ANNA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND FRANKLIN DELANO Roosevelt were married on 17 March 1905. It was, coincidentally, the anniversary of Anna Hall Roosevelt’s birth, but the date had not been selected to honor Eleanor’s mother. It had been selected to accommodate President Theodore Roosevelt, who was scheduled to be in New York City for the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Uncle Ted and Aunt Edith had offered Eleanor a White House wedding, but she preferred to be married from Cousin Susie Parish’s home—actually the twin homes of Cousin Susie and her mother, Elizabeth Livingston Ludlow—at 6–8 East 76th Street.
Eleanor looked “beautiful,” “regal,” “magnificent” on her wedding day. As she walked slowly down the aisle on the arm of her Uncle Theodore, people whispered to each other. For the first time, she seemed to resemble her mother, in the grace and dignity of perfect bearing—justifying all those years of practice up and down the River Road. Her thick golden hair was swept high, her blue eyes luminous, her gaze steady, focused on the future, and the present, and the past. In long-sleeved heavy satin, with shirred tulle at the neck, Eleanor wore the same lace veil and long train her mother had worn at her own wedding—Grandmother Hall’s rosepoint Brussels lace, which covered her dress—and “was festooned with natural orange blossoms.” Her mother’s diamond crescent fastened her veil. She also wore a dog collar of pearls and diamond bars given to her by Sara that made her feel “decked out beyond description.” Would her mother have thought her beautiful? Would she have been pleased? How different would it have been had her father led her to this altar adorned with palm, roses, and ferns in front of the fireplace?
There were over two hundred guests, a great union of families, of generations connected in complicated ways. The room seemed filled with ghosts and shadows. Grandmother Hall, in black velvet, sat in front, in her sister’s home, surrounded by Halls and Roosevelts, Livingstons and Ludlows, her remaining sons and daughters. Close beside her sat Sara Delano Roosevelt, in white silk covered with her own mother’s black lace. Nearby sat Aunt Bye and her husband, Admiral Will Cowles. Aunt Bye had introduced Sara to Squire James. He had courted the one, married the other, named Bye’s brother Elliott the godfather of his son. And now, joined in holy matrimony, the circle was unbroken.
Aunt Pussie, married the year before in the same room, had given Eleanor a note of advice (drink strong tea shortly before the wedding march, to heighten your color and make you glow; no milk or sugar) and three kisses: “for Father & Mother & Ellie.” Aunt Maude gave her a note of great loving affection: Let us always be as sisters. And as she was dressing, a telegram arrived from Marie Souvestre: “BONHEUR!” Eleanor knew that cancer was about to claim her great friend and teacher; she died two days later.
Now, in the attached brownstones of her godmother and great-aunt, surrounded by white and lavender lilacs, and large lilies in great profusion, standing in a bower of roses and palm, carrying a bouquet of her very favorite lilies of the valley, Eleanor was flushed with excitement. Nothing should have been able to mar the happiness of that day; but the day was marred.
It had seemed to take so long to get to this room. On 11 October 1904, Franklin had given Eleanor a secret gift for her twentieth birthday. With consideration for what might truly please her, “after much inspection and deliberation” at Tiffany’s, he had chosen her engagement ring. It was just right: “You could not have found a ring I would have liked better,” she wrote. “I love it so I know I shall find it hard to keep from wearing it!” After almost a year of hiding and dissembling, there were still weeks of silence to endure. At least they were now geographically closer. Franklin had entered Columbia Law School, and lived with his mother in a newly rented house at 200 Madison Avenue.
Finally, on 1 December, their engagement was officially announced. New York’s society sheets featured the engagement and celebrated Eleanor. According to Town Topics, Eleanor Roosevelt had “more claim to good looks than any of the Roosevelt cousins….” She was “attractive …unusually tall and fair,” with “a charming grace of manner that has made her a favorite since her debut.”
Now Eleanor was free to write her closest relatives the truth. Aunt Bye replied: “My own darling soft-eyed child, your letter has given me great joy. I love Franklin as you know on his own personal account because he is so attractive & also because I believe his character is like his Father’s whom Uncle Will & I always feel was the most absolutely honorable upright gentleman (the last in the highest sense) that we ever knew.” Clearly, for Aunt Bye, Franklin was a Roosevelt—and not a Delano at all.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote Franklin a letter of congratulations:
We are greatly rejoiced over the good news. I am as fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter, and I like you, and trust you, and believe in you. No other success in life—not the Presidency or anything else—begins to compare with the joy and happiness that come in and from the love of the true man and the true woman…. You and Eleanor are true and brave, and I believe you love each other unselfishly…. May all good fortune attend you both, ever.
Although TR loved his niece, and felt responsible for her well-being, Aunt Edith had never cast any noticeable warmth in Eleanor’s direction. She invited Eleanor to White House festivities, including all the most intimate family parties that attended TR’s inauguration on 4 March, but she retained a cold edge, a frosty formality, that rendered Eleanor distinctly uncomfortable in her presence. Even when specifically invited to stay at the White House, Eleanor preferred to stay at Aunt Bye’s. Nevertheless, Aunt Edith wrote Eleanor:
Your Uncle and I have thought and talked so much of your wedding and he feels that on that day he stands in your father’s place and would like to have your marriage under his roof and make all the arrangements for it…. Of course dear Eleanor your Uncle and I will understand if you prefer to have your wedding in New York as you have planned, but we wish you to know how very glad we shall be to do for you as we should for Alice….
Eleanor did not even consider a change in plans. Her grandmother sent out the invitations; Cousin Susie made all the preparations, and together they shopped for her trousseau. Except for Isabella Selmes and Helen Cutting, Eleanor’s six bridesmaids were chosen from the extended family circle: Corinne Robinson, Ellen Delano, Muriel Delano Robbins, and Alice Roosevelt. Alice, always wild and beyond control, was now frequently in the headlines for her outrageous behavior. Her father’s remote attitude toward his firstborn child, his seeming lack of concern as to her whereabouts for months at a time, his willingness to have her live elsewhere as often as possible, caused Alice to resent her cousin out of all proportion to TR’s alleged favoritism for Eleanor. Over time, Alice’s resentment would surface in specifically nasty ways. But on this occasion, any jealousy she may have felt because her father had offered the first White House wedding to her cousin, who had actually beaten her to the altar, was veiled by a letter of unbridled gratitude: “You angel, to ask me to be your bridesmaid. I should love to above anything…. Really you are a saint to ask me….”
