“PROTECT YOURSELF.” “PROTECT YOURSELF, MY DEAR child,” from the turmoil, contradictions, and expectations of society’s demands. “Give some of your energy, but not all, to worldly pleasures…. And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought-after women at a ball or …at the various fashionable affairs.”
In New York and Tivoli, Eleanor reread Marie Souvestre’s concerned letters many times, but they could do nothing to protect her from her sense of duty to society’s demands. Social rituals were specific, rigid, ordered—and quite simple, really. At eighteen, Eleanor Roosevelt—a Livingston-Ludlow-Hall Roosevelt, the niece of the president of the United States—was supposed to emerge as from a chrysalis, fullblown and decorous, carefree and charming. She was to be a belle, an eligible mate for a suitable swain.
That she might have had contrary ideas, or feelings of terror; that her family situation alternated between disagreeable and painful, were all obscured by one reality: Eleanor was to enter society through a series of parties and balls in which she was meant to reaffirm the continued reign of the women of her line.
But Eleanor Roosevelt was no ordinary belle. And her situation did not encourage carefree joy. Her brother was now an adolescent for whom she had primary responsibility. Her uncles were no longer sober, even on occasion. At some point, three strong, very protective locks were installed on the door of her room at Tivoli. Was she ever hurt or abused? Did Uncle Vallie or Uncle Eddie ever actually get into her room? What kind of battle ensued? Three locks appeared; and nobody ever referred to their presence. Life in the house at Tivoli was now more unpredictable and gloomy than ever.
During her first summer at home, before the social season started, Eleanor lived entirely at Tivoli. Those months were marked by family disintegration, and social obligations that neither amused nor interested her. Pussie, still unmarried at thirty-two, was away most of that summer; Maude, her youngest aunt, was now married to polo player Larry Waterbury—a sportsman and gambler, often in debt and generally high-spirited. Her Uncle Eddie was then married to glamorous Josie Zabriskie, but he too had become alcoholic and querulous. The focal point of pain, however, was Uncle Vallie—the best-beloved, most irresponsible son who was now quite out of control. “My grandmother would never believe that he was not going to give it up as he promised after each spree,” but all the rest of the family understood, and daily life had been rendered “distinctly difficult.”
Unable even in retrospect to acknowledge the similarities to her father’s ordeal, Eleanor wrote that she considered this her
first real contact with anyone who had completely lost the power of self-control, and I think it began to develop in me an almost exaggerated idea of the necessity of keeping all of one’s desires under complete subjugation.
I had been a solemn little girl, my years in England had given me my first real taste of being carefree and irresponsible, but my return home …accentuated almost immediately the serious side of life, and that first summer was not very good preparation for being a gay and joyous debutante.
Eleanor had invited her Allenswood classmate Leonie Gifford, who had recently lost her mother, to spend part of the summer with her. But Vallie’s behavior was so unpredictable, every moment was an agony of insecurity. He shot his rifle out the window at strolling guests. Full of braggadocio, he said amazing, unbearable things. Eleanor held her breath during Leonie’s entire visit, and never invited another woman friend to Tivoli. “After that I would occasionally invite a man, but never felt free to do so unless I knew him well enough to tell him that he might have an uncomfortable time.”
In September, Eleanor and her grandmother accompanied Hall to Groton. That trip marked the beginning of Eleanor’s primary responsibility for her brother’s well-being. Though not old, her grandmother, not yet sixty, seemed now exhausted, beaten down by her own children. During the trip to Groton, Eleanor noticed that her grandmother seemed rather vague and unsettled. Responsibility for Hall slipped “rapidly from her hands into mine. She never again went to see him at school and I began to go up every term for a weekend, which was what all good parents were expected to do.” For the next six years, Eleanor wrote Hall virtually every day, so that he would never forget that he belonged to somebody. She took him on trips, arranged parties for him, and in every way served as his maternal parent and confidante until his early death from alcoholism in 1941.
During that first autumn, Eleanor spent many days virtually alone in New York City. Her grandmother rarely went to town, and lived almost entirely at Tivoli, “in a vain attempt to keep Vallie there and keep him sober as much as possible.” Occasionally Pussie joined Eleanor at the 37th Street house, but it was even worse when she was there. With “several love affairs always devastating her emotions,” Pussie continued to go the rounds of “dinners and dances as hard as any debutante.” Indeed, at the parties and cotillions Pussie remained, at thirty-two, quite the successful belle. But she was never content. Frequently she locked herself in her room, and refused to eat. Given over to rages and tantrums, vapors and melancholy, Pussie had become “even more temperamental than she had been as a young girl.” To add to Eleanor’s domestic stress, Uncle Vallie also appeared on occasion at 37th Street, “for one purpose and one alone: to go on a real spree.”
Eleanor ran the house, “as far as it was run by anyone,” and discovered within herself “a certain kind of strength and determination which underlay my timidity.” With her newfound strength, she handled efficiently and tactfully the many and extraordinary “difficulties that arose during this strange winter” of her coming out—when all society expected her to do was be joyful and dance until dawn.
Then her grandmother decided to close down the New York town house. It was too little used, required too many servants, and money had become a serious issue. Although her godmother, Cousin Susie Parish, took Eleanor in and her town house at 8 East 76th Street was a comfortable place, Eleanor felt again that she had no home she could call her own. Still, even by Eleanor Roosevelt’s own account, “a number of pleasant things” happened that winter. Ever since Marie Souvestre had encouraged her to discard unflattering clothes, she had enjoyed dressing well for formal occasions. Now her Aunt Tissie sent her Paris designs from the finest houses. She was at ease in conversation, especially with older people, and quickly achieved a reputation for bringing out the best in serious company. She often found herself seated next to the host, or the most esteemed gentleman in the room. Just as often he was fascinated by her sophisticated and learned conversation. She appeared to be years older than her contemporaries, and her letters during this period seem astounding when one remembers that they were written by a woman of eighteen, not twenty-five—as many people then assumed her to be. But for Eleanor these were all dubious distinctions; sophistication did not render her a belle, and there were many situations in which she felt awkward.
Nevertheless, her cousin Alice, Uncle Theodore’s daughter, now known as “Princess Alice,” was jealous of Eleanor. “Odious comparisons,” and the idea that Eleanor was considered by many to be “more like my father’s daughter than I was,” and the only member of the family who truly took after him, “added nothing to family solidarity,” she later explained.
Alice Roosevelt always insisted that stories about Eleanor’s clumsy lurch into society were ER’s own invention: “She was always making herself out to be an ugly duckling but she was really rather attractive. Tall, rather coltish-looking, with masses of pale, gold hair rippling to below her waist, and really lovely blue eyes. It’s true that her chin went in a bit, which wouldn’t have been so noticeable if only her hateful grandmother had fixed her teeth.”
At eighteen, Eleanor Roosevelt was cautious and judgmental. Having learned from Marie Souvestre to discriminate, and to choose experiences that pleased her, she refused to suffer fools, and loathed arrogance and pomposity. She could be cold, stubborn, and haughty as well as warm and tender. She hated deceit, and feared youthful alcoholic silliness. Though she would indeed rush off from a dull dance, when the company was interesting, the conversation unusual, witty, or original, she felt free to stay and enjoy herself well into the morning.
DURING THESE ARDUOUS SOCIAL MONTHS, ELEANOR WAS PARticularly happy to spend time with Bob Ferguson, the much-beloved family friend who had waited so tenderly upon her mother as she lay dying. The younger brother of Ronald, Lord Novar—whose Scottish lands included the magnificent Novar and Raith, on the Firth of Forth—Robert Munro Ferguson was a former Rough Rider and had once been Auntie Bye’s attentive young squire. He had remained an eligible bachelor whose wide-ranging interests and bohemian friends made his company particularly appealing to Eleanor. With him, Eleanor was relieved of the burden of being chaperoned about New York by her waiting maid. And with him she met people she otherwise might not have known. Eleanor particularly liked the artists and writers who attended parties in Bay Emmet’s studio in Greenwich Village.
