Notes

In the notes I refer to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, as FDRL; Eleanor Roosevelt’s memoir This Is My Story as TIMS; and Elliott Roosevelt’s edition of FDR: His Personal Letters, 4 vols., as Letters.

Introduction

1–2  “Her very presence”: The quotations are from various people around the United States—students and friends, members of ER’s extended family, and critics who prefer to remain anonymous.

An encounter with Eleanor Roosevelt remains one of the most vivid experiences in the lives of many people. Her friends, the general public, relatives, members of the press, people who met her casually or only once have stories to tell. During the decade I researched this book, and wherever I spoke about my research, interested people have given me their memories, their version of Eleanor Roosevelt.

For the quotations above or in the forthcoming Volume Two of this biography, I am particularly grateful to Jane Marcus, who sent me Eleanor Roosevelt jokes, and a sense that every woman in Boston and Cambridge of a certain age and disposition modeled herself on Eleanor Roosevelt; Audre Lorde, whose mother went to business, and managed money, and “carried herself regally, straight and high, and wore Eleanor Roosevelt hats. Eleanor Roosevelt was the only visible positive image for women that existed. Did you ever see Mary McCleod Bethune in the [New York] Daily News?”; and Robin Morgan, Arthur Blaustein, Carolyn Heilbrun, Connie Murray, Marion Harmon, Estelle Linzer, people who chose to remain anonymous, and people whose names are lost, especially the woman ER helped onto the Fifth Avenue bus, who told me the story at the Darlinghissima book party.

3  Many judge her naïve: Some of those who dismissed Eleanor Roosevelt as stupid, silly, and naive turned out to be political women, or daughters of political women, whom ER specifically opposed. In 1985, Elizabeth Thompson (Betty) Babcock (vaguely related to ER through her grandmother, Angelica Livingston Hoyt—Mrs. William Dare Morgan) told me that her mother and her aunts always liked ER but considered her gullible and usable. Among the leading suffragists and reformers of Dutchess County, Betty Babcock’s mother, Geraldine Livingston Morgan Thompson, and her aunts, Margaret Lewis Morgan Norrie and Ruth Morgan, were allied during the early years of the League of Women Voters with ER’s enemies. Indeed, Margaret Norrie and Mary Garrett Hay were the leaders of the group ER opposed. ER instead supported the women who were to become her closest friends: Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read, and Narcissa Vanderlip;. Although ER admired Margaret Norrie’s progressive campaign in behalf of the Sheppard-Towner Act and other causes to protect women and children, and subsequently worked frequently with peace activist Ruth Morgan, they were during the 1920s rivals for power, and represented opposing factions. If Geraldine Thompson and her sisters thought ER naïve because her actions benefited Lape and Vanderlip, it was in part because they did not know the intensity of ER’s primary loyalties—or her willingness to play rough political games.

3  vast FBI file: Eleanor Roosevelt’s FBI file is now open, as a result of the Freedom of Information Act. It consists of more than 3,000 pages, and constitutes a running record of her work in behalf of dignity, decency, and justice, with an emphasis on her opposition to segregation and lynching; fascism in Europe; her support for civil rights, workers’ rights, and unionism; human rights, international peace, and a sane nuclear policy.

5  associate with spirituality: As I contemplated ER’s journey in terms of her spirituality (see Volume Two), I benefited from conversations with Rabbi Marshall Meyer, Honor Moore, Shula Konig, and Dorothy Norman, who began her memoir, Encounters, with the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: “Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous…. It is a direction of the heart.”

5  working in politics: “Good Advice from Mrs. Roosevelt,” Democratic Digest, July 1936, p. 3.

6  her last book: ER, Tomorrow Is Now (Harper & Row, 1963); see esp. ch. 9.

8  “Learning and living”: ER, You Learn by Living (Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 3.

8–9  these new feminists: Esther Lape to Anna Roosevelt Halsted, n.d. [1971], Esther Lape Papers, FDRL.

9  “a …poor teacher”: ER, This Is My Story (Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 108–9 (hereafter TIMS). ER continued insistently to minimize her influence and power in This I Remember (Harper & Brothers, 1948) and On My Own (Harper & Brothers, 1958).

10  “world …split open”: Muriel Rukeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz,” from The Speed of Darkness (1968), in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (McGraw-Hill, 1978), pp. 479–84. See Louise Bernikow, ed., The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552–1950 (Vintage, 1974).

10  caters to her own presentation: See Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (W. W. Norton, 1971), and The Years Alone (W. W. Norton, 1972).

10  “tyrannies and servilities”: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1966 [1938]), p. 142.

11  asexual spinsters: See Blanche Wiesen Cook (hereafter BWC), “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, and Emma Goldman,” Chrysalis, Autumn 1977, reprinted in Linda Kerber and Jane De Hart, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, 1987, 1990).

12  Born in 1884: For the continued imprisonment of ER in a Victorian “cage,” see William H. Chafe, “Biographical Sketch,” in Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 18. For alternative understandings, see especially Ethel Spector Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion (W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 20 (“Love is an act of the imagination. For some of us it will be the great creative triumph of our lives”); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); and Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (W. W. Norton, 1988).

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote frequently and with clarity about love: “It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who live generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.” (“My Day,” 1 April 1939.)

ER also believed that “women know not only what men know, but much that men will never know. For, how many men really know the heart and soul of a woman?” (“My Day,” 6 March 1937).

15  “subject is highly controversial”: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957 [1929]), p. 4.

15–16  In February 1942: ER to Fannie Hurst, Hurst Papers, University of Texas at Austin.

17  Eleanor Roosevelt devoted her life: See A. Glenn Mowrer, The United States, The United Nations, and Human Rights: The Eleanor Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter Eras (Greenwood, 1979); BWC, “Eleanor Roosevelt and Human Rights: The Battle for Peace and Planetary Decency,” in Women and American Foreign Policy, ed. Edward Crapol (Greenwood, 1987); and BWC, “‘Turn Toward Peace’: ER and Foreign Affairs,” in Hoff-Wilson and Lightman, Without Precedent.

17  “consciences grow so tender”: ER, “The Importance of Background Knowledge in Building for the Future,” Annals of the American Academy, July 1946, pp. 9–12.

18  “to save the U.S. from Eleanor Roosevelt”: Eisenhower on ER in The Diary of James Hagerty, ed. Robert Ferrell (Indiana University Press, 1983), 11 Jan. 1954, p. 6.

18  “Where …do …human rights begin”: ER’s 1958 speech, “Challenges in a Changing World,” ER Papers, Box 3058, FDRL.

19  “wonderful to feel free”: ER to reporters as she left for London, 3 Jan. 1946, quoted in Lash, A World of Love: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, 1943–1962 (Doubleday, 1984), p. 209.

19  “never turn one’s back”: ER, Tomorrow Is Now (Harper & Row, 1963); see especially “The Individual and the Revolution,” pp. 119–30.

19  TV commercials: See Thomas L. Stix, “Mrs. Roosevelt Does a TV Commercial,” Harper’s, Nov. 1963, pp. 104–6; and Abram L. Sachar, A Host at Last: Chancellor of Brandeis University (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1976), passim for ER at Brandeis. I am grateful to Eleanor Pram for this reference.

19–20  needs of this planet: “My Day,” 14 Sept. 1962.

20  “honor the word free”: ER, Tomorrow Is Now, p. 138.

1. Ancestry and Heritage

21  “My mother”: All quotations from Eleanor Roosevelt in this section are from This Is My Story (Garden City Publishing, 1937), pp. 1–5ff. See also The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt, a one-volume compendium, recently reprinted (Harper & Row, 1958, 1978; G. K. Hall, 1984, with a new introduction by John Roosevelt Boettiger).

According to Virginia Woolf, “We think back through our mothers if we are women” (A Room of One’s Own [Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929 (1957)], p. 79). See Jane Marcus, “Thinking Back Through Our Mothers,” in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (University of Nebraska Press, 1981), pp. 1–30; and Jane Marcus, Art and Anger (published for Miami University by the Ohio State University Press, 1988).

21–22  “maternal grandmother: Family materials relating to the Halls, Livingstons, and Ludlows are in Eleanor Roosevelt Family Papers at the FDRL. Lorena Hickok’s interview with Eleanor Roosevelt shortly after the election of 1932 took ER’s Livingston connection all the way back to Mary Livingston, “who went to France as Lady-in-Waiting to the beautiful young [Queen] Mary Stuart.” (AP wire, Dec. 1932, Lorena Hickok Papers, FDRL.)

22  after the Civil War: For Ward McAllister in the context of Knickerbocker Society, see Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society? (Harper & Brothers, 1960); for Sarah Van Brugh Livingston (Mrs. John Jay), pp. 114–15.

For issues of society in extended context, see G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Prentice Hall, 1967), and The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (Vintage, 1971); E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America (Vintage, 1966); and Stephen Birmingham, who wrote: “Roosevelts always were and always will be of Real Society” (The Right People: A Portrait of the American Social Establishment [Dell, 1938], p. 10).

23  “My father”: ER on her father’s democratic impulses, Autobiography of ER, pp. 4–5.

ER emphasized her vision of her father’s egalitarianism in several of her writings. When she edited her father’s letters for publication in 1933, she prefaced, for example, a letter of congratulations on her birth from one of Elliott’s servants, Harry Hewitt, his horse trainer at the Meadow Brook Club, by explaining: “I include the following letter because it shows the sympathy which existed between Elliott and many different types of people. He loved people for the fineness that was in them and his friends might be newsboys or millionaires. Their occupations, their possessions, meant nothing to him, only they themselves counted.” (ER, Hunting Big Game in the ‘Eighties [Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933], 15 Oct. 1884, pp. 157–58.)

23–24  a religious zealot: For Valentine Hall’s business and theological interests, see Eleanor Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL; and Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 15.

24  Oak Terrace: I am grateful to Karen Greenberg for a tour of Oak Terrace at Tivoli, and nearby environs.

25  “pining for excitement”: Correspondence between Elliott Roosevelt and Anna Livingston Ludlow Hall are in Eleanor Roosevelt Family Papers, Box 1, FDRL. Elliott Roosevelt’s writings are in Box 5, FDRL, and in the Roosevelt Family Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (hereafter Houghton).

25–26  Oyster Bay branch: For Roosevelt family background I have relied upon Allen Churchill, The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats (Harper & Row, 1965); Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles (Doubleday, 1979); Lash, Eleanor and Franklin; and especially David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, 1981).

27  Cobb County, Georgia: For the removal of the Creek, Cherokee, and other Indians from Georgia lands and its impact on American life, see Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance (University of Oklahoma Press, 1941); BWC, “In Pursuit of Property: The Dispossession of the American Indian,” in BWC et al., Past-Imperfect: Alternative Essays in United States History, vol. 1 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), pp. 195–204; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers & Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), esp. ch. seven; Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New American Library, Meridian, 1980); and Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

28  At Bulloch Hall: Clarisse Martin, The History of Bulloch Hall and Roswell, Georgia (Historic Roswell, Inc., 1973). I am grateful to my colleague Howard Umansky for this reference.

I am also grateful to Darden Asbury Pyron of Florida International University, for sending me the manuscript of his biography of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter (Oxford University Press, 1991); and several out-takes, including his description of Margaret Mitchell’s interview with the last surviving bridesmaid in the Bulloch-Roosevelt wedding party at Bulloch Hall. Mrs. William Baker particularly emphasized the vast quantities of food served: There was baked ham, “shaved so thin it curled like a lady’s hair,” chicken and turkey and roasted meats, and all manner of sweets; icing parties preceded the feast for days so the cakes would be pretty. (Peggy Mitchell, “Bridesmaid of 87 Recalls Mittie Roosevelt’s Wedding,” 10 June 1923; and “Across Covered Bridge to Bulloch Hall,” 20 July 1924; Darden Pyron to BWC, with notes, 3 Sept. 1991.

28  “little black shadow”: For the story of Daniel Elliott’s murder of a slave child, see McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 45.

28–29  Civil War was devastating: The descriptions of Civil War tensions within the Roosevelt-Bulloch hearth are derived from McCullough, Mornings on Horseback; and Lilian Rixey, Bamie: Theodore Roosevelt’s Remarkable Sister (David McKay, 1963), pp. 10–12.

29  the famous Alabama raider: Built and outfitted in England, the Alabama destroyed fifty-eight commercial vessels during its two years at sea. When it was finally torpedoed off Cherbourg, the crew, including Irvine Bulloch, were rescued by a British ship. On 10 Sept. 1863, abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vowed revenge on Britain and France for their diplomatic support of the Confederacy. In a monumental four-hour speech, Sumner sneered at Queen Victoria, that “virtuous lady,” who embraced the South, civilization’s last “bordello” of slavery, and served to extend the Civil War for years.

Coincidentally, Senator Charles Sumner pressed the Alabama claims just as the Roosevelts arrived in England in 1871 for their first European family tour. The demands were front-page news. Sumner wanted $100 million from Britain for its perfidy; the British press clamored for war to protect its version of neutrality and freedom of the seas. Ultimately the Treaty of Washington demilitarized the U.S.-Canadian border; the Crown apologized; the crisis passed. But the turmoil meant little to the Roosevelt children, who gloried in the heroism and of their Confederate relations.

For the Bullochs’ connection to the Alabama, see McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, pp. 44, 64, 73–76; for Charles Sumner’s agitation against England, and the diplomatic negotiations involved—all of which were referred to as the Alabama Claims, see David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); and Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865–1872 (Cornell University Press, 1975).

29–30  hired a substitute: Although there is some disagreement about what contribution Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., actually made in behalf of the Union effort, he was away for months at a time during a two-year period. He is reported to have persuaded Abraham Lincoln to adopt a salary allotment plan to protect the pay sent to troops in the field so that their families, and not gamblers or gangsters, received their pay. Invited to Washington by his friend John Hay, TR was associated with the U.S. Sanitary Commission, precursor of the Red Cross.

According to Jeanie Attie’s work on the U.S. Sanitary Commission, TR’s name appears as an associate member of the Commission after March 1864. Jane Turner Censer, ed., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (vol. 4): Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1861–1863 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), credits the idea for the family allotment plan to Olmsted, who lobbied Congress and the War Department for a “system that would allow soldiers to forward their military pay to their families” (p. 7). (Attie to author, private conversation, and letter, 28 Nov. 1990.)

29–30  New York City draft riots: One result of the conscription law during the Civil War, whereby the rich hired the poor, was the violent New York City draft riots of 1863. See Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (University of Kentucky Press, 1974).

30  fanatic about cleanliness: Bamie described to Alice Roosevelt Longworth Mittie’s fastidious bathing habits and horror of dirt during and after the Civil War. See Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), p. 20; Rixey, Bamie; and McCullough, Mornings on Horseback.

31  “beggars came round”: Theodore Roosevelt, Diaries of Boyhood and Youth (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 14 Dec. 1869, pp. 122–23.

31  “Father tossed pennies”: Ibid., 4 Jan. 1870, pp. 155–56. See also 18 Dec. 1869: “The beggars are becoming worse…” (pp. 131–32). (I have corrected TR’s spelling.)

32  enjoyed …bodybuilding: McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 35.

32  “As athletes we are about equal”: Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), p. 116. The competitive theme between Elliott and Theodore, highlighted by Morris, has been especially emphasized by Howard Umansky, whose unpublished conference paper, “Mourning Patterns of Theodore Roosevelt,” is compelling and provocative.

32  much-treasured overcoat: On Elliott’s gift of his new overcoat, see McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 35, and ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. viii-x.

Eleanor Roosevelt edited and published her father’s letters shortly after her husband’s election to the presidency, to keep Elliott Roosevelt’s memory alive for her own children and grandchildren: “They will read much in many books of their uncles and their aunts…, but no less important in our daily lives are the things and the people who touch us only personally.” “He was the one great love of my life as a child,” she wrote; and she considered his outstanding characteristic the “generosity [that] actuated him…. With him his heart always dominated.” (Pp. viii-x.)

Eleanor Roosevelt seems to repeat for purposes of historical memory the tones of competition between the brothers. Referring to her father’s first years on the Texas frontier, she wrote: “These early camping and shooting experiences added to the love of all sport which seems to have been inborn in my father.” Years later a friend who lived “on a ranch near Uncle Ted’s in the bad lands of the Dakotas told me she remembered my father well and the surprise he occasioned among the cowboys by his shooting and riding. It seemed to be natural to him, whereas Uncle Ted acquired his skill through persistence and against great odds, for he was delicate as a boy and shortsighted all his life.” (P. 33.)

32  spectacles and his gun: McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 118, 120, 124. For TR’s descriptions of his “great enjoyment from the shooting,” see letters to Aunt Annie Bulloch, 26 Jan. 1873; Henry Davis Minot, 11 July 1877; and especially to his sister Anna (“Darling Bysie”) Roosevelt, 20 Sept. 1884, concerning the big game he bagged in Wyoming, which eclipsed birds forever: “I came out after two weeks, during which time I killed three grizzly bear, six elk …and as many deer, grouse and trout as we needed…. I was more anxious for the quality than the quantity…. I have now a dozen good heads for the hall.” (Elting, Morison et al., eds., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1 (Harvard University Press, 1951).

33  “What will I become”: Elliott to his father, 19 Sept. 1873. Correspondence in Houghton; and quoted in McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, pp. 144–46.

34  “It came from overexcitement”: TR, Sr., to Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, 9 Nov. 1874, and 14 Nov. 1874. Ibid.

34  “afraid to leave [Elliott]”: TR to Teedie, 23 Nov. 1874. Ibid.

34  “funny, my illness”: Elliott to Teedie, 22 Nov. 1874. Ibid.

34–35  Saint Paul’s School: Elliott’s letters from Saint Paul’s were “homesick and unhappy.” Although he fought “against it,” his attacks left him nervous. “But I am all well now so don’t worry,” he wrote his father. “You told me to write you everything or I would not bother you with this, but you want to know all about me don’t you? …Don’t forget me please and write often.” (ER, Hunting Big Game, 1 Oct. 1875, pp. 10–12.)

35  “brother came up”: Quoted in McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 147.

35  sent off to Texas: Elliott’s letters to his mother, “Dear little Muz,” and “My Dear Father,” from Houston and Fort McKavett, 8 Jan.-22 Feb. 1876, in ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. 15–29; and McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 148. Elliott’s Texas notebooks, filled with pen-and-ink drawings, stories, and verse, several of which include references to himself as a hero and a woman, are in the FDRL.

35  “the great Southern herds”: Theodore Roosevelt’s dedication is in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (Works, vol. 1 [Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926]). For the slaughter of the great herds, see ibid., p. 192; see also p. 459.

36  “curious habits”: Cecil Spring-Rice quoted in Sylvia Jukes Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), p. 136.

36  “avoided …the New York fellows”: TR to Bamie, 15 Oct. 1876, quoted in McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 165.

36  “Elliott gave unstintedly”: Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), p. 104.

36  Afterward, Elliott agonized: For Elliott’s anguish over Theodore’s absence during their father’s last hours, Umansky, “Mourning Patterns.” Umansky’s emphasis on the fact that Theodore was not called by Elliott, who had promised to do so, encourages speculation on the path of their relationship from that point forward.

36  “Tell Teedie and Ellie”: On 20 July 1873, after visiting the site of his last enthusiasm, the Museum of Natural History, he wrote his wife: “I think without egotism this really would never have been carried through without my aid. Three things that I can recall with pride are my connection with this [museum], the 18th Street Lodging House, and the Orthopaedic Dispensary…. Tell Teedie and Ellie….” (TR to Mittie, 20 July 1873, quoted in Umansky, “Mourning Patterns,” p. 25.)

37  “ruled the world”: Corinne to Douglas Robinson, 18 March 1881, quoted in McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 30.

The belief that Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Aunt Bye, would have been a great leader continued for generations. In 1953, Nicholas Roosevelt wrote: “Had she been a man in seventeenth-century Europe it would be easy to imagine her as a successful and highly capable minister of state or perhaps a cardinal, unquenchable in zeal and effective in guile. She charmed all by her wit and astonished them by the wide scope of her knowledge of men and affairs and by the acuteness of her intellect. In many ways hers was the best mind in the family, and her personality one of the most dominant and fascinating.” (Nicholas Roosevelt, A Front Row Seat [University of Oklahoma Press, 1953], p. 33.)

Although the Roosevelt women are as fascinating as their brothers, they have been neglected by scholars. We await the new work by Betty Boyd Caroli, who is now researching all the Roosevelt women.

2. Elliott and Anna

38  “secure golden world”: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 25.

39  left standing: Although the details of Eleanor’s abandonment at the Knickerbocker Club have become hazy with time, she evidently waited all day, and presumably spent part of the time walking about with the dogs and waiting under the canopy. ER wrote about being left “in the dog room” of the Knickerbocker Club at the age of six in the last article she wrote for her monthly column in McCall’s. Called “I Remember Hyde Park,” it was published in Feb. 1963, several months after her death (pp. 71–73, 162). See also Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 51–52.

39  a splendid jaunt: TR to Anna (“Darling Bysie”), 22 Aug. 1880, Houghton.

40  “Elliott revels”: TR to Corinne (“Darling Pussie”), 12 Sept. 1880, in Letters of TR, ed. Morison, vol. 1, p. 46.

40  serious heart trouble: McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 229.

40  elephants and tigers: Ibid.

40–41  Sara Delano and James Roosevelt: See ibid, p. 226.

41  Elliot began his journey: For Elliott’s travel adventures, political observations, and introspections while in India, see ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. 35–144.

42  “to buy pretty things”: Elliott to “My Dear Little Mother,” 17 May 1881, ibid., p. 88. “I have enjoyed great opportunities for seeing the way of living and governing of both natives and Europeans…” (Ibid., 3 Feb. 1881, p. 53.) For his letter from Ceylon, see p. 124.

During his time in India, Theodore sent his brother his rifle and snow shoes, and was encouraging and generous: “This is your last great hunt, so stay as long as you wish…” (6 Dec. 1880, ER Family Papers, Box 5, FDRL.)

42  “My Love”: Elliott fell in love with Anna Rebecca Hall, and they announced their engagement in June 1883. His diary essay, “My Love,” is dated Feb. 1883 and is in Houghton.

43–44  “All my love and ambition”: Anna Hall to Elliott, 8 Aug. [1883], in ER, Hunting Big Game, p. 149.

44  “This happiness of yours”: Aunt Ella Bulloch to Elliott, 1 July 1883, ER Family Papers, Box 1, FDRL.

44  “Ellie is very ill”: Aunt Annie Gracie journal, TR Collection, Houghton.

44  “You must be very pure”: Aunt Annie Gracie to Elliott, 1 July 1883, FDRL. See other congratulatory letters in ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. 150–55.

44–45  “Roosevelt-Hall Wedding”: New York Times, 2 Dec. 1883.

44–45  Edith Wharton: See The Age of Innocence for a glimpse of Knickerbocker society during the 1870s and 1880s (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968 [1920], with introduction by R. W. B. Lewis).

Born Edith Newbold Rhinelander Jones, Edith Wharton was a contemporary and neighbor of Eleanor Roosevelt’s parents’ generation in New York and Newport. Since ER’s Aunt Pussie (Edith Livingston Hall) was thought to be the model for Lily Bart, see especially The House of Mirth (Bantam, 1984 [1905]); also Wharton’s Summer (Berkley Books, 1981 [1917] and Old New York (Berkley Books, 1981 [1924]), both with splendid introductions by Marilyn French.

45  “a curse on this house”: 12 Feb. 1884, quoted in McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 283.

45  double funeral service: “The Double Funeral of Alice Hathaway Roosevelt and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt,” New York Times, 17 Feb. 1884.

46  “a miracle from heaven”: Autobiography of ER, p. 5.

46–47  “my hand is shaking”: Regular correspondence, mostly from Anna to Elliott, generally undated, chronicles their lives during these years. Because there are so few letters from Elliott to Anna, we can only presume she destroyed them.

47–48  “I am …not the same strong girl”: 21 Aug. [N.Y.]. “Poor old Nell”: n.d. [Nov. 1887]. “Have you had any doubts”: n.d. Anna’s letters to Elliott are in ER Family Papers, Box 4, FDRL.

47  “Amateur Comedy Club”: Biographical information, references to Anna Hall’s Amateur Comedy Club and other activities in a memoir by “Three Friends,” In Loving Memory of Anna Hall Roosevelt (pamphlet, privately printed, 1892), FDRL; and New York Times obituary, 8 Dec. 1892.

48  The first day out: For the devastating account of the Britannic disaster, see New York Herald, 23 May 1887; New York World, 23–24 May 1887 (clippings in FDRL); see also Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 29–30; Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt (Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 268–69; and ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. 158–61.

49  Browning asked: See Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 23, and McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 249.

49  Elliott wrote again to Bye: 8 July, on the success of the Hall sisters, in ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. 158–61; and Houghton.

50  the spring of 1888: TR to “Darling Bysie,” 17 June 1888, in Letters of TR, ed. Morison, vol. 1, pp. 140–41. (“Elliott has had a really hard illness during this last week. He has had two abscesses on his neck; they prevented him from swallowing, and drove him nearly mad with pain; …he got a severe attack of rheumatism. He looks ghastly …and has been kept much under the influence of anodynes…. Aunt Annie is with him….”)

50  “I do hate his Hempstead life”: Ibid., 24 June 1888.

50  “I don’t grudge the broken arm”: TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, Oct. 1886, quoted (along with details of the hunt) in E. Morris, Rise of TR, pp. 315–16.

51  Alice ran in horror: Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s memory of her father in Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth (Doubleday, 1981), p. 42.

51  almost deadly rivals: On the Meadow Brook-Oyster Bay polo accident, see S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 116.

52  “Newport has been very gay”: Elliott’s and Anna’s correspondence during Aug. 1888 (and especially Anna to Elliott, 25 Aug., and n.d.. [“Halfway Nirvana”]), FDRL.

52  “everybody loved her”: Elliot to Bye on Eleanor’s birthday (“The funny little tot had a happy little birthday”), 13 Oct. 1888, in ER, Hunting Big Game, p. 162.

52–53  “broke his nerves”: ER on the accident at Larry Waterbury’s (who subsequently married and divorced ER’s Aunt Maude), TIMS, p. 8.

53  “Under Anna’s ready hand”: Elliott to Bye, 13 June 1889, in ER, Hunting Big Game, pp. 163–64.

53  Totty is flourishing”: Pussie to Elliott, n.d. [Oct. 1889], FDRL. Elliott, Jr., was born on 29 Sept. 1889.

54–55  “Please don’t worry”: Anna to Elliott, along with all Thanksgiving- and Christmas-season correspondence, n.d., ibid.

55  “a perfect nightmare”: TR to Bye, 24 Jan. 1890, Houghton.

3. Childhood of Tears and Loss

56–57  “poor old Nell”: TR to Bye, 30 April 1890, Houghton.

57  “Half measures simply”: TR to Bye, 2 May 1890, Houghton.

57  “For Bye only”: Elliott to Bye, 21 July 1890, Houghton.

58  “first in his heart”: TIMS, pp. 8–9.

58  “Dear Anna’s Mother”: Elliott’s letters to Mrs. Hall from Venice, FDRL.

58  “given a donkey”: TIMS, p. 9.

ER returned to this episode of her life with her father in Sorrento, and her efforts to conquer fear, frequently, most notably in her March 1939 article, “Fear,” published as “Conquer Fear and You Will Enjoy Living,” Look, 23 May 1939; original typed manuscript in Lorena Hickok Papers, FDRL.

But ER wrote nothing of her father’s unraveling. Venice was full of temptations, old friends, and drinking partners. Elliott wrote to “Dear Anna’s Mother” on 20 Oct. 1890: “Our stay in Venice has been made very agreeable by the Curtis’s, Edens and Brownings—whose invitations …would have filled the winters. As it is I think that we are now bound for Florence then Naples or Sorrento, as Anna desires (Because it is warmer—she says…).” (FDRL.)

59  “a perfect angel”: Anna to Bye, 15 Oct. 1890, Houghton.

59–60  “something dreadful awaiting us”: Elliott Roosevelt Mann was born on 11 March 1891; Gracie Hall Roosevelt was born on 28 June 1891.

60–62  “go into an asylum”: TR to Bye, Bye to TR and Edith Roosevelt, and other correspondence concerning Catherine (Katy) Mann, from March to May 1891, is in Houghton. Elliott and Anna to Bye, in FDRL.

62–63  hopes of protecting Eleanor: On the convent school, her mother’s warning, and the house in Neuilly, TIMS, pp. 11–12.

The effort to educate Eleanor, no matter what tensions swirled about, evidently continued from Germany to Graz, Austria, to Italy, to France. Indeed, during their first stay in Graz, Elliott wrote his brother: “Tell Alice that Eleanor takes French lessons every day and tries hard to …write so she won’t be far behind her when we return. Eleanor is learning to skate too, quite well. She has some little German friends with whom she coasts and plays snow balling all day. She really talks German very well.” (20 Jan. 1891, Houghton.)

64  an idyllic time: Elliott to Mrs. Hall, n.d. 1891, 2 June 1891, FDRL.

64–65  “My own dearest sister”: TR to Bye, 7 June 1891, Houghton.

65n.  Katy Mann settlement: Edmund Morris, the first to deal with the Katy Mann affair, wrote that Katy Mann “mysteriously” faded from history, and assumed that she was paid “her price [of] $10,000.” “The scandal never broke. Evidently the girl [sic] got her money, although how much, and when, and who paid it, is unknown.” (See E. Morris, Rise of TR, pp. 437–41.) After the publication of his book, Elliott Roosevelt Mann’s daughter, Eleanor Mann Biles, wrote to Morris that whatever trust money existed was presumed stolen (quoted in Joseph Lash, Love, Eleanor [Doubleday, 1982], pp. 11–12). Elliott Roosevelt Mann died on 13 April 1941. See John Allen Gable, ed., “The Roosevelt Family in America: A Genealogy,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Spring 1990, pt. 2, pp. 52, 75.

65–66  TR was now unrelenting: TR to Bye, 17 June, 2 July, 12 July 1891, Houghton.

66  divided the family: The Grades tried to get TR to pull back. On 21 July 1891 (ibid.), TR wrote Bye that Corinne and Douglas stayed with them for several days; “and I have had some dextrous steering and hard fighting to do….” Anna also continued to hesitate, dreading the legal suit.

66  her own tooth powder: On Edith Roosevelt, see S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 140.

66–67  stood virtually alone: Anna to Bye, n.d.; Anna to Bye, June and July 1891, FDRL.

68  tried to derail the suit: James King Gracie’s efforts were met by TR’s anguish: “Uncle Jimmie has certainly played the fool. I fear we have an ugly fight ahead….” (TR to Bye, 22 Aug. 1891, Houghton.)

ER remained emotionally close to those who fought for her father. She corresponded with and visited the Bullochs in England during and after her school years, and felt particular warmth for Uncle Grade until his death in 1903.

In 1951, she wrote to Helen Gracie Lowrie: “In answer to your letter, my grandmother’s half sister, a Miss Bulloch from Georgia married Mr. James King Gracie…. The house they lived in …is now the official residence of the Mayor of New York City. I imagine you read about my visit to the house. I am sorry I do not know the genealogy of the Gracie family.” (ER Papers, Box 3912, FDRL.)

69  “I slept in my mother’s room”: TIMS, pp. 12–13.

69  “Sometimes I woke”: Ibid., pp. 15–16.

70  martinet named Madeleine: Ibid., p. 18. 70–71 “disgracing my mother”: Ibid., pp. 16–18.

71  wanted life to go on: Anna to Bye, n.d., FDRL.

71  “nobody told me anything”: Autobiography of ER, p. 8.

72  to spell the simplest words: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 42. 72 “a great trial to my mother”: TIMS, p. 14.

72  “I fear”: TR to Bye, 2 Sept. 1891, Houghton.

72  a preventive war: John Hay to Henry Adams in E. Morris, Rise of TR, pp. 443–44.

72–73  “Won! Thank Heaven”: TR to Bye, 21 Jan. 1892, Houghton.

73–74  On 28 January: Evidently Florence Bagley Sherman sent her diary entry and several letters to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, who gave the documents to ER, and they are now in the ER Family Papers, FDRL.

74–75  “Was Miss Vedder an Adventuress?”: Elliott’s thirty-one-page typed story is in the ER Family Papers, Elliott Roosevelt’s writings, Box 5, FDRL.

75“  both wicked and foolish”: TR to Bye, 22 Feb. 1892, Houghton.

75–76  Desperate to prove himself: Elliott to Bye, 25 Feb. 1892, FDRL.

76  “Try and think lovingly”: Elliott to Bye, 5 March 1892, FDRL.

76  Her fears were “groundless”: 12 June 1892, FDRL.

77  Anna lay dying: On Robert Munro Ferguson, TIMS, p. 18. See also Rixey, Bamie, pp. 63–66.

77–78  Anna’s final struggle: Elliott to Mrs. Hall, 23 Nov., 26 Nov., 7 Dec. 1892, FDRL.

78  “my mother was dead”: TIMS, p. 19.

4. Years of Dreams and Longing

Most of Elliott Roosevelt’s letters to his daughter are published in ER, Hunting Big Game. His other letters, especially those to Anna Hall Roosevelt and Mrs. Hall, are in ER Family Papers, FDRL. Several of Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters to her father are in Joseph P. Lash’s recently opened collection, Box 12, as ate other previously unavailable or presumed lost letters and several of ER’s school essays.

80  “With my father”: TIMS, pp. 17–21.

81  Society mourned: All Anna Hall Roosevelt’s memorial and obituary notices are in ER Family Papers, FDRL.

81  “tragedy of utter defeat”: TIMS, p. 19.

82  Elliott wrote …to Mrs. Hall: FDRL.

82–85  wrote to Eleanor: 20 Jan. 1893 (on education), 6 April 1893 (on generosity), 20 Aug. 1893 (“a very trying time”) in ER, Hunting Big Game; 26 May 1893 (“We bury little Ellie), FDRL.

All through 1893, Elliott worked vigorously to restore a semblance of financial security. On 22 Sept., he wrote Mrs. Hall that he had traveled three states in an effort “to protect my interests. All of western Virginia went under, including the coal fields…. I have lost heavily dear lady and am in great distress and sorrow, for I was doing well…. I hope to pull out allright.”

And he was desperate not to become completely erased from his children’s memory: “I love them with all my heart…. [Do] try and make them love my name at least as ‘father’…”

According to Abingdon-area newspaper accounts written in 1933, when Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady visited her father’s last home, Elliott’s ventures were relatively successful during the Panic of 1893. Though he lost over $30,000 in an effort to save his bank, he bailed out other mining, lumbering, and land-development ventures, “launched the Coeburn Land Development Company,” “worked desperately for the relief of the starving miners,” and enabled the interests of the Douglas land company to thrive. “Elderly Southwestern Virginians Remember the Father of Mrs. Roosevelt, Who Once Lived at White Top [Mountain], Washington County, Was Liberal to the Needy, Won Friends Quickly, and Was a ‘Sport.’” (Clippings in ER Family Papers, Box 3, FDRL.)

85  “in a dream world”: TIMS, pp. 20–21.

86  Washington was rhapsodic: TR to Bye, 11 Oct. 1893, Houghton.

86  “Eleanor saw him driving”: Corinne to Bye, 11 Oct., ibid.

86–87  a spirited hunter: TIMS, pp. 19–20.

87  “high points”: Ibid.

ER wrote of these events in “My Father and I,” an article written for Leonard White, who asked eleven American celebrities “to share with the world their most vivid recollection of their fathers,” in honor of Father’s Day, for The New York Times, 16 June 1946.

87  “the children of my dear Friend”: ER, Hunting Big Game, 2 Feb. 1894, p. 178.

By the summer of 1894, only Corinne was trying to see Elliott. TR wrote to Bye on 29 July: “I do wish Corinne could get a little of my hard heart about Elliott; she can do, and ought to do, nothing for him…. Poor fellow! If only he could have died instead of Anna!” (Morison, ed., Letters of TR, vol. 1, p. 392.)

87  “my love to the puppies”: 24 June 1894, FDRL.

87  “Brudie wears pants”: 5 July 1894, FDRL.

87  “lessons with Grandma”: 30 July 1894, in Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

87–88  On 13 August: Elliott’s last letter to Eleanor, in ER, Hunting Big Game.

88  “Elliott died suddenly”: Corinne to Bye, 15 Aug. 1894, Houghton.

88–89  “frightful drinking”: TR to Bye, 18 Aug. 1894, Houghton. According to TR, “for the last few days he had dumbly felt the awful night closing in on him.” But he would not allow the family “to come to his house, nor part with the woman, nor cease drinking for a moment, but he wandered ceaselessly…, wrote again and again to us all…. He was like some stricken, hunted creature….”

After Elliott’s death, TR lost some of his own interest in the hunt. On 4 April 1901, he wrote to Hamlin Garland: “As I grow older I find myself uncomfortable killing things without a complete justification, and it was a real relief this year to kill only ‘varmints,’ and to be able to enjoy myself in looking at the deer, of which I saw scores or hundreds every day and never molested them.” (Morison, ed., Letters of TR, vol. 3, p. 40.)

But, more immediately, on 25 Aug., he wrote Bye of the ongoing business ends of Elliott’s demise:

“Freddy Weeks has been in charge of Mrs. Evans and poor Elliott’s affairs generally; and he has now closed them all out, without a scandal. We narrowly missed one, too; for Mr. Evans arrived on the scene and threatened both his wife and Fred with a loaded revolver! but finally left, pacified. Freddy has behaved like a trump, as he always does in such emergencies!

“Emlen and Harry Weeks, the executors, have not behaved at all well, wishing to refuse to pay Mrs. Evans her claim of $1250.00, writing Corinne to pay it! They say they do not see that the interests of the children are concerned! She has a fair claim to it, and it is not our affair, but the children’s; and I have written them very sharply that they ought to pay at once.” (Houghton.)

89  The Halls were …overlooked: Corinne wrote Bye a twelve-page letter detailing Elliott’s last days and funeral, which she had arranged. She chose “Just As I Am” for the first hymn: “I felt as if God would surely hear and accept our poor Elliott that way, and then I had ‘Jesus, Saviour of My Soul,’ and ‘Rock of Ages,’ those hymns we sang so often with Aunti & Mother” (Houghton). According to Corinne, Theodore “came to me at once” after Elliott’s death “and we did together the things always so hard to do connected with the death of those we love.” (C. Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, p. 156.)

89  “Elliott loved flowers”: Mrs. Hall to Corinne, 25 Aug. 1894, in Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

89  Elliott’s funeral followed the pattern: TR to Corinne, 29 Aug. 1894, in Letters of TR, ed. Morison, vol. 1, p. 397. (“There is one great comfort I already feel; I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now. He is just the gallant, generous, manly boy and young man whom everyone loved. I can think of him now …the time we were first in Europe …and then in the days of the dancing class, when he was distinctly the polished man-of-the-world from outside, and all the girls, from Helen White to Fanny Dana to May Wigham used to be so flattered by any attentions from him. Or when we were off on his little sailing boat for a two or three days trip on the Sound; or when he first hunted; and when he visited me at Harvard….”)

90  “wondering about his children”: Florence Bagley Sherman to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, n.d. [Aug. 1894], and 17 Aug. 1895, ER Family Papers, Box 1, FDRL. Evidently Corinne Robinson gave Mrs. Sherman’s letters to her niece, who kept them with her papers.

90–91  book of poetry: Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, One Woman to Another and Other Poems (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), pp. 1–6.

91–92  from Bar Harbor: Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall to Corinne, 25 Aug. 1894, in Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

92  “in constant dread”: Edith Carow Roosevelt to her sister, Emily Carow, 10 Aug. 1894, Houghton.

92  “never wished Alice to associate with Eleanor”: Edith to her mother, Gertrude Carow, 4 Nov. 1893, Houghton. On Edith’s father’s alcoholism and business difficulties, see S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 15; and Teague, Mrs. L, pp. 30–31. Although Edith did not want the cousins to consort, she hoped above all, that the “poor little soul,” who looked so “forlorn” in the “makeshifts” she was made to wear, would be sent to “a good school.” (Edith to Bye, n.d. [1892], Houghton; S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 137.)

Alice Roosevelt Longworth wrote of the closeness between the Roosevelt-Robinson cousins, the frequent children’s parties at both Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay and the Robinson place in Orange, New Jersey. Aunt Corinne and Aunt Bye were both central to the children’s lives: “Aunt Corinne was as much of a companion with her children and nieces and nephews as Father was. She took part in everything we did…. She could stand on her head and turn cart-wheels better than any of us…. [She] was the moving spirit in everything that went on.” But Eleanor and Hall rarely took part. Grandmother Hall was against it, and Edith Roosevelt was against it too. (Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours, pp. 30–31.)

Aunt Bye sent ER a set of Shakespeare for Christmas 1894; on 27 Dec., ER wrote a note of gratitude, saying, “I have already begun it.” (Houghton.)

93  the nurse Madeleine: Autobiography of ER, pp. 16–17.

93  Mrs. Overhalse: Ibid., pp. 15–16. Madeleine the martinet caused ER “many tears,” and ER was “desperately afraid of her.” Nevertheless, she wrote of her in 1933: “Madeleine was my little brothers’ Alsatian nurse. Very strict with me but adoring them. She talked French and German with us and taught me to sew and to darn. I thought her very hard when I had darned a heel and she took her scissors and cut it all out…, but now I think she was probably very good for me.” (ER, Hunting Big Game, p. 170. On Mrs. Overhalse, see also TIMS, pp. 21–23.)

94  wear short skirts: On ER’s old-fashioned, inappropriate, and ungainly clothes, and her friends’ protective reactions, see Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 60–61, 63; and TIMS, p. 36 (“All my clothes seem to me now to have been incredibly uncomfortable!”).

94  young aunts and uncles: On ER’s adventures with her uncles, especially Vallie, who taught her to jump horses and shoot rifles, see TIMS, pp. 31, 360, and passim.

94  corrective steel brace: ER recalled that steel brace as “vastly uncomfortable and prevented my bending over.” (TIMS, p. 28.)

95–96  ER especially esteemed: TIMS, pp. 22, 360–61, and passim.

96–98  the Roser schoolroom: Manuscripts of ER’s stories—including “The Flowers,” “Gilded Butterflies,” and “Ambition,” poetry, and pages from her “headache journal” written during her Roser years are in Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

ER had no particular interest in Mr. Roser, something of a prig, and certainly a bore. He was “fashionable,” but ER considered him hardly “remarkable.” His assistant, however, Miss Tomes, evoked ER’s “admiration.” “She taught us well and thoroughly.” (TIMS, p. 17.)

98–99  reading and dreaming. Over the years, ER wrote several articles about what she had liked to read as a child and gave advice about the importance of books in the lives of young people: “The great thing for the child of today is to form the habit of reading so that they may escape sometimes from their surroundings into different ages and different moods.” (ER to Henry Canby, for The Saturday Review, 6 Nov. 1929, Box 15, FDRL. Quotations from “Article for Children: The Magazine for Parents,” 1941.)

99–100  Dodsworth’s …dance classes: TIMS, p. 47.

100  Eleanor loved the theatre: On Eleanora Duse, see Autobiography of ER, p. 18. 100 “attention or …admiration”: TIMS, pp. 22.

100–1  Marie Souvestre: To Mrs. Hall, FDRL. Marie Souvestre’s correspondence with Anna Roosevelt Cowles and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson and her daughter Corinne Robinson Alsop, in Houghton. I am grateful to Judith Friedlander and Naomi Holoch, who helped me translate Souvestre’s French script.

101n.  Aunt Bye …married: For Anna Roosevelt Cowles’s marriage, see Rixey, Bamie, pp. 86–87; S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, pp. 160–61.

5. Allenswood and Marie Souvestre

102  sailed for England: For ER on Aunt Tissie, see TIMS, p. 53. The Mortimers’ Roslyn house is described in Steven M. L. Aronson, “A Life in the Country: Patrician Bohemians Barbara and Stanley Mortimer Look Back …,” House and Garden, April 1984, pp. 168ff; I am grateful to Barbara Guest for this article.

Too little is known about ER’s Aunt Tissie, Elizabeth Hall Mortimer, who impressed generations of Roosevelts by her ability “to walk the moors all day and play poker …far into the night” (ER, This I Remember, p. 10). For information on her British circle of friends, see Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984).

103  not an ordinary finishing school: In 1899, Henry James wrote William James that Marie Souvestre “is a very fine, interesting person, her school holds a very particular place (all Joe Chamberlain’s daughters were there and they adore her), and I must tell you more of her” (quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 74). Although there is to date no study of Marie Souvestre, or her schools, for the impact of her life on the women she taught, see especially Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, vol. 1, The Unknown Years, 1880–1910 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), esp. pp. 36–41; and Elizabeth French Boyd, Bloomsbury Heritage: Their Mothers and Their Aunts (London: Evelyn Adams & Mackay, 1968), pp. 64, 87.

Souvestre’s influence on men was equally significant. According to Michael Holroyd, although Lytton Strachey was often fierce in his criticism, “cette grande femme,” as he called Marie Souvestre, “was almost unique in that, throughout his often drastic and belligerent correspondence, he never once mentions her in a derogatory manner.”

104  She also wrote Olivia: Dorothy Strachey Bussy wrote Olivia in 1933, but it was not published until 1948. All quotations herein are from the Arno Press Reprint, 1975. On the Stracheys, see Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, for a more sympathetic portrait of Lady Strachey, see Virginia Woolf, “Lady Strachey,” The Nation & Athenaeum, 22 Dec. 1928, reprinted in Virginia Woolf, Books and Portraits, ed. Mary Lyon (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 208–11.

See also Martha Vicinus, “Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870–1920,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New American Library, Meridian, 1989), pp. 212–29; and BWC, “Women Alone Stir My Imagination: Lesbianism in the Cultural Tradition,” Signs, Summer 1979, pp. 718–39, in which I first suggested that Laura was based in part upon Eleanor Roosevelt—not only because of the obvious similarities in character, but because of the peculiar chronological circumstances of the year when Dorothy Strachey Bussy was moved to reconsider her own school years, as pupil and teacher, and the little girl she knew as “Totty,” who had just become America’s First Lady. Nor is it irrelevant that Laura was portrayed as the daughter of England’s “leading statesman.” During ER’s years at Allenswood, her Uncle Theodore was elected vice-president of the United States on 6 Nov. 1900. (He and William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan and Adlai E. Stevenson.) On 14 Sept. 1901, TR succeeded to the presidency when McKinley died of an assassin’s bullet.

For a scene remarkably reiminiscent of the meeting between Laura and another school “favorite” in Olivia, see ER’s account of her meeting with Beatrice Chamberlain, in my opinion the other model for Laura, in TIMS, p. 75.

104–5  giant cucumbers: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 65.

105  Beatrice Webb: For Webb on Souvestre, see Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, eds., The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 2 vols. (Harvard University Press, 1982), esp. vol. 1, p. 277; vol. 2, pp. 340–41; and passim.

105–6  Marie Souvestre in action: Dorothy Strachey Bussy descriptions in Olivia.

106  “far and away”: For ER on Souvestre, Allenswood, and her schoolmates, see TIMS, ch. 3.

All Allenswood records are in ER Papers, Boxes 1 and 3, FDRL, except for several of her devoirs, report cards, and letters from Marie Souvestre, which are in Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

106  Helen Gifford: Quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, p. 27.

106–8  became confident: TIMS, p. 58.

108–9  “Jane”: Ibid., pp. 60–63.

109–10  Souvestre wrote Mrs. Hall: n.d., 1899, FDRL.

110  ER’s scholarship ranged: Report cards and notebooks, ER Papers, Boxes 1 and 3, FDRL.

111  Classes were compulsory: TIMS, pp. 59–60.

111  Souvestre’s library: According to Rixey, the “rather startling” nudes of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes “overpowered” some of Marie Souvestre’s students (Bamie, p. 15).

111–12  Souvestre read aloud: TIMS, ER on Souvestre, pp. 64–65.

112–13  “gets terribly mad”: Corinne Robinson to her mother, Alsop Family Papers, Houghton: quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, p. 29.

113  Heroines were few: ER’s notes and essays on Christine de Pisan and other notables are in her French-literature notebook, summer 1901, Box 1, FDRL. I am grateful to Judith Friedlander, who helped me translate these essays. See also Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (Persea Books, 1984).

114–15  At Alassio: For ER’s travels with Marie Souvestre, see TIMS, ch. 3. For a discussion of Marie Souvestre’s curiously complex friend Mary Augusta Ward, see Virginia Woolf, “The Compromise (Mrs. Humphry Ward),” a review of The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward by her daughter Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The New Republic, 9 Jan. 1924, reprinted in Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (London: The Women’s Press, 1979), pp. 169–72; see also Vera Brittain, Women at Oxford (London: George G. Harrap, 1960), pp. 41–46; and Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Indiana University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 70–71.

115  “I lose a dear friend”: Souvestre to Mrs. Hall, [1901], Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

115–16  encounter with her Aunt Pussie: TIMS, pp. 89–90.

116  “after much begging and insistence”: Ibid.

116  “beloved by everybody”: Corinne Robinson quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 84.

116–19  when they meet: Quotations are from Olivia. On Dorothy Strachey Bussy and Olivia, see Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, vol. 1, pp. 36–41, 46.

119  Decades of biographical denial: For the view that Eleanor Roosevelt did not quite comprehend Olivia and was ashamed of Marie Souvestre’s life, see Lash, Love, Eleanor, ch. 2.

It is significant that ER and Virginia Woolf were contemporaries (Woolf was born in 1882), since so much of ER’s life has been attributed to her alleged “Victorianism,” and so many of her papers are lost. Woolf’s accounts provide us with a vivid understanding of the relationships between women of that generation that were a daily and lifelong aspect of women’s experience in ER’s culture. Woolf explained that she was attracted to such lesbian friends as Vita Sackville-West and Dame Ethel Smyth because “these Sapphists love women.” Friendship with them “is never untinged with amorosity.” She was not being metaphorical or whimsical, or imprecise.

In 1937, the same year ER wrote This Is My Story, Virginia Woolf wrote a New Year’s Day letter to Dorothy Strachey Bussy: “London was the usual scrimmage. I saw too many people—among them, tell Janie [Dorothy Bussy’s daughter], La Princesse de Polignac, née Winnie Singer, but whatever she was born she’s grown into the image of a stately mellow old Tory, and to look at her you’d never think she ravished half the virgins in Paris, and used, so Ethel Smyth tells me, to spring upon them with such impetuosity that once a sofa broke.” (Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Strachey Bussy, 1 Jan. 1937, in Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980], vol. 6, p. 100.)

120  “She wrote me lovely letters”: For ER on Marie Souvestre, see TIMS, p. 97. In the 1960 Autobiography of ER, p. 35, we find it repeated: “She wrote me lovely letters which I still cherish. They show the kind of relationship that had grown up between us and give an idea of the very fine person who exerted the greatest influence, after my father, on this period of my life.”

120–23  Souvestre wrote: Typed translations of Marie Souvestre’s letters to ER, 7 July 1902, 17 Aug. 1902, 5 Oct. 1902, are in ER Papers, Box 3, FDRL.

124  In October 1905: Marie Souvestre’s obituary is in London Times, 1 April 1905, pp. 1, 6; the 5 April 1905 Memorial Service book is in Lash Papers, Box 12, FDRL.

6. Coming Out and Courting

125  “Protect yourself”: Marie Souvestre to ER, 7 July 1902, ER Papers, Box 3, FDRL.

126  Three locks: For this information I am grateful to Geoffrey C. Ward, who interviewed Laura Chanler White when she was over 100. A family friend, and Stanford White’s daughter-in-law, Laura Chanler White asked ER why there were so many locks on her door, when she stayed over one night during their adolescence. ER replied simply, “to keep my uncles out.” (Ward to author, 23 April 1991. See Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 [Harper & Row, 1985], ch. 7.)

Because we have only recently considered seriously the frequency and impact of emotional and sexual abuse in the lives of young women, we have tended to ignore or trivialize many of the most significant moments in a woman’s emotional development. Whether or not ER’s “lurching” uncles ever succeeded in molesting her or were sexually abusive cannot now be known. But that she recognized the need to create physical barriers to their presence indicates a far more embattled adolescence than we have heretofore understood. See especially Louise De Salvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Beacon Press, 1989).

126–27On   Leonie Gifford: and other visitors to Tivoli, see TIMS, pp. 97–99.

127  Hall to Groton: Autobiography of ER, pp. 36–38.

127–28  alone in New York City: Ibid.

128  “Odious comparisons”: Alice Roosevelt quoted in Teague, Mrs. L, p. 36.

128–29  “really rather attractive”: Ibid., p. 154.

129–30  Ellen (“Bay”) Emmet: TIMS, pp. 102–3.

After her marriage (in 1911) to William Blanchard Rand, there was more financial security; but throughout her life Ellen Emmet Rand painted for both love and money. Henry James once wrote her: “‘You’re quite right—it’s a world in which one must beg away for one’s self and count on nothing and nobody. Lucky for you that you’ve such a splendid little self to count on….”’ By the time of her sudden death in 1941, Bay Emmet had painted more than 800 portraits, including most notable American leaders, and, in 1934, the official presidential portrait of FDR. (See Martha Hoppin, The Emmets: A Family of Women Painters [Berkshire Museum, 1982], p. 31 and passim. I am grateful to Honor Moore for this reference.)

130–31  Madison Square Garden: Franklin’s diary entry, quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet, pp. 307–9. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, notes that FDR was not mentioned in the press coverage of the horse show (p. 92).

Throughout 1902, ER’s name was regularly mentioned in New York’s society columns, and society’s most popular gossip weekly, Town Topics. Since there were five Roosevelt cousins (“Princess” Alice, Christine, Dorothy, Elfrida, Eleanor) involved (Alice had come out the year before), and Eleanor attended most of their parties, as well as several hosted specifically for her—including a much-celebrated theatre-dinner-dance party at Sherry’s given by Aunt Tissie (the play was The Cavalier, with Julia Marlowe)—one is left with a breathless sense of activity during this season of “social dissipation.” All the Roosevelt debutantes seem to have been invited to the famous Assembly Ball at the Waldorf Astoria on 11 Dec. 1902 (which ER attended with the Parishes). (See Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 92–93.) But of the cousins, only Eleanor Roosevelt’s name appears on the list of guests at Mrs. Astor’s still more exclusive evening.

If Eleanor was indeed the only Roosevelt debutante of the 1902–3 social season invited to Mrs. Astor’s annual ball, as press coverage indicates, it was because of the ongoing vigor of her mother’s connections. However much ER disparaged the event, Mrs. Astor’s remained in Jan. 1903 the “one large entertainment to which all that is representative in society in New York …stands first…. An invitation to Mrs. Astor’s ball carries with it an absolute cachet as to social position.” (See New York Times, 13 Jan. 1913, p. 3, and list of “some of the guests.”)

In many ways ER did her mother proud: she was dressed elegantly by the best Paris designers, and she was remembered as unfailingly gracious, and sophisticated. But there was a tone of disapproval, even rather a snide quality, to some of the press commentary, the worst appearing in Town Topics: “The debut of Miss Eleanor Roosevelt, daughter of the late Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt, also recalls the brilliant days of New York Society in the late eighties. Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Barclay [who died in 1894, and whose daughter was also coming out in 1902] were in the limited definition of that day ‘leaders,’ a term which now has no special significance.” (Town Topics, Nov. 1902, p. 4; see also 11 Dec., 18 Dec. 1902.)

131–32,n.   “utter agony”: For ER’s memory of great misery during 1902–3, see TIMS, pp. 100–1; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 92–93; Duncan Harris to ER, 1937, quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 306.

132  “E is an Angel”: See Ward, Before the Trumpet, ch. 7.

133  “addressed as ‘Granny’”: TIMS, pp. 103–4.

133  Rosy gave a “very jolly!” dinner party: Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 254.

133  Alice Sohier: Ibid.

134  “made many friends”: TIMS, pp. 105–7.

134–35  most gratifying hours: For ER on her settlement work and the Consumer’s League, see ibid., pp. 107–9. For information on Mary Harriman and the founding of the Junior League, see Persia Campbell, “Mary Harriman Rumsey,” Notable American Women, ed. Edward James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul Boyer (Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 208–9; and Rhoda Aderer, on the Junior League’s sixtieth anniversary, New York Times, 12 March 1961, p. 90.

Originally called The Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Movements (1900–1907), and “organized by the debutantes of the winter 1900–1901,” the group worked to improve neighborhood conditions, built coalitions with other settlement workers, and worked to interest college women and debutantes in their efforts. See Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements (Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), esp. pp. 190–95.

134  Jane Addams: See Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Oxford University Press, 1973).

134  Lillian Wald: See especially Clare Coss, Lillian D. Wald: Progressive Activist (The Feminist Press, 1989); and Doris Groshen Daniels, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald (The Feminist Press, 1989).

134  Gladys Vanderbilt: Quoted in Amory, Who Killed Society?, p. 219.

135  “There was no clubhouse”: For ER on the League, see “Interview with Eleanor Roosevelt—Charter Member, New York Junior League, 1940,” reprinted in 50th Anniversary Commemorative Anthology Issue, 1927–1971 (Association of the Junior Leagues, Spring 1971), pp. 53–54.

135–36  “nicest part of the day”: ER to FDR, 6 Jan. 1904, FDRL. Most of ER’s letters to FDR during this period are in the Family Papers Donated by the Children, Boxes 13–16, FDRL. Unfortunately, ER destroyed all of FDR’s courtship letters, presumably after she learned of his affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918.

137–38  also inspired by her Aunt Bye: For ER on Washington, Uncle Ted’s campaign, and Aunt Bye, see TIMS, pp. 112–15.

139  “a great curiosity”: ER’s engagement to her fifth cousin once removed, TIMS, p. 111.

139  “Oh! darling”: ER to FDR, 6 Jan., 24 Jan. 1904, FDRL.

140  The next week: ER to FDR, 24 Nov. 1903, FDRL.

140  “with my darling”: For FDR’s proposal and diary entry, see Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 313.

140  James King Gracie died: On 23 Nov. 1903; New York Times obituary, 24 Nov. 1903. TIMS, p. 112.

140–41  “I am going to write it out”: ER to FDR, 24 Nov. 1903, FDRL.

141–42  subject of tension: ER to FDR, 1 Dec. [1903], FDRL.

142–43  “Boy darling”: ER to FDR, [6 Dec. 1903], FDRL.

143–44  so cold, so disapproving: Although there is to date no full-length biography of Sara Delano Roosevelt, see especially Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady: The Life of Sara Delano Roosevelt (Appleton-Century, 1935); Clara and Hardy Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park (Viking, 1950); Eleanor Roosevelt, “I Remember Hyde Park,” McCall’s, Feb. 1963, pp. 71–73, 162–63; and Sara Delano Roosevelt (as told to Isabel Leighton and Gabrielle Forbush), My Boy Franklin (Long & Smith, 1933).

ER named her mother-in-law as one of “The Seven People Who Shaped My Life,” Look, 19 June 1951, pp. 55–58: “My mother-in-law was a lady of great character. She always knew what was right and what was wrong. She was kind and generous and loyal…. But it was hard to differ with her…. She dominated me for years.”

144–45  sin of human carelessness: For Squire James’s political values, see Ward, Before the Trumpet, pp. 154–56.

145  “Franklin is a Delano”: SDR quoted by James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), p. 7.

145  very serious stables: ER wrote of Gloster in FDR and Hyde Park: Personal Recollections (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), pp. 4–5. See also Ward, Before the Trumpet, p. 53.

146  Little Lord Fauntleroy: Alice Longworth in Teague, Mrs. L, p. 46.

146  “my bath alone”: FDR to his father, quoted in Burns, Lion and Fox, p. 4.

146  Groton: On FDR at Groton and Harvard, see Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1985), ch. 4, pp. 239ff.

147  Taddie …eloped with …Dutch Sadie: Ibid., p. 75.

147  “disgrace to the name”: FDR to “My Darling Mama and Papa,” 23 Oct. 1900, FDRL. These are the sentences deleted from FDR’s published Letters, vol. 1, pp.

429–30.(Elliott Roosevelt, ed.,   FDR: His Personal Letters [Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947; Kraus Reprint, 1970], hereafter Letters.)

Ironically, Theodore Roosevelt—always so afraid of scandal—was inconveniently besmirched, since the headlines occurred during his campaign for the vice-presidency. But the entire family pulled together, and on 30 Oct. 1900 FDR marched through Cambridge in his crimson cap and gown in the Republican torchlight parade.

148  a model Grotonian: Ward, Before the Trumpet, chs. 5, 6; Burns, Lion and Fox, pp. 13–21.

148  something of an outsider: Joseph Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance (Viking, 1982), pp. 35–36.

148n.  “my friend”: Endicott Peabody quoted in Baltzell, Protestant Establishment, p. 249.

148–49  “those squaws”: Morgan, FDR, pp. 68–69.

149  “How about Teddy Robinson and Eleanor”: FDR to “Dearest Mama and Papa,” 11 Dec. 1898, in Letters, vol. 1, pp. 243–44. This was FDR’s first mention of ER.

149  failure to make Porcellian: William Sheffield Cowles, Jr., quoted in Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, pp. 36–37.

150  “I know what pain”: FDR to SDR, 4 Dec. 1903, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 518.

150  “Dearest Cousin Sally”: ER to SDR, 2 Dec. 1903, in ibid., p. 517.

150–51  Caribbean cruise: SDR’s Caribbean effort was a failure. After the trip, FDR wrote his mother, “It is horrid to be back after such a perfect trip—if it only could have lasted longer without being very far away from N.Y.!” (14 March 1904 in Letters, vol. 1, p. 527.)

151–52  the Delano “clan”: TIMS, pp. 118–22.

152–53,n.   Howard Cary: TIMS, p. 110; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 134–37. On Cary’s suicide, see W. A. Swanberg, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), p. 239.

153–54  Nicholas Biddle: Biddle and Lyman Delano on ER, the Delanos’ enthusiasm, and Grace Tully in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 136–37; congratulatory letters in FDRL.

154  “by no means good enough for her”: Corinne Robinson Alsop’s papers and her unpublished diaries are now available at Houghton; quoted in Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 36.

154  “I like ‘Fear nothing’”: ER to FDR, 18 Nov. 1903, FDRL.

154Sonnets from the Portuguese: ER to FDR, 18 Dec. 1903, FDRL.

155  “learn to love me”: ER to FDR, 3 Dec. 1903, FDRL.

155  consulted Cousin Susie: ER to FDR, 6 Dec. 1903, FDRL.

155  master’s degree: ER to FDR, 7 Oct. 1903, FDRL.

155–56  promoted all his activities: 19 Dec. 1903, FDRL.

156  “not worth it”: ER to FDR, 17 Dec. 1903, FDRL.

157  “just as well”: ER to FDR, 12 Feb. 1904, FDRL.

157  “Women have served”: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, pp. 35–37. It is a situation, Virginia Woolf concluded, that leads “to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.”

157–58  five weeks of separation: ER’s letters to FDR during his Caribbean trip, 16 Dec. 1903; 7 Jan., 18 Jan., 27 Jan. 1904; 6–11 Feb. 1904, Box 14, FDRL.

158  diverting, even entertaining: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 124–26.

158–59 Candida: All quotations from   Candida: A Mystery, in Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces (Dodd, Mead, 1963), vol. 3, pp. 199–268. For “propagandistic” tour with A Doll’s House, Shaw’s preface, p. 112.

159–60  “Don’t let her feel”: ER to FDR, 23 May 1904, FDRL.

160  “adopt her fully”: Sara’s pre-Christmas letter to FDR quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet, pp. 323–24.

160  momentous times: For the Roosevelt-Robinson wedding and FDR’s graduation, see ibid., p. 333.

160  Mrs. Hartman Kuhn …wrote Eleanor: quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 135.

161  “high life lady”: ER to FDR, 17 May 1904, FDRL.

7. Franklin and He, and Sara Makes Three

162  17 March 1905: All greetings, congratulatory letters, gift listings, and other wedding memorabilia are in Family Papers Donated by the Children, Box 20, FDRL.

162–63  “beautiful,” “regal”: Bridesmaids’ and ER’s gown, and the fullest description of wedding, in New York Times, 18 March 1905.

163  Aunt Pussie: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 140.

164  “more claim to good looks”: However complimentary, Town Topics was also disapproving: “Miss Helen Cutting and Miss Eleanor Roosevelt have elected to be married in Lent, and, moreover, Miss Roosevelt has chosen a Friday (St. Patrick’s Day) for her nuptials” (9 March 1905).

Helen Cutting was to marry Lucius Wilmerding; Isabella Selmes, who was to become ER’s closest confidante during the early years of her marriage, had been staying that year with her mother, Martha Flandrau Selmes, at Cousin Susie’s. A Southern aristocrat and Western adventurer, Mrs. Selmes was particularly close to TR and Aunt Bye, and was Cousin Susie’s great friend. Town Topics rhapsodized over “Miss Isabella Selmes, the charming Louisville beauty, who is spending the winter with Mrs. Parish” (9 March 1905).

164  Aunt Bye replied: Anna Roosevelt Cowles to ER, 19 Dec. 1904, Box 20, FDRL.

164–65  “We are greatly rejoiced”: TR to FDR, 29 Nov. 1904; Aunt Edith to ER, 28 Dec. 1904; cf. TR to ER, 19 Dec. 1904, Box 20, FDRL.

165  “Really you are a saint”: For the notion that Alice was “downright jealous” of TR’s offer to ER, see Carol Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988), p. 77.

165  “in Bobbie Goelet’s auto”: ER to FDR, 30 Jan. 1904, FDRL.

165–66  “so pleased with your gift”: Autobiography of ER, p. 49.

ER was indeed pleased with many of her gifts. Although there were many conventional silver trays and ornate vases, there were also many considerately selected gifts: carved and interesting clocks, and leatherbound first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Austen, the Brownings, and Christina Rossetti. ER cherished particularly Bay Emmet’s portrait of Aunt Bye. She never referred to Aunt Edith’s present, a small watercolor of children wading, framed by Fischer, originally a gift to TR from a Dutch genre painter named Blommer. Edith Roosevelt was glad to be rid of it. She wrote her sister, Emily: “It is really good of its kind, but a kind which I don’t happen to care for.”

(Gift lists and memorabilia, Box 20, FDRL. Edith Roosevelt quoted in S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 289.)

166  “scuttled” into New York: TR wrote his son Kermit, “I paid a scuttling visit to New York on Friday to give away Eleanor at her marriage, and to make two speeches” (in Joseph Bucklin Bishop, ed., Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children [Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919], p. 18).

167  “the lion of the afternoon”: TIMS, pp. 124–26. The New York Tribune headlined: “President’s Flying Visit / Gives Niece Away…, Speaks at Two Dinners and Whisks Back to Capital.” The Tribune story was the least critical: “The residence of Mrs. Henry Parish, Jr., is one of the most attractive in New York, and is especially well adapted to a large wedding…. Miss Roosevelt, who is a tall girl, made a handsome bride, and the bridesmaids looked uncommonly well also.”

The New York Sun called the wedding “a simple one.” Detailed and neutral, The New York Times noticed that ER was “considerably taller than the head of the nation, suggesting to many present her beautiful mother…. She has much of that simple grace that characterized her mother.”

(All newspaper accounts are dated 18 March 1905.)

168–69,n.   “the most perfect wedding”: SDR to “My precious Franklin & Eleanor,” quoted in Morgan, FDR, p. 103.

Nobody (not even SDR, who seemed to enjoy the fact that Franklin missed the first bars of the “Wedding March” from Lohengrin when she related the story in My Boy Franklin) referred to the egregious wedding review in Town Topics, 23 March 1905:

“The Henry Parishes, the Livingston Ludlows and the other relatives of Miss Eleanor Roosevelt received as much advertising out of the wedding as did Mrs. Goelet and Mrs. Oliver Belmont out of the ducal alliances of their daughters. The event was characterized by pathetic economy and the guests were not overly conservative in discussing it. To begin with, the food was supplied by an Italian caterer, not of the first class, and one man said he got only a fleeting glimpse of a bottle of champagne….” (Since, to date, nobody has discovered a picture of the wedding party, one might add: And no photographer was hired for the occasion.)

“The street in front of the Parish house was jammed with a typical St. Patrick’s Day crowd, noisy and full of an exuberance of spirits that was embarrassing…. The police had been ordered to let no one through the lines …and the guests who were unwise enough to leave their carriages before reaching the house ran against a solid bank of bluecoats…. Mrs. Alexander nearly lost her overskirt and had considerable difficulty readjusting her bonnet. Colonel Latrobe, of Baltimore, had a much worse time…. Mrs. I. Townsend Burden and Miss Gwendolyn had the distinction of being mistaken for Mrs. [Theodore] Roosevelt and the little daughter of the President …and their open carriage was surrounded…. Mrs. Norman Whitehouse arrived …and some woman in the crowd took such a fancy to her that she threw a bunch of violets at her…. The President fooled the crowd in leaving …by the Fifth Avenue end…. The uninvited spectators failed to notice the bridal couple, who went away unobserved in a closed cab….”

Until FDR completed his semester at Columbia, the couple lived in a small apartment in the Hotel Webster, at 40 West 45th Street. (TIMS, p. 126.)

169  three-month European honeymoon: TIMS, pp. 127, 135; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 146–47.

169 “  a wonderful sailor“: FDR to SDR, 25 July 1905, in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 46–47.

169–70  Franklin had nightmares: Ted Morgan, FDR, pp. 104–5.

170–71  “we did things”: TIMS, p. 135.

171–72  hike up the Faloria: Ibid., p. 130; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 148.

ER’s subsequent hiking and climbing feats give one pause as one considers the Dolomites, and Franklin’s failure to encourage his wife even on their honeymoon. Indeed, Lake Roosevelt, high above the Tuolumne Meadows of Yosemite National Park, near the base of Mount Connes, was named for Eleanor Roosevelt. She had helped to stock it with rainbow trout in 1934. Moreover, with Ranger Forrest Townsley, she “climbed up an elevation of some 13,000 feet. When they came down, I thought the ranger was going to have a stroke.” But Lorena Hickok thought ER looked as if she had returned from “a stroll in Central Park.” (Shirley Sargent, Yosemite’s Famous Guests [Flying Spur Press, 1970], p. 34. I am grateful to ranger and naturalist Carl Sharsmith for his memories of ER during her second visit to Yosemite in 1942. See Volume Two.)

172  Aunt “Doe”: TIMS, pp. 131–32.

172  “prolonged bat”: FDR to SDR, 14 Aug. 1905, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 66.

172–73  “extremely ‘French play’”: TIMS, p. 131; and ER to SDR, 16 Aug. 1905, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 69.

173  time with Marjorie Bennett: TIMS, pp. 131–32.

173  “brought home the loss”: Ibid., p. 132.

173  Scotland …with …the Fergusons: Ibid., pp. 134–37; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 150; Rixey, Bamie, pp. 63–65.

173–74  “sweet …together”: “It is impossible to imagine how sweet she and Bob are together for I would not know him for the same man.” ER to SDR, “Dearest Mama,” 30 Aug. 1905, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 80. In this letter ER also noted that they had met Beatrice and Sidney Webb at Novar: “Franklin discussed the methods of learning at Harvard with the husband while I discussed the servant problem with the wife!” (Ibid.)

174–75  a home and a family: See ER, “I Remember Hyde Park.”

175  sought Sara’s advice: Autobiography of ER, p. 61.

175  “just the sweetest, dearest”: ER to SDR, 7 June 1905, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 4.

176  “no plans to make”: TIMS, p. 138.

177  “For ten years”: Autobiography of ER, p. 62.

178  Bound by custom: TIMS, p. 142. On Alice’s wedding, and Edith Carow Roosevelt to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, see Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, pp. 104–7.

178  “I had never had any interest”: TIMS, p. 142.

178–79  a trained nurse: For ER on childrearing, see ibid., pp. 145–46, 151; and ER, “I Remember Hyde Park.” On the tensions and cruelties of the nursery, see also James Roosevelt, with Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View (Playboy Press, 1976); and Bernard Asbell, Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982).

179n.   Decades later: TIMS, p. 145.

179  Society for the Prevention: Ibid., p. 151.

Even at the time, ER acknowledged that she was considered “a fussy mother” by her contemporaries, but she wanted to be both correct and protective: “Anna and Brother [James] are very well but Cousin Susie tells me if I keep them up on the roof so much I will ruin all their chances for growing up with any imagination and so I have bought Brother a carriage and he and Anna will spend occasional afternoons in the park ‘to cultivate their imaginations and see other children’! It strikes me as a little ludicrous to worry so young about these things but I suppose that is because I am so ‘matter of fact’!” (ER to Isabella Ferguson, 28 Dec. 1908; 8 Jan. 1909. All letters from ER to Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway are in the Greenway Collection, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson [hereafter Tucson]).

180,n.   “Griselda” moods: TIMS, pp. 149–52. My discussion of Griselda has been informed by Judith Bronfman’s splendid Ph.D. dissertation, “The Griselda Legend in English Literature,” New York University, 1977; and Robert Dudley French, A Chaucer Handbook (Crofts, 1947).

180  “I never talked to anyone”: ER to Lorena Hickok, 1933, Hickok Papers, FDRL. See Volume Two.

181  only one horse: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 156. 181–82 summer of 1908: TIMS, pp. 157–59.

182  Mrs. Hartman Kuhn: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 163.

183  cried and cried: TIMS, pp. 162–63. Whether the new house reminded her of her mother’s last home in the same neighborhood, or the Ludlow-Parish twin houses of her godmother and great-aunt, or whether it was the lack of privacy, ER did not want to live in the house that Sara built: “I had nothing to do with getting it and it is not the kind of house I would have got. I hate it.” (Quoted in Alfred Steinberg, Mrs. R: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958].)

183  “E. brave and lovely”: SDR quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 166.

183  Eleanor Roosevelt blamed herself: TIMS, pp. 164–65.

Baby Franklin was born on 18 March 1909. On 14 April, ER noted with dismay that her baby “is very flourishing but I’ve already stopped nursing him so I don’t expect him to gain much for a little while though the food agrees with him finely.” On 25 Oct., she wrote, “Anna and James are very well but baby Franklin is not as fine as I would like, however I hope he will improve….”

The baby was buried on 7 Nov., and ER was in a state of emotional depression for months thereafter, the record for which is almost entirely in her letters to Isabella Selmes Ferguson, Tucson. On 12 Nov., she wrote: “Sometimes I think I cannot bear the heartache which one little life has left behind but then I realize that we have much to be grateful for still, and that it was meant for us to understand and sympathize more deeply with all life’s sorrows.”

Almost three years later, when Teddy and Helen Roosevelt Robinson lost their month-old infant, ER wrote again: “No matter how little one’s baby is, something of one’s self dies with it I think and it leaves an empty place in one’s heart which nothing can ever fill again…. Oh, well I suppose there is a reason for it all & we can but try to take it in the best way….” (ER to Isabella Selmes Ferguson, 7 March 1912, Tucson.)

184  “I miss you dreadfully”: ER to FDR, 23 Sept. 1910, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 166.

184  Franklin’s habits: TIMS, p. 149.

184–85  opportunity not only knocked: Osborne to FDR, 8 Oct. 1910, quoted in Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 16.

In 1908, TR, having regretfully announced that he would not run again, vacated the White House for his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft. But Taft tilted toward reaction, and horrified Roosevelt Republicans, who called themselves Progressives. Progressivism among New York Democrats was also on the agenda. In his letter to FDR, Osborne observed that TR was “trying to make his party radical, which is impossible; don’t let us be forced into the mistake of trying to make our party conservative, which is equally impossible.”

185  “I’ll take it”: FDR to Perkins, quoted in Morgan, FDR, p. 112.

185–86 first political campaign: Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, pp. 17–22.

8. Eleanor Roosevelt, Political Wife

187  a congenial house: TIMS, pp. 168–71.

After the death of baby Franklin, the move to Albany seemed ER’s salvation. Both the State Street house, and later the house at 4 Elk Street, appealed to her: “You don’t know how I am looking forward to the winter there. It is all so quiet, no crowd, no rush just stately houses overlooking a broad street with occasional passers by, really, I feel one might have time to live there.”

The State Street house was a “square brownstone …only two blocks from the capitol so F can be home for lunch. It is quite a big house with a piazza and a big yard …and built more like a country house….” (ER to Isabella Ferguson, 26 Nov. 1910, Tucson.)

187–88  She experimented: On her first days in Albany, and the wet nurse, see TIMS, pp. 168–71.

188–89  “very, very busy”: ER to Isabella Ferguson, 11 Jan. 1911, Tucson.

189–90  now a political wife: ER’s thoughts and activities during the Albany years, the political books she read and commented upon, and her occasional criticisms of Franklin’s speeches are found scattered throughout her correspondence to Bob and Isabella Ferguson, Tucson. Her appeal to the Tammany reformers is derived from Frances Perkins’s Oral History, Columbia University. Although she invariably supported her husband’s position in private as well as public, her own reactions were occasionally those of an entertained observer: “We went to the opening of the Senate and Bob would have enjoyed hearing a dreadful Senator Newcomb attack the Governor’s message and then Senator Grady, who is a reprehensible character but a delightful speaker, get up and defend it. I thought they would come to blows and it certainly was not a dignified argument but Grady had the whole room laughing before he had been speaking five minutes and I could not help being sorry for any one who tried to oppose him!” (ER to Isabella, 11 Jan. 1911, Tucson.)

190–91  anti-Tammany “Insurgents”: For FDR and the Insurgency, see Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, pp. 25–33. The ten-week struggle led to a compromise candidate, James O’Gorman, and both sides claimed victory.

192  charmed by State Senator Tom Grady: TIMS, pp. 172, 176.

192  Tom Grady wrote ER: Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 173. ER discussed those politicians who interested her in a letter to Isabella, 30 Jan. 1911, Tucson.

192  poor Jewish children: FDR’s letter to ER, written on Carter, Ledyard and Milburn stationery, is undated, and presumably written, therefore, after 1907. (ER Papers, Box 3, FDRL.)

192–93  After 1910: TIMS, p. 181.

193  a “damn fool”: Al Smith on FDR, quoted in Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 95.

Those, like FDR, interested less in social legislation and more in good government were at this time frequently called “goo-goos.”

193  Tim Sullivan: Quoted in Frances Perkins Oral History; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), pp. 11–12.

193–94  In 1911, Franklin was not the reformer: Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, p. 14; Morgan, FDR, pp. 125–27; Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, pp. 43–44; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 334–38. See, most recently, Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament (Harper & Row, 1989), ch. 4; and Frank Friedel, FDR: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Little, Brown, 1990). (The latter two works appeared after this book was written.)

