MR. AND MRS. ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT lived in New York at a time when money was easy to come by if you had the right name or right parents, and when respect, or a facsimile thereof, was easy to come by if you had enough money. The Roosevelts’ nighttime activities, which have been sketched into previous chapters, usually occupied them four or five times a week, perhaps more—causing men as well as women to make lists of the attire they had worn here and the attire they had worn there so that they did not repeat themselves any more than necessary.
During the day, Manhattan was aswirl with the moneymaking passions of the Gilded Age—some legal, some not; ruthlessness more common than gentlemanliness, although the former was often disguised as the latter. As for Elliott, he did not go along with such practices. He had mastered the motions of employment in run-amuck capitalism, but neither the substance nor the timing; instead, he kept sneaking out of the office earlier and earlier to play polo and carouse with friends afterward. As for Anna, she enjoyed gossiping with her own set of friends while sipping a beverage and watching others cavort at tennis; further enjoyment came from such events as kennel and horse shows, and she met her civic duties by attending an occasional board meeting of one or two philanthropic groups. She “had her coupe in town and ordered her dresses from Palmers in London and Worth in Paris while Elliott stabled four hunters at Meadow Brook.” Their existence was a breathless one. The object was to enjoy it.
For the Roosevelts and the other right people of the time, Manhattan was a “golden secure world in which the significant or even ominous events around the globe were hardly noticed.” It was lush, arrogant, envied, expensive, exclusionary, and painfully tumultuous. It was life at the speed of light, with emptiness at the core of both public discourse and private party-going. Motion was all, contemplation a pastime for the poor and idle.
Which is to say, it was the worst possible place for a girl like Eleanor Roosevelt to be raised.
NO ONE WOULD EVER THINK of calling her a Swell. Not as a baby, not as an adolescent, certainly not as an adult. Among other things, Swells were prattling and garrulous, especially in the company of one another. Eleanor remembers herself as timid even at the age of two, insisting that her memory went back that far. She also recalls that the experience she describes here happened more than once over the course of a few years:
My earliest recollections are of being dressed up and allowed to come down into what must have been a dining room and dance for a group of gentlemen who applauded and laughed as I pirouetted before them. Finally, my father would pick me up and hold me high in the air. All this is rather vague to me, but my father was never vague. He dominated my life as long as he lived.
The so-called “dancing” was an ordeal for Eleanor, although of a different kind than the dancing of her later debutante days, and she believes she never smiled once during an entire performance. If it weren’t for her father, she would not have been able to go through with it at all, frolicking about a roomful of strange men—for she knew, at some level, that they applauded and forced their laughter not because they were entertained but because the little girl was making a fool of herself for their amusement, which was all the more amusing because of her odd appearance.
But Elliott was oblivious. He did not realize the embarrassment he was causing his “little golden hair.” Unable to read the situation, he seems instead to have been proud of the attention Eleanor was attracting. And Nell was too adoring of her father to reveal her true feelings, if she was even aware of them yet.
Much more to Eleanor’s liking was a different kind of show, one that she performed privately, displays of the little girl’s affection for her father that went unseen by a roomful of coarse and unfeeling strangers. He “was always devoted to me . . . and as soon as I could talk,” Eleanor wrote, “I went into his dressing room every morning and chattered to him[,] often shaking my finger at him as you can see in the portrait of me at the age of five which we still have. I even danced for him, intoxicated by the pure joy of motion, twisting round and round until he would pick me up and throw me into the air and tell me I made him dizzy.”
A FEW YEARS LATER, INSPIRED by her father’s labors on behalf of the needy, Eleanor volunteered at a settlement house and a newsboys’ club, the latter another place that Theodore Sr. had founded. As young as she was, she tried her best to educate other youngsters who, for one reason or another, did not attend school. Perhaps they had to work to help support their families; perhaps they simply could not be bothered.
But a shy child is often a self-critical child, and Eleanor constantly found her efforts lacking. “I feel sure I was a very poor teacher.” Worse, and even more untrue, she pronounced herself lazy. “I rather imagine that by spring I was quite ready to drop all this good work and go up to the country and spend the summer in idleness and recreation.” She simply did not have the self-confidence to credit herself, no matter what she was doing.