A portrait painter of distinction, descended from a family of revolutionary Irish heroes, Ellen (“Bay”) Emmet became one of Eleanor’s lifelong friends. She was hardworking, robust, with masses of bright red hair, profoundly political, unpretentious, and vigorously cheerful. Like her older cousins, the equally renowned artists Rosina Emmet Sherwood (Robert Sherwood’s mother) and Lydia Field Emmet, Bay Emmet studied in Boston, New York (at the Art Students’ League), and in Europe, particularly in Paris, with the famed sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. By the time she returned to New York, in 1900, she was considered by many, including her cousin Henry James, “a pure painter, a real one, a good one.”
In 1902, when she and Eleanor first met, she had her first one-woman exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in New York. She was virtually the sole support of a very large family, including her widowed mother, three sisters, and young brother. Ten years older than Eleanor, Bay’s zest for life and joy in work, as well as her bohemian circle, were refreshing to the uptown debutante. Eleanor vastly preferred the many hours she spent in Bay’s studio to all the “dinners and dances I was struggling through in formal society each night, and yet I would not have wanted at that age to be left out, for I was still haunted by my upbringing and believed that what was known as New York Society was really important.”
IN OCTOBER, MARIE SOUVESTRE WROTE: “PLEASE TELL ME when the big season of social dissipations starts in New York?” The answer was actually a bit vague: there were dances and dinners, cotillions and theatre parties in the early autumn; but with the shorter, colder, grayer days of November, New York society announced its return to town by attending the great horse show at Madison Square Garden.
The New York Herald noted Eleanor’s presence in a box full of Roosevelt-Roosevelts. (Indeed, it has been said that Roosevelts so often married Roosevelts because they never met anybody else.) The box belonged to her distant cousin, the dapper sportsman addicted to magnificent coaches and superior carriages, James Roosevelt Roosevelt. “Rosy” Roosevelt was generous and fun-loving. His marriage to Helen Astor, the second-oldest daughter of the Mrs. Astor (Caroline Schermerhorn Astor), and his years in England while first secretary at the Court of Saint James had rendered him mannered beyond belief. But his younger half-brother, Franklin Delano Roosevelt; his daughter, Helen, now engaged to Eleanor’s cousin Theodore Douglas Robinson (Aunt Corinne’s son); and most of the younger generation were generally enthralled by his witty extravagance. He had invited them all to the horse show that evening. Eleanor Roosevelt’s presence was featured not only in the Herald but in Town Topics, society’s gossip sheet. Franklin’s presence in his half-brother’s box was overlooked.
Franklin, a Harvard junior, recorded in his diary: “Dinner with James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Helen [Astor] Roosevelt Roosevelt, Mary Newbold and Eleanor Roosevelt at Sherry’s and horse show.” Franklin’s diary entry for 17 November 1902 was his first mention of Cousin Eleanor. There was no similar reference to this meeting, or this event, on Eleanor’s part.
For all her very real successes as she entered society, Eleanor Roosevelt was haunted by one fact: She was not the belle her mother and her aunts had been. Her feelings and her fears intensified when she read nostalgic allusions to her relatives in New York’s leading papers. The week before the great Assembly Ball, held on 11 December, Town Topics broadcast Eleanor’s coming out by recalling her mother’s rapturous social leadership.
For Eleanor, that Assembly was “utter agony.” If she had known how awful it could be, she “would never have had the courage to go.” There was, to begin with, the indignity of those blank lines on the dance card tied to her wrist. At each cotillion a suitable swain would, or would not, put his name on one’s card—for the first dance, the dinner dance, the ninth dance, the last dance, and then the added and special dances. It was a slow process, a grueling mortification. Taller than most of the young men, unused to their company, Eleanor found the space between dances an agony of dread. Would she be chosen? Would she be a wallflower? Would an older relative ask her to dance out of charity or duty? Although Eleanor danced with Forbes Morgan, Pussie’s most ardent escort and the man she was to marry, and with Bob Ferguson, who introduced her to Nick Biddle, Duncan Harris, and Pendleton Rogers, “by no stretch of the imagination could I fool myself into thinking that I was a popular debutante.”
However differently others may have remembered Eleanor that evening, she remembered only that she left early, “thankful to get away, having learned that before I went to any party or to any dance I should have two partners, one for supper and one for the cotillion…. But you must also be chosen to dance every figure in the cotillion, and your popularity was gauged by the numbers of favors you took home. Pussie always had far more than I had! I knew I was the first girl in my mother’s family who was not a belle, and …I was deeply ashamed.” When combined with the emotional extravagances of her family situation, that first winter brought Eleanor to the verge “of nervous collapse.”*
By Christmas, however, the ordeal of her debutante season was over. In December, there began to appear a particular young man at parties and dances who genuinely sought her company. They danced, they talked, they read poetry together. And there was that physical sense of heightened intensity that happens when the chemistry is right. He thought her willowy (everyone called her willowy), elegant, lithe. He considered her eyes and hair particularly lovely. In a secret code, he noted in his journal: “E is an Angel.” He was as tall as she, and very much like her father: endlessly charming, always enthusiastic. When he looked at her, he looked at her deeply. He seemed to see her, and to care. He was attentive and ardent and complimentary. When they danced, they were striking. They made each other laugh, often and with gusto. They shared a world of interests, and of dreams. Franklin felt inspired. Eleanor felt hopeful.
Eleanor and Franklin had not seen each other since she was fourteen, and they had danced at Aunt Corinne’s Christmas party. Franklin had told his mother after that party that he thought Cousin Eleanor had a fine mind, but they had not corresponded while she was at Allenswood. When they met again after four years, on a New York Central train going up the Hudson during her first summer home in 1902, an easy intimacy marked their conversation. Eleanor had been sitting in a coach, reading, when Franklin walked by and saw her. They talked for almost two hours, and as they neared Poughkeepsie he suggested they go to the parlor car so that she might greet his mother. Eleanor had always been partial to Cousin Sally, who had loved Eleanor’s father and named him Franklin’s godfather. Now she was stunned by Sara Delano Roosevelt’s austere beauty. Considered queenly by many, her manner appeared even more regal because of the severe black mourning veils she still wore in remembrance of her husband’s death two years before.
That chance meeting was for Eleanor and Franklin the beginning of a year of frequent encounters at parties and dances, culminating in the summer and autumn of 1903, when they were both guests at several country houses and she was invited to his family home, Springwood in Hyde Park. Eleanor’s memories of those early days with Franklin focused primarily on his mother: She “was sorry for me, I think.” Sara Delano Roosevelt was never notably delighted when Franklin wanted to invite girls home, but Eleanor was kin, and Sara was always gracious. On the other hand, she took the opportunity of Eleanor’s first party weekend at Hyde Park to remind Eleanor that her mother had publicly humiliated her when she was two years old—during her very first visit to Springwood:
Cousin Sally told Eleanor that she remembered “my standing in the door with my finger in my mouth and being addressed as ‘Granny’ by my mother, and that Franklin rode me around the nursery on his back. This visit, however, is purely a matter of hearsay to me.”
For many months, Eleanor and Franklin saw each other only in stolen bits of time. Before Christmas, there were several lunches and teas, but only when Franklin could escape his mother—who kept a very close watch on her boy, and was entirely unready to imagine that he might have a special friend. Nevertheless, they spent New Year’s together at the White House. The dinner was sumptuous, the theatre party delightful, and Franklin noted in his diary: “sat near Eleanor. Very interesting day.”
On 30 January 1903, Rosy gave a “very jolly!” dinner party for FDR’s twenty-first birthday, which for Franklin was highlighted by Eleanor’s presence. Franklin hesitated to say anything about her to his mother, however, perhaps because Sara had become so dependent on his solace and companionship after his father died. Recently her loneliness had intensified so much that she had taken an apartment in Boston, in order to be closer to Franklin while he was at Harvard.
Franklin had been similarly discreet about his romance the previous year with seventeen-year-old Alice Sohier. Franklin, then twenty, evidently seemed to her parents too intent on a serious relationship, and they sent her off on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East. Alice Sohier remembered that she accepted her family’s offer of a grand tour with alacrity after Franklin confided to her that his lonely childhood had created a great desire to have a large brood of children, six at least. Years later, she told a friend that she had decided not to marry FDR because she “did not wish to be a cow.”
Although Franklin had proposed to Alice Sohier, he never mentioned her to his mother—just as he now failed to mention Eleanor’s new presence in his life, which began to be of real interest to him at that November 1902 horse show, less than two months after Alice Sohier sailed for Europe. The following summer and autumn were largely devoted to Eleanor, but he continued to be silent on the subject of their relationship, never referring to her in either correspondence or conversation with his mother.
For her part, Eleanor actively sought a variety of other interests. She had now, she acknowledged, “made many friends.” She mentioned Harry Hooker, who was to remain her adviser and attorney, Isabella Selmes, who would soon marry Bob Ferguson, and her mother, Martha Flandreau Selmes, who was Cousin Susie Parish’s particular friend.
Many of Eleanor’s most gratifying hours during this period were spent in volunteer work. In 1900, while still freshmen at Barnard, Mary Harriman (daughter of railroad builder Edward Henry Harriman and philanthropist Mary Williamson Averell Harriman), Nathalie Henderson, Jean Reid (daughter of Elizabeth Mills Reid and Whitelaw Reid), Gwendolyn Burden, and others had been moved to action by the dreadful crowding, lack of sanitation, cruel working conditions, frequent epidemics, and general misery that faced New York’s poor and immigrant population. They decided to join their middle-class sisters in an effort to create centers for social reform. Inspired by Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago; Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York; and the university-educated radicals who built Toynbee Hall in London, these debutantes founded the Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements, and its affiliated organizations—notably the University Settlement. According to Gladys Vanderbilt (Countess Széchényi), the members of the Junior League were admired, fashionable, beyond mockery: “They were smart, and they made it smart.” Several of these women, although two years older than Eleanor, had been among her closest friends and Roser schoolmates, and in 1903 she decided to participate actively in the work of the League: “There was no clubhouse; we were just a group of girls anxious to do something helpful in the city where we lived.”
Specifically, she agreed to teach calisthenics and fancy dancing to classes of children at the College Settlement on Rivington Street, in New York’s Lower East Side. While Eleanor taught the young girls every exercise and dance step she had ever learned, Jean Reid played the piano. Jean frequently arrived “in her carriage,” but Eleanor decided to make the trip downtown by public transportation. Whether she took the elevated train or the Fourth Avenue streetcar, she had to walk across the Bowery—which “filled me with a certain amount of terror and I often waited on a corner for a car, watching, with a great deal of trepidation, men come out of the saloons or shabby hotels nearby, but the children interested me enormously.”
Eleanor Roosevelt never compromised her decision to take public transportation. Even in the evenings, no matter how cold and dark, she refused Jean Reid’s offer of a ride home. She preferred to walk through the streets and to observe the Bowery’s lost and lonely men, generally drunk if not particularly threatening. They gave the concerned debutante yet another level of insight into the ravages of alcoholism, and the costs to the children who moved her so deeply.
Eleanor wrote Franklin that she found her hours at the settlement always the “nicest part of the day.” She liked the children who took her classes. She enjoyed their spirit, and admired their ability to learn and to play even after twelve to sixteen hours of toil, whether in factories or doing piecework at home. On occasion they were too spirited, and once she “had to send two children home which I hated doing.” Generally, however, her classes were harmonious, and her students eager to please. “I still remember,” she wrote in 1937, “the glow of pride that ran through me when one of the little girls said her father wanted me to come home with her, as he wanted to give me something because she enjoyed her classes so much.”
She also joined the Consumers’ League in 1903, and investigated working conditions in garment factories and department stores. The Consumers’ League, then headed by Maud Nathan, sought through exposure and publicity, through political lobbying and direct action, to improve the most dreadful places. It worked for better lighting, hygiene, toilet and restroom facilities. As Eleanor Roosevelt, always accompanied by “an experienced, older woman,” witnessed the actual working conditions under which so many young girls and women toiled, she gained a “great deal of knowledge of some of the less attractive and less agreeable sides of life.”
Her family was somewhat appalled by her good works, and continually pressured her to leave it all behind “for a summer of idleness and recreation.” Cousin Susie in particular urged her to quit all her settlement work and join her in Newport. She feared that Eleanor would bring home an immigrant’s disease, or be in some way harmed. Moreover, Cousin Susie could see no reason for or benefit from Eleanor’s efforts.
But Eleanor considered her work valuable, because it was the first work she did in order to improve the lives of others—a theme that would become a hallmark of her vision. And working on New York’s Lower East Side with poor children made her feel connected to her father. She had, from the age of six, helped him serve Thanksgiving dinners to the Newsboys, and had accompanied him to the Children’s Aid Society. She decided to continue her work—even if her family and her friends, including Franklin, might not understand. Moreover, while believing in the charitable responsibilities of her class, she also began to understand the need for real economic and political change, and was eager to learn more about what could be done.
On 6 January 1904, Eleanor wrote Franklin that she had spent the morning “at a most interesting class on practical Sociology! Now, don’t laugh, it was interesting and very practical and if we are going down to the Settlement we ought to know something—I know you are laughing at this and if you were only here to take up all my time I would not be going I’m afraid but one must do something or not having the one person who is all the world to one, would be unbearable….”
Eleanor at nineteen was deeply moved by the sight of a society undergoing fundamental transformations on every level. As new work, new visions, new expectations for young women unfolded, Eleanor felt torn between the traditions of her mother and her aunts, and her own inclinations—as awakened by her father and Marie Souvestre, and as now supported by the small group of unconventional debutantes led by Mary Harriman and Jean Reid.
Eleanor was also inspired by her Aunt Bye, who during TR’s presidency (1901-09) became a publicly admired intellectual and salonist. Her Washington home was now known as “the little White House,” and few decisions of any importance were made without her guidance. Eleanor spent part of each winter in Washington with Bye, who introduced her to all the most interesting and influential young women in town—Marjorie Nott, Cissy Patterson (subsequently the owner and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald), Harriet and Mary Winslow, Catherine Adams (daughter of Charles Francis Adams), and Margaretta MacVeagh, among many others. Eleanor accompanied Aunt Bye, whose husband had recently been promoted to admiral, on her daily rounds of card-bearing calls, which at the time seemed to her “most entertaining” rather than tedious; and was taken to “exciting” dinners, luncheons, and teas marked by “people of importance, with charm and wit and savoir faire.“
At Aunt Bye’s, Eleanor Roosevelt acquired still another level of “social ease” and an understanding of Washington and the political world. Until the winters of 1903 and 1904, she had not thought much about politics, or the men who shaped them. She did not connect the poverty she witnessed daily at Rivington Street with the kind of movements for social change that created anarchists and revolutionaries. Actually, she never thought much about Uncle Theodore’s election, or his elevation to the presidency after William McKinley had been assassinated by an anarchist. She never discussed his vision of empire, his Rough Rider heroics during the Spanish-American War, or even his progressive support for the work of settlement pioneers, who championed a Children’s Bureau and better conditions for America’s poor—as she herself was then doing.
Uncle Ted’s campaign and reelection had meant very little to me…. I lived in a totally nonpolitical atmosphere. In Washington, however, I gradually acquired a faint conception of the political world, very different from my New York world. I also acquired little by little the social ease which I sorely needed.
Because of Aunt Bye’s influence, Eleanor Roosevelt came to believe that, though women might not have the vote, they could be influential—perhaps even powerful. She realized too that Washington was a city with a different rhythm, a different purpose. New York society tended to frown on public life, and scorn publicly engaged citizens—men and women. Eleanor felt oddly at home in Washington. “The talk was always lively,” there was excitement, and a passion for things beyond petty personal concerns. Moreover, she found great comfort in Bye’s generous warmth and hospitality; the “unexpected guest was always welcome, and, young or old, you really felt Aunt Bye’s interest in you.” “I loved to be with her.”
During their courtship Franklin supported Eleanor’s interests. Though he may have laughed, he never suggested that she abandon her work at Rivington Street. When they met after her classes, he was greatly moved both by the poverty of the neighborhood and the enduring enthusiasm of her young students, who called him her “feller.” On one of his visits, he accompanied Eleanor and a young student who had fallen ill to the girl’s home. Although he had occasionally volunteered to teach at a boys’ club in Boston, he had never seen such tenement conditions. He kept repeating that he “simply could not believe human beings lived that way.” Eleanor Roosevelt always believed that those early visits to Rivington Street had a lasting and powerful impact on him.
For all her interests, Eleanor at nineteen was above all in love. She spent her days in a variety of ways—she did good works, she attended German classes and literature classes, she danced and partied, she went to the opera and the theatre—but every night she wrote to her secret love, her fiancé, now a junior at Harvard. Nobody knew. It was their secret. Eleanor did not really approve of secrets, however, and she waited for him to tell his mother. Nonetheless, romance flourishes in secret, and Eleanor was very happy.
I had a great curiosity about life and a desire to participate in every experience that might be the lot of a woman. There seemed to be a necessity for hurry; …and so in the autumn of 1903, when Franklin Roosevelt …asked me to marry him, though I was only 19, it seemed an entirely natural thing and I never even thought that we were both young and inexperienced…. I know now that it was years later before I understood what being in love or what loving really meant.
Whatever that last phrase meant to Eleanor Roosevelt so many decades later, her letters to Franklin between 1903 and 1905 were as full of love as any letters she would ever write. On 6 January 1904, she wrote:
Oh! darling I miss you so and I long for the happy hours which we have together and I think of the many which we have had these last two weeks constantly—I am so happy. So very happy in your love dearest, that all the world has changed for me. If only I can bring to you all that you have brought to me all my dearest wishes will be fulfilled and I shall know that you too will always be happy—
Goodbye dearest Boy, take care of yourself in this cold weather and think always of
Your devoted
“Little Nell”
Signing herself “Little Nell,” the term of endearment her father had used, indicates the new level of intimacy and trust that had been reached during the holiday season of 1903. After almost a year of casual correspondence, everything changed over the pre-Thanksgiving November weekend when Eleanor visited Franklin in Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game—well chaperoned by Cousin Muriel Robbins and her mother, Aunt Kassie. After the game (Franklin led the cheers but Yale won), he showed Eleanor his room, and she left for Groton to spend the rest of the weekend with her brother. The next day, Franklin joined her there, and they spent that Sunday, 22 November 1903, together—somehow finding sufficient time alone, without Hall, for Franklin to propose. That evening, in his secret code, he noted in his diary: “After lunch I have a never to be forgotten walk to the river with my darling.”
The next week was hard for Eleanor. The day after she had accepted Franklin’s proposal, her Great-Uncle James King Gracie died. She wanted her first letter to her new fiancé to be “cheerier and more coherent,” and in spite “of it all I am very happy.” But her great-uncle’s death was a terrific blow, and “I am more sorry than I can say for he has always been very kind and dear to us,” and because he and Aunt Annie (her father’s favorite aunt) “both loved my Father very dearly so it is just another link gone.” Eleanor spent the day with her Aunt Corinne, who was devastated and looked “so worn & I wish I could do something more to help her.” The funeral was planned for the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Eleanor dreaded it: “I know I ought not to feel as I do or even to think of myself but I have not been to a funeral in ten years and it makes me shudder to think of it.”
Eleanor wrote to Franklin twice on the 24th. The second letter, written late at night after a “very trying” day of grief and mourning, was in reply to his pleasing letter from Fairhaven: “I wanted to tell you that I did understand & that I don’t know what I should have done all day if your letter had not come.” His words encouraged her to spend part of that day searching for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Woman’s Shortcomings,” which she had “tried to recite” on Sunday.
I am going to write it out for you, because it is in part what it all means to me:
Unless you can think when the song is done,
No other is left in the rhythm;
Unless you can feel, when left by one,
That all men else go with him;
Unless you can know, when upraised by his breath,
That your beauty itself wants proving;
Unless you can swear, “For life for death!”
Oh, fear to call it loving!…
ER particularly cherished Ellen (“Bay”) Emmet’s wedding present, this portrait of Eleanor’s Aunt Bye, Anna Roosevelt Cowles. During the years between Allenswood and her marriage, ER preferred the time she spent at Bay Emmet’s Greenwich Village studio, with her bohemian friends, to any society event she felt she had to endure.
I wondered if it meant “for life, for death” to you at first but I know it does now. I do not know what to write. I cannot write what I want. I can only wait and long for Sunday when I shall tell you all I feel….
Their plan to see each other that Sunday was a subject of tension. Franklin had planned to lie to his mother, and tell her that he would be in New York to visit “Mr. Marvin.” Eleanor wanted him to tell his mother the truth, “because I never want her to feel that she has been deceived…. Don’t be angry with me Franklin for saying this and of course you must do as you think best.”
Evidently Franklin did tell his mother the truth. At some point during the Delano Thanksgiving party at Fairhaven, he asked to see her quietly, alone; Sara Delano Roosevelt wrote in her journal: “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement.” She was staggered. It was all so sudden and unexpected. They were too young and ill-prepared. It was impossible. They simply must wait—a year at least. And nobody need know.
Franklin spent Sunday and Monday in New York. Afterwards, Eleanor wrote: “It is impossible to tell you what these last two days have been to me, but I know they have meant the same to you so that you will understand that I love you dearest and I hope that I shall always prove worthy of the love which you have given me. I have never known before what it was to be absolutely happy, nor have I ever longed for just one glimpse of a pair of eyes….”
She wrote to him late at night, and then again on rising:
Dearest Franklin,
Though I only wrote last night I must write you just a line this morning to tell you that I miss you every moment & that you are never out of my thought dear for one moment. I was thinking last night of the difference which one short week can make in one’s life. Everything is changed for me now. I am so happy. Oh! so happy & I love you so dearly. I cannot begin to write you all I should like to say, but you know it all I am sure & I hope that you too dearest are very, very happy. I am counting the days to the 12th & the days in between seem so very long.
But the weekend of 12 December 1903 was to become an embattled one. During the week that followed Eleanor’s letter to Franklin, Sara Delano Roosevelt met with her to issue several decrees. Eleanor wrote Franklin:
“Boy darling, I have rather a hard letter to write to you tonight and I don’t quite know how to say what I must say and I am afraid I am going to give you some trouble, however I don’t see how I can help it….” Cousin Sally was not pleased. She did not want Franklin to stay with Eleanor in New York for the two days they had planned, however well chaperoned. They would be seen in church, and people were beginning to notice them together. Sara wanted him to spend Sunday in Hyde Park. “She asked me to write you and I tell you all this dear because I think it only fair. Of course it will be a terrible disappointment to me not to have you on Sunday as I have been looking forward to it and every moment with you is very, very precious as we have so little of each other but I don’t want you to stay if you feel it is your duty to go up and I shall understand of course.”
Also, his mother had told Eleanor of the house she rented in Boston. She intended to invite Eleanor up only “once or twice,” and she did not want Franklin to “be coming to New York.” Eleanor could understand “how she feels but I am afraid I can’t promise not to want you more than twice in all that time, however I think that you and she will have to talk it over….”
Eleanor left it up to Franklin to decide: “You mustn’t let what I want interfere with what you feel to be right dearest….” Nonetheless, she appeared certain she would see Franklin as planned, for she urged him “to get a little rest sometime, for I don’t want to receive a wreck next Saturday.” As for herself, his concerns were unfounded: “I am very good about resting and you must not worry about me dear. I take great care of myself and I assure you that I never will tire myself through my unselfishness.”
Sara was equally certain that Franklin would in fact be in Hyde Park on the contested Sunday, and Eleanor noted: “You see it is hard for her to realize that any one can want you or need you more than she does. So I suppose I ought not to mind, only I do mind terribly, as you can understand dear, however I mustn’t complain, must I?”
Although all evidence suggests that the young couple won this particular battle and spent the whole weekend together, Eleanor began to feel that it was all going to be more difficult than she had imagined. At first she felt stoical, resigned. Franklin reassured her. He seemed so confident, and untroubled. Still, familiar sensations, old feelings of self-doubt, began to gnaw their way into her newfound happiness. She had no doubts about Franklin; she trusted his love, and believed in his enthusiasm. But his mother could be so cold, so disapproving. There were moments, especially when the two women were alone with each other, when Sara’s firm jaw and direct gaze seemed hard to endure.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only child of Sara Delano and “Squire James” Roosevelt. When James met Sara, at the home of Eleanor’s paternal grandmother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, he was a fifty-two-year-old widower, who sported lush muttonchop whiskers and rode about his estate in full and formal English country attire. His first wife, Rebecca Howland, had died three years before, in 1876, shortly after their son, James Roosevelt (Rosy) Roosevelt married Helen Schermer-horn Astor. Widely traveled, well educated, and classically beautiful, with great masses of auburn hair worn high, Sara had had many suitors by the time she met James, but her father, Warren Delano, had vetoed them all as unworthy (including the architect Stanford White, said to be the great love of Sara’s youth). At twenty-six (the same age as James’s son Rosy), she believed herself committed to “spinsterhood.”