By this time, Eleanor’s own feelings toward her cousin had become frayed. She had heard many of the cruel things Alice had said about her (the boring, dowdy, somber thing); and about Franklin (Alice had called him a prissy, fluttering boy who might be “invited to the dance, but not the dinner”). And Eleanor in turn was critical of Alice’s behavior. Once she spotted Alice in New York, “looking well but crazier than ever. I saw her this morning,” she wrote Franklin, “in Bobbie Goelet’s auto, quite alone with three other men! I wonder how you would like my tearing round like that!…”
Eleanor’s feelings for her other bridesmaids were far more harmonious, as were theirs for her. Her good friend Isabella Selmes seemed entirely to identify with Eleanor. As she helped her with the thank-you notes for the 340 presents that arrived, she wrote, “Franklin and I are so pleased with your gift,” etc., and signed her own name.
Franklin had as his ushers Nicholas Biddle, Owen Winston, Lyman Delano, Charles Bradley, Thomas Beal, Warren Robbins, and Lathrop Brown, who (because Rosy was ill in Florida) served as his best man. All wore tie pins, which FDR had designed, with three feathers in diamonds. Indeed, the Roosevelt family insignia was much in evidence. The bridesmaids, in white silk, with sleeves embroidered with silver roses, wore white “demi-veils of tulle fastened with three white feathers tipped with silver” in their hair. In addition, Franklin had given Eleanor a gold watch-pin, which he had designed with her initials, ER, in diamonds attached to a three-feathered pin. Eleanor was moved by Franklin’s thoughtful design, and she wore it throughout her life. Franklin was as serious about the family insignia (three feathers above a cluster of roses) as his mother was about the family tree. There were roses in bookplates and crested rings. He later incorporated the family symbol into the White House china.
Theodore Roosevelt arrived at three-thirty to “give the bride away.” He had “scuttled” into New York, he wrote his son, to review the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, make two speeches, and, in between, perform his familial duty. The Saint Patrick’s Day parade continued up the avenue as the president detoured to his niece’s wedding; it blocked both avenues (Fifth and Madison) leading to the Parish-Ludlow entrances. There was so much police protection for the president, and so much fanfare and hoopla as he arrived, that many wedding guests were detained. To Eleanor’s dismay, some “irate guests could not get into the house until after the ceremony was over!”
The ceremony itself was practically drowned out by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who passed below the windows singing “The Wearing of the Green” as the vows were exchanged. Perhaps because he was afraid he might not be heard, when the Reverend Endicott Peabody asked, “Who giveth this woman in marriage?,” TR declaimed in what seemed to some his most inappropriate “loud emphatic tones, I do!” Then, after Eleanor and Franklin exchanged vows and rings and kissed each other, the president, reaching up to kiss the bride, exclaimed: “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.”
On that note, according to Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, her uncle spun about and headed directly into the library for the refreshments, leaving the young couple standing alone at the altar waiting “to receive congratulations from the various members of our families and our friends.” But “the great majority” had followed Uncle Theodore. Decades later, Eleanor recalled that “Those closest to us did take time to wish us well.” But most of “the guests were far more interested in the thought of being able to see and listen to the President—and in a very short time” the newly married couple “were standing alone!” Even at the cake-cutting they were left all but unattended.
Eleanor Roosevelt never criticized her uncle. When writing about the one day that might have been, above all, her day, she recalled the facts with wry detachment—leaving the rest of us to imagine the pain beneath the words. TR had upstaged the putative stars and stolen the show’s entire audience of Roosevelts, Halls, Delanos, Ludlows, Vanderbilts, Belmonts, Sloans, Winthrops, Van Rensselaers, Mortimers, and Burdens. He held forth for the next hour and half with his “stories which were always amusing. I do not remember being particularly surprised by this, and I cannot remember that even Franklin seemed to mind. We simply followed the crowd and listened with the rest” until “the lion of the afternoon had left!” As his daughter Alice understood: “Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”
Eleanor Roosevelt at twenty had a very specific understanding of the whims and vagaries of life. In her experience, death always flew after the heels of life; sadness was frequently trapped in the heart of joy. The choreography of the entire ceremony served well as metaphor for the early years of Eleanor’s marriage—which were for her primarily years of struggle to establish a place for herself.
During the early years of her marriage Eleanor Roosevelt faded into the demands of a home life that was orchestrated by her mother-in-law, and that she could not claim as her own. For the first time since her own mother had died, she was faced with a situation in which she simply could not please the woman of the house. Where Grandmother Hall and Marie Souvestre had both appreciated Eleanor’s special gifts, the rare nature of her heart, and the “purity of her soul,” Sara Delano Roosevelt was more like Anna: careless of Eleanor’s presence, oblivious to her pain, focused elsewhere—on her son, and her own need for his devotion. She was not crude or cruel, merely distant, and implacable. Sara Delano Roosevelt knew best; the young couple could not possibly do for themselves what she could do for them. They were so inexperienced; they needed her money, her help, her presence, her advice—about everything, and at all times. Sara’s imperious, cold manner plunged Eleanor back into the hurt and sullenness she seemed for several years to have left behind her.
Eleanor Roosevelt never used the word “depression”; but during these years she never missed an opportunity to mock her own ignorance, her clumsiness, her many and various inadequacies as a young wife. She never blamed Franklin, or her mother-in-law, or the strange arrangements they chose—which always involved Sara’s preferences, Sara’s generosity, Sara’s control.
Their immediate honeymoon was a week in Hyde Park, which Sara allowed them to have alone, supervised only by Elspeth McEachern (“Elespie”), the Scottish “caretaker” who had presided over Spring-wood and attended to the needs of its mistresses since the days of Rebecca Howland. She had lighted all the candles in the windows, and the house was aglow as Eleanor and Franklin’s carriage drove up the long tree-framed entrance. She was at the open door to greet the young couple when they arrived. What Eleanor may have thought of the dour critic, so important to Franklin and his mother, she never said. But, she noted, Elespie “looked me over critically and appraisingly, wondering if I could come up to her expectations as the wife of ‘her boy.’”
The next day, at her sister Kassie’s in Tuxedo Park, Sara wrote: “My precious Franklin & Eleanor.” “It is a delight to write to you together & to think of you happy at dear Hyde Park, just where my great happiness began. You have a real spring day and I can just see the sun …and feel how you two are resting and reveling in your quiet time together.”
Whatever she really thought of the wedding, she wrote the newlyweds with pride:* “Everyone says it was the most perfect wedding so simple and yet so elegant and so refined…. Eleanor dear you were a perfect bride and I was very proud of both my dear children.” Still, when she wrote My Boy Franklin, a memoir of her son, she relished the memory that he was not “so deeply engrossed” in his bride to have heard his cue. Franklin had been reminiscing about Groton with Dr. Peabody and Lathrop Brown, and they all evidently failed to hear the wedding march. They had to scurry to meet Eleanor at the altar after the procession was actually under way.
After their honeymoon, Eleanor and Franklin returned to New York City, where Franklin’s primary task was to pass his law-school courses at Columbia (he failed two), and Eleanor’s primary task was to make life comfortable for her new husband, his mother (who accompanied them frequently), and her brother, Hall, who immediately moved in with them for Easter vacation and made many subsequent visits from Groton. He “seemed to fill the entire apartment,” which was a very modest one in the old Hotel Webster.
As soon as Columbia’s semester ended, they embarked on a three-month European honeymoon. The trip over was calm, and Eleanor’s fear of the sea abated. She was not sick once. Relieved, Franklin reported to his mother: “Eleanor has been a wonderful sailor and hasn’t missed a single meal or lost any either.” Unlike her previous ocean voyages with aunts who insisted that the only comfortable place to be was in one’s cabin, under the covers, Eleanor thoroughly enjoyed this crossing. She felt loved, and protected: “Franklin has been a wonderful maid & I’ve never been so well looked after.” They walked on deck; they danced; they had interesting talks with interesting people; they went with the captain on a tour of the ship, in the course of which Eleanor saw—and was horrified by—the conditions the steerage passengers had to endure; and they played endless games of cards—mostly piquet, which Franklin always won, “all due to skill!” he claimed, though she suspected he cheated, and was willing only to credit him with luck.
For all his outward confidence, Franklin had nightmares and began to sleepwalk during his honeymoon. On the steamer, he walked out of the cabin. “He was very docile, however, when asleep,” Eleanor noted, and simply returned to bed at her suggestion. On another occasion, she awakened to “wild shrieks” as he battled against an imaginary “revolving beam.” She assured him there was no beam. Another night, he stood at the foot of the bed, cranking away at the air as fast as possible, muttering: “The damn thing won’t start.” She said: “Franklin, if you get into the car I’ll help you to start it.” He returned to bed and held an imaginary steering wheel while she pretended to do the cranking, until he went back to sleep. There were other moments of somnambulism, outbursts of sleep-time distress, anxiety, anguish. There were also daytime moments when Eleanor noticed a pattern of casual flirtation and occasional overindulgence that disturbed her. But on the whole, their three-month honeymoon was tranquil and pleasurable.
In Europe, for “the first time we did things that I had always longed to do.” They spent weeks in Britain, France, Italy, and Germany. They visited relatives and friends of relatives. They saw Eleanor’s Great-Aunt Annie Bulloch in Liverpool, who wept at the sight of her newlywed niece and spoke only with kindness of her beloved Ellie-Boy. They spent a week in London, which was Franklin’s favorite city, and which Eleanor grew to enjoy as never before. They shopped and shopped, for clothes, books, and prints. They were identified with Uncle Ted and given the royal suite at Brown’s Hotel, which they could neither afford nor leave graciously. The sitting room was so large, Eleanor complained, “I could not find anything that I put down.” They lunched at the embassy with the Whitelaw Reids, and Eleanor was seated beside the ambassador. Alone, Eleanor went out to Allenswood to visit, but it was desolate without Marie Souvestre.
When they crossed the Channel Eleanor became “really excited.” In Paris they “dined in strange places,” always ordering the spécialtiés de la maison, and had a festive time. Again they shopped for clothes, books, and prints, and, Franklin noted, “ordered thousands of dollars worth of linen.” However exaggerated his claim, their primary joy for weeks seemed making rather lavish purchases—including “such lovely furs,” which Franklin insisted she have: “I don’t think he ought to give them to me but they are wonderful and of course I am delighted with them.”
For Eleanor, Italy was magical. Rome, Florence, and Venice recalled her happiest memories—memories of good times with her father, of splendid days with Marie Souvestre. Nothing, she believed, “could be quite so lovely as Venice” in July. They walked in leisure all day; spent endless idle hours feeding the pigeons on the Piazza San Marco, “as I remembered doing as a little girl”; and spent many of the warm nights on the canals with “a delightful gondolier who looked like a benevolent bandit” and sang much as she remembered her father had sung. Eleanor had a chance to practice her excellent Italian, and evidently her conversation so charmed the gondolier that he gave her a volume of sixteenth-century poetry by Torquato Tasso, that she might always remember him.