And after some more years had passed and a sophisticated social life intruded on her charitable efforts, her opinion of herself remained at the same nadir. “Eleanor dreaded her debut,” according to biographer Jan Pottker. She was as uncomfortable being the center of attention as other girls of the upper classes were when they were not the centers of attention. “Her memory was colored by her own self-doubt and insecurities.”
Once again it was distant cousin Franklin who tried to come to the rescue, assuring Eleanor that she was being too hard on herself. “I hasten to tell you,” he wrote to her, “that you are far too modest about your appeal to the gilded youth of 1902.”
His words cheered her, even if she could not make herself believe them.
“Try to forget about yourself and get interested in other people,” Eleanor told Art Unger in Datebook, when, decades later, he asked her to give advice “for the girl who is shy.” But it is much easier said for an adult than done for a child.
EVENTUALLY, OF COURSE, ELEANOR AND Franklin would wed, but as a newly married woman in her early twenties, there were times when her feelings about herself reached levels that seemed to supersede mere shyness.
As Blanche Wiesen Cook writes, “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.”
But she was a grown woman then, if a young one, and she still seemed no more confident in her abilities, or the perceptions of others in her abilities. “In 1922, she joined the Women’s Division of the Democratic State Committee. Painfully shy, she forced herself to make speeches and official appearances and discovered, to her surprise, that she was not only good at politics, but that she liked it.”
Only, though, after it was over. In the moments, sometimes even the days, preceding a speech or official appearance, she was nervous to the point of fright.
Even when she reached the status of First Lady of the United States at the age of forty-nine, a long-time companion said
She never thought of herself as exceptional or extraordinary or important. Whenever we traveled, she was genuinely surprised that people made a fuss. Once, when she returned from a tour to promote the United Nations, we landed in an airport that had laid down a red carpet and there were children with flowers and quite a display, and she said, “Oh, look! Somebody significant must be coming in.”
DANCING FOR HER FATHER’S FRIENDS might have been one of her first memories, but there were others almost as early. The locale for one of them was a cherry tree on the property that surrounded the Roosevelts’ summer house in Hyde Park, New York. Out of the tree grew a thick, tenderly curving branch that Eleanor found remarkably comfortable, an embrace of sorts. She took up residence there while taking solace in her books. She nestled into the branch as comfortably as her brace would allow and found refuge from her social inadequacies by immersing herself in poetry and fiction. When she was finally rid of the dreaded back brace, the branch felt like a feather bed.
Eleanor’s capacity to lose herself in her reading caused her to miss many meals. Nothing ordinary could be relied upon to “bring me out of the world between the pages.” To the young ER all of Longfellow and such poems as “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armor,” “Evangeline,” and “The Building of a Ship” were favorites—as were Tennyson and Scott: “What young person can read the ‘Revenge’ or ‘Marmion’ or parts of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ and ‘The Idylls of the King’ without being stimulated to dreams of a different age.”
As an adult, Eleanor encouraged children to follow her example, to “read the Chanson de Roland, Le Cid, some of Dumas, some of Victor Hugo, some of German poetry, Heine, Goethe and some of the more modern German novelists and dramatists. . . . Every child should read the translations of Indian and Chinese poetry. We know too little of the thought of these far distant races and the beauty of the imagery in which they hide their precious kernels of thought and philosophy.”
It is a profound thought, nicely expressed. What she nowhere acknowledges, however, is that a child might be led to books as often by timidity as by a love of learning, or that the two might exist in combination, one feeding the other. Reading, after all, can be a means of spending time in the company of others without actually having to endure their presence, feel inferior to them, or suffer the bite of their criticisms on her psyche. The characters in a book, after all, ignore the reader, just presenting themselves for observation. It is an ideal recourse for the faint of heart. In Eleanor’s case, the written word would be an escape for her all her life.
“I have to this day,” she wrote much later, “an insatiable interest in every kind of romance and story which grew I think from the first forbidden tales and novels, which I purloined as a child and read as far from the house as possible, perched in a cherry tree where I could eat cherries and watch the approach of any grown up who might disapprove of the type of literature I had chosen.”
