FOR MONTHS ELLIOTT BROODED, AND CAST ABOUT FOR cures, relying on Dr. Lusk, who offered sage advice but little practical help. Elliott wanted to return to Europe with his family and he hoped Bye would join them in a trip that would be diverting and healing. Anna remained encouraging and faithful, but grew increasingly remote. Seeking to escape his wild, abusive behavior, as well as his self-pity and remorse, she spent time with her own friends, kept her own counsel, and became more and more emotionally withdrawn. Nobody was allowed to see her suffering. She asked no advice, sought no expert opinion. Her sisters, except for Tissie, were too young to go to for support, and Tissie was preoccupied with her new husband, Stanley Mortimer, and their new home. Her mother was increasingly concerned, and generally distraught. But there was little that she could say, really nothing she could do. Anna was on her own, and she clung desperately to a misplaced faith in Elliott’s judgment.
ON 30 APRIL 1890, TR WROTE HIS SISTER BYE, WHO REMAINED close to Elliott’s struggle. Theodore was in Washington and for months had had virtually no direct contact with his brother but was nonetheless eager to exercise some control over the situation.
I have been very glad to get both your recent letters; you are very good to keep us so constantly informed. Yesterday I received a perfectly ordinary letter from poor old Nell himself, it made me feel dreadfully to read it. In response I put in a line or two of …advice as I knew how; but of course it will do no good. He must leave that fool Lusk and put himself completely in the hands of some first rate man of decision …and unless he goes to a retreat he ought to be sent on some long trip, preferably by sea, with a doctor as companion. Anna, sweet though she is, is an impossible person to deal with. Her utterly frivolous life has, as was inevitable, eaten into her character like an acid. She does not realize and feel as other women would in her place. San Moritz would be in my opinion madness; he must get away [from the] club and social life. For you to go to Europe with them, under their guidance, would in my opinion be simple folly. Somebody must guide them; merely to follow them round would be nothing….
TR wanted dramatic action to be taken. “Half measures simply put off the day, make the case more hopeless, and render the chance of public scandal greater….” There is little in TR’s letters at this time to indicate any real concern for Elliott, for his health, his well-being, his emotional needs or those of his family. He expressed only a vague contempt for Anna, who seemed so long-suffering, so “Chinese” in her “moral and mental” stand, which was beside and in support of her husband.
As during his adolescent trips west and his hunting voyage to India, Elliott imagined he might again escape and prove himself worthy in exile. The Elliott Roosevelts left for Germany during the summer of 1890. Their last days in New York were tense and bitter. Elliott felt abused and rejected by everyone in his family except Bye. On 21 July 1890, Elliott wrote his sister from Berlin: “For Bye only/Dearest old Bye, Your sweet note to me and your letter to Anna have both been received. You were very good to us as you always are…. Continue it all to her, our noble beautiful Anna. But I am not going to speak of this all again even to you. I am too sad & need no friends.”
They did not stay in Germany long, continuing on to Italy, where Eleanor Roosevelt remembered “my father acting as a gondolier, taking me out on the Venice canals, singing with the other boatmen, to my intense joy.” ER loved her father’s voice, and, “above all, I loved the way he treated me. He called me ‘Little Nell’ after the Little Nell in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop…. Later he made me read the book, but at that time I only knew it was a term of affection, and I never doubted that I stood first in his heart.”
Indeed, Elliott wrote proudly to “Dear Anna’s Mother”: “Eleanor is so sweet and good [with her younger brother] and really is learning to read and write for love of its making it possible to tell him stories….” Together, Elliott and little Eleanor adored “the lovely music on the Canal in decorated Gondolas…, the delight that Eleanor and I have taken in the Lido Shore, wandering up and down looking over the blue Adriatic watching the gray surf and catching little funny crabs.” But, he told his mother-in-law, “I am not, I fear, particularly well….”
ELLIOTT HAD IN FACT BECOME IRASCIBLE, DEMANDING, thoughtless, and even cruel. He stormed and raged, then wept uncontrollably. Though his little daughter was generally protected from his most obnoxious outbursts, she did recall one unhappy incident, for which she blamed herself:
“I was given a donkey and a donkey boy so I could ride over the beautiful roads. One day the others overtook me and offered to let me go with them, but at the first steep descent which they slid down I turned pale, and preferred to stay on the high road. I can remember still the tone of disapproval in [my father’s] voice.” “I never knew you were a coward,” he said to the five-year-old Eleanor, then he galloped ahead and left his daughter alone to ponder her failure.
All the way back, she contemplated her father’s anger, and the fact that fear had caused her to disappoint him. It seemed never to occur to her, even years later, that her father’s expectation had been unreasonable, and his impatience cruel. Evidently he did not pause to consider his daughter’s hesitation at the steep height, so reminiscent of the dreadful day their ship sank three years before when Eleanor was dropped into the lurching lifeboat. ER recalled only that she had to conquer fear.
After Italy, the family returned to Austria, where Elliott entered a sanitarium at Graz for a cure. From there they went on to France, and another spa. Their travels and their tastes were expensive, and no treatment seemed effective. They spent over $1,200 a month, which exceeded Elliott’s trust income, and they began to invade the family capital. In France, Anna began to prepare for the birth of her third child.
During much of this time, Anna remained outwardly optimistic. Often alone with her children, she struggled to provide a stable and entertaining environment. But her imaginative powers and her faith began to waver as Elliott’s spirits grew more chaotic. By October, his depression had become overpowering, and finally, at Innsbruck, he seemed suicidal. In desperation, Anna turned to Bye for help:
Elliott has been a perfect angel since he left Arles & he never tried to take anything more which I think shows how very much better he is & how much more control over himself. But Bamie I have never been so worried about him as for the past week he is settled into a melancholy from which nothing moves him…. He says you and Uncle Jimmy both told him he has irretrievably disgraced himself, which he knows you think true, so he says he cannot go home, & there is no future for him, besides which he feels that as long as he stays with us, he injures the children & myself. I was so worried I stayed another three nights fearing his mind would flee away. Yet he is as well in every way as you & I. He is the saddest object I have ever seen & so good & penitent. Ask Theodore to write him praising him for keeping straight & pulling himself together & you write me in the same vein. I am afraid he might suspect my telling you if you both write him. He also believes there is something dreadful awaiting us in the near future.
Elliott’s fear of “something dreadful awaiting us” was more than prescient. Just at this time, a servant named Katy Mann, who had been employed by Anna, took legal steps to claim that she was now pregnant with Elliott’s child. Evidently Katy Mann and Anna were to deliver their babies at about the same time. At first TR refused to believe Katy Mann’s charges, and was profoundly relieved when Elliott denied the story absolutely. Still, TR feared the consequences of his brother’s alcoholism, and he wanted him confined. If there was any hint of relapse, “he must go into an asylum. It is both wrong and foolish for Anna to go on living with him, and having the children with him, while he is in such a state, for he is then either insane and should be confined, or else not insane, and therefore acting with vicious and criminal selfishness.”
Matters worsened when Katy Mann’s charges intensified. TR wrote to Bye, who was with Anna in Paris. “Did Douglas write you that the woman claims to have a locket and some letters of Elliott’s? Of course she is lying. Wynkoop is going to try to get at the truth. Whether she will make a public scandal or not no one can tell….”
When Katy Mann responded to Elliott’s denial by threatening to go to court and create a public scandal, TR again wrote to Bye that the family—Douglas Robinson and Uncle Gracie in particular—wanted to offer a settlement. Having seen Katy Mann, they agreed that $3,000 or $4,000 should be “allowed,” for “the support of the child.” TR was told that in any suit of this sort the jury sympathizes with the woman “if she can make out at all a plausible case. The character of the man is taken much into account. If it can be shown that he was apt to get drunk, or to be under the influence of opiates, or to go out of his head and become irresponsible, it would tell heavily against him….” Moreover:
Katy Mann says she can prove the other servants chaffed her about his being devoted to her, and asked her once if they had not heard his voice in her room….
Elliott must consider whether he is fit to go on a witness stand and be examined as to his whole way of living—his habits…. You know what every one who knows him would have to testify to on these points; the more intimate they were with him, the more they loved him, the worse it would be….
TR agreed it would be better for Elliott to pay a “moderate sum than have his reputation shredded in court. Is it not better to be blackmailed than to have blazoned to the world the way he has been acting…?” But he wrote Bye that if after talking with Elliott she were certain that he told the truth “and wish us to push the defense until the last gasp we will do it, public scandal or no public scandal.”
In March, Elliott agreed to return to Graz for another effort at a cure. Anna and Bye and the children accompanied him. He also agreed to negotiate a settlement with Katy Mann, although he quibbled about the amount. Whereas at first he had denied that he had had sex with her, he now maintained that it might have happened but he had no memory of it.
ON 13 MARCH 1891, BYE WROTE TO TR FROM GRAZ THAT Elliott’s health was somewhat restored. He rode on horseback virtually every afternoon, while she and Anna and the children took sleigh rides through the snow. They tried earnestly to enjoy what life offered, the budding springtime just barely greening, with primrose and laurel in great profusion. No matter the weather and the recreations, their lives were in a shambles.
As for his drinking, “Elliott has kept perfectly straight,” Bye wrote Edith. But he “is as utterly impossible in every other way as usual which naturally leaves me with no confidence as to what he will do when not in this very quiet spot—it apparently never occurs to his mind for one instant that he is in any way responsible for anything he does, or, for what he brings on Anna….”
Though Anna was only two months from delivering, Elliott had refused to consult with her regarding the travel plans he made, and refused to stop to allow her to rest during the long journey from Vienna to Paris. Indeed, “he was perfectly furious the whole day because the doctor told him Anna must break the journey at least three perhaps four times…. He said it was all ‘Poppycock’ and they could go right through it was so much trouble stopping with children. And so it goes all the time.”
Nonetheless, Bye assured Edith that Eleanor seemed content. “Anna gives Eleanor writing lessons daily & she has a French governess in the morning—so she is being tutored….”
TR now believed Katy Mann’s story and decided that Anna and the children must be made to leave Elliott. He condemned Elliott as a “flagrant man-swine” who had abandoned all claims to decency and honor. On 20 March, Theodore sent Bye an outraged diatribe. Elliott belonged in an asylum. For Anna to remain with him was “little short of criminal.” She ought not to have any more children and those she had should be brought up away from him. “Of course he was insane when he did it; but Anna has no right to live with him henceforth.”
On 10 May, TR wrote again. In a letter full of civil-service reform, Washington politics, and his own interests and pleasures, he reported: “Douglas is in much apprehension….” Katy Mann would not be easily bought off: “there seems a strong likelihood of an ugly scandal.” TR mused, “If only [Elliott] could have lived quietly at Oyster Bay! I suppose such a plan would come too late now; and the same with life in the west.”
As the tension over the Katy Mann affair mounted, Elliott became more depressed, and spoke of suicide. Anna and Bye left him in Graz and moved to a small house in Neuilly, near Paris, to await the birth of the new baby. Though filled with confusion, anguish, and fear, Anna tried to appear serene.
In hopes of protecting Eleanor from the bitter emotions that filled the household, she decided to send her daughter to a nearby convent school. During the carriage ride to the convent, Anna, worried about her children’s future, turned to Eleanor, and gave her a long, thoughtful gaze that ER always remembered. Eleanor, not yet six, was tall for her age and suffered the fate of most prematurely tall children, who are spoken to too candidly by adults who forget how very young, needful, and vulnerable they still are. Anna took this occasion, when Eleanor was already feeling wretched about her banishment from home, to speak to her of her appearance. Although ER was an appealing child with regular features and positively lovely blue eyes, a full mouth that was not yet marked by protruding teeth, and rather glorious thick long blond hair, her mother saw only that she was not beautiful in the Hall tradition. ER looked like a Roosevelt. After careful scrutiny, Anna told her daughter: “You have no looks, so see to it that you have manners.”
Eleanor was miserable at the convent school. She felt abandoned, and like her father somehow in disgrace for unnamed crimes she could not describe, unjustly treated, and entirely forlorn.
Of her agony she wrote only: “The house [in Neuilly] was small, so it was decided to put me in a convent to learn French, and to have me out of the way when the baby arrived. In those days children were expected to believe that babies dropped from Heaven….”
From the depths of her exile ER longed for attention, warmth, and love. One day, she contrived to be noticed: “Finally, I fell a prey to temptation. One of the girls swallowed a penny. The excitement was great, every attention was given her, she was the center of everybody’s interest. I longed to be in her place.” Eleanor went to one of the sisters and told her that she too “had swallowed a penny.” Although the nuns doubted her story, little Eleanor insisted it was true.
I could not be shaken, so they sent for my mother…. She took me away in disgrace. Understanding as I do now my mother’s character, I realize how terrible it must have seemed to her to have a child who would lie!
I finally confessed to my mother, but never could explain my motives. I suppose I did not really understand them then, and certainly my mother did not understand them….
My father had come home for the baby’s arrival, and I am sorry to say he was causing my mother and his sister a great deal of anxiety—but he was the only person who did not treat me as a criminal!
Meanwhile, Anna had ceased to be able to protect Elliott from his family’s wrath. TR insisted that Elliott be put away. Nor was she any longer able to protect herself or Elliott from the ravages of his disease. Now he disappeared for days at a time, only to return even more depressed, apologetic, repentant.
Every day brought new details, and each day was worse than the day before. During his wife’s confinement, Elliott evidently began an affair with a well-traveled and sophisticated American woman, the mother of two children, Florence Bagley Sherman. Although Anna did not know of this relationship, she was undone by his new behavior, his oddly secretive ways, his unconscionable and ever more frequent disappearances.
Elliott’s letters during these dreadful weeks were written mostly to his mother-in-law. They were rhapsodies of an idyllic time: He and Anna walked each morning in the beautiful park of the chǎteau. The weather was lovely, and they “read for two hours at a time while the children play.” Eleanor was sent to the local school in the mornings, but joined them each afternoon and was pleased to feed the fishes and the ducks. “Sometimes in the afternoon Anna and I drive a jolly little pair of ponies we found at a Livery Stable down along the banks of the Seine or through the grand old forest.”
Elliott looked forward to their return to Paris, and concluded: “Mother dear I will take good care of your sweet Daughter own darling Anna you may be sure that no accident shall come to her from fault of mine. She is my only friend my precious Wife. The children are so happy and little Boy gets more enchanting every day. Eleanor too I think. Give my love to all….” After the birth of his son Gracie Hall, on 2 June 1891, he wrote, “Dear Mother, all is over and Anna our darling girl is well & the Boy is the biggest thing you ever saw and kissed me like a little bird the first hour of his life…. Her pains and all did not take three hours…. Bamie was very sweet & the doctor a wonder. The little wife looks so sweet & well. Good bye Mother …Try to love and trust your devoted son in law….”
FOR ANTIDOTE TO ELLIOTT’S EFFERVESCENCE, TR HAD THE benefit of Bye’s candid accounts and wrote to her on 7 June:
My own dearest sister, the strain under which you are living is like a hideous nightmare even to hear about. Your last letter in which you describe Anna’s hysterical attack due to Elliott’s violence, is the most frightening of all. His curious callousness and selfishness, his disregard of your words and my letters, and his light-heartedness under them, make one feel hopeless about him.
