THE VALUES OF THE ROOSEVELT FAMILY were put to the test in 1891, when Mr. James suffered a heart attack and recurring angina. Although he would live another decade, the effect of his illness would bind his wife and nine-year-old son even closer. Just as strong mothers have often bred strong presidents, so the absent or weak father appears again and again in presidential family history, often as pitied by their sons.*
For FDR, his father’s decline left a different imprint. From age nine, Franklin saw Mr. James not as his protector but as someone to be protected, an early lesson in the imperative to tend the lame and repay debts of gratitude to once strong figures who have fallen into trouble. FDR’s notion of the country as a family with basic responsibility for its most vulnerable members—the animating spirit of the New Deal—could well have begun inside his own small nuclear family.
Franklin and Sara routinely conspired to shield James from anything upsetting. When Franklin found a nanny “perfectly awful,” he hid his feelings because his father had taken the trouble to hire her. When a steel curtain rod fell aboard their private railroad car and cut his forehead deeply while his father was in another compartment eating breakfast, young Franklin made his terrified mother promise not to tell James. He put on a cap to cover the bloody wound and spent the rest of the day on the observation platform, avoiding his father. And when a friend at Campobello Island accidentally knocked out his front tooth with a stick meant to bat pebbles, Franklin wouldn’t cry or open his mouth to show his mother the exposed nerve, much less tell his father.
Franklin was showing not just physical courage and a talent for deception but the guts to play the angles on his parents without actively rebelling. His new approach allowed him to maintain freedom of movement and yet be seen as respectful and concerned about his father. At an early age, Franklin was self-reliant and a bit of an operator. In later years, he liked to recount the story of how as a fourteen-year-old he was denied admission to London’s Museum of Natural History in South Kensington, which was closed that day to the general public. He pulled out a membership card from the New York Museum of Natural History and somehow convinced the guard that he was a scientist. Even if the story was exaggerated, it reflected his pride in improvising to get his way.
The combination of fortitude and guile would turn up again and again, from Roosevelt’s response to polio to his handling of Herbert Hoover to deceiving the public about how far he would go to aid Britain in 1940 to riding through New York City in the rain at the end of the 1944 campaign, drenched to the bone, knowing his health was shot, fortified only by a swig of brandy and his old grit. Like John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, Roosevelt was a compartmentalized president, able to put his life into separate sealed boxes. This ability to separate or integrate great warmth and utter detachment—depending on the context—would prove a superbly useful trait.
Though his temperament was largely inborn, some authors have offered tentative Freudian speculations about Franklin and Sara. John Gunther, who became friendly with the family, wrote that “of course Roosevelt had an Oedipus complex as big as a house.” But he was spared by his father’s age. Had James been younger than fifty-three when Franklin was born, Gunther wrote from the distance of the more psychoanalytic 1950s, “Franklin might have turned into a very neurotic and unstable child.” What Franklin most liked about his father, Gunther heard from a family member, was that he controlled his mother, who in turn controlled him.
Actually, Sigmund Freud, contrary to reputation, did not focus much on mothers in his case histories. But his conclusions—still persuasive despite the challenge to so many of his theories—were clear. “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feelings of a conqueror,” he wrote. “That confidence of success often induces real success.” While Sara was never what Carl Jung calls a “power devil,” whose smothering attention incapacitates her son, she drove him to seek refuge within himself. Franklin developed a lifelong habit of not letting his mother or anyone else know much about what he was thinking—a habit that could be maddening but gave him an edge in handling other people. One thing he wasn’t thinking about was what might go wrong. He seemed to be missing the normal emotional equipment that produces worry.
For all of his attachment to home and family, Franklin quickly came to think of himself as cosmopolitan, and not just because his extensive stamp collection made him a whiz at geography. The Roosevelts sailed for Europe eight times during his first twelve years, often bound for the baths of Bad Nauheim in Germany to “take the cure” with other wealthy invalids. Franklin grew accustomed to being around sick people all searching for the curative power of water, a foreshadowing of his life in Warm Springs. Where another child might have retreated into surliness, he was compassionate on these trips—a younger English boy confined to a wheelchair remembered his kindness many years later—but he was also clearly ready for at least some measure of independence from his parents.
When he left, it was to Groton, an elite boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts that was only a decade old when Franklin entered. He had, in fact, been enrolled at birth before the school even opened. Such was the respect that James and his circle had for the founder and headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, an ambitious Episcopal clergyman whose preparatory school, based on the British model (minus the flogging), appealed to their anglophilia. Peabody, who later performed the marriage of Eleanor and Franklin, preached a muscular Christianity in the raising of boys. The rigorous schedule was academically challenging, but the rector was suspicious of intellectuals and he emphasized athletics and spartan living, including open cubicles for sleeping and cold showers, even in winter.
While Peabody would be a lifelong influence, Groton was not an experience Franklin looked back on with much nostalgia. He wasn’t popular, in part because he entered at fourteen, two years behind the rest of his classmates, whose parents, unlike James and Sara, were willing to part with their sons when they were twelve. As a result, he had to work hard to win the approval of his schoolmates, which may have intensified the anxiousness to please that is so characteristic of politicians. His summers abroad had left him with an accent the other boys considered “too English.” He seemed affected, perhaps a trifle effeminate, and his ingratiating manner annoyed many of his classmates.
More important, skinny “Uncle Frank,” * as he was nicknamed, was neither a scholar nor an athlete. He excelled only at Latin and “high kick,” a game favoring long-legged students that entailed kicking a tin pan strung from the ceiling and enduring embarrassment after the inevitable and painful falls. The game was emblematic of his desperate attempts to win favor, even if it meant hurting himself. Franklin may have been secure in background but not in his ability to make his way in the world. He was off-key with schoolmates, and even as an adult his gaiety and sociability always had a slightly forced quality to it.
For the next decade, F. D. Roosevelt would be seen as effete even by the standards of the nation’s most effete subculture. His own cousins mocked him as “Miss Nancy” or “the man on the handkerchief box,” a reference to a drawing of a snooty-looking gentleman on a toiletry they all recognized. To imply something not quite manly about this Roosevelt cousin was a particular slur in the testosterone world of Theodore Roosevelt and his brood. Alice Roosevelt, daughter of TR and an acerbic wit (until her death in 1980 she kept a pillow on her couch with the embroidered line: “If you don’t have anything nice to say…come sit by me”), was particularly vicious, especially after it became clear that FDR had eclipsed the Oyster Bay branch of the family. “He was the kind of boy whom you invited to the dance, but not the dinner,” she recalled, “a good little mother’s boy whose friends were dull, who belonged to the minor clubs and who was never at the really gay parties.” She and her cousins used the foppish young man’s initials to call him “Feather Duster” Roosevelt, a nickname that stuck so long that it was still used to damage him as late as the 1932 Democratic Convention.
But if Franklin seemed light and unsubstantial, he was anchored. “All that is in me goes back to the Hudson,” he said in later years. When he traveled and had landed safely, he often wired back one word: “Algonac.” The name of the Delano estate was a family code word for “all is well.” In the White House, FDR fell asleep imagining himself sledding down the hill behind his Hyde Park home, then dragging his sled back up for another run—a crippled president at a time of crisis drawing sustenance from happy boyhood memories of frolicking in the snow.
In studying the sources of optimism, therapists are increasingly focusing on such “illusive inner islands of strength” that people build in their heads, especially childhood places of comfort in which they can take refuge throughout their lives. These secure mental images help build what is now called emotional intelligence, a trait that can be acquired and nurtured as well as innate. Emotional intelligence entails not simply picking up cues from other people and intuiting their motives but regulating one’s own frustrations deftly enough to keep moving forward.
In school, Franklin never seemed hurt by the slights. He began zestfully embracing activities even when he wasn’t good at them. His ever-growing list of eclectic interests—stamps, stuffed birds, Navy ships, rare books—later contributed to his reputation as a dilettante, but they reflected the spirit of a happy collector. Eventually, he would collect people and ideas, too.
