Jean Edward Smith Read online

  Back at Cambridge, FDR threw himself into a round of frenetic activity. After a grueling competition in freshman year, he had been elected to the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate newspaper. For the next three years, the Crimson would be his central interest, often requiring four to six hours a day to ready the paper for publication. Along with membership on the editorial board went prestige and responsibility. Franklin gloried in both. He represented the paper at the Yale bicentennial celebration, an occasion notable in retrospect for the presence on the platform of President Theodore Roosevelt, Princeton president Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. In his third year, Roosevelt was elected managing editor of the Crimson and worked even harder. Administrative responsibility came naturally. He handled the staff adroitly and was always able to cajole crusty Cambridge printers into opening the forms and remaking a page for last-minute submissions by tardy college journalists. “In his geniality was a kind of frictionless command,” his co-editor, W. Russell Bowie, recalled.53

  At the end of his third year, Roosevelt was elected editