WHATEVER FRANKLIN’S SOCIAL SETBACKS AT HARVARD, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt represented at least a partial solution. They had seen each other as toddlers at Hyde Park and at one family party in New Jersey when Franklin was seventeen and Eleanor fourteen. But in the New York social season of 1903, the fifth cousins once removed were thrown together at a Madison Square Garden horse show. While not a beauty, Eleanor at eighteen was willowy, refined by a European education, and—before her teeth bucked—considerably less homely than later photographs reflected. Franklin, age twenty-one and a Harvard senior, fell hard; his letters to his “angel” sound genuinely passionate.
Seemingly shy and docile, Eleanor had more to offer on closer inspection. Like Franklin, she felt slightly awkward in the easy social whirl of their set but could laugh about it when talking with Franklin one-to-one. She felt secure with him, and he appreciated her intelligence—rare for suitors of the time, who were usually satisfied with charm and social position in a woman. Eleanor’s commitment to social justice opened new worlds to him and softened some of his self-satisfaction. She worked with poor Jewish immigrants at a settlement house on the Lower East Side, where FDR was shaken after climbing the stairs of a tenement to a cold-water flat. “He kept saying he could not believe human beings really lived that way,” Eleanor later recalled.
He may well have been in love, but her relationship to her uncle certainly didn’t hurt. Eleanor’s proximity to power must have served as an aphrodisiac for Franklin, who treasured an invitation from her to dine at the White House. After all, President Theodore Roosevelt was the most exciting thing to happen in public life in a generation and Eleanor was his favorite niece. The Hyde Park Roosevelts were distant relations, and all through college Franklin had his nose pressed up against the glass. This caused some tension with his mother. “Please don’t make any more arrangements for my future happiness,” he wrote Sara tartly after she declined an invitation he received for a party at Oyster Bay without telling him—an attitude quite at odds with his “mama’s boy” reputation.
When Franklin informed his mother of the engagement on Thanksgiving Day, 1903, she was dumbfounded: Franklin had kept the couple’s intention to marry a secret for many months, reflecting an instinct for deception not just on little things but on important matters involving people he loved. This was no small achievement. Sensing how hurt his mother must be, he wrote her: “I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest—And for you, dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have always been and always will be to each other.” Here Franklin, sensing that Sara and Eleanor would now begin competing for him, indicated that he would allow neither a total victory.
To the extent that marriage is a rational decision, Eleanor was a highly pragmatic choice. Rather than giving up his independence by getting married, Franklin figured he would be gaining it. Whatever Sara’s misgivings, he knew she couldn’t openly object, couldn’t yank back his “freedom” as if he were a five-year-old again. After all, Eleanor was from the right family and solicitous of Sara (whose Delano family offered a “sense of security I had never known before,” Eleanor wrote). On paper, anyway, the good feelings were reciprocated. In her letters to Eleanor and Franklin, Sara was loving toward “the children,” as she would refer to them for several years thereafter.
But after Franklin’s intentions were clear, a subtle battle of wills developed between mother and son. Sara wanted to see Franklin alone at Hyde Park instead of letting him spend more time with Eleanor. In chatty letters, Franklin mastered the art of seeming good-natured and vaguely agreeable toward “Mama” while doing as he pleased, a trait he would use to great effect in politics.
Sara tried to fight back by arguing that, at twenty-one and eighteen, they were too young. She convinced them to delay the announcement of the engagement for a full year, then began scheming to break it off by winning a job for Franklin in the U.S. Embassy in London. But he was too young for the post. Instead, he enrolled in Columbia Law School, where he proceeded to flunk two courses.
Franklin and Eleanor were married the following St. Patrick’s Day, 1905, at a friend’s home in Manhattan, with the president of the United States giving away his niece. For one awful moment, the couple recalled, they stood entirely alone, ignored at their own wedding, as the crowd abandoned the bride and groom to hover around the president. TR famously insisted on being “the groom at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral,” as one relative put it, and this event was no exception.
Franklin’s ego was a bit bruised by the experience. Moreover, he was struck by the fact that everyone congratulated him for winning Eleanor, but not Eleanor for winning him. From then on, he resolved to break the social tradition in his circle against congratulating brides, and he did so, effusively, at every wedding he attended thereafter. Later, he came to dislike other social and political traditions he considered “silly” and delighted in breaking them, too.
Franklin’s resolve to “never change” his relationship with his mother was itself a major decision, as any man caught between his wife and mother knows. It meant that Eleanor would never become the most important woman in his life. For all of the indispensable practical help she provided him in politics, Eleanor was not Franklin’s emotional rock. There is little evidence that she fueled his ambition or bolstered his self-confidence. That would remain Sara’s psychic role, which she conveniently performed from the adjoining town houses (with a doorway connecting the fourth-floor bedrooms) that she built for herself and Franklin and Eleanor on East Sixty-fifth Street in New York.
All told, Franklin and Eleanor had six children between 1906 and 1916. A daughter, Anna, and son, James, came first. In 1909, their third child, Franklin Junior, developed a heart ailment. When he was failing to thrive, his parents left him for a time in the care of his grandmother at Hyde Park, where it was thought the autumn air would help him. It didn’t. Franklin Junior died at seven months and this apparently contributed to some of the bitterness between Eleanor and Sara. Eleanor sank into a deep depression. The trauma also caused her to question her own abilities as a mother when a doctor cruelly suggested that perhaps the infant might have lived had he been breast-fed. Eleanor bore three more sons—Elliott, a second Franklin Junior and John—but in the years that followed, she increasingly sacrificed child rearing in favor of fulfilling political and social activities.
On the surface, Eleanor maintained a pleasant correspondence with her mother-in-law, but much later, after Sara’s death, she lashed back at her. “She [Sara] determined to bend [our] marriage to the way she wanted it to be. What she wanted was to hold on to Franklin and his children,” Eleanor wrote in an article she decided not to publish. “She wanted them to grow as she wished. As it turned out, Franklin’s children were more my mother-in-law’s children than they were mine.”
But Sara was only secondarily at fault for moving in next door or using her money to enforce her family decisions or otherwise making her daughter-in-law feel like a stranger in her own home. That was principally the responsibility of Franklin Roosevelt. It was FDR who let his mother pay his bills until the end of her life; who let her sit at the other head of the table, with Eleanor and the children in the middle; who thought nothing at age fifty-five of allowing his mother to write a thank-you note for a scarf sent to her son the president.
He deferred to his mother again and again, mostly because it was easier for him that way. “He lived in an atmosphere almost totally devoid of conflict,” John Gunther later wrote. “Perhaps that gave him his confidence in later life, and perhaps, too, it might have contributed to his touchiness and sensitivity to criticism.”
It was Franklin who arranged to keep the atmosphere conflict-free, at least on the surface. That made him, finally, responsible for his own self-confidence and ease. For all of his great advantages in life, he would make his own world. Just as his mother told him.