Squire James, who had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1851, owed his wealth to anthracite coal, steamships, railroads, and considerable real estate. Although he lost several big financial gambles, including a plan to build an interocean canal through Nicaragua, which failed during the depression of 1893 (and was finally scuttled when TR decided to construct the Panama Canal), his holdings were sufficient to please his business associate Warren Delano, who objected only momentarily to his advanced age.
The Delanos were very proud of their lineage, which Sara could—and did, repeatedly—recite, back to William the Conqueror. The first American de la Noye, a Huguenot, settled in Plymouth in 1621. For generations the Delanos circled the world as fortune-hunting merchants and seamen. Both Warren Delanos, Sara’s father and grandfather, met with particular success in China—notably in the opium trade. And on 21 September 1854, Sara Delano was born (the seventh of eleven children) to Catherine Lyman, daughter of an equally prominent family of Massachusetts jurists and financiers, and Warren Delano at Algonac—a splendid villa across the Hudson River, and twenty miles south of Springwood.
Educated by tutors in Europe—especially Paris, where the family lived for many years—Sara Delano Roosevelt was a prominent member of society in New York, Boston, Paris, and London. She loved to travel and had a wide range of interests. She was rigid in her views, and opinionated on all matters. She hated, with considerable verve and in no particular order, ostentation, vulgarity, shabby politicians, the new resorts of the new rich, and virtually all races, nationalities, and families other than her own.
Although known for his good humor, Squire James was equally opinionated, and shared many of Sara’s social views. In some ways he was more rigid. Once, in Germany, when she met an old girlhood friend, he forbade their planned luncheon because the friend had been divorced. Later, when their new neighbors, the Vanderbilts, invited them to their grand and garish manor for dinner, Sara was curious and intended to go. But Squire James was appalled: “If we accept, we shall have to have these people to our home.” Profound snob that he was, he was nevertheless in some ways more liberal than his wife. While idealizing work and thrift, he specifically scorned the Social Darwinist survival-of-the-fittest notions that had been vigorously embraced by most of the gentry and had become the new religion of the new rich of his generation. He believed that spirituality required social responsibility, and near the end of his life he delivered a passionate oration, at a guild meeting of the Saint James Church in Hyde Park, on the perils of extravagance and the sin of human carelessness within the human community.
In London, New York, and Paris, he said, he had witnessed the desperation of poverty; he had seen the hovels and the squalor; the overworked children, naked, bony, and filthy; the sick and dying mothers, abandoned to poverty and disease. “In all countries and all ages there have been more workers than work.” He had seen the dreadful place of a family in London, into whose home one descended by ladder, “several feet below the sewage and gas pipes.” There was never any daylight or breathable air; pests abounded. “Help the Helpless!” Squire James demanded. “Help the poor, the widow, the orphan; help the sick, the fallen man or woman, for the sake of our common humanity. Help all who are suffering…. Work for humanity. Work for your Lord….” It was for “that single cause that we have, all of us, one human heart.”
Such views were irrelevant to Sara, but they were part of James’s legacy to his son Franklin—and thus familiar and congenial when Franklin met with them again in Eleanor Roosevelt.
Although Sara was devoted to her husband, she repeated frequently over the years her most profound conviction: “My son Franklin is a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all.” Perhaps she referred to what she perceived as hereditary flaws among the Roosevelts. Had she wanted Franklin to marry into a family with better genes, better bones, less alcoholic blood? Was there among America’s aristocracy at the fin de siècle such a family? Perhaps she would have preferred that he be involved with a less political family, one less engaged in public life, committed to social responsibility. Certainly, over time, Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were in combination more Roosevelt than she approved of; and in the beginning she never missed an opportunity to keep them apart.
Born on 30 January 1882 into the comfort and security of Spring-wood on the Hudson, FDR loved his home, which then included over six hundred acres of rolling meadows and dense virgin woodlands. There were vineyards and orchards, fields of grain, gardens dedicated to roses, greenhouse, icehouse, servants galore, and very serious stables.*
From the beginning, Franklin was above all Sara’s very own little darling. She kept him attached to her physically for as long as it was humanly possible. (Rumors that he was breast-fed until he was three, six, or even eight persisted for decades.) For many years, his hair, meticulously curled and fluffed, went uncut. He wore long blond curls and dresses until he was five. From five to eight, he wore either kilts or Lord Fauntleroy suits—costumes of considerable derision among his Oyster Bay cousins. Alice Roosevelt Longworth commented that she wasn’t even allowed to read Little Lord Fauntleroy “because it was so dreadful. That awful child being frightfully condescending to everyone including Grandfather Dear, ugh!” But Franklin, with his cultivated English accent and smug manner, “was encouraged to read Little Lord Fauntleroy.” When he was eight, Franklin persuaded his parents to dress him in English sailor suits. He was almost nine when he wrote his father: “Mama left this morning and I am going to take my bath alone.”
However protected, Franklin was not brought up to be Caspar Milquetoast. His father taught him to swim, to fish, to sail, to hunt, to ride, to golf, to skate, to iceboat, and in general to become a self-reliant, fun-loving, and capable youth. He shot birds and had them stuffed. He collected old prints, great books, and mountains of stamps. His parents indulged his every whim, and delighted in his every word. They simply could not bear to part with him until he was fourteen, and so he failed to enter Groton with his form. When he arrived there, he was plunged into a society of 110 boys who by then had had two years in which to settle themselves into their various teams, clubs, and cliques.
Congenial and self-assured among adults, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had never been among many boys before. Their mores, manners, and attitudes were as strange to him as his were to them. The new boy on campus had an odd manner, and his speech was aggressively haughty—the influence of European nannies, exclusively adult company, and studies abroad. He preened, and was unused to various merriments. Although he had a ready, hearty, and engaging smile, he was frequently arrogant. Rather spindly, he was lackluster at team sports, despite his best efforts and sincere enthusiasm. He was far more popular with his teachers than with his peers, and certainly his awards for punctuality did nothing to win him any friends.
Franklin was also mocked as the younger “uncle” of a high-spirited and independent youth in the class ahead of him, and a perpetual outsider. At Groton, Franklin considered James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Jr.—Rosy’s son, known as “Taddie”—a “queer sort of boy.” Later, at Harvard, Taddie became a decided embarrassment. In 1900, he eloped with a hardworking woman of the night called Dutch Sadie. Stories conflict as to whether Sadie Meisinger and Taddie lived happily ever after or bitterly until her death in 1940. They lived, however, in familial isolation in a small apartment above a garage in Queens where Taddie worked as an auto mechanic. He remained a recluse until his death in 1958, and never touched his inheritance. He left his entire and considerable Astor fortune to the Salvation Army.
The Astors and the Roosevelts were scandalized by Taddie, whose elopement with Dutch Sadie made newspaper headlines and became the butt of society jokes for weeks. His father, Rosy, rushed back from England to have the marriage annulled; his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Astor, went into hiding; and two days after the story broke, his paternal grandfather, Squire James, suffered the first of the heart attacks that would later kill him. Young Franklin worried about his father, whose condition rapidly declined, and he personally blamed Taddie. On 23 October 1900, he wrote that “the disgusting thing about Taddy did not come as a very great surprise”; but “the disgrace to the name has been the worst part of the affair [and] one can never again consider him a true Roosevelt. It will be well for him not only to go to parts unknown but to stay there and begin life anew.”