TR was adamant: Immediately after Anna’s confinement, the family would isolate and institutionalize Elliott. Anna had to be persuaded that the situation was hopeless. Her continued faith in Elliott’s ability to recuperate was madness. TR considered it “both maudlin and criminal—I am choosing my words with scientific exactness—to continue living with Elliott….
“Make up your mind to one dreadful scene,” he wrote Bye. “Tell him he is either responsible or irresponsible. If irresponsible then he must go where he can be cured; if responsible he is simply a selfish, brutal and vicious criminal…. If you need me telegraph for me…. But remember I come on but one condition. I come to settle the thing once for all. I come to see that Elliott is either put in an asylum, against his will or not, or else to take you, Anna and the children away and to turn Elliott loose to shift for himself. You can tell him that Anna has a perfect right to a divorce; she—or you and I—have but to express belief in the Katy Mann story….”
As soon as Anna was ready to travel, she, Bye, and the three young children sailed for home. Elliott was left in the asylum at Chǎteau Suresnes, near Paris, where he had been before Hall’s birth. Their departure was marked by bitterness and resentment on both sides. Elliott later protested that he had been “kidnapped.” The rest of that summer of 1891 was devoted to legal details regarding the Katy Mann settlement, * and the legal effort to have Elliott declared incompetent and insane.
TR was now unrelenting. He considered his brother “a maniac, morally no less than mentally.” Nobody owed him the least consideration. He must be abandoned, discarded. The only consideration was now the safety of Anna and the children. TR worried that Elliott would “try to kidnap” them. He dreaded also “to think of the inheritance the poor little baby may have in him.” And he wanted Anna to get a divorce. Any other decision would be “criminal.” The family had hired an expert on likenesses, who saw Katy Mann’s baby and had to conclude that “K.M.’s story is true….” TR was outraged “that Anna should have been so foolish as to insist on Elliott’s being sent for when her baby was being born….” But Anna continued to believe that Elliott was curable and refused to get a divorce.
Elliott’s capacity for self-delusion also remained endless. Even though he suffered delirium tremens, and was emotionally and physically ravaged, he wrote TR a letter that “dumbfounded” his brother. There was no mention of the bitterness surrounding Anna’s departure, or of his wild threats to end all support for his wife and children should they leave. He wrote merely to criticize Bye for being “under the Doctor’s thumb.”
Elliott’s financial threats caused TR to demand a lawsuit that would declare Elliott “incapable of taking care of his property.” The effort to declare Elliott incompetent and insane divided the family and shattered their spirits. It coincided with a serious economic crisis, which wrecked TR’s finances during the recession of 1891–92. The recession culminated in the panic of 1893, which also blasted many of Elliott’s holdings. TR’s own economic situation during 1892–93 was so dire that he contemplated the sale of his beloved home on Sagamore Hill above Oyster Bay and feared for the future of his political career. Paper money had become so tight that Edith Roosevelt paid the servants in gold. She also feared that her extravagant household management had contributed to the problem, and decided to compensate by making her own tooth powder out of “ground-up cuttlefish bones, dragon’s blood, burnt alum, arris root,” and fragrances.
Throughout this entire period, Anna struggled desperately against medical advice, TR’s bullying, and what must have been her own doubts to persuade his family that Elliott was curable. She stood virtually alone in her effort to find an alternative and loving approach to Elliott’s treatment. Only when Elliott became uncontrollable and vindictive, did she agree to leave him in the Chǎteau Suresnes, and consent to TR’s suit to establish a trust that would protect her children’s financial interests. But she continued to hope for Elliott’s recovery, and to worry about his peace of mind. All the legal confusion, the clashes between Elliott’s representatives and Theodore’s, were “awful, & very bad for E.” The tension was so great that she had chronic headaches and even began to shout. She apologized to Bye for one such outburst: “I am awfully sorry I lost my temper & think I must be unbearable & very irritating at present to everyone.”
Anna had become completely reliant on Bye’s opinion, and was now unsure of her ability to deal with Elliott. She no longer knew how to answer Elliott’s letters, and sent her replies first to Bye for advice and scrutiny. If Bye approved them, they were mailed. Anna tried to write Elliott only affectionate sentiments, but even these were sometimes met with baseless rantings, dastardly screeds. “His letter is certainly that of a mad man. First he flings the most abominable charges against me [including marital infidelity—he even demanded to know if baby Hall was really his child]. Then says I am a Noble Woman & he trusts me entirely. What do you think I ought to do. Ask Corinne and Douglas.” She could demand that he write to retract each word or “I would try & prove him a dangerous lunatic. And yet his letter is so hopelessly sad & I long to help him, not to make him suffer more. And yet I feel I ought not on his account pass this over again….”
AND THERE WERE SO MANY OTHER PROBLEMS. FOR INSTANCE, “I am afraid the wet nurse is giving out.” Above all there was the dreadful press coverage. On 18 August the New York Herald announced:
ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT DEMENTED BY EXCESSES.