For Frances Perkins’s career, see especially her 5,000-page Oral History, Columbia University; Charles Trout, in Barbara Sicherman, et al., eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 535–39; and George Martin, Madame Secretary: Frances Perkins (Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

The publicity given to the lives of the Triangle Fire victims, and the mean conditions under which they toiled, fortified the emerging suffrage campaign among working women and their allies, and intensified labor-reform activity—led in Albany by the vigorous activities of Frances Perkins. See especially Elizabeth Dutcher, “Budgets of the Triangle Fire Victims,” Woman Voter, June 1912, pp. 14–16; and Dutcher’s vivid description of Perkins’s last-minute chase to find Christy Sullivan and his cousin “Big Tim” Sullivan, who supported the fifty-four-hour bill on behalf of his hardworking mother and sister.

Their votes were crucial, but they were en route to New York City when the bill came up. When they received Perkins’s message, they dashed off the ferry, ran up the hill, and arrived as the roll call was taken: A “mighty roar” greeted their arrival, “right hands raised,” shouting their votes. The Senate “was swept by a tidal wave of emotion…. Callous old politicians, who had long forgotten what a tear was, were weeping…. And at the back of the chamber, clinging to the brass rail, beyond which she might not go, Frances Perkins was weeping too.”

According to Dutcher, after the vote “Senators engulfed” Frances Perkins with praise and congratulations. She named several, but FDR was not among them. (Elizabeth Dutcher, “Frances Perkins: Doctor of Politics,” Woman Voter, Sept. 1912, pp. 12–13.)

194–95  invited Gifford Pinchot: FDR on desertification, quoted in Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, p. 335.

195  Of those first years in Albany: TIMS, pp. 180–81.

195  “an anti-suffragette”: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 238–39.

The only indication, cited repeatedly, that ER actively opposed suffrage is a letter from her brother, Hall, written from Groton on 31 Jan. 1908: “You seemed surprised that Auntie Pussie is a suffragist (ette). I told you that the day I went to lunch with her. The most surprising part to me is that she is trying to convert you of all people!” (Hall Roosevelt to ER, FDRL.)

But, to date, there is scarcely one contemporary word from ER directly on the subject. Subsequently, she analyzed her belated evolution as a feminist who embraced enfranchisement, equality, and the full empowerment of women: “In my grandmother’s home politics were never mentioned and I think she was rather ashamed to acknowledge that even by marriage anything so contaminating as a government official was related to the family.” At Allenswood, “I came in contact …with the first women I had ever known who were really intellectually emancipated, and I found this experience extremely stimulating.” But here one must pause to recall that Marie Souvestre was eager to introduce the impressionable sixteen-year-old Eleanor to her great friend Mrs. Humphry Ward, Britain’s leading antisuffragist.

As a debutante and young matron, ER “still heard with amusement and horror in the early nineteen-hundreds of the early fighters for suffrage who had worn trousers and walked around the streets of New York in them.” ER dated the real change in her views, and the views of her society, with World War I, and noted: “I had my first contact with the suffrage movement rather late, and consider myself lucky to have heard Anna Howard Shaw speak and to have known Carrie Chapman Catt before she was widely recognized as the great leader of women in the struggle for equal political rights.” (ER, “Women Have Come a Long Way,” Harper’s Magazine, Oct. 1950, pp. 74–76.)

195–96  In 1912: Jane Addams speech, New York Times, 8 Aug. 1912. See also, A. F. Davis, American Heroine, pp. 186–97.

On 5 Nov. 1912, TR wrote to Jane Addams: “I prize your action, not only because of what you are and stand for, but because of what it symbolized for the new movement. In this great National Convention of a new party women have thereby been shown to have their places to fill precisely as men have, and on an absolute equality.” (Quoted in Melanie Gustafson, “Women’s Partisanship and the Progressive party of 1912,” unpublished paper presented to the Eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1990, p. 23. I am grateful to Melanie Gustafson for sending me this paper.)

196  refrained from any public support (of TR): TIMS, p. 189.

197  “F is …well satisfied”: ER to Isabella and Bob Ferguson, 24 July 1912, Tucson. 197 Her brother, Hall: TIMS, pp. 186–87, 193.

197  Margaret Richardson: The granddaughter of architect Henry Hobson Richardson (noted for Trinity Church and the Hay-Adams houses in Washington), she was an enthusiastic sportswoman, and a celebrated Boston belle. On 14 Jan. 1912, the Boston Herald noted that she was “one of the most strikingly good looking girls of her set,” and that Gracie Hall Roosevelt was “foremost in her train.” I am grateful to Honor Moore for this reference.

197–98  ER and FDR were separated frequently: FDR to ER, 14 April 1912, FDRL. (FDR’s correspondence with SDR during his Panama trip is in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 180–90.)

198  New Mexico: ER planned the visit with the Fergusons for months. (Tucson correspondence.)

198  “love at first sight”: On the Democratic convention, see Morgan, FDR, p. 139; Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace, 1910–1917 (University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Privately, ER wrote Isabella, her heart was with the Progressives. (24 July 1912, Tucson.)

199  “You must have a fever”: SDR quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 178.

199–200  Louis McHenry Howe: For descriptions of Howe, see Burns, Lion and Fox, p. 44; Morgan, FDR, p. 132; Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, ch. 1; TIMS, p. 193.

Daniels and Root are quoted in Burns, Lion and Fox, p. 50, Morgan, FDR, p. 143.

As the election neared, ER wrote several letters to Bob and Isabella Ferguson expressing hope that Uncle Ted would “win.” On 28 Sept. she wrote Isabella: “Uncle Ted’s Progressive ideas have fired so many of the young men to real work in this state that even if he doesn’t win this time I feel a big work will have been accomplished.” (Tucson.)

On 2 Nov. 1912, ER wrote that even if TR did not win “this time he will four years from now.” (Tucson.)

200  During the inauguration: ER’s observations on the suffragists, Wilson, and the new First Lady, Ellen Axson Wilson, are in letters to Isabella Ferguson, 12 March 1913, 11 April 1913, Tucson.

200  “nice fat ladies”: ER’s curious note failed to give any hint of the excitement of the day. The New York Times devoted a full page to the event, and described in detail both the march (“the capital saw the greatest parade of women in its history”), and the “wonderful allegory” on the Treasury steps:

“Over 5,000 women passed down Pennsylvania Avenue…. Floats …illustrated the progress the woman’s suffrage cause had made in the last seventy-five years. Scattered throughout …were the standards of nearly every State in the Union. It was an astonishing event.”

Over 500,000 persons watched the march: “Imagine a Broadway election night crowd…. Imagine that crowd surging forward constantly, without proper police restraint…. It was necessary many times to call a halt while the mounted escort and the policemen pushed the crowd back.”

(Washington’s failure to monitor the crowd was insulting to the suffragists, who had their own escorts, and with their own restraint and horsemanship managed the affair. Subsequently, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw demanded an investigation.)

“Through all the confusion and turmoil the …paraders marched calmly, keeping a military formation….”

Mounted on a white horse, Inez Milholland led the parade “in a white broadcloth Cossack suit and long white-kid boots. From her shoulders hung a pale-blue cloak, adorned with a golden maltese cross.”

At the rear, equally honored, was General Rosalie Jones and the women who had hiked from New York to Washington. “Carrying her yellow pilgrim staff and a great bunch of roses, Gen. Jones walked in front of the line of women,” all in brown, who had made the trip on foot.

The first section marched under the banner “Women of the World, Unite!” and was led by the Marysville, Missouri, band of thirty-five, “wearing the yellow color of the suffragist cause,” and followed by delegations from twenty nations.

The floats of the second section told the story of the suffrage fight from 1840 to the present, and included several men “representing ‘male supremacy’ [who] seemed rather ashamed of themselves.” The float called “Today” was limited to women, in college gowns, followed by a troop of women cavalry from Baltimore.

The third section portrayed women’s various callings: farmers, housekeepers, patriotic workers, and “floats for all the occupations,” including one representing the interior of a sweatshop, followed by delegations of women. “The clergy was represented by six sedate, rather elderly women in black gowns.” The educational division included “thirty-two colored women from Howard University,” all in caps and gowns. The businesswomen “marched 400 strong in blue. The writers …wore white gowns. Artists were in pink, and musicians in red.” Actresses, attorneys, librarians, social workers, housewives, physicians all followed, delegation, by delegation, wearing “gowns of like color.”

After the parade, “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country” occurred on the steps of the Treasury Building. “It was a triumph for the women who came here to play an unprecedented part in the festivities attending the inauguration….”

The elaborate allegory, featuring brilliantly colored costumes and the most stirring music, “illustrated those ideals toward which both men and women” continued to struggle: Columbia, upon hearing the trumpets of march as it made its way up Pennsylvania Avenue, “summoned to her Justice, Charity, Liberty, Peace and Hope, to review with her the ‘New Crusade’ of women.” Columbia, in velvet-and-silken robes of red, white, and blue, waited while Justice, “clad in richest purple and attended by maidens robed in all the violet shades came down the long flight of steps….” “The triumphal march from AIDA served to herald the coming of Liberty, a girl in trailing veils of rose color, who …danced across the stage, an unfettered being, beautifully free.” As the band “struck into the opening strains of the Lohengrin Overture,” Peace, robed in white, stood motionless—and then lifted her arms to free a white dove, which “sprang joyously into the air, circled down over the crowd and away.”

The “bare legs” of the participants, which ER had commented upon, were also a subject of interest in the Times’ celebration:

“The raw, biting wind …was not suited to the almost diaphanous costumes that served to adorn most of the figures …and most of them presented bared arms to the cold that was enough to make the men in the crowd glad that they had brought their heaviest fur coats.” Though the wind “served to whip and turn and flutter the drapery most attractively, it did not serve to allay the concern for the health of the participants that could be heard expressed…. But the real suffragists said it was heroic.”

(“5,000 Women March / Beset by Crowds,” New York Times, 4 March 1913.)

9. The Roosevelts in Wilson’s Washington

201  Eleanor was not with him: FDR to ER, 17 March 1913, FDRL.

201  second letter: Correspondence between FDR and his mother, 17 March, 18 March 1913, in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 199–200.

202  ER spent the summer: On the aftermath of Josie Zabriskie’s death, and SDR’s reaction to ER’s guests at Campobello, ER to FDR, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 180–81.

203  “I have a little more milk”: ER to Isabella, Sept. 1914, Tucson.

203  She gave a party: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 194. On John Aspinwall’s birth, see TIMS, p. 239.

203–4  Wilson’s most radical allies: Daniels’s 1 Oct. 1912 editorial, on “the subjection of the negro,” in the News and Observer, quoted in Morgan, FDR, pp. 147–48.

On Wilson, darling of the Dixiecrats, see especially Kathleen Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History, April 1959, pp. 158–73. According to Wolgemuth, the impetus for the unprecedented segregation of federal workers came from Postmaster General Albert Burleson, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, and Josephus Daniels. See also Nancy Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly, March 1968, pp. 61–79; Rayford W. Logan, The betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (Macmillan, Collier Books, 1965 [1954]); and Harry N. Scheiber, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, 1917–1921 (Cornell University Press, 1960).

W. E. B. Du Bois was stunned by Wilson’s executive order that mandated segregation in office buildings, cafeterias, and toilets throughout the federal city. In his editorials in The Crisis, Du Bois had urged African-Americans to support Wilson in 1912: “We sympathize with those faithful old black voters who will always vote the Republican ticket…. We can understand those who, despite the unspeakable Theodore Roosevelt, accept his platform which is broad on all subjects except the greatest—human rights…. [But] we sincerely believe that even in the face of promises disconcertingly vague, and in the face of the solid caste-ridden South, it is better to elect Woodrow Wilson….” (“The Last Word in Politics.”)

Six months after Wilson’s inauguration, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote “An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson,” full of disbelief that Wilson (who in 1912 had said he wanted to see “justice done to the colored people…; and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling”) even knew “of the gravest attack on the liberties of our people since emancipation.”

“Public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government.

“In the Treasury and Post Office Department colored clerks have been herded to themselves as though they were not human beings. We are told that one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work had consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years. Mr. Wilson, do you know these things? Are you responsible for them?…” (The Crisis, Sept. 1913.)

204  Daniels expressed horror: For ER on Josephus Daniels, see Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence (J. B. Lippincott, 1954), p. 80.

204–5  Ellen Axson Wilson’s crusade: See ibid., pp. 85–86, 125, 136; Edith Elmer Wood, “Four Washington Alleys,” The Survey, 6 Dec. 1913, pp. 250ff; Mrs. Ernest P. Bicknell, “Home-Maker of the White House: Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s Social Work in Washington,” The Survey, 3 Oct. 1914, pp. 10ff; and “Mrs. Wilson’s Death and Washington’s Alleys,” The Survey, 3 Oct. 1914, pp. 515ff.

Charlotte Everett Hopkins was president of the board of the Home for Incurables, and chaired the women’s department of the National Civic Federation. She waited only several weeks to engage ER in her crusade for decent housing in 1933. See Volume Two of this biography for ER’s efforts in behalf of public housing after 1933.

205  “next step will be Socialism”: ER to Aunt Maude, [1912], quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, p. 63.

206  respect for Mrs. Daniels: Jonathan Daniels, End of Innocence, p. 38.

206  unruffled by the 1912 breach: TR to FDR, 18 March 1913, Family Papers Donated by the Children, Box 20, FDRL.

206  in Aunt Bye’s home: For ER’s assessment of her friends and allies in Washington, see TIMS, pp. 198–99, 234–37.

When Sir Cecil Spring-Rice was recalled to London during the war, ER felt a personal loss, and was outraged that he had been so shabbily treated by his government. He was replaced by Lord Reading, who was considered more knowledgeable about the war, and better able to get along with Wilson. ER wrote Bob Ferguson: “We were all very sorry to see the Spring Rice’s go & it seemed very sudden & inconsiderate but I suppose governments can’t bother about anyone’s conveniences now. What a change in British policy to send a politician, isn’t it? Franklin says he is very clever and able and of course is close with the present government. Sir Cecil never was well known by many people in this country …but those who knew him, loved him & will miss him and his wife.” (23 Jan. 1918, Tucson.)

ER also wrote Isabella that, when she asked Henry Adams how he felt about Spring-Rice’s sudden departure, he said: “Jews are trumps just now!” His comment presumably referred to Rufus Isaacs, Earl (later Marquess) of Reading, and it appears ER did not at the time disagree. (ER to Isabella, 11 Jan. 1918, Tucson.)

Although Sir Cecil left the United States in good health, he was stunned by his recall, given no other appointment, and died suddenly on 14 Feb. Henry Cabot Lodge believed he “died of a broken heart.” ER wrote, “We were truly grieved about Sir Cecil,” and sent Isabella a note Florence Spring-Rice had written so that Isabella might see her “particularly brave and unselfish” qualities (ER to Isabella Ferguson, 24 Feb. 1918, Tucson). (Henry Cabot Lodge quoted in S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 418.)

206–7  curmudgeon Henry Adams: Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted in Jonathan Daniels, End of Innocence, p. 83.

207  “loved to shock his hearers”: TIMS, pp. 236–37.

207  “very interesting”: ER to SDR, 9 Jan. 1919, Letters, vol. 2, p. 445.

Within a month after Sir Cecil’s death, during the night of 26 March 1918, Henry Adams died in his sleep. During the early years of Wilson’s administration, ER shared Henry Adams’s views on certain issues, most notably his antagonism to Jews in high places. For a discussion of the development of her social thought on issues of bigotry and race, see Volume Two.

207  tradition of “calling”: ER’s journals for this period (FDRL) are filled with daily lists of whom she called upon, who was home, where she merely left her card. They are also filled with seating arrangements for weekly official and unofficial dinner parties given for ten to forty people.

207–8  “dreariness and waste”: ER to Isabella, 21 June 1916, Tucson.

208  Two Sundays a month: On “The Club,” Mrs. Leavitt, and other Washington friends, see TIMS, pp. 198–99; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 190–91.

208–10  Franklin K. Lane: For ER on Lane, see TIMS, pp. 256–58. Line’s 1920 letter to ER is quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 260; Lane to FDR on his behavior toward Josephus Daniels is quoted in Jonathan Daniels, End of Innocence, p. 129. On Josephus Daniels’s amazing patience with his frequently impertinent subordinate, see Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, p. 345; Jonathan Daniels, End of Innocence, passim.; and Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, pp. 117–19 and passim.

210  a uniquely devoted …couple: On Washington’s perceptions of ER, and her own sense of reality, see TIMS, p. 238; Jonathan Daniels, End of Innocence, p. 246.

211  “her really brilliant mind”: FDR to Aunt Maude, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 182.

211  beginning of the war: ER on TR and William Jennings Bryan in TIMS, pp. 230–32.

212  “All one’s thoughts”: ER to FDR, 7 Aug. 1914, FDRL.

212  “seemed the least bit excited”: FDR to ER, 2 Aug. 1914, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 238.

On 1 Aug., FDR had written his wife: “Germany has declared war against Russia. A complete smash-up is inevitable. Mr. [Daniels] totally fails to grasp the situation…. These are history-making days. It will be the greatest war in the world’s history. All well.” (Ibid., p. 233.)

Despite the outbreak of war, FDR decided to run in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in 1914. ER wrote the Fergusons: “He doesn’t stand a chance of winning but I hope he’ll run well to encourage them [the party leadership] for future battles.” (28 Sept. 1914, Tucson.)

For the activities of that segment of the peace movement spearheaded by women and men who were later to become ER’s political friends and allies, see BWC, “Woodrow Wilson and the Antimilitarists, 1914–1917,” Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1970; BWC, “The Woman’s Peace Party,” in Peace and Change, March 1972; BWC, “For Peace and Democracy in England and the United States, 1914–1918,” in Charles Chatfield, ed., Peace Movements in America (Schocken, 1973); C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918 (Princeton University Press, 1972); Barbara Steinson, American Women’s Activism in World War I (Garland, 1982); and, most recently, John Whiteclay Chambers, ed., The Eagle and the Dove: The American Peace Movement and United States Foreign Policy, 1900–1922 (Syracuse University Press, 1991), which includes excellent bibliography and documents.

212–13  Mexico, and Haiti: On the successful effort to avert war with Mexico, which U.S. oil interests and Republican “jingoes” allied with TR agitated for in 1914 and 1916, see BWC, “Woodrow Wilson and the American Union Against Militarism”; Chambers, ed., Eagle and Dove, pp. 76–87; Frederich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, The U.S., and the Mexican Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World, 1913–1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

On 14 July 1914, FDR dispatched 700 Marines and two ships to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo in Cuba to be prepared for all exigencies in the area, and went himself on a fact-finding mission at the end of the year. ER wrote the Fergusons that she would have the “very interesting book” they had sent her for Christmas “to read in the very lonely evenings when F goes to Haiti, San Domingo and Guantanamo, a three weeks trip which is to begin the 21st.” (Tucson.)

The United States occupied Haiti in 1915. Negotiations to purchase the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) also began in 1915, and were completed in 1917. See William Boyer, America’s Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs (Carolina Academic Press, 1983).

Although more cautious about intervention than FDR, Josephus Daniels was not a pacifist or an anti-imperalist when it came to Haiti, or other areas in the Caribbean. Rather, he called for “the complete pacification of Haiti,” if the Haitian government and leadership refused to sign the treaty which established U.S. control. By 1917, Haiti’s National Assembly was dissolved and Haiti was ruled by the Marines, under direct authority of Daniels and FDR. When FDR toured Haiti in 1917, he was so well pleased by the effects of martial law, he considered investing in the area’s tourist future. If he saw any of the brutal excesses; later so graphically reported, he wrote nothing of them after his journey to what he called the “Darkest Africa of the West Indies.”

In 1919, FDR urged the navy “quietly to take title” to an “unused” Caribbean island, and then to “slip the matter” into an appropriations bill later. For FDR’s 1917 trip, see especially Morgan, FDR, pp. 176–77. On his investment interest in Haiti, see Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe, p. 173. On FDR’s 1919 suggestion, see Rollins, p. 121.

FDR at first boasted and then denied that he wrote Haiti’s new constitution. Contemporary sources fully credit him with having done so, including the most hated and resisted clause, which gave Americans (“foreigners”) the right to own Haitian lands. The treaty with Haiti was signed on 16 Sept. 1915, and ratified with speed by the Senate on 28 Feb. 1916.

See especially Emily Greene Balch, ed., Occupied Haiti (Garland Publishing, 1972 [1927]); Major General Smedley D. Butler, “War Is a Racket,” in Three Generals on War, ed. John Whiteclay Chambers (Garland, 1973 [1935], an expansion and revision of Butler’s Forum article of the same title, Sept. 1934, pp. 140–43; Rayford Logan, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Oxford University Press, 1968).

213  she wrote with dismay: ER to FDR, 5–6 Aug. 1914.

213  “I’m glad Bryan is out”: ER to FDR, 10 June 1915, Box 15, FDRL.

On 11 June 1915, ER wrote Isabella Ferguson: “We are all much excited politically since Mr. Bryan’s resignation…. My new governess has three brothers at the front, one wounded, so we feel the war rather close….” ER also shared FDR’s feeing about preparedness in 1916: “Our chief interest now,” she wrote Isabella, were the “National Defense Bills. F does not think them adequate—but the question seems to be, ‘will Congress give even this’?…” (14 Nov. 1916, Tucson.)

213–14  World War I destroyed the progressive alliance: For the wartime breach between the Wilson-Hughes suffragists, see BWC, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1978). For the demise of the Jane Addams-TR alliance, see A. F. Davis, American Heroine, p. 223. See also Allen Davis, ed., Jane Addams on Peace, War, and International Understanding, 1899–1932 (Garland, 1976).

214  TR was desperate: TR to ER, 15 March 1915, Family Papers Donated by the Children, Box 20, FDRL.

214  “a bitter blow”: TIMS, pp. 249–50.

214–15  Hall and …Quentin …enlist: TIMS, p. 252.

215  the war meant new work: TIMS, pp. 245–46; 254–65.

216  Washington’s night life: ER to Bob Ferguson, 16 Sept. 1920, Tucson.

216  Livy …Davis: ER wrote most frequently about Livy Davis to her mother-in-law; see especially ER to SDR, 8 Feb. 1919, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 467.

216  “gay and glamorous”: On Davis, see Jonathan Daniels, End of Innocence, pp. 252–54; and Morgan, FDR, pp. 202–3.

217  first …mention of Lucy Mercer: ER to FDR, 23 July 1916, Family Papers, Box 15, FDRL.

217–18  “goosy girl”: FDR to ER, 16 July 1917, in Letters, vol. 2, 347.

Many of ER’s letters, beginning in 1915, have a hurt, angry, resigned quality. On 15 Oct. 1915, she wrote: “Not a word from you wretch!” On 10 July 1916: “The infantile paralysis is terrible and I am thankful to have the children here.” (Family Papers, Box 15, FDRL.)

218  “Such a funny party”: FDR to ER, 25 July 1917, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 352.

218–19  “food-saving program”: New York Times, 17 July 1917, and FDR to ER, 18 July, are both in ibid., pp. 349–50.

219  “it was horrid”: ER to FDR, 24 July 1917, FDRL.

219  “nothing I ask for appears”: Ibid.

219  “My threat was no idle one”: ER to FDR, 15 Aug. 1917, FDRL.

220  another jolly outing: FDR to ER, 20 Aug., in Letters, vol. 2, p. 358.

220  “Isn’t she perfectly lovely”: For the conversation between Alice Roosevelt Long-worth and FDR on Lucy Mercer, and her oft-repeated string-bean story, see Teague, Mrs. L, pp. 157–58, 160; also Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, p. 67; and Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, p. 137.

220  her own marriage disintegrated: Alice told her family as early as 1912 that she wanted a divorce, but they persuaded her that the public scandal would be too terrible (Teague, Mrs. L, p. 158).

221  “look up in the chandelier”: On the rivalry between Alice Longworth and Cissy Patterson for Senator Borah, see Ralph G. Martin, Cissy: The Extraordinary Life of Eleanor Medill Patterson (Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 189; Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, pp. 135, 147, 149. Cf. Eleanor Gizycka, Glass Houses (Minton, Balch, 1926).

Despite their rivalry, Alice always considered Cissy Patterson a “great friend”: “Cissy was an enchanting creature.” (Teague, Mrs. L, pp. 174, 176.)

222  “she wanted to he Eleanor Roosevelt”: Cissy Patterson on ER, R. Martin, Cissy, p. 324; cf. Alice Albright Hoge, Cissy Patterson (Random House, 1966).

Although Alice could barely abide her husband, they remained politically allied. For their relations, see Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ch. 8; on destruction of his papers and violin, see p. 168.

According to composer Mary Howe, who frequently played with Nicholas Long-worth, his violin was an “excellent Stradivarius,” and the congressman was very serious about his music. “It was almost incongruous in his apparently hard-boiled make-up.” (Mary Howe, Jottings [Washington, D.C., privately printed, 1957].) I am grateful to Dorothy Indenbaum for this reference.

222–23  “most unjust to poor May Ladenhurg”: On the Bernard Baruch-May Ladenburg caper, see Teague, Mrs. L, pp. 162–63; Alsop, Centenary Remembrance, pp. 66–68; Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, pp. 137–39.

223  “terribly disappointed”: ER to FDR, 5 Nov. 1917, FDRL.

223–24  “Dearest Honey”: ER to FDR, n.d. [1918], Box 15, FDRL.

224  her canteen …co-workers: especially Mary Astor Paul Munn; she and her husband (the “Charlie Munns”) were members of the set that FDR and Lucy Mercer partied with. See, for example, FDR to ER, 25 July 1917, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 352.

224  “I loved it”: ER to Lorena Hickok, Oct. 1932, AP Release, Hickok Papers, FDRL.

224  “asked me to go”: ER to FDR, 20 July 1918, Box 15, FDRL; see also ER to SDR, 17 July 1918, Box 13, FDRL.

ER was restless. In her 20 July letter, she had noted that “life is very quiet here.” “I feel as though you had been gone years.” On 1 Aug. 1918, she wrote: “Dearest honey, I got your letter from the Azores…. It was wonderful to hear only I hate not being with you and seeing it all! Isn’t that horrid of me!”

225  letters of gratitude: Letters to ER quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, pp. 216, 218–19; and FDRL.

225  to raise money: TIMS, pp. 255, 259.

225  Theodore Roosevelt divided: On TR’s disposition of prize money, see Theodore Roosevelt, The Great Adventure, Scribner’s, 1918, pp. 173–178.

225  ER had also learned: “I went in bathing with the chicks on Friday and had a rope on and I think Butler may succeed in teaching me to swim …and all the chicks [are] learning to swim too …Elliott with the best stroke of all” (ER to FDR, 4 Aug. 1919, Box 15, FDRL).

226  “Is F paying any attention”: Hall to ER, 26 July 1912, FDRL.

226  “many quiet evenings”: ER to Isabella, 13 Nov. 1917, Tucson.

226–27  “noblesse oblige”: SDR to “Dearest Franklin and Dearest Eleanor,” 14 Oct. 1917, in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 274–75. SDR’s own affirmations were strained as the world she knew teetered around her. She concluded this letter with the observation: “When I talk I find I usually arouse opposition, which seems odd, but is perhaps my own fault, and tends to lower my opinion of myself, which is doubtless salutary….”

227  “how lucky we are”: ER to SDR, 22 Jan. 1918, FDRL. 227 “I love you dear”: ER to SDR, 18 March 1918, FDRL.

228  the “bottom dropped out”: Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 221.

There is no record of ER’s feelings between FDR’s return in Sept. 1918 and their trip to Europe together in Jan. 1919.

Although her brother, Hall, was a regular correspondent, his letters for this period are not among his papers. And to the Fergusons ER wrote at a great slant: On 13 Nov. 1918, ER wrote Bob Ferguson: “Franklin had a horrid time but is quite well again.” She apologized for not writing for so long, because the war’s end had left everything so uncertain: “We’ve lived in suspense from day to day never knowing what would happen next and no one making any definite plans so I put off even writing till things settled down a bit!” (Tucson.)

Ironically, Josephus Daniels’s son was the first to write of the Lucy Mercer affair. See Jonathan Daniels, The Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents (Doubleday, 1968).

228–29  Lucy Mercer’s Catholicism: According to Joseph Alsop, Lucy Mercer’s “extra-strict” Catholicism prevented not only divorce but any consummation of an affair with a married man (Centenary Remembance, pp. 68ff). But Lucy Mercer evidently told family and friends that she would have married FDR if Eleanor had only been “willing to step aside.” (Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille, p. 145.)

Although Lucy Mercer was educated at a convent school in Austria, her mother was divorced when she married her Roman Catholic father. See Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 (Random House, 1971), pp. 484–85.

229  “Lucy Mercer married Mr. Wintie”: ER’s life was frequently intersected by one of history’s most interesting women, Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont. Her husband, O. H. P. Belmont, was a friend of Elliott’s, who sent him a terrier for company during his exile in Abingdon. In 1905, Town Topics compared ER’s wedding to her daughter’s. On the ERA, they were political opponents, although there is no evidence that they ever confronted each other.

The woman who donated Belmont House in Washington to the feminist cause, and became an outstanding leader of the equal-rights movement internationally, began her public life when she prevented her daughter from marrying Winthrop Rutherford. Famous as the most dominating mother in American society, Alva Erskine Smith was the daughter of fabulously wealthy cotton planters in Alabama and Kentucky. She married William K. Vanderbilt in 1875, and divorced him in 1895 on grounds of adultery. She married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, recently divorced from Sarah Whitney, in 1896. But her own marital history was as nothing compared with the cruelty of her daughter’s fate. At seventeen, Consuelo Vanderbilt fell in love with Winthrop Rutherford, a bachelor of thirty, and they became secretly engaged. Alva Belmont would not have it: “She made me leave the country.” “She intercepted all letters my sweetheart wrote and all of mine to him. She caused continuous scenes. She said I must obey. She said I knew very well I had no right to choose a husband, that I must take the man she had chosen.”

And at her daughter’s hearings before the Rota, the Vatican’s Ecclesiastical Court in Rome, where Consuelo applied for an annulment in 1926, Alva Belmont agreed with her daughter’s testimony: In 1895, she had chosen for her daughter the ninth Duke of Marlborough. (To arrange the marriage had cost the Vanderbilts a fortune estimated at $10 million.) Her daughter had no right to choose her husband. “I have always had absolute power over my daughter…. I ordered her to marry the Duke.”

Her daughter and the Duke separated in 1908—ironically, the same year Alva Belmont, influenced by Anna Howard Shaw, became one of America’s most militant and generous feminists. Evidently her first move was a reconciliation with her daughter. In 1909, she agreed to pay the rent for the new headquarters of the New York State Suffrage Association and the entire expenses of the National Association’s press department, and to finance the Political Equality League, which she organized.

By 1919, she supported virtually every suffrage and feminist activity, including the Southern Woman’s Suffrage Conference and the Women’s Trade Union League. She also contributed thousands of dollars to Max Eastman’s radical journal The Masses. She cared little for partisanship, she insisted, only for victory.

Her heart, she wrote, belonged to women the world over. There was “a common ground” between the richest woman on earth and the poorest “peasant woman.” After suffrage, she became the international leader of equal-rights feminists and worked ardently for women until her death in France in 1933.

In 1926, she spoke to the International Alliance of Women in Paris as president of the United States’ National Woman’s Party: “Have courage in your own judgment; trust yourselves; do not listen to the voice of fear; speak out…. Let us all together bear witness …that we will not cease for a single day until all women are completely emancipated.”