Franklin’s own inclinations at Groton and Harvard tilted toward conformity, acceptance, and well-rounded if limited achievement. He adored Groton and its headmaster, Endicott Peabody. A Cheltenhamand Cambridge-educated Anglican minister, Dr. Peabody intended to re-create Britain’s public (private, in U.S. parlance) school tradition. Groton was conceived to serve as an academy for the preparation of America’s leadership class. In order to produce proper Christian gentlemen with ideals and manners, six years of Latin, Greek, history, literature, and science were secondary to six years of Christian principles and ethics, vigorous sports, clean and Spartan living, and class-conscious comradeship. Sara Delano Roosevelt enrolled her son into this extended-family environment as soon as she met Dr. Peabody in 1884, the year he founded Groton.*
FDR considered himself a model Grotonian and a champion of its precepts. Dr. Peabody’s goal had been, after all, to raise a new class of gentlemen who would rule with a patrician sense of service to God, country, and humanity. However romantically FDR came to regard Groton, he had been in fact an ordinary if not indifferent student, although he debated with gusto, sang in the choir, and excelled in Latin. Tall and gawky, he was burdened at Groton by glasses on his nose and braces on his teeth; for glasses he affected Cousin Teddy’s pince-nez, which made him look just a wee bit silly.
As a youth, Franklin was something of an outsider along society’s fast track. According to Eleanor’s cousin Joseph Alsop (Corinne Roosevelt Robinson’s grandson), Franklin was not popular. Though never specifically “disliked,” he was not taken very seriously. The girls in his circle said “F. D.” stood for “feather duster.” Franklin was seen as a spoiled and smug “mama’s boy.” Never dashing, he was too pretty to be handsome; some said he resembled the faces painted on “presentation handkerchief boxes.” Throughout his Groton years, to judge from Franklin’s words, the feelings were mutual. His utter devotion to his mother was matched only by the disdain he felt for the girls he knew. Even when he had to select a partner, he asked his mother to do it for him,—and to be sure he was not stuck with an “ice-cart,” a “brat,” a “pill,” or anything “elephantine.” During one Christmas season, Sara planned to have some of his young cousins stay over for the holidays, to Franklin’s chagrin: “It will be a horrible nuisance having those squawson our hands for such a long time.” But while he was a junior at Groton, after the party at Aunt Corinne’s where he had recently encountered Eleanor, Franklin wrote his mother: “I cannot think of anyone to get up here, as most of the boys are already engaged that I would like to have, so I hope you will be able to find someone else. How about Teddy Robinson [Aunt Corinne’s son] and Eleanor Roosevelt? They would go well and help to fill out chinks.”
If the girls he knew called him “feather duster,” the boys simply declined to admit him into their company. His social failures continued during his first years at Harvard, the cruelest and most lasting blow of all being his exclusion from the Porcellian, the club to which his own father and Theodore Roosevelt had both belonged. In 1918, FDR told Aunt Bye’s son, William Sheffield Cowles, Jr., that his failure to make Porcellian was the worst disappointment of his life.
FDR recovered from these defeats by becoming more politically aware, by being a devoted member of the clubs to which he did belong—Hasty Pudding and Alpha Delta Phi (the Fly)—and by contributing most of his time to the student newspaper. Eleanor’s influence was to be a key factor in his new successes. At the beginning of their courtship, she encouraged him to run for class office, to do better work, and to take himself, his concerns, and his talents more seriously. Her letters to him are full of advice and enthusiasm for his work and his ideas. In his junior year, he was elected president and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson, to which he devoted his entire senior year, having actually completed his courses after three years.
Eleanor’s good influence notwithstanding, Sara Delano Roosevelt determined to separate the couple as soon as Franklin revealed their secret to her on Thanksgiving Day 1903. They were children, with neither the emotional moorings nor the financial security to begin an independent household. Their irrepressible enthusiasm and unqualified happiness galled her. She tried patience and subterfuge, seduction and spite. And they responded with equal cunning, equal determination.
BECAUSE ELEANOR ROOSEVELT DESTROYED ALL OF FDR’S courtship letters, we have only a few letters from Franklin to his mother to suggest the happiness that his love for Eleanor had aroused in him.
On 4 December 1903, Franklin wrote:
Dearest Mama—I know what pain I must have caused you and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it—mais tu sais, me voilà! That’s all that could be said—I know my mind, have known it for a long time, and know that I could never think otherwise:
Result: I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest—And for you, dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have always been and always will be to each other—only now you have two children to love & to love you—and Eleanor as you know will always be a daughter to you in every true way….
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to “Dearest Cousin Sally” in much the same spirit on 2 December:
I must write you & thank you for being so good to me yesterday. I know just how you feel and how hard it must be, but I do so want you to learn to love me a little. You must know that I will always try to do what you wish for I have grown to love you very dearly during the past summer. It is impossible for me to tell you how I feel toward Franklin, I can only say that my one great wish is always to prove worthy of him….
With much love dear Cousin Sally,
Always devotedly
Eleanor
Cousin Sally was not so easily charmed. Having gotten their agreement to postpone any announcement for a year at least, she arranged a leisurely six-week Caribbean cruise for February and March 1904, to fill Franklin’s mind with other interests. His roommate, Lathrop Brown, accompanied them aboard the luxurious Hamburg-American liner Prinzessin Victoria Luise, which took them to Saint Thomas, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, Martinique, Trinidad, Venezuela, and Curaçao. When that ploy failed—despite FDR’s shipboard flirtations with several considerably older women, which also annoyed his mother—she encouraged her friend Joseph Choate, then U.S. ambassador to the Court of Saint James, to name Franklin his secretary and remove him to London. But Choate refused; he already had a secretary.
Although Eleanor resented Cousin Sally’s dominating interference, she seemed to have embarked on this struggle of wills with a remarkable sense of security. She kept her feelings of frustration and anger in check, and set about to court her future mother-in-law. She did this not just because of her love for Franklin, but because she craved his mother’s love as well, and longed to be accepted as part of Sara’s family. Eleanor wanted desperately to belong to this family that seemed so different from her own, its members closely united by great quantities of generous and devoted support for each other.
When she was first invited to meet the Delano “clan,” at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, she was struck above all by “a sense of security which I never had known before.” There were among the Delanos many differences and many disagreements, but there was also the most remarkable sense of unity and connectedness, which to Eleanor was “something of a revelation” and “relief.” There had always been such a “feeling of insecurity in most of the relationships of my Hall family.” There had also been an obsession with money, and what Eleanor had come to consider rather meaningless display, which led to many problems, since there was somehow never enough money to go around. ER’s grandmother, left without a will, had nothing but her “dower right in her husband’s estate,” with which to meet her expenses and help her “extravagant children.” When, for example, her Aunt Maude and husband, Larry Waterbury, had visited her in England, she had watched them “with awe and envy.” There were so many magnificent costumes, so much polo, endless gaiety. “Theirs was a world where pleasure dominated.” But they gambled and were frequently in debt. Both Eddie and Vallie needed help, for they “had squandered what money was left to them.” And part of Pussie’s perpetual angst was due to the fact that she had handed over her investments to various men “with good intentions” and dreadful “business judgment.” Only Aunt Tissie, who had married Stanley Mortimer, was financially secure, and for years ”Tissie spent practically every penny she had” bailing out members of her family. The financial and emotional strains involved in trying to “keep up with the Joneses” had come to seem a disagreeable, joyless enterprise to Eleanor.
The Delanos were not only financially secure, they “watched their pennies, which I had always seen squandered.” They could afford, therefore, to be “generous in big things, because so little was ever wasted or spent in inconsequential ways.” But, more than that, they “were a clan, and if misfortune befell one of them, the others rallied at once. My Hall family would have rallied, too, but they had so much less to rally with.” They might criticize one another, but if an outsider so much as looked askance at a Delano, “the clan was ready to tear him limb from limb!”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s profound longing for familial unity in the face of criticism, opposition, and hard times came from the very core of her childhood experience. To be made to feel welcomed by the Delanos—to be embraced by Sara’s eldest brother, Warren Delano, now head of the tribe, and his wife, who “were always kindness itself to me,” and by Franklin’s aunts, Dora Delano Forbes, Annie Delano Hitch (“the most philanthropic and civic-minded”), Kassie Delano Price Collier, and his Uncle Frederic Delano, who remained her close friend and ally over the years—added what seemed a particularly satisfying dimension to her life as she embarked upon that great unknown, marriage and motherhood.