His mother knew this quality helped define him. “Whether he excelled at what he tackled or whether he met with indifferent success had little or no influence upon his enthusiasm for the project,” Sara wrote of his teenage years. Under the same impulse, FDR worked diligently to transform shortcomings into strengths. Like young Theodore Roosevelt turning himself from a childhood weakling into an icon of manhood, Franklin’s lack of popularity as a student made him even more determined to hone his charm into a subtle instrument for advancement.
After the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Franklin wanted to lie about his age and run off to volunteer, or so he later claimed. The historian Geoffrey C. Ward suggests this was likely a fib he told to link himself more closely with Theodore Roosevelt and to cover for the fact that he never served in the military. More plausible was his recollection that he hoped to apply to the U.S. Naval Academy, but his father told him a life at sea would be too cruel to his mother. Instead, his path was to be Harvard and the law, per Mr. James’s instructions.
When Franklin was a Harvard freshman, James Roosevelt died of a heart attack. It was no surprise and Franklin was not distraught, but it proved hard on Sara. The following two winters, she rented a house in downtown Boston, a few miles away from her son’s apartments on Dunster Street in Cambridge. This has often been depicted as an example of her suffocating attention, but it might more accurately be seen as the understandable reaction of a grieving widow with almost no other immediate family. She mostly saw Franklin on weekends, when he would sometimes host parties at her house.*
A middling B student, Franklin’s great passion in Cambridge was the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, where his big scoop was an interview with his distant cousin, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become president after the assassination of William McKinley. Fending off his bitter Crimson rival, Arthur Ballantine, who would reappear in his life during the banking crisis of 1933, Franklin eventually worked his way up to managing editor and then, in a postgraduate year, to president of the daily. Even then, he provoked radically different reactions in people. One fellow editor recalled him as an effective and easygoing leader of the newspaper; another remembered “a snob—he did not have the common touch in those days.” Over time, the former trait would dominate.
If running the Crimson was his major college accomplishment—and one he liked to brag to White House reporters about in the 1930s—Franklin’s major setback was his failure to win election to the most prestigious of all Harvard “finals” clubs, the Porcellian, to which his father (who had gone to Harvard Law School, but not to the college), his half brother, his rector, Endicott Peabody, and many other relatives had belonged. His easily lampooned emulation of President Theodore Roosevelt (a Porcellian member) might have generated opposition, or a highly publicized scandal involving his relative, Taddy Roosevelt, who was caught around that time in a sex scandal.*
Regardless of its cause, the Porcellian blackballing would sting. Fifteen years later, Franklin told his cousin, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., that it was “the biggest disappointment of my life,” a measure, of course, of how easy his life was before polio. Eleanor said the rejection gave her husband “an inferiority complex.” This sounds like an exaggeration. Eleanor, whose father was hopelessly alcoholic and whose mother proved so cold and withholding that she called her own daughter “granny,” was the one who often felt insecure, and she may have been projecting that onto her husband. Even so, the rejection no doubt contributed to the overeagerness for social acceptance in FDR that irritated so many of his contemporaries.
Here was a young man who had not yet bridled his ebullience. But he was gaining self-confidence, and the ones who laughed at him would be left a step behind.
*Lincoln was estranged from his father, Thomas, while Lyndon Johnson’s father, Samuel, and Richard Nixon’s father, Frank, were conspicuously depicted by their sons as failures in business. The alcoholism of Jack Reagan and Roger Clinton (Bill Clinton’s stepfather) rendered them weak in the eyes of their sons.
*The nickname came in part from the presence in an upper form (grade) at Groton of “Taddy” Roosevelt, the ne’er-do-well son of Franklin’s half brother, Rosy. Franklin was thus the uncle of an older relative.
*Might there be some connection between mothers following their sons to college and great success? Douglas MacArthur’s mother took a room near West Point and Adlai Stevenson’s mother did the same at Princeton.
*Taddy dropped out of Harvard and married a Hungarian prostitute he met in New York’s Tenderloin district, a disgrace that made headlines while Franklin was a Harvard freshman. He later became an auto mechanic, and left his huge estate to the Salvation Army.