Apparently, this seldom, if ever, happened. “No one tried to censor my reading,” she would admit in her autobiography, “though occasionally when I happened on a book that I could not understand and asked difficult question [sic] before people, the book would disappear. I remember that this happened to Dickens’ Bleak House. I spent days looking for it.”
WITH HER TIMIDITY COMPELLING HER, it was but a short step for Eleanor to go from reading to writing, thereby providing herself with an even greater opportunity to elude all that made her young life so hard to bear. She was always more advanced with the pen than her years would suggest.
On one occasion, perhaps as much to inspire herself as to explore the topic, Eleanor wrote an essay she called “Ambition.”
Some people consider ambition a sin, but well-trained it seems to be a great good for it leads one to do, and to be things without it one could never have been.
Later in the piece, after pointing out the role of ambition in the lives of great military leaders and great artists, she said:
Of course it is easier to have no ambition and just keep on the same way every day and never try to do grand and great things, for it is only those who have ambition and who try to do who meet with difficulties and they alone face the disappointments that come when one does not succeed in what one has meant to do. . . .
But those with ambition try again, and try until they at last succeed.
And, perhaps even more, she enjoyed writing the poetry that she was sometimes able to share with her mother. As was the case with “Ambition,” she was more often than not didactic, producing her rhymes to instruct and urge herself on.
To be the thing we seem
To do the thing we deemed enjoined by duty.
To walk in faith nor dream
Of questioning God’s scheme of truth and beauty.
“It is very hard to do what this verse says,” Eleanor would in time confess, “so hard I never succeed. . . . I am always questioning, questioning because I cannot understand & never succeed in doing what I mean to do, never, never. Suppose I don’t really try. I can feel it in me sometimes that I can do much more. . . . I mean to try till I do succeed.”
And, of course, she did succeed, so magnificently and for so many years that the adult does not seem to have grown out of the child, but to be a different person entirely.
ELEANOR WAS ALWAYS A SUCCESS academically. Well, almost. But, as she began the formal process of learning, there was, on random occasions, a forbidding presence in the classroom, observing her, silently judging. As a result, she “remembered her first days in school as a time of agony and mortification. She was asked to spell simple words such as ‘horse’ that her Mother knew she knew, but frozen by shyness and the presence of her mother, who sat in on the class, she misspelled every one.”
Eleanor was as bewildered by her performances as she was ashamed. Believing that her fellow students were ashamed of her too, that they secretly giggled at her ignorance, she would not speak to them for the rest of the day, and ran for the cherry tree to open a book the moment her class was dismissed.
Anna never explained why she paid her visits to school. Nor is it known what she said to her daughter when she returned home on days like this, or whether she said anything at all. Perhaps she, too, was ashamed, without realizing her role in everyone’s discomfort.
AS A YOUNG GIRL, ELEANOR had to cope with tension more often than adults ever do. It was part of the daily routine, like eating her meals and brushing her teeth. Her only means of coping, the only person with whom she would have shared the tree branch with her, had there been room, was her father. With him, she said, “I was perfectly happy.” He had kind words for her when no one else did, and just the right kind words. He had a smile. He had a hug.
“He was the one great love of my life as a child,” she wrote, when childhood was far behind her, “and in fact like many children I lived a dream life with him; so his memory is still a vivid, living thing to me.”
It was a dream life of rich detail. When Eleanor was nine, “Father’s own little Nell” received a letter from him about the dreams he would make come true for her, of “days through the Grand snow clad forests over the white hills, under the blue skies as blue as those in Italy under which you and I and Little Ellie [Eleanor’s younger brother] . . . used to sail over Naples Bay to beautiful Capri.”
Elliott would later be accused of building up a little girl’s hopes unfairly, of taking advantage of her vulnerable state for his own emotional needs, not hers. It was not so. The child in him, whom his sons did not bring out nearly as much as his daughter, meant every word he ever wrote to the child that was Eleanor. Unfortunately for him, and sorrowfully for Nell and the rest of the family, there would come a time when, in lieu of actually whisking her off to faraway, exotic locales, he would not see her at all. Instead, he would have no choice but to describe his visions to her on paper rather than utter them excitedly to her face. Nor make them a reality.
But to the extent that his mind was still capable in those days, he still believed. Would believe until the end.