F DR COULD CONVINCINGLY EMBODY a sense of security for millions of Americans in part because he possessed so much of it himself. Even when he felt a trifle insecure among his dismissive peers at school, he could always fall back on his proud heritage and storied name as a source of strength. Character development is always a mystery, but in Franklins case the combination of the entrepreneurial success of his mother’s family, the Delanos, and the old-money stability and impeccable social standing of the Roosevelts seemed to protect him behind a double-bolted door of invulnerability, reinforced by the unusually strong love and attention of his parents.
Security for his family was Warren Delano’s aspiration when he first sailed for China in 1833, a hundred years before his grandson was sworn in as president. Delano could trace his roots back to a Huguenot, Philippe de la Noye (eventually shortened and conjoined), who arrived in Plymouth Colony just months after the Mayflower. But lineage has never been a convertible currency in the United States; even the most aristocratic American families must replenish the family fortunes every few generations, as Warren Delano did by trading opium and other commodities in China. Delano was an autocrat and what later came to be known as a rock-ribbed Republican. He liked to say that while not all Democrats were horse thieves, it was his experience that all horse thieves were Democrats.
Delano’s daughter Sara accompanied her father to China as a girl and would pass on her family’s sense of adventure to her son. As a young woman, she had fallen for the famous architect Stanford White, but her father disapproved and it seemed for a time as if she might not marry. Sara was twenty-six, with impeccable posture and a strong will, when she met a country squire named James Roosevelt, whose mutton chops made him look less like the British lord he aspired to be, sniped one relative, and more like the lord’s coachman. “Mr. James” was twice her age—fifty-two—a widower and father (his first son, James “Rosy” Roosevelt, was FDR’s little-remembered and much older half brother) who had found success in business and become a reliable Democrat, thanks in part to a post–Civil War friendship with General George B. McClellan, the 1864 Democratic presidential candidate.
James was descended from the Dutchman Claes Van Rosenvelt, who arrived in the New World about 1650. The family fortune was founded when James’s great-grandfather, Isaac, imported sugar from the West Indies to make rum, then used the profits to invest heavily in New York real estate. FDR would boast that Isaac led George Washington’s horse in the first Inaugural Parade, though this was likely one of his embellishments.
James’s father (Franklin’s paternal grandfather, whom he never knew) was a medical doctor afraid of the sight of blood, insecure to the point of being a shut-in. James learned not to say anything that might upset the old man, a sense of discretion passed on to Franklin. Perhaps rebelling against his father’s nervous disposition, James also developed an easy equanimity. This, too, would be bequeathed.
To opium dealing in the Delano line, add draft avoidance among the Roosevelts. James had been thirty-two when the Civil War began, still young enough to take part. Like many gentlemen of his day, he paid a substitute to serve for him in the Union Army. FDR’s Hudson River Valley branch of the Roosevelt family felt none of the embarrassment experienced by cousin Theodore over his father having shirked service in Lincoln’s war. In fact, after two decades of ambitious ventures in the business world—including an abortive effort to finance a canal through Nicaragua and the presidency of the largest railway in the South—James developed a sense of ease about his position in the world. Recriminations, his son later learned, were for others.
Buffeted by the Panic of 1873 and forced to resign as president of the coal company he founded, James Roosevelt’s fortune slipped below that of other prominent families in the Hudson Valley. But he appeared unflappable amid this personal setback, perhaps because he still held enough assets to assure that his branch of the family would remain relatively wealthy for at least another generation. Outside the business world, James was perhaps best known for breeding horses at “Spring-wood,” as he called the estate he built near the tiny village of Hyde Park, New York, ninety miles north of New York City. With sweeping views of the Hudson River, the house at Hyde Park would become the anchor of this branch of the Roosevelt family for the next two generations. By the 1880s, he had also bought a fifteen-room Victorian summer “cottage” on Canada’s Campobello Island, just off the coast of Maine.
The circumstances of FDR’s birth may have contributed to his sense of security because the trauma made him all the more precious to his parents. Sara was in labor for twenty-five hours and nearly died. To save her, chloroform was administered, with the assumption that the baby would be stillborn. When the boy was born on January 30, 1882, he was blue and not breathing; the nurse was sure he was gone. But the doctor began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and he came around. He was named after Sara’s childless uncle, Franklin Delano.