Wrecked by Liquor and Folly, He is Now Confined
in an Asylum for the Insane near Paris
Proceedings to Save the Estate
Commissioners in Lunacy Appointed on Petition of his Brother
Theodore and His Sister Anna
with his Wife’s Approval
The headlines screamed her shame, ravaged her family’s honor, ruined all hope for privacy. To suffer so in public was simply unbearable. And still she tried to protect Elliott: “I have tried to write Elliott as though I had not seen [the newspaper stories]. Do you think this deceitful? Not right?…”
Elliott struggled to salvage his reputation. On 21 August, his letter to the editor in the European edition of the Herald, was reprinted in the New York paper, denying that he was the subject of proceedings:
You publish in your edition today a most astounding bit of misinformation under the title “Is Mr. Elliott Roosevelt To Be Adjudged A Lunatic?” I wish emphatically to state that my brother Theodore is taking no steps to have a commission pass on my sanity with or without my wife’s approval. I am in Paris taking the cure at an establissement hydrothérapeutique, which my nerves shaken by several severe accidents in the hunting field, made necessary. My wife went home at my request to spend the summer with her mother, Paris not being a good place for children during the hot months. I hope you will give this letter as great prominence as you today gave the invention—or worse—of your misinformant.
Elliott Roosevelt
Paris, 18 August 1891
When his Uncle Jimmie Gracie read his letter in the newspaper, he tried to derail the suit. Although TR remained unwavering, the effort to declare Elliott insane was eventually suspended by quarrels within the family and disagreement among the doctors. Anna had always been less than enthusiastic, and TR could not sustain a public scandal that now lacked even the appearance of family unity.
Weighed down by what TR called “a nightmare of horror,” Anna nevertheless made every effort to provide her children a normal and active life. She resumed her social activities, and her charity work. In November, she moved into a new and more comfortable house at 54 East 61st Street. A change of scene, the chance to furnish a new home and resettle, seemed a pleasant diversion. She was closer to Bye’s home at 62nd Street and Madison Avenue. Publicly she behaved as if her circumstances were ordinary. But she was frequently depressed, and often took to her bed with excruciating headaches. They were the kind of migraines that ate up her days, and her spirit.
Eleanor recalled that we “lived that winter without my father.” She had whooping cough, and a series of colds, as she evidently did each winter; but she was allowed to study with the children of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland Dodge, “so time did not hang altogether heavy on my hands.” Above all, Eleanor felt closer to her mother during that winter than ever before. She sensed that her mother needed her, and wanted her close by. For the first time she felt useful and worthy in her mother’s eyes. Eleanor wrote in her memoirs:
I slept in my mother’s room, and remember well the thrill of watching her dress to go out in the evenings. She looked so beautiful, I was grateful to be allowed to touch her dress or her jewels or anything that was part of the vision which I admired inordinately.
My mother suffered from very bad headaches, and I know now that life must have been hard and bitter and a very great strain on her. I would often sit at the head of her bed and stroke her head. People have since told me that I have good hands for rubbing, and perhaps even as a child there was something soothing in my touch, for she was willing to let me sit there for hours on end.
As with all children, the feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.
These moments of intimacy were important to Eleanor. They were the only loving moments with her mother she remembered. The “hours on end” she spent rubbing her mother’s headache away did not pass entirely in silence. Did Anna tell Eleanor nothing of her feelings or their origins? The adult Eleanor tells us only:
Sometimes I woke up when my mother and her sisters were talking at bed time, and many a conversation which was not meant for my ears was listened to with great avidity.
I acquired a strange and garbled idea of the troubles which were going on around me. Something was wrong with my father, and from my point of view nothing could be wrong with him.
One day at Tivoli, while Eleanor was visiting her Great-Aunt Elizabeth Ludlow, “whose house was next to ours but nearer the river and quite out of sight,” Mrs. Ludlow discovered to her dismay that her seven-year-old great-niece could not read at all. “The very next day and every day thereafter that summer she sent her companion to give me lessons in reading, and then she found out that I could not sew and could not cook and knew none of the things a girl should know!” The tutor her aunt sent over was an Alsatian martinet named Madeleine—stern, unsmiling, and impatient; ER hated her for years. She did, however, teach Eleanor to sew and to read, but never to cook. Every morning, Eleanor repeated to her mother whatever verse in the Old or New Testament she had read and memorized the day before.
ER surmised that her “mother was roundly taken to task” for her daughter’s prolonged illiteracy, but she diligently made up for it. Anna monitored her daughter’s lessons for hours each day, corrected her spelling, supervised her reading, and read aloud to her three children every afternoon.
Anna also created a schoolroom on the third floor of her new home, where Eleanor and several children of Anna’s closest friends would be systematically tutored. She hired Frederic Roser and his assistant Miss Tomes, who were highly regarded by fashionable society as perfect educators. Steeped in Social Darwinist ethics, devoted to McGuffey’s Readers, Mr. Roser was rigid and formal, pompous and dapper.