When Eleanor agreed to become engaged to Franklin, she was being courted quite vigorously by several other suitors, particularly Nicholas Biddle, Lyman Delano, and Howard Cary—one of Franklin’s Harvard classmates, her most insistent admirer of all. Years later, Eleanor Roosevelt described Cary as “a charming man with a really lovely spirit, [who] wrote me occasionally about books, for we had a mutual interest in literature. His letters were charming, but formal and even stiff when they touched on anything but books….” She failed to note that he pursued her with ardor and repeatedly in New York and Dark Harbor, Maine, during the summer of 1904, while she was visiting Aunt Corinne. He invited her to dinner, tea, lunch; to go climbing; to explore the island; to spend more time with him on a regular basis. When her engagement was finally announced in November 1904, Howard Cary’s mother wrote Eleanor: “and so you are not going to be my daughter-in-law after all”; and Howard wrote Franklin: “You are mighty lucky. Your future wife is such as it is the privilege of few men to have.”*
Nicholas Biddle did not manage his disappointment so gracefully: after three disastrous efforts, he finally was able to write a barely satisfactory letter to Franklin. Cousin Lyman Delano (Warren’s son) was more effusive: “I have more respect and admiration for Eleanor than any girl I have ever met, and have always thought that the man who would have her for a wife would be very lucky.” To Eleanor he wrote: “I never saw the family so enthusiastic in my life and I am sure your ears would have burned if you could have heard some of the compliments paid you.”
Although all letters to Eleanor rhapsodized over her good news, many of them conveyed sentiments of loss that reflected Eleanor’s impact, even as a young woman, upon everyone graced by her presence. Aunt Maude wrote: “Do be good to Grandma I think she will miss you frightfully.” Uncle Henry Parish, who taught Eleanor how to keep accounts, deal with her bills, and balance her checkbooks, and whom she considered “the kindest person I have ever known,” feared that his wife, Eleanor’s Cousin Susie, would feel bereft without her presence: “Much as I am to Susie, you are more and I pray that you always will be.” And her colleagues at the Junior League threatened to hold a “grudge” against Franklin if her engagement deprived the League of its “most efficient member.”
Over the years, FDR altered the custom of congratulating the groom, while giving best wishes to the bride, by always congratulating the bride as well. When his secretary Grace Tully asked him why he did that, he replied that, when his engagement to Eleanor had been announced, he was drowned by such effusive congratulations for his great good fortune in winning her that he always felt miffed at the fact that no one had acknowledged that she too might have been congratulated on her luck.
Why in fact did Eleanor choose Franklin, considered by so many a lightweight and a mama’s boy? A middling scholar and a middling swain, he had little really to recommend him over her other suitors. He was less serious than many; not as rich as others; was considered by some frivolous and frothy, and by others arrogant and deceitful. He was known to be a womanizer, a tippler, and a careless flirt. According to Joseph Alsop, Alsop’s mother, Corinne Robinson Alsop—who knew Eleanor better than most and had witnessed her triumphs at Allenswood—was adamant in her feeling that Franklin was unworthy, and confided in her diary that he was “by no means good enough for her.”
But Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a gift for bringing out the best in people, saw special qualities in Franklin. To her he was tender, considerate, attentive. She felt that he admired her intelligence, and relied on her advice. Above all, she perceived that he needed her, and in many ways Franklin resembled Eleanor’s romantic image of her father—that debonair man who had been the first to call her Little Nell.
Franklin was ardent, affectionate, flamboyant. He sent her poetry and “a gift from the sea,” which she cherished. He brought her flowers and books. They shared a sense of awe about the mysteries of love; and they courted the highest idealism. In the beginning, Franklin seemed even more romantic than Eleanor. In response to one of his first letters after they became secretly engaged, she wrote that she considered a poem he had sent her “splendid, but what ideals you have to live up to. I like ‘Fear nothing and be faithful unto death’ but I must say I wonder how many of ‘we poor mortals’ could act up to that!” A month later, he sent her Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, which, she wrote, “is an old friend of mine and queerly enough I read it over the other evening also and thought how beautiful and expressive it was.”
Their affinity was chemical, intellectual, total. Together, they might reach beyond their family constraints. With Eleanor, Franklin might limit his mother’s imperious domain; and the announcement of his engagement constituted a first and successful beginning. With Franklin, Eleanor might have security and a home of her own. Her great capacity to give and to love, cut off so abruptly when her father died, was now once again focused on one person, who seemed to love her with equal ardor, and entirely for herself.
From the beginning, however, they sailed on rough seas. Sara Delano Roosevelt was uncertain of her new position, but she intended to retain a central position in the life of her boy, and did everything she could to undermine the young couple’s affection for each other. Franklin distanced himself from any possible conflict between his mother and fiancée. For her part, Eleanor made every effort to accommodate Sara’s needs and wants: She urged Franklin to be patient with his mother, as she intended to be, and to realize “how hard it is for her and we must both try always to make her happy and I do hope someday she will learn to love me.”
While Eleanor did consent to keep their engagement secret for a year, as Sara wished, she nevertheless consulted Cousin Susie, who “felt as I do that your Mother’s feelings ought to be considered first of all.” She also spoke with her grandmother, who asked only if Eleanor were “sure that she was in love,” and encouraged her to feel that everything would follow in due course from that assurance. Eleanor was sure, and pleased with her grandmother’s reaction: She was “very quiet and wise about it and never asked any questions.” However aware, steady, and poised Eleanor had become, Sara’s cold opposition to her very presence recalled childhood feelings. However unconscious they were as memory, they began to erupt in old patterns, old insecurities, old hurts.
Two themes now began to recur in Eleanor’s daily letters to Franklin, letters that were generally between four and nine pages: her growing dependency on his presence in her life, and her increasing commitment to his career. Indeed, her first serious letter to him, written even before he invited her to the Harvard-Yale game, was one of vigorous encouragement regarding his decision to spend his senior year taking courses for a master’s degree: “You know quite well you need not apologize for writing about yourself—I should think history and political economy would be most interesting and much the most useful for you in the future and of course you are going to get an AM….”
She promoted all his activities, and congratulated his every success. “My own dearest Boy, I cannot tell you how glad I am you got on the Class committee for I know how much it means to you and I always want you to succeed. Dearest, if you only knew how happy it makes me to think that your love for me is making you try all the harder to do well and oh! I hope so much that someday I will be more of a help to you….”
But a third theme also began to appear in Eleanor’s letters, a virtual litany of self-deprecation and apology. “Why do you read over my old letters dearest, they really are not worth it—However I don’t suppose I ought to talk as I have kept all yours and probably read them far oftener than you read mine, but you write nice letters and I love them and mine are often very dull I fear….” It was as if to be fully herself was not enough, or too much, and so she felt a need to make herself appear less than she was, and repeatedly to apologize for being precisely herself. There is almost a geometric symmetry to her letters. As she reassures him, bolsters his spirits and self-image, cares for his future, worries over his health, and actually instructs him, she demeans herself, apologizes for her care, her worry, and all of her “woman’s shortcomings.”
One must pause here to consider her conception of her role: to make him, and all those she loved, happy; to secure harmony; to remain patient and calm through all adversity and under any assault. Their roles were different, and predetermined. He was being educated to lead, to command, to take his place at the helm. She wished only to encourage, to guide, to help him take over. If he laughed at her decision to take a course in political economy or sociology, which would be so useful at Rivington Street, she laughingly apologized for taking it. What would he have thought had she joined Jean Reid and Mary Harriman at Barnard? They seemed never to have discussed the possibility, and Eleanor later regretted her inability to defy her relatives who scorned a college education for women.
At nineteen, she had accepted her prescribed role in life: to grow while never allowing herself to appear taller, to be worldly but always supportive, sophisticated but always secondary. She must never, under any circumstances, appear competitive. To play the role well, she swallowed her ambition, and her words. Over time, it sapped her strength, but as she looked forward to her new life, she understood the function that limits serve: “Perhaps it is just as well we haven’t the power of fulfilling our desires for we would do so many things which we ought not to do.”
In considering Eleanor’s understanding of her range of choices during her year of coming out and courting, one might recall Virginia Woolf’s observations regarding the cost to women of a life devoted exclusively to service:
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size…. Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge….
As the days between her secret engagement and her marriage—days whose limits were largely imposed by her future mother-in-law—dragged on, Eleanor Roosevelt: became increasingly irritable and weary. On those occasions when her energies were exhausted and she expressed herself directly, with anger or impatience, she was overcome with remorse. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I need someone to watch over my temper, it makes me so cross with myself to lose it and yet I am forever doing it.” But “the thought of you makes me happy and I only hope that I shall bring you happiness. I don’t seem to succeed in bringing it to most people, however, do I?” When, on occasion, a day passed without a letter from Franklin, she felt “absolutely lost.” “I really am afraid sometimes when I think of what an hour with you means to me.” And when he left for the Caribbean, she missed him each day: “I miss you so much dear, it really frightens me to see how dependent I am growing and how the whole world turns for me around one person….” During those five weeks of separation, she wrote him daily, five-to-ten-page letters, and occasionally cabled:
I think of you all the time dear and try to imagine what you and your mother and Mr. Brown are doing.
I cannot tell you the awful fear which came over me, when no letter came. I suppose women are always fools about the people they love and I know you will laugh at me for worrying so….
I feel lost without you somewhere near. I used to think myself so self-sufficient but I’m learning too quickly how much of my happiness lies in someone else’s hands—Well, honey, when this is over you won’t leave me again will you dear? I know I’m selfish but I cannot help it and if you only knew how much more I would like to ask and do not I think you would forgive me this….
Please give your mother my love and tell her I hope it has been very smooth and that she is having a lovely trip….
Still, some moments away from Franklin were diverting, even entertaining. She enjoyed the exclusive Tuxedo Ball more than she might have imagined. There was a party at Jean Reid’s parents’ Madison Avenue town house (which resembled a Florentine villa and featured a dinner table for eighty) that was so agreeable she stayed until almost four in the morning. She also spent a weekend at the Whitelaw Reids’ eight-hundred-acre estate, Ophir Hall, in Purchase, New York, which was thoroughly delightful; she attended the Bible classes of Barnard-trained theology scholar Janet McCook; and she read with ardor, sometimes three books a weekend, some so wonderful she hoped she and Franklin might reread them together some day—especially, for example, Sesame and Lilies, John Ruskin’s passionate protest against injustice and war, and for the increased participation of women in political affairs.
Most significantly, she saw George Bernard Shaw’s play Candida at least three times. A class-conscious comedy about love and marriage, Candida opened in 1897 and was taken on a “propagandist tour” on the Woman Question with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Candida explored many themes that were later to become significant in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life: love between people of different generations, unrequited love, loyalty in marriage, a woman’s right to her own unfettered spirit, and especially Candida’s decision to give her heart to the one who needs her most, the one who cannot function successfully without her.
Candida, the enchanting wife of a highly regarded and popular Christian Socialist minister, James Morell, who takes her and her generous deeds entirely for granted, becomes interested in her husband’s protégé, a callow youth and inflamed poet of eighteen, Eugene March-banks. He is devastated by his love for the lady, and tries to persuade her that her husband does not appreciate her: Love will be served only if she chooses him:
“We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the first prayer of our hearts; but we dare not utter our longing: we are too shy…. I go about in search of love…. And I see the affection I am longing for given to dogs and cats and pet birds, because they come and ask for it. It must be asked for: it is like a ghost: it cannot speak unless it is first spoken to. All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy! shy! shy! That is the world’s tragedy.”
Though Candida is stirred by the young man’s passion, he has mistaken his own intensity for shared desire. She cannot be taken for granted; she “belongs to herself,” and will choose the weaker, the more dependent, of the two. She will stay with her husband—if only he will acknowledge his need for her, and the real role she plays in his life. “Quite overcome,” Morell embraces his wife: “It’s all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labor of your hands and the love of your heart. You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me.” Exit Marchbanks.
Throughout the winter of 1904, stimulated by romance and anticipation, Eleanor Roosevelt longed for an end to the silence of her engagement, the ordeal of the year of waiting imposed by Sara. Nevertheless, she continued to work with delicacy to win a corner of Sara’s heart.
Eleanor was ready to compromise in many ways. She understood Sara, and wrote Franklin after they returned from the Caribbean: “Don’t let her feel that the last trip with you is over. We three must take them together in the future …and though I know three will never be the same to her still someday I hope that she will really love me and I would be very glad if I thought she was even the least bit reconciled to me now. I will try to see her whenever she comes to town if she lets me know.”
Sara and Eleanor did spend more time together. They lunched, dined, went to the theatre, walked in the park. Even before her outings with Eleanor, Sara made an effort to accept the inevitable with good grace. Shortly before Christmas 1903 she wrote her son: “I am so glad to think of my precious son so perfectly happy. You know that I try not to think of myself. I know that in the future I shall be glad & I shall love Eleanor & adopt her fully when the right time comes. Only have patience, dear Franklin, don’t let this new happiness make you lose interest in work or home….”
Finally, after their return from the Caribbean, Sara seemed resigned: “I am feeling pretty blue. You are gone. The journey is over & I feel as if the time were not likely to come again when I shall take a trip with my dear boy…, but I must try to be unselfish & of course dear child I do rejoice in your happiness & shall not put any stones or straws even in the way of it….”
For her part, alone at Tivoli that spring, Eleanor wrote that she realized every day “more and more how much fuller my life had become …and I lay and wondered this afternoon how life could have seemed worth living before I knew what ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ really meant….”
There were momentous times spent together during the spring and summer of 1904. On 18 June, Helen Astor Roosevelt married Teddy Roosevelt Robinson at Hyde Park. Franklin was an usher, Eleanor a bridesmaid, and the weekend was jolly. On 24 June, Eleanor and Sara attended Franklin’s graduation from Harvard. Eleanor spent a magical August with Franklin and his mother at their summer home on the rocky Canadian shore at Campobello. When she left, Mrs. Hartman Kuhn, a friend and next-door neighbor who appreciated the ardor the young couple did so much to hide, wrote Eleanor: “I wish you could have seen Franklin’s face the night you left Campo. He looked so tired and I felt everybody bored him.”
But the rest of the summer and autumn were tedious. Eleanor spent a good deal of her time going from one great house to another, visiting friends and members of her family, but feeling trapped, and longing for Franklin. From Cousin Susie Parish’s Long Island home she wrote that she had a “feeling that doing one’s duty isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be and I very much wish I wasn’t doing it now! One thing I am glad of every minute I stay here and that is that we won’t ever have a house half so beautiful or half so overwhelming! I’m afraid I wasn’t born to be a high life lady, dear, so you’ll just have to be content with a simple existence, unless you teach me how to change!”
There would be many changes over time for both members of one of America’s unique and abiding partnerships. Though Eleanor declined the life of “a high life lady,” in the grand manorial style, there was to be nothing simple about her future with Franklin.
* When Duncan Harris read ER’s version of her “ordeal,” he wrote her a gentlemanly note of disagreement: “I hasten to tell you that you are far too modest about your appeal to the gilded youth of 1902. Bob Ferguson, Nick Biddle and I were not doing heavy duty at parties, and I remember well that when we asked you to dance it was because we wanted to, and contrary to your story, the spirit of competition was distinctly present.”
* Springwood stables were noted for very fine and fast racing trotters. James Roosevelt bred Gloster, for example, the first trotter to do a mile under 2:20. But Squire James agreed to sell Gloster for the heady sum of $15,000 to California’s Leland Stanford. Before he could race again, Gloster was killed in a railroad accident. His attendant returned Gloster’s tail to FDR years later, and he kept it on his bedroom wall, both in Albany and at the White House.
* Although a conservative Republican, Endicott Peabody remained amazingly loyal to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During the first years of the New Deal, anti-Roosevelt antagonism ran so high among Groton boys that Peabody warned all alumni who cared to participate in the fiftieth homecoming celebrations that they should not do so unless they were “prepared to be polite to the President and Mrs. R.” On another occasion, at New York’s Union Club, Peabody spoke directly of the tensions among his boys and announced: “I believe Franklin Roosevelt to be a gallant gentleman. I am happy to count him as my friend.” Stony silence greeted his words.
* After Eleanor, Cary turned his attentions to Dorothy Payne Whitney, who evidently also rejected him, and he died on 5 May 1905, of what appeared to be suicide. Still in evening clothes, holding a gun in his right hand, he was found dead with a bullet in his right temple. He was visiting his cousin Lord Fairfax (the only American-born British baron), seemed to be having a pleasant time, and left no note. His death remained a puzzling tragedy among the gilded youth of the fin de Stècle.