The Roosevelts were old money. By American standards, very old money. Like the Schuylers and Schermerhorns and Van Rensselears and other early Dutch settlers who arrived in New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, Claes Martenzen van Rosenvelt and his descendants put down deep roots and quietly prospered.
At the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s birth in 1882, his family maintained a lifestyle somewhere between well-to-do and rich. He was born into the post–Civil War era known as the Gilded Age, a time when immense new fortunes were being created, and while his family could not boast the prodigious wealth of such neighbors as the Vanderbilts, they could take for granted the security and comfort of the moneyed classes. But it was not so much money as it was social prominence that contributed to the Roosevelts’ sense of entitlement. The family held a position as close to that of nobility as it is possible to get in a democratic republic, replete with all the trappings of landed estates, carefully researched genealogies, and a family coat of arms centered around a decorous display of roses topped by three feathers, just like the Prince of Wales.
All that social prominence was not due solely to the Roosevelt side of the family. Franklin’s young mother Sara was a Delano heir, who could trace her New World lineage back as far as her husband’s, and who liked to point out that “Franklin is as much a Delano as he is a Roosevelt.” Her son learned that lesson early, and throughout his life always included his middle name, or at least its initial, when signing papers.
Both parents taught the boy to take pride in his family heritage, and the combination of wealth and social position helped breed in him a certain confidence, a fearlessness, that served him well throughout his career. He was an only child and profited from the highly focused attention of two adoring parents.
His father, James Roosevelt, was considerably older than his mother, and had been a widower when he first met the vivacious, high-spirited Sara Delano at a party at Theodore Roosevelt’s home in New York City. James was something of an entrepreneur. He managed the family’s investments and served on various corporate boards and enjoyed playing the role of country squire. He encouraged young Franklin’s interests in natural history, and, along with sailing, taught him the gentlemanly skills of horseback riding and hunting.
His young mother Sara watched over him solicitously, and while some have accused her of being overly solicitous at times, she did not pamper him. He was assigned household duties—he had to take care of his pony, Debby, and his red setter puppy, Marksman—and she made sure he performed his duties responsibly and on time.
The Roosevelts moved comfortably in high circles. One time in Washington, when Franklin was just five years old, his father took him to the White House to meet his old friend President Grover Cleveland. At the end of the visit, Cleveland, a Democrat who was having difficulties with Congress at the time, put his hand on Franklin’s head and said with great earnestness, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President of the United States.” The adult Franklin loved to repeat that story, particularly in those years after he had moved into the White House. He always followed the retelling with a loud burst of laughter.
By any measure Franklin was a well-educated boy. He had a solid grounding in English literature, was well read in history, had a good grasp of geography, knew his sums, and was conversant in both French and German, thanks to a succession of teachers and governesses imported to instruct him. And because the Roosevelts regularly toured through Europe, Franklin was well traveled, and by the age of twelve was a veteran of half a dozen Atlantic crossings.
But for all his travel and learning, there were important deficiencies in his education that would take him years to fully overcome. The most significant of these was the fact that he was taught almost exclusively at home: he did not actually go to school until he was fourteen. While academic lessons can be taught anywhere, some of the most important lessons of childhood can only be learned in the rough-and-tumble of school. Such lessons include the complex and sometimes painful ones involved with learning how to get along with one’s peers—the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes humiliating competition of the classroom, with its rivalry for attention and good grades; the cut and thrust of the schoolyard, where students are sorted out in ways that are often unfair and undemocratic, but always realistic; the problem of dealing with bullies; the agonizing and delicate compromises that must be learned in order to make friends, and the further compromises needed to keep them; the bargaining and lies—black and white—required to hold your position in the crowd. These were the life lessons that Franklin Roosevelt missed as a young boy, and which would later take him decades to master. Although he was neither spoiled nor pampered, his sheltered life would leave him at a certain social disadvantage for many years.
Although home-educated, Franklin was not a recluse. There were always the children of his parents’ employees to play with, augmented on occasion by other kids imported from the village for the afternoon.
There is a famous story that his mother liked to tell about her son. “Franklin had a great habit of ordering his playmates around,” she remembered in her book, My Boy Franklin, “and for reasons I have never been able to fathom, [he] was generally permitted to have his way. I know that I, overhearing him one day with a little boy on the place, with whom he was digging a fort, said to him:
“‘My son, don’t give the orders all the time; let the other boys give them some time.’
“‘Mummie,’ he said, without guile, ‘if I don’t give the orders, nothing would happen!’”
The story is sometimes cited as an indication of the inherent leadership skills FDR would exhibit throughout his public life, but it is just as likely that it indicates his early grasp of basic social realities. The simple fact was that he was demonstrably superior to his playmates. They were, for the most part, the children of people who worked on the estate, and they did what his mother and father wanted them to do. By extension, it was Franklin’s right to govern the activities of the servants’ children. They were never his equals in any sense. He knew it and they knew it.
Years later, Mike Reilly, who as chief of the White House Secret Service detail knew FDR from a particularly intimate perspective, put it bluntly. “He never was ‘one of the boys,’” he observed. “[He] was raised alone and he had just about everything he wanted throughout his youth, so it would be just a little too much to expect him to be ‘one of the boys.’”