Eleanor craved her mother’s approval and sought comfort in her company. But she was continually disappointed. No matter what she did, it was never enough really to please Anna. She remembered instead: “I was always disgracing my mother.” Even during those precious hours Anna devoted each afternoon to her children, Eleanor always felt a “curious barrier between myself and these three”—her mother and two baby brothers. “Little Ellie …was so good he never had to be reproved,” and baby Hall “was too small to do anything but sit upon her lap contentedly.” Eleanor acknowledged that her mother “made a great effort for me, she would read to me and have me read to her, she would have me recite my poems, she would keep me after the boys had gone to bed, and still I can remember standing in the door, very often with my finger in my mouth—which was, of course, forbidden—and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said: ‘Come in, Granny.’”
Anna’s disapproval of her daughter’s solemnity reflected her own unwillingness to give in to the grave emotions that devastated her heart. Anna turned aside and rejected the feelings Eleanor’s eyes revealed. Every time Eleanor thought back to her mother, she remembered her glib dismissal: “‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her “Granny.”’ “Eleanor “wanted to sink through the floor in shame.”
Anna Hall Roosevelt wanted life to go on. Profoundly alone, she was neither a widow nor a divorcee. She agonized over whether to go to balls, to remain active and social. She confided to Bye: “It is an awful temptation when one feels desperately lonely and wildly furious with the world at large, not to make up one’s mind to pay no attention to criticism as long as one does no wrong and to try to get some fun out of the few years of our youth. I hate everything and everyone so and am most of the time so miserable that I feel anything one could do would be a comfort to forget for one moment.” She wanted to do what was correct and caring, but the situation was out of hand. She tried to ignore her feelings, and dance through the night. But every day little Eleanor’s gaze betrayed Anna’s loneliness and desperation.
Moreover, Eleanor was an independent and willful child. Since Anna never took her into her confidence, she created a life of her own. Eleanor understood only that her home was a battlefield. Mother and daughter might have been allies, but Anna’s silence discouraged that, and so she became the enemy. Too obedient to be a brat, and too quiet to be much fun, Eleanor sulked, pouted, studied the situation, and seemed to know all. She looked accusingly at Anna. She blamed her mother for her father’s disappearance, and for all her unhappiness. The adult Eleanor always believed that it would have been better if her mother had told her more: “If people only realized what a war goes on in a child’s mind and heart in a situation of this kind, I think they would try to explain more than they do, but nobody told me anything.”
Anna sought instead to protect her children. She had no intention of turning her daughter away from Elliott, of betraying the unquestioning devotion Eleanor felt for her father. It might have been easier for Anna if she had. But, with enormous self-control, even as those clear blue eyes gazed at her with such hatred and misunderstanding, even as they reflected her own pain and suffering, Anna said nothing.
Over time, Eleanor went from solemnity to sullenness; she became stubborn and spiteful. One day, during class, when Anna and several other mothers were present, Mr. Roser called on Eleanor to spell the simplest words, words she knew. She stood to answer but was overcome by a strange sensation that silenced her. She stood there in agony, the room heavy with anxiety and shame, until she was asked to sit down. Her mother took her aside and whispered severely in her ear that she feared to think “what would happen if I did not mend my ways!”
Eleanor did things her mother forbade her to do. She put sugar on her cereal, lied about her behavior, stole candy meant for dinner guests by the entire bagful out of the pantry. When her mother tried to get her to parties with other children, she resisted and burst into wild sobbing. On several occasions, she had utterly unbecoming and embarrassing tantrums in public. As an adult, Eleanor wrote: “I now realize I was a great trial to my mother.”
But her mother had far greater trials to endure. During Elliott’s stay at Chǎteau Suresnes, with his wife and children back in New York, his liaison with Mrs. Sherman deepened. From September 1891 to January 1892, all negotiations regarding Elliott were on hold.
TR wrote to Bye on 2 September: “I fear that Elliott when he comes out would repudiate any agreement, and bring a suit for conspiracy….” Coincidentally, TR went on a hunting excursion in October and “killed nine elk in four weeks.” At the same time the murder of two U.S. sailors in Valparaiso made him lust for a preventive war against Chile. He was disgusted when the United States asked merely for an apology. President McKinley’s Secretary of State John Hay wrote to their mutual friend Henry Adams that “Teddy Roosevelt …goes about hissing through his clenched teeth that we are dishonest. For two nickels he would declare war himself, shut up the Civil Service Commission, and wage it sole.”
Spoiling for a fight, on 9 January 1892, TR sailed for France to confront Elliott face to face. After a week of browbeating, moral rectitude, specific threats, and familial blandishments, TR persuaded his brother to create a trust fund for his wife and children, and to return to the United States, where he would be confined in a treatment center for a year, and then prove himself worthy by a period of two or three years’ probation marked by meaningful work. During that time he would live alone, apart from his family. One can only imagine the scene. Day after day, hours and hours on end: What would Father think of you? Consider your dear sainted mother. You bring disgrace and disaster upon the entire family. Your wife. Your children. Our good name.
On 21 January, TR wrote Bye: “Won! Thank Heaven I came over….”