The spell of Venice was intensified by the presence of Charles Stuart Forbes, Franklin’s cousin, a Venetian resident and painter who had given them one of his paintings as a wedding present. He loved the city and its people; he knew everybody and took the young couple everywhere. They ate sumptuously where few tourists knew to go, followed canals right into the heart of luxurious homes and secret gardens, visited artists and art galleries, churches, museums, and palaces. They also toured the island of Murano and ordered Venetian glasses adorned with the Roosevelt crest, and glass dolphins for table decorations. In Venice, Eleanor bought yards of very old and “very beautiful red damask,” which she always cherished; some of it was made into curtains, some used for an evening coat. There was not only beauty, but harmony and friendship associated with each day spent in Venice.
From Venice, the Roosevelts traveled north to the Dolomites. “It was a beautiful trip to Cortina,” where they remained for several days. In the foothills of those lovely mountains, Eleanor experienced her first moment of pain and fierce resentment as a wife. For no apparent reason, Eleanor believed that the rather modest four-hour hike up the Faloria was beyond her endurance. The woman who would later climb thousands of feet up the High Sierras, leaving her companions exhausted in their efforts to match her pace, evidently wanted to be encouraged by her young husband. But he never did encourage her, not at climbing, golf, sailing, or even tennis—which he played so poorly he was known as “Miss Nancy” on the courts. Pausing neither to give her any good reasons to accompany him nor to persuade her of the ease of the walk, he took off accompanied by the somewhat older and very stylish Kitty Gandy—a hard-smoking New York milliner who had been flirting with him since their arrival in Cortina. After dinner, as they all played cards, she puffed his best cigarettes and promised him a fine autumn hat with a plume. While they climbed, Eleanor fretted. After waiting several hours, she set out on the trail with two sisters (the Van Bibbers), but failed to find Franklin, who did not return with the “charming lady,” until after dark. Subsequently, Kitty Gandy and Eleanor Roosevelt became “very good friends”; but that day she felt abandoned, and betrayed. Although “I never said a word I was jealous beyond description.”
She did not feel better until they drove toward Germany, where they visited Augsburg and Ulm, and Franklin impulsively stopped to pick a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers for his wife: the wild jasmine were “sweeter than anything I ever had.” They drove through the Alps and on to Saint-Moritz, to visit the Mortimers. Switzerland’s prices appalled them, and they were pleased to return to the relatively inexpensive splendors of Paris.
Eleanor and Franklin stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Paris, but Sara’s sister, Aunt “Doe” (Deborah Perry Delano Forbes, also called Aunt Dora), opened her apartment “which became the most hospitable home to us.” Aunt Dora entertained them lavishly. Eleanor was vastly impressed by Franklin’s aunt, with whom she spent many days touring museums and shops. They also played cards during several evenings when Franklin cavorted with an array of visiting Harvard friends and cousins and went “on a prolonged bat.”
One evening FDR and his friends thought it would be naughty and amusing to take Eleanor and Aunt Dora to “an extremely ‘French play.’” Eleanor praised Aunt Dora’s reaction to the risqué: She “had lived many years in Paris and did not give them the satisfaction of turning a hair!” Although ER later noted in her memoirs that the evening “strained” her “Anglo-Saxon sense of humor,” at the time she wrote Sara: “We all went to the Français to see ‘Le Depit Amoureux’ and ‘Andromaque,’ both well given and the latter quite marvellous. There is really nothing like an old classic and the French language to bring one to the highest pitch of excitement, is there?”
Before they sailed home, they returned to Britain, where Eleanor felt particularly conscious of the reality of Marie Souvestre’s passing. She spent time with Marjorie Bennett, her great Allenswood friend, and became aware during this trip that she had not had time to mourn her teacher’s death. It “had been a great sorrow to me,” coming as it did immediately after her wedding, when “life was so full I had little time for repining.” But her trip to so many places they had been to before “brought home the loss, and made me long for her more than once.”
In Scotland, Eleanor and Franklin visited with her friends the Fergusons, who had been connected in so many complicated ways to so many Roosevelts. Their family seat at Raith, near Kirkcaldy, north of the Firth of Forth, was a center of Liberal Party politics and great activity, and their country seat at Novar had been Auntie Bye’s second home whenever she was nearby. In the beginning, Robert H. Munro Ferguson, fourteen years younger than Bye, had been her particular friend; more recently, his charming, affectionate presence had enabled Eleanor to endure the agony of her coming-out year with far more happiness and many more interests than would otherwise have been possible. Now, while on her honeymoon, Eleanor received a surprising telegram about Bob Ferguson and her dear friend Isabella Selmes from Isabella’s mother: They had suddenly, and with little notice, married, and were also in Scotland. He was eighteen years older than Isabella, and although it seemed to Eleanor “an incongruous marriage,” it was born of the deepest love. ER visited with them and wrote Sara that they were unimaginably “sweet …together.” Bob Ferguson had “become demonstrative if you can believe it and they play together like two children.”
For a time, Eleanor and Franklin stayed with the senior Fergusons at Novar, and Eleanor spent many hours with Emma Munro Ferguson, the family matriarch, and Bob’s sister Edith Ferguson, who was a great friend of Aunt Bye’s. Both women were as interested as the Ferguson men in all things political, and Eleanor realized in their company that she had allowed herself to remain unacceptably ignorant. She resolved to change her own attitude toward politics. But when they invited her to give a talk to open the local fair, she at first felt undone, “quite certain that I could never utter a word aloud in a public place.” By contrast, the women of the Novar were routinely expected to speak in public, and for years they served for Eleanor as models of how to be in society, and in any company.
From Novar, Eleanor and Franklin went to Raith—a “beautiful place, with wonderful woods and rhododendrons,” and extraordinary plantings everywhere—to spend a week with the eldest brother and head of the clan, Sir Ronald (“The Novar”) Ferguson and his wife, Lady Helen. Eleanor felt entirely comfortable until one afternoon at tea when Lady Helen “suddenly asked me a devastating question.” It was an ordinary question, really, about the differences between national, state, and local government in the United States. But ER was uninformed. She knew vaguely that Uncle Theodore had been involved with New York City offices, had been governor, and was now president, but she had never concerned herself with government: “My heart sank, and I wished that the ground would open up and swallow me.” She was spared by Franklin’s reappearance. His answer “was adequate,” and Eleanor vowed anew that she would study her own government, and never be unprepared or seem ignorant again. She left the Fergusons determined to change, to learn more, and to do more.
