences summered at Campobello with the James Roosevelts, to whom they described Peabody’s plan for a boys’ school. James Roosevelt was impressed by the board of trustees Peabody had put together, starting with Morgan. Sara Roosevelt took note that the most distinguished families of New York and Boston were enrolling their sons for admission, years before the boys would be old enough to enter the school. Lest Franklin lose out, she put his name on the list.

By the time Franklin arrived, in September 1896, Peabody’s vision had taken fair shape. The school was located thirty-five miles north of Boston, above the Nashua River and two miles from Groton village, which was just visible from the higher parts of the hundred-acre campus. The school’s handful of structures included a classroom building, a chapel, a gymnasium, a boathouse, and the most recent addition, the Hundred House, opened in 1891 as a dormitory for the hundred boys of the school. Students typically entered at age twelve and remained for six years, but because Sara couldn’t part with Franklin so young, he didn’t enter till fourteen, when he joined the students of the third “form,” or year.