Once Elliott agreed, he seemed “absolutely changed.” He “surrendered completely, and was utterly broken, submissive and repentant. He signed the deed for two-thirds of all his property (including the $60,000 trust); and agreed to the probation. I then instantly changed my whole manner, and treated him with the utmost love and tenderness. I told him we would do all we legitimately could to help him to get through his two years (or thereabouts) of probation; that our one object now would be to see him entirely restored to himself; and so to his wife and children. He today attempted no justification; he acknowledged how grievously he had sinned; and said he would do all in his power to prove himself really reformed. He was in a mood that was terribly touching. How long it will last of course no one can say.”
On 28 January, Mrs. Sherman wrote in her journal a different version of Elliott’s last days in Paris:
This morning, with his silk hat, his overcoat, gloves and cigar E came to my room to say goodbye. It is all over, only my little black Dick [the dog Elliott had given her], who cries at the door of the empty room and howls in the park, he is all there is left to me. So ends the final and great emotion of my life. “The memory of what has been, and never more shall be” is all the future holds. Now my love was swallowed up in pity—for he looks so bruised so beaten down by the past week with his brother. How could they treat so generous and noble a man as they have. He is more noble a figure in my eyes, with all his confessed faults, than either his wife or brother. She is more to be despised, in her virtuous pride, her absolutely selfish position than the most miserable woman I know. But she is the result of an unintelligent, petty, common timid social life…. If she were only large-souled enough to appreciate him.
At some point during Elliott’s ordeal, he wrote a curiously revealing suicidal story that takes place in Paris and details the last days of an elegant woman, Sophie Vedder, whose life has been lived for pleasure, and entirely wasted. At the end she is penniless, indebted, and lonely, although surrounded by many friends who offer her help, and try to save her. Written in the first-person voice of a woman, “Was Miss Vedder an Adventuress?” presents Elliott’s philosophy of life:
“Live and let live” I say, “Never miss an opportunity of enjoying life, no matter at what cost, and when the end comes, well take it cheerfully. Strauss is going to be played at my funeral, no funeral march for me. Not that I am anxious to die, but I can’t help realizing at times that if such an occurrence should happen, neither the world or myself would lose much by the event….”
Sophie Vedder’s reflections are interrupted by her friends, who try to cheer her; but she is worried about her finances (“wondering how long one’s funds are going to last, takes the edge off of every pleasure in life”), and since she has quarreled with her family she can expect no support from them. Her only chance to survive is to marry old, portly Mr. Johnson. But she remains a woman of principle, and shrinks from a cynical marriage of convenience: “I am a bad, weak woman, and I have committed many sins, but thank God! no one has had to suffer for them but myself.”
In a final conversation with Dick Carrington, Sophie Vedder explains that she has no regrets: “My life has been a gamble, I lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it…. I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler. My life has been a pleasant one and I do not regret having acted as I have done….”
After Dick leaves, Sophie sits down at her dressing table, lights two candles, and looks at herself closely in her silver mirror. She looks “like a queen,” but it is all over. “‘Poor Sophie, what a frivolous, useless thing you were. Still you never did any one any harm but yourself, and now there will be no one to regret you.’ Undoing the leather case she took out a small revolver mounted in silver. ‘How pretty it is’ …A few drops of blood running across her white neck, stained some of the old lace about her throat.”
Elliott’s story was the fantasy of a maudlin romantic, frankly in love with death, and unconcerned with those who would be left behind. Proud, vain, and shallow, he wrote without any hint of remorse or selfdoubt.
When Elliott Roosevelt returned to the United States, he entered the Keeley Center for the treatment of alcoholism, featuring “Dr. Keeley’s Bi-Chloride of Gold cure,” in Dwight, Illinois. But he was soon distraught. Somehow, he had convinced himself that he would have to endure only a three-month probation away from his family. His ongoing exile surprised him, and he wrote to everybody in the angriest terms. He would agree to it if it were Anna’s wish, he said, though he considered it cruel, unwise, unnecessary, “both wicked and foolish.“
TR had persuaded Anna to choose between a long probation and divorce. The plan involved his removal to Abingdon, Virginia, where his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, hired him to scout, claim, and settle the vast and uncharted lands he had purchased in a giant speculative mining tract. Although Elliott really appreciated this position, he dreaded the long months away, and felt publicly disgraced by his exile from his family.
Above all, he wanted to see Anna. But now, for the first time, she refused even to talk to him. Elliott appealed to Bye to intervene. “I do want her to see me as I am. Not as she last saw me, flushed with wine, reckless and unworthy, but an earnest, repentant, self-respecting, gentleman. That is all I wish except for love’s sake to see once more my wife and children after these long weary months. Then I shall go on perfectly quietly and without complaint doing what may please her….”
Desperate to prove himself, Elliott repaid old debts to his sister, and endured without complaint all the agonies of the treatment in Dwight. The other “drunkards” were fine and superior fellows, entirely supportive. “I am on in the third stage of the thing …and it combines all the troubles flesh is heir to…. All together I am about as uncomfortable as I well can be—But it must mean freedom and success at last Bye….”
As Elliott regained his health, he became increasingly clear-eyed about the ordeal that he had put his family through. In a letter to thank Bye for her birthday note and the books she had sent, he wrote: “As I regain my moral and mental balance I am able to appreciate more fully the hideousness of my past actions and I grow stronger daily in my determination to live rightly and do anything required of me by my loved ones…. Try and think lovingly and forgivingly of me….”