(The Rota testimony is quoted in Amory, Who Killed Society?, pp. 233–34; Belmont’s speeches in BWC, Crystal Eastman, pp. 207–9. Although there is to date no biography of Alva Belmont, see Christopher Lasch in Notable American Women, ed. James et al., pp. 126–28.)

230  “My husband did not seem”: TIMS, p. 268. 230 “I think I learned”: Ibid., pp. 259–60

232  Mother never slept with Father: Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973); J. Roosevelt with Libby, My Parents, pp. 101–2. ER’s granddaughter said she remembered her mother’s words exactly. Anna told her own daughter that upon her marriage (in June 1926) ER told her that sex “was an ordeal to be borne.” (Eleanor Seagraves to author.)

232  a second honeymoon: With few exceptions, the letters from both ER and FDR to Mama and the children during the European tour of 1919 are in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 444–70.

232–33  death of her Uncle Theodore: ER to SDR, 9 Jan., in ibid., p. 445; TIMS, p. 275.

ER did not write with emotion about her uncle’s death. Nor did she associate it with his months of evident agony over Quentin’s death. Indeed, when Quentin was killed, his plane shot down over enemy lines, ER wrote Bob Ferguson that he had died instantly “by two bullet holes in the head so he did not suffer and it is a glorious way to die; but I know Aunt Edith and Ethel are suffering.” (28 July 1918, Tucson.)

It seems, however, that the bellicose warrior was shattered. A light faded, his friends noticed; “the boy in him had died.” (S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 428.)

TR wrote his son Kermit that Edith had been wonderful in crisis. “Mother has …the heroic soul.” They went for a row “out on the still, glassy water towards the sound; there was a little haze, and it all soothed her poor bruised and aching spirit; then we took a swim; and as we swam she spoke of the velvet touch of the water and turning to me smiled and said, ‘there is left the wind on the heath, brother!’” (S. J. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, p. 425.)

Six months later Theodore Roosevelt was dead.

ER wrote with tenderness about her Uncle Douglas Robinson’s death on 12 Sept. 1918. Her Aunt Corinne’s husband had been her father’s mentor and business partner, and she “joined the family and friends” for his funeral at Herkimer, the family compound, “a very sweet place,” in bird-filled woods, “nine miles up the mountain.” “Of all the cemeteries I know, it is the least lonely place to leave someone you love.” (TIMS, p. 267.)

233  a transforming experience: ER to Isabella, 11 July 1919, Tucson.

233  Astounded by the devastation: TIMS, pp. 278–88.

233  grieved not to be with FDR: ER to SDR, 31 Jan. 1919, Box 16, FDRL.

234  “fascinated by Lady Scott”: ER to SDR, 11 Feb. 1919, in Letters, vol. 2, p. 469. 234 “the scandals”: Ibid.

234  nobody referred to the Lucy Mercer affair: ER’s glancing comment about her “breathless, hunted year” contrasts with the long, detailed letters she wrote to Isabella and her mother-in-law about the dissipations of her cousins in Paris. She worried especially about Aunt Corinne’s son Munro, who behaved much as her father had. When he returned to the United States, his behavior worsened “and [he] is now in Bloomingdale’s…. I confess to rather a hopeless feeling as to the future unless they can send him where he must work hard physically as well as mentally.” (ER to Isabella, 11 July 1919, Tucson.)

235  lost her appetite: ER to FDR, May 1919, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 244.

235  Clover Adams committed suicide: Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams (Temple University Press, 1981).

236  the poem Cecil Spring-Rice had written: Quoted in Lash, Love, Eleanor, p. 237.

10. 1919–20: Race Riots and Red Scare, Grief and Renewal

237  The Russian Revolution: ER considered Russia “certainly a baffling problem and one can’t help feeling sorry for those poor people.” (ER to Bob Ferguson, 24 Feb. 1918, Tucson.)

Neither ER nor FDR viewed the secret Allied intervention into Russia with concern. On 8 Aug. 1918, ER wrote FDR: “the news continues good and I imagine you are glad to be in Europe…. I’m sorry General Glover and not General Wood goes in command of Siberia….” (FDRL.)

237  Women demanded the vote: The radical suffragists of the Woman’s Peace Party of New York hailed the revolution with “mad, glad joy.” (Four Lights, 24 March 1917.)

238  “There is no life”: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence quoted in BWC, Crystal Eastman, p. 11. On Anglo-American suffragist militancy and the war, see Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975); Jane Marcus, ed., Suffrage and the Pankhursts (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987); and J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (University of Illinois Press, 1973), ch. 1.

238  “terms must please you”: ER to Bob Ferguson, 13 Nov. 1918, Tucson.

239  Red Scare: William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933 (Harvard University Press, 1963; Harper Torchbooks, 1966); Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (McGraw-Hill, Paperback, 1964); Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (Columbia University Press, 1963); and Joan Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 (Yale University Press, 1991).

The demand for political repression against “un-Americans” predated communist revolution, and was not limited to Wilsonians. It began with a crusade against immigrants and workers’ rights after the Civil War, and intensified mightily during World War I. In April 1917, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at Oyster Bay on the “Duty of Every American.” This introduced his frequently quoted line “No man can serve two masters,” and was a rallying cry against radicals, conscientious objectors, and dissenters of all persuasion: “The American who is not now heart and soul …in favor of fighting this war …is a traitor to this country and a traitor to mankind. He is unfit to live in America. He is unfit to be a free man, for his soul is the soul of a slave….” The neutralist should be sent “to some other neutral country.” The seditionist “should be shot.” (Quoted in Chambers, ed., Eagle and Dove, pp. 126–27.)

240  Alice Wadsworth and Eleanor Roosevelt lunched: On Alice Hay Wadsworth and the antisuffragists, see Lemons, Woman Citizen, pp. 11–13; 35–36.

240  the “Palmer Raids”: New York Times, 9 Nov. 1919. See also Robert W Dunn, ed., The Palmer Raids (International Publishers, 1948).

240–41  the first “Red Ark”: On the cruelty and illegality of the deportations, see “The Buford Widows,” Survey, 10 Jan. 1920; Louis F. Post, The Deportations Delirium of 1920 (Charles Kerr, 1923).

241  “boast of a superior liberty”: Max and Crystal Eastman quoted in New York State Legislature, Joint Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, Clayton R. Lusk, chair, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics, 4 vols. (J. B. Lyon, 1920), vol. 1, Propaganda, pp. 1254–55. See BWC, ed., Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on War and Revolution (Garland, 1979).

241  Palmer’s descriptions: A. Mitchell Palmer, “Extent of the Bolshevik Infection Here,” Literary Digest, 17 Jan. 1920, quoted in Preston, Aliens and Dissenters, p. 193.

241  “Like a prairie-fire”: A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” Forum, Feb. 1920, p. 179.

241–42  democracy seemed limited: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.’s commitment to civil liberties, in Miller, Roosevelt Chronicles, p. 296. On Berger, Debs, and the New York State five, see BWC, “The Socialist Party Convention,” in Crystal Eastman, pp. 349–56; Paula Eldot, Governor Alfred E. Smith: The Politician as Reformer (Garland, 1983), pp. 314–24.

Arrested for obstructing the draft, and sentenced to ten years in prison, Debs addressed the court: “Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Harding released him after 32 months. (See Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (Rutgers University Press, 1949.)

243  As a member: On the DAR and “Spider Web,” see Lemons, Woman Citizen, pp. 223–24.

243  ER was appalled: Women’s Democratic News, July 1927, p. 6. Carrie Chapman Catt wrote that all those under attack were opposed “because all have expressed the hope:

“That peace will one day supplant war

“That children will be taken from factories and sent to school.

“That mothers and babies will not die by preventable causes.

“That this country may at least have as high a percent of literacy as that of Japan….”

ER printed and distributed the article to all her friends.

243–44  progressive change was the answer: ER to Bob Ferguson, 16 Sept. 1919, Tucson.

244–45  Palmer’s house was dynamited: ER to SDR, 3 June 1919, FDRL.

245  “thought happiness did not matter”: ER to Trude Lash, 1940, in Lash, Love, Eleanor, p. 66.

245–46  In that sanctuary: Clover’s life was known to ER. Whatever version of the stories she had been told, her family was for generations connected to the Hay-Adams circle. During the Civil War, for example, ER’s grandfather Theodore Roosevelt was brought down to Washington by John Hay, and worked, as did Clover Hooper (Adams), with the U.S. Sanitary Commission. For Clover Adams’s life, I have relied on Kaledin, Education of Mrs. Henry Adams.

246–47  “I shall dedicate”: Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, 1884, quoted in ibid., p. 183.

There remains a curious unwillingness to consider Elizabeth Cameron (also Clover’s best friend) a serious factor when one contemplates Clover Adams’s suicide. In the most recent work on the subject, Patricia O’Toole’s The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends (Clarkson N. Potter, 1990), filled with much new research and detail, one is encouraged yet again to disregard Elizabeth Cameron on that day Clover took her life. It is a Sunday, and we are told Henry Adams left his wife in the afternoon because he had an appointment with his dentist. That Friday, Clover and Henry visited Elizabeth Cameron, who was not feeling well. Later we learn that she was pregnant with Martha, with whom Henry had a lifelong attachment of rare affection. When Henry died, Aileen Tone and Elizabeth Cameron went through his desk. In the top drawer they found the partially empty bottle of potassium cyanide that had killed Clover so quickly. “And in the kneehole hung a sign, hand-lettered in red ink on white paper, …MME. MARTHE, MODISTE.” The sign had never been removed in thirty years from that place where little Martha Cameron played so often; she was Uncle Henry’s “first adopted niece.” (P. 399.) And still we are told that Clover Adams’s depression and suicide were due entirely to her father’s death—without even a pause to consider circumstance and chronology.

247  a howling letter of protest: Henry Adams to the American Historical Association, in Kaledin, Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, pp. 169–70.

Henry James, however, did appreciate the “intellectual grace” as well as the irreverent manner of his friend, and called Clover Adams the “genius of my beloved country.” Ibid.

249  Grandmother Hall died: TIMS, pp. 299–301. Cf. Mrs. Valentine G. Hall, New York Times obituary, 16 Aug. 1919; and Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, of 20 Gramercy Park, in “Wills for Probate,” New York Times, 25 Aug. 1919.

250  replaced all her servants: TIMS, pp. 295–96.

251  the colored race: Ibid. “Amid a world of people who are having fearful domestic trials, I seem to be sailing along peacefully, having acquired on my return from England …a complete darky household.” (ER to Isabella Ferguson, 26 Oct. 1919, Tucson.)

251  “a ton of bricks”: ER to FDR, 23 July 1919, FDRL. On her dinner with Mama, see Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 244.

252  race riots: ER to FDR, 23–25 July 1919, FDRL.

252  “It is surely a rainy time”: FDR to ER, 22 July 1919, in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 479–81.

252  “The riots seem”: FDR to ER, 23 July 1919, in ibid, p. 481.

253–54  “gave birth to the new Negro”: Arthur Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-in (Doubleday, 1967), p. 25 and passim. For a day-to-day account of the riots, see Adrian E. Cook, “At the Gates of the White House: The Washington, D.C., Race Riots of 1919,” in R. Jeffreys-Jones and B. Collins, eds., The Growth of Federal Power in American History (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983).

254–55  His plans were vague: FDR to ER, 25 July 1919, in Letters, vol. 2, pp. 480–81.

255  party at Chevy Chase: See Teague, Mrs. L, 160.

255  “My family filled my life”: TIMS, pp. 173, 177, 189.

256  “feats of endurance”: Ibid., pp. 203, 208.

256  “don’t know what I want”: ER to FDR, 28 Sept. 1919, FDRL.

256  “I should be ashamed”: ER to FDR, 3 Oct. 1919, FDRL.

257  letter of apology: ER to SDR, 6 Oct. 1919, FDRL.

257  On 11 October: ER was alone on her birthday, while FDR was with Livy Davis and Commander Richard E. Byrd, in the Canadian woods, hunting moose. (Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 242–43.)

258  her first contact: ER on the International Congress of Working Women, see TIMS, p. 304.

Margaret Dreier Robins’s husband, Raymond Robins, had particularly appealed to ER when she heard him at a Progressive Party “goodbye dinner for Uncle Ted” in 1913. “Uncle Ted made a splendid speech …absolutely clear & logical & yet very amusing…. A Mr. Robins from Illinois also spoke well….” (ER to Isabella Ferguson, 4 Oct. 1913, Tucson.)

On the International Congress and Margaret Dreier Robins, see Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (Macmillan Free Press, 1979), pp. 273–76. This congress led to the creation of the International Federation of Working Women in Geneva in 1921. In 1922, Robins resigned as president of the National Women’s Trade Union League and became president of the International Federation, declaring that the first task of women was to declare “war against war.” She called for an end to the manufacture of armaments, and a political struggle for full employment: “When we are hungry and homeless and idle or slaughtering our brothers or killing our sons, let us vote against the government without regard to party.” (Foner, Women, pp. 275–76.)

On the early relations between these activist women and the International Labor Organization, see Carol Riegelman Lubin and Anne Winslow, Social Justice for Women: The ILO and Women (Duke University Press, 1990).

258  “Women had no direct share”: Margaret Dreier Robins, quoted in Foner, Women, pp. 273–74.

259  unusual marital partnership: Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 31 and passim.

259  A businessman and an adventurer: On Raymond Robins, see William A. Williams, American-Russian Relations, 1781–1947 (Rinehart, 1952), much of which is derived from Williams’s important, but unpublished, Ph.D. dissertation on Robins.

259  Leonard Woolf: Introduction to Elizabeth Robins, Raymond and I (Macmillan, 1956).

259–60  opponent of the Allied Intervention: Robins believed that it was the secret military intervention against the Soviet Union, not the first stirrings of revolution, that threatened the Treaty of Versailles, and the future:

“Bolshevik Russia, blockaded, starved, attacked by Finns and Poles and Serbs and Czecho-Slovaks and French and Italians and British and Americans and Senegalese, cries Bolshevism now with a doubled voice. It cries …to every working-class in the world to rally to the rescue of the world’s only working-class government, beset by the world’s capitalism….

“The deeper the Allies go into Russia, the deeper they go into the class war at home….”

(William Hard, Raymond Robins’ Own Story [Harper & Brothers, 1920], pp. 216–17.)

260  League opponents: Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of Nations (W. W. Norton, 1970); Robert James Maddox, William Borah and American Foreign Policy (Louisiana State University Press, 1969).

260  never quite warmed to …Wilson: TIMS, pp. 289–91; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, pp. 233–35.

261  “Colonel of Death”: Felsenthal, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, p. 141; Teague, Mrs. L.

262  Cousin Susie Parish: ER wrote most candidly about her godmother, Cousin Susie Livingston Ludlow Parish, to Isabella Ferguson, whose mother was her lifelong friend (13 Nov. [1916], 16 Sept. 1919, 11 Jan. 1920, Tucson). Hall occasionally wrote ER anguished letters about Cousin Susie: During the 1920s she became so critical, he threatened never to see her again, and considered her views those of a “Klanner.”

262  The Delano women: ER to FDR, Dec. 1920, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, p. 245.

263  “I cannot bear any funeral parlor”: TIMS, pp. 307–9. According to the New York Times obituary, 5 Feb. 1920: “Mrs. Edith Morgan, wife of W. Forbes Morgan, …and her two daughters, Barbara, 14 years old and Ellen, 10, died of suffocation in their burning house at 52 West Ninth Street…. [They] were alone in the house, because the mother recently had been doing most of her own work, owing to the difficulty in getting servants.” Neighbors tried unsuccessfully to call the fire company, and called for an investigation of the long delay.

263  “Pussie might have been”: TIMS, p. 360.

263–64  “the horror”: ER to Isabella, 10 Feb. 1920, Tucson.

264  “needed and wanted”: TIMS, pp. 307–9.