On her return, however, her resolve was initially derailed by the daily necessities of matronly existence. She was, to begin with, pregnant. The voyage home had been an agony of seasickness, in no way made easier when she realized that its true cause was morning-sickness. Nor did her spirits lift when she realized, upon landing, that in their absence Sara Delano Roosevelt had not only rented a house for them, as they had agreed, three blocks from her own, at 125 East 36th Street, but had also furnished it herself and engaged their servants. There was nothing for Eleanor to do. Everything was arranged and in order. And until the last finishing touches were applied, they were to live with her mother-in-law, in New York and at Hyde Park.
Eleanor Roosevelt had wanted, above all, a home and a family of her own. Her husband, however, considered Hyde Park his family home and was content there. But it belonged to Sara, and she presided over the dining-room table. It was her table, at either end of which she and Franklin sat. Eleanor, and later the children, sat along the sides. There were no spaces at Hyde Park dedicated to making Eleanor feel welcome, and she had no study. There was a particularly small and cozy reading room she might have liked, but it was Sara’s “snuggery.” There were two comfortable wing-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace, FDR’s and SDR’s. No one thought to buy a third. Eleanor generally sat on the floor, occasionally on the sofa, or just anywhere. At Hyde Park the family geography was rigidly determined. All her life an outsider in the homes of others, Eleanor was once again on the periphery, and could not imagine claiming a place at the family hearth. Though she sought Sara’s advice on “almost every subject,” she never asked her “for anything that I thought would not meet with her approval.”
Eleanor Roosevelt’s initial efforts to please her mother-in-law were monumental. Her honeymoon letters to Sara had been full of love and longing. On 7 June 1905, the first day out aboard the RMS Oceanic, she wrote: “Dearest Mama, I am all unpacked and settled and F is now getting his things in order…. Thank you so much dear for everything you did for us. You are always just the sweetest, dearest Mama to your children and I shall look forward to our next long evening together, when I shall want to be kissed all the time!”
Her daily letters to Sara contained full reports concerning parties and social events, servants and the problems of servants, the many tedious details of dining and travel. She asked Sara to send all the news and family gossip, and she longed for Sara’s advice and wisdom. Eleanor wanted Sara’s approval and love so much that she temporarily abandoned her liberal inclinations and parroted Sara’s narrow views, her rigid ethnic stereotypes, her likes and dislikes.
To appreciate the young wife Eleanor, who tried so hard to fit into a family run by a powerful matriarch for the exclusive benefit of her only son, one has to keep in mind Eleanor’s childhood. She had no experience of belonging, no idea what a mature, loving mother-daughter relationship might look like, unless one counts what she had learned from Marie Souvestre—her tutor, her mentor, her friend. But that relationship occurred outside the confines of the family and was informed by values that seemed irrelevant to the present situation—freedom, independence, equality. Eleanor had no idea how to achieve what she wanted in her relationship with Sara, nor any sense that the cost of achieving it would be higher than any she ought to pay. And so, for over a decade, she submerged and distorted her own needs and convictions. Comparing the first years of her marriage with her school years at Allenswood, she noted that in marriage she had allowed herself to become entirely dependent and servile, whereas with Marie Souvestre, she had risen to the challenge of the great responsibilities thrust upon her. When they traveled, she did the “packing and unpacking,” looked up the train schedules, mapped the route, made all the arrangements. She was an entirely competent sixteen-year-old. But she lost her “self-confidence and ability to look after myself in the early days of my marriage.” There were “no tickets to buy, no plans to make.” Instead, there was always someone “to decide everything for me.” At first it seemed a “pleasant contrast to my former life, and I slipped into it with the greatest of ease.” Within months, Eleanor Roosevelt fit very well “into the pattern of a fairly conventional, quiet, young society matron.”
Initially she believed that she could establish a relationship with her mother-in-law similar to the one she had had with her beloved friend and teacher. Both were strong and elegant women, resourceful, independent, vigorously opinionated. But Marie Souvestre encouraged Eleanor Roosevelt to grow according to her own inner vision, to be critical about the world—its shibboleths and rigidities. Sara Delano Roosevelt liked the world the way it was. She believed it had been created by her and her class, for her and her class. She wanted those around her to think precisely as she did, to share her concerns and her priorities. Indeed, she believed that those around her did believe as she did. To be loved freely by Sara meant to become fully like Sara. To be loved by Marie Souvestre had meant to display an independent spirit with individual flair, and a playful imagination. Marie Souvestre cared mostly for young people with intelligence and daring, who were willing to challenge her authority and to become skeptical of all authority. Sara Delano Roosevelt insisted that her convictions were correct, and they would do for the entire family. Since Sara now represented her only chance for maternal love and affection, Eleanor capitulated to her.
Capitulation meant imitation. For over a decade, Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters to her mother-in-law reflected precisely her mother-in-law’s views. During the first years of her marriage, Eleanor moved away from Souvestre’s example and buried herself in the details of childrearing, home-making, seasonal travel, and lavish entertainment. Her letters are dominated by purchases, servant problems, parties, and children. They are also full of observations intended to please Sara, who loathed politics and political people, especially political women. One is continually surprised to read sentences in this correspondence of flip, class-bound arrogance and egregious racism.
Eleanor’s growing suspicion that nothing she could do or write or say would ever fully satisfy Sara Delano Roosevelt was correct. Nevertheless, she continued to make every effort to be a pleasing daughter-in-law, a dutiful wife and mother. Of this time she wrote: “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted.”
Although the needs and wants of young children might have made a satisfying claim on her time and energy, her mother-in-law ran the Roosevelt household, managed the staff, and in every significant way dominated the only sphere Eleanor then occupied. It seemed never to have occurred to Franklin to live for any time on the combined trust income he and Eleanor then received. Together, their annual earnings (Eleanor’s was more than $7,500 and Franklin’s was $5,000) would have insured a comfortable, although different, standard of living away from Sara’s authority. ER often referred to her unsuccessful effort to persuade Franklin of this option, which would have allowed their marriage to develop its own rhythms and chemistry. Denied that opportunity, Eleanor grew passive and silent. While she continued to encourage Franklin to study hard and excel in law school, she submerged her abilities and repressed her feelings. Things began to taste bitter; plants began to wilt; her dutiful daily walks through the park with Mama failed to renew her spirit. Trapped in a situation that she could neither move out of nor grow within, she began to lose her sense of purpose. As fewer and fewer responsibilities were left in her hands, her usual delight in service and helpfulness was momentarily forgotten. Even the tasks of motherhood were performed by others, and pregnancy kept her literally confined.
Bound by custom and convention, Eleanor was not to be seen in public while pregnant. As a result, on 17 February 1906, Franklin attended Alice Roosevelt’s White House wedding with his mother, leaving Eleanor behind though she was only in her sixth month. The festivities were elaborate, but Alice chose to have no bridesmaids. Like Eleanor, she wore white satin trimmed with point lace that had been worn by her deceased mother, Alice Lee, and grandmother. When the bishop of Washington asked, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?,” TR placed his daughter’s hand into that of the congressman from Cincinnati, Nicholas Longworth, and uncharacteristically said not one audible word. The press reported that throughout the ceremony the president looked glum and his wife (in brown brocade which “accentuated her tired pallor”) looked impassive, fulfilling her reputation as a storybook Mean Stepmother. To Alice’s spontaneous outburst of gratitude for her beautiful wedding, Edith Carow Roosevelt replied: “I want you to know that I’m glad to see you go. You’ve never been anything but trouble.”
Alice’s wedding, like Eleanor’s, was a metaphor for her marriage. In Alice’s show, she was the star and sole performer. Eleanor was often in the shadows, on a very crowded stage.
All preparations for Eleanor’s first child, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, born on 3 May 1906, were made by Sara. Although she had entirely controlled Franklin’s infancy, and fired any servants who challenged her dominion, it never occurred to her to encourage Eleanor to follow her example. On the contrary, she encouraged her daughter-in-law’s sense of inadequacy, and usurped her role. Eleanor blamed herself: “I had never had any interest in dolls or in little children, and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” The fact is, nobody cared to teach her, and her every effort was sabotaged.
Except for a trained nurse, Blanche Spring, who attended her children during infancy and became personally close to and supportive of Eleanor, most of the nursery staff tyrannized her. Blanche Spring had suggested that ER raise her children by herself, but her mother-in-law and Cousin Susie so vigorously opposed the idea, she hardly considered it.*
Trapped by the dictates of her class and culture, Eleanor allowed a series of strict, occasionally cruel British martinets to dominate the nursery. In addition, she had some strange ideas about how to be a modern mother. Fanatical about fresh air, she left Anna Eleanor outside a window in a wire box every morning for her nap. But she placed the box on the dark and cold side of the house, and little Anna screamed so long and loud, the neighbors were aghast. They threatened to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to report that Eleanor Roosevelt treated her child “inhumanly.” ER was shocked: She had read that “you should not pick up a baby when it cried,” and she had not thought much about warmth and sun.
Later, ER tied little Anna’s hands above her head to the bedposts so that she could not masturbate. Later still, one of her sons found his thumbs enmeshed in wire to discourage his thumb-sucking habit. Generally, she left the children to the exclusive care of whichever tyrant she had hired, until the children’s complaints were substantiated. One particularly sadistic nanny was promptly fired when liquor bottles were found in her closet.
The destructiveness of the household dynamic was compounded by Franklin’s refusal to participate in domestic matters. As primary provider, Sara Delano Roosevelt went to great material lengths to seduce and captivate her grandchildren. So eager to be regarded as the essential parent, she repeatedly asserted: “I was your real mother, Eleanor merely bore you.”
Increasingly afloat in a sea upon which she never got to chart the course, never fully understood the tides, and could not quite count on her mate for support in a storm, Eleanor found the early years of her marriage to be the loneliest of her adult life.
Denied control and authority, Eleanor became ever more depressed and withdrawn. Her childhood willingness to go to great lengths to avoid a scolding “developed now into a dislike for any kind of discussion.” She offered few opinions, never disagreed, rarely indicated her true feelings about anything. But she was often miserable. Whenever she was hurt, disappointed, or angry, she shut up “like a clam,” became long-suffering, “humble and meek,” felt “like a martyr,” and acted like one. Although she may have deluded herself into thinking that she suffered in silence, her anguish was hardly a secret. Everyone around her during those years felt the chill of what she called her “Griselda” moods.*
Although she spent much of her time with Isabella Selmes Ferguson and her former Roser classmates, who were also in the process of becoming society’s perfect matrons, she did not feel she could confide in them. In 1933, looking back on this period, ER wrote: “I never talked to anyone. That was why it all ate into my soul…. In other words, I was a morbid idiot for many years! Only in the last ten years or so have I made friends to whom I have talked.”
Her husband in particular had no interest in intimate talk. He turned aside serious household problems with a shrug, or with a kind of careless gaiety that Eleanor could not share. Franklin wanted no part of the growing tensions between his wife and his mother. Their disagreements, he firmly maintained, were their business. ER later understood FDR’s lifelong ability to ignore anything difficult or painful. She even came to marvel at his patience while he waited for all unpleasantness to wither with neglect. But these skills, when applied to her and to his home during their first years together, made her feel betrayed, meanly abandoned.
Eleanor did try to glean moments of pleasure out of each day. She loved the theatre; enjoyed concerts and classes; and looked forward to the many lectures, social obligations, family gatherings, holidays, and other rituals around which her days were carefully planned. She even had good times with Sara. She lunched with Sara; they shopped and took classes together; they dined together and played cards. There were happy times with Franklin too. She and Franklin moved with the seasons from the city to Hyde Park to Campobello.
But to glean is not to reap. Both Eleanor’s husband and her mother-in-law discouraged her from enjoying some of the most ordinary pleasures. She had always liked to ride horses: “as a girl I had ridden all the time.” She had her favorite saddle and harness sent down from Tivoli to Hyde Park. But only one horse remained in the Springwood stable, Bobby. And FDR had trained him to trot when he reached one crossroad, canter when he got to a particular post, and then gallop until he reached the last marker. Bobby followed his ritual, no matter who rode him or what alternative orders he received. Unable to ride at her own pace, or ever to ride with Franklin, ER wanted to buy another horse. But Sara refused: It was a waste of money to keep two horses for such infrequent use. Since FDR did not support his wife’s request, she temporarily gave up riding altogether.
During the summer of 1908, with their infant son, James, recovering from pneumonia, they decided to rent a house at Sea Bright, New Jersey, on the boardwalk. Born in the early morning hours of 23 December 1907, James had required medical care. Eleanor spent much of that summer alone with her two children and three servants in a state of high anxiety. She had never had neighbors close by before, and they were noisy. The boardwalk was dangerous and, one day, Anna toppled her brother’s baby carriage onto the sand. Weekends, when houseguests and Franklin and Hall arrived, Eleanor was more relaxed, and the endless hours on the beach were wonderful for the children. But she was generally distraught. She even gave up driving before she began. One weekend Franklin bought a little Ford car, and Hall and his friend Julia Newbold encouraged Eleanor to drive. After a happy few moments at the wheel, she turned into the driveway and ran into a post, causing minor damage. Instead of encouraging her to get back behind the wheel immediately, Franklin allowed her to feel guilty beyond endurance, and she refused to learn to drive for years. Toward the end of August, Franklin and Hall left for a hunting trip to Newfoundland, and she was left alone with her two children: “I played no games, I could not swim, I was feeling miserable.”
The next summer, because Franklin liked the game, Eleanor secretly took lessons in golf. She practiced every day for weeks. Then, one day, they went out together. After several minutes, Franklin smugly suggested she just not bother. “My old sensitiveness about my inability to play games made me give it up then and there! I never again attempted anything but walking with my husband for many years to come.” Instead, she did what a proper matron was supposed to do. She took classes to keep up her French, Italian, German. She knitted and embroidered, walked and wove fantasies.
Her one consolation during this period was the pleasure she found on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, the first real home of her own. Her romance with its rugged rocky shores, its intense mists and chill grey days, had much to do with the fact that on Campobello she and Franklin lived in a cottage that was well separated from Sara’s by plantings and privets.
Sara’s neighbor Mrs. Hartman Kuhn, who had met Eleanor during her first trip to the island in August of 1904, had been one of the few to notice the love that radiated between Franklin and his then secret fiancée, and had entertained warm feelings for them ever since. In her will she gave Sara first refusal on the purchase of her home for the minimal price of $5,000, if she would buy it for her children, which Sara did upon Mrs. Kuhn’s death in 1908. Eleanor never tired of this place. She never apologized to guests for the endless fogs; they comforted her. She never tired of the howling winds; they made her feel serene. And when the sun shone, Campobello’s lush and vivid green-and-blue splendor was unrivaled. Here she enjoyed long, leisurely evenings reading aloud beside the fire—books of her own choosing, in a chair of her own choosing. Though Mrs. Kuhn had left all the furniture, linen, crystal, and silver, ER spent weeks rearranging the furniture, and used only what pleased her. She was mistress of this home; she invited her own guests, employed her own servants, and imposed her own order on the day.
The situation was vastly different in the Siamese-twin town houses the Roosevelts also moved into in 1908: 47–49 East 65th Street, designed by Charles A. Platt under Sara Delano Roosevelt’s direction. On each floor, sliding doors gave Sara full reign of both houses. On the parlor floor, the dining rooms and drawing rooms could be opened onto each other to create a spacious party environment. On the bedroom floor, the children’s floor, and the servants’ floor, there were connecting passageways. The house was designed so that Sara could at any time intrude herself on every level into her children’s lives. One never knew, ER wrote, “when she would appear, day or night.”
Shortly after they moved into the new six-story town house, Eleanor sat in front of her dressing table, looked into the mirror, and wept. She cried and cried, until Franklin appeared to find out what was delaying her for dinner. “I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.” Franklin made no effort to console his wife or comprehend her pain. He announced that he thought her “quite mad,” and assured her she would “feel differently” as soon as she became “calmer.”
Five children were raised in that house. James, the firstborn son, was named after Franklin’s father. Then came Franklin, born on 18 March 1909. At eleven pounds, he was “the biggest and most beautiful of all the babies.” But he was not robust. There was something wrong with his heart, and after a bout of influenza, he died, seven months and fourteen days old, on 1 November. Eleanor was devastated by his death. Sara wrote in her journal, “my heart aches for Eleanor.” He was buried in the Saint James Church at Hyde Park on 7 November. Sara noted, “E. brave and lovely,” but Eleanor Roosevelt blamed herself for her baby’s death, and remained melancholic for months. “To this day,” she wrote decades later, “I can stand by his tiny stone in the churchyard and see the little group of people gathered around his tiny coffin, and remember how cruel it seemed to leave him out there alone in the cold.”
During that year of intense mourning, she carried Elliott, who was born on 23 September 1910. She spent much of that summer alone with the children at Campobello. Although she was happiest there, she wrote Franklin: “I miss you dreadfully and feel very lonely, but please don’t think it is because I am alone, having other people wouldn’t do any good for I just want you!”
Eleanor’s depression was intensified by Franklin’s habits. Like her father, he had started to stay out late at night. Frequently he returned close to dawn, after poker games at the Knickerbocker Club, or dinner at the Harvard Club, or some allegedly urgent meeting related to his lackluster legal business. When her high spirited, happy husband came back from wherever he had been, he generally found a very somber wife—who sulked and said nothing. Silently she nursed her fears, and her romantic ideals of “goodness,” which she fully expected Franklin to share. What a “tragedy it was if in any way my husband offended against these ideals of mine—and, amusingly enough, I do not think I ever told him what I expected!”
Immediately after law school, FDR had been hired by Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, a commercial firm that represented such corporations as Standard Oil of New Jersey and the American Tobacco Company when TR’s antitrust lawyers targeted them. But FDR did little if anything significant for them, and was exceedingly bored. Basically, he spent these early years waiting for something more interesting to turn up.
In 1910, the year of Eleanor’s most severe depression, opportunity not only knocked—it came a-courting, hat in hand. Reform Democrats led by Thomas Mott Osborne, the wealthy independent mayor of Auburn, New York, wanted to end the rule of political boss Charles Francis Murphy, who had had the audacity to support the unscrupulous father of “yellow journalism” and “jingo imperialism,” William Randolph Hearst, for governor. The upstate Democrats needed new faces, and the 26th State Senate district, comprising Putnam, Columbia, and Dutchess counties, was up for grabs. They offered the race to the twenty-eight-year-old, relatively unknown but affluent Franklin Roosevelt, with their full and enthusiastic support. Several of FDR’s neighbors, allied with Osborne—notably John Mack, an attorney and Dutchess County farmer, and Ed Perkins, president of the First National Bank of Poughkeepsie and Democratic county chairman—had been watching the squire’s son, and found him pleasing.
Although FDR had never thought much about politics or party, both his father and Rosy were Grover Cleveland Democrats identified with reform. They were Democrats in a Republican family, Democrats in a Republican district. FDR himself was no party regular—he had paraded around Harvard in Republican rallies, and had cast his first vote for Eleanor’s Republican Uncle Ted—but he was at least vaguely a Democrat, and he was positively intrigued by the new anti-Tammany movement, which opposed boss rule in New York’s Democratic Party. When Ed Perkins appeared at his office one Friday with the proposal—and incidentally, the offer of a ride up to Hyde Park—FDR at first replied that he had to discuss it with his mother. But as they drove up to the door of the Poughkeepsie bank to meet his supporters, Perkins said: “Frank, the men that are looking out of that window are waiting for your answer. They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.” FDR answered with finality: “I’ll take it.”
His mother would have discouraged him, had he asked. She thought politics messy, and considered politicians ruffians. But Eleanor was delighted. Throughout the summer of 1910, the summer she spent alone, pregnant with Elliott, at Campobello, while he met with Democratic leaders to plan strategy and the future, she wrote letters of encouragement and asked to be kept informed of every step, every detail, every decision.
In October 1910, a week after Elliott’s birth, FDR embarked on his first political campaign. Eleanor wrote from home that she wished she could be with him, and sent notes conveying deepest love and endless luck. He spoke in every village and hamlet; he spoke in taverns and train stations; he spoke to people who despised the wealthy River Road families, and he asked for their votes—promising to represent them and their interests, directly and full-time. He bought a bright-red open Maxwell touring car, and bumped along two thousand miles of rugged country roads with his new political tutor, the congressional candidate and flamboyant orator Richard Connell. They got soaked; the car broke down; they hit a farmer’s favorite dog; they went deep into ravines and muddy ditches. But Franklin was a winner. Connell told him to take off his pince-nez, which made his eyes look mean and exaggerated his haughtiness. Connell told him to be plain, and direct, and roll up his sleeves. He began each speech: “My Friends!” He promised nothing, sidestepped all issues, and was entirely superficial. But he was charming and enthusiastic; he stood as an independent and a progressive; he deplored “rotten corruption”; he praised the popular former governor, Charles Evans Hughes, and identified himself with his cousin the former president (both progressive Republicans).
FDR spent more than five times as much on his campaign as any other candidate in the district. But it was his ability to spar with the crowd and entertain the hecklers, to think fast and speak earnestly, that accounted for his unprecedented majority in Republican territory, and he ran far ahead of the state ticket in Dutchess County. The Democrats won statewide for the first time in eighteen years, and FDR’s 26th Senate district was Democratic for the first time since his neighbor Thomas Jefferson Newbold had won in 1878.
The year 1910 changed everything.
* Town Topics had criticized the wedding for the Ludlow-Parish-Hall frugality. The food was too ordinary; the orchestra lackluster; and they had failed to use a first-rate florist. See notes, pages 522–23.
* Decades later, she believed that, had she decided to explore and discover the mysteries of child-raising for herself, or at least paid more and closer attention, “my subsequent troubles would have been avoided and my children would have had far happier lives.”
* The medieval metaphor “Patient Griselda”—the heroine of a tale told by Petrarch, Chaucer, and others—is a monster of passivity. From the fourteenth to the twentieth century, men have romanticized her “sweet servility.” There are hundreds of versions, over forty in English, and a simple plot: Walter, the marquis of Saluzzo, seeks a wife to bear his heirs. He selects an attractive peasant girl and offers her title and comfort if she will be uncomplainingly and absolutely obedient. She promises to do so. All goes well until she has a daughter; the marquis decides he will not accept a peasant heir, so the child must be killed. Griselda uncomplainingly hands the infant to her husband. A son is born; the ritual is repeated. Then the marquis decides to return Griselda to her father. She is banished in tatters, and with nothing, exiled for over fifteen years. At that point, the marquis sends word that he plans to marry a beautiful young bride, and asks Griselda to come prepare the feast. She returns, scrubs, and cooks. He calls her before the assembled guests, in her tattered rags, and asks what she thinks of the bride. Griselda finds her lovely and praises her generously. The marquis announces that the bride and her brother are Griselda’s children, and he at last is satisfied with her obedience. All are united; jubilation and rejoicing are her reward. Did ER find her situation so noxious she could compare Griselda’s trials to her own? Or did she identify only with the extremism of her self-imposed and ever-patient silence? during their first years together, made her feel betrayed, meanly abandoned.