Elliott left Dwight in the spring of 1892 for Abingdon. He worked hard, and very quickly made a host of new and supportive friends. Throughout the summer, his correspondence with his family was warm, cordial, optimistic. Anna and the children were on their usual rounds at Tivoli and Bar Harbor. Anna wrote regular letters of encouragement and information, but she was not eager to see Elliott, and her tone was fearful. It was too soon to tell. She wanted and needed a longer respite—her reserve of trust and optimism had run dry. She now feared her husband, his wrath, his depression, his inconstancy. Elliott was astonished and felt meanly rejected. Her fears were “groundless,” he wrote Bye on 12 June. Could she not see how hard he tried? “I signed a deed securing her and the children…. If I had been a bad man does she think this would have been my line of action.”
Elliott wanted it understood that it would have been much easier for him to have “thrown off all obligations” and start over again, alone, unfettered. He could have created a new identity, built an entirely new life “in the west, or in some other country.” His agreement to Anna’s harsh terms—and he believed they were Anna’s terms, not his brother’s—was simply to show “the very powers of self-control and purpose she wishes me to have.”
Elliott’s sense of despondency and discouragement were not misguided. Anna had come to dread his company. Their marriage had been a terrible ordeal for her, and her sympathies were threadbare. She was exhausted, fragile, and unwell. She now wanted Elliott to leave her alone.
An extended period of sobriety might have restored her faith and her love for him, but they had run out of time. In November, Anna had an operation. Under the influence of ether, she spoke more clearly than ever before of her despair. She wanted to be done with the long years of disappointment and suffering. She wanted to die. Her mother and her sisters heard her lament, and resolved to keep Elliott away, as Anna wished. Shortly thereafter, she contracted diphtheria and lapsed into semiconsciousness.
While Anna lay dying, her children were sent out of their new home. Eleanor stayed with her godmother, Cousin Susie Parish, and her brothers stayed with Cousin Susie’s mother, Anna’s Aunt Elizabeth Ludlow. Grandmother Hall left Tivoli to nurse her daughter. And the Roosevelt family’s faithful friend, Bye’s young Scottish escort, Robert Munro Ferguson, now “sat on the stairs outside [Anna’s] room to do any errands that might be asked of him, both day and night.”
Anna’s final struggle coincided with and mocked Elliott’s desperate efforts to prove himself worthy of her. His sister Corinne told Elliott of Anna’s words during her surgery, and repeated to him Mrs. Hall’s remark that “it was the hidden sufferings expressed which she had controlled for so many months.” He wrote daily to Mrs. Hall during the last week of Anna’s life—alternating between being frantic with worry, overwhelmed by guilt and outraged by the family’s refusal to allow him at her bedside.
On 23 November, he wrote: “It is too awful to me to feel I have forfeited the right to be in my proper place…. Oh the misery of my Sin! …I am so relieved though to know that you are in charge…. Is my wife very ill Mrs. Hall? Two trained nurses has such a terrifying sound…. If I should be wanted, in mercy forgive and remember that I am a husband and a Father and your son by adoption—though I have failed in many things…. I have a right in the sight of God to be by my wife’s side in case she should wish me…. Do please trust me….” On 26 November, he said: “Of course I trust you entirely and your words in the telegram ‘do not come’—I take as Anna’s command…. Did she say she wanted to die, that I had made her so utterly miserable that she did not care to live any more—And did you say that was what your poor child had been suffering in silence all these past killing months? How terribly sad—…”
Elliott could not believe that his wife’s refusal to see him represented her real feelings. On the very day of her death, 7 December 1892, he wrote to Mrs. Hall: “I cannot understand what influence can have been brought to bear upon her to make her feel the way she evidently does to me. I have before me two letters she wrote me the day before she had me kidnapped in Paris …and no woman using the terms of endearment she does in them and giving promises of faithful love as she does there could possibly have changed without outside influence being brought to bear…. It is most horrible and full of awe to me that my wife not only does not want me near her in sickness or trouble but fears me….” Elliott protested that he was worthy of Anna’s trust and insisted that he “never did a dishonorable thing, or one cruel act towards my wife or children.” He understood what Mrs. Hall must be going through, and: “If Anna cares for it give her my love….” While he was writing this letter, he was sent for. But that telegram arrived too late.
Eleanor Roosevelt remembered 7 December 1892 very clearly. She was standing by a window when Cousin Susie Parish told her that “my mother was dead. She was very sweet to me, and I must have known that something terrible had happened. Death meant nothing to me, and one fact wiped out everything else—my father was back and I would see him very soon.”
*Katy Mann had asked for $10,000. Whatever settlement was reached, there is now evidence that Katy Mann received no money, and that whatever money was put in trust for her son was presumed “stolen” by the attorneys. On 26 November 1932, Elliott Roosevelt Mann and his mother wrote ER a letter of congratulations on the election results. ER responded: “I was very interested to receive your letter and to learn that you were named after my father…. I shall hope sometime to see both you and your mother.” According to Eleanor Mann Biles, the granddaughter of Katy Mann, no invitation was ever extended, nor was any further correspondence answered. See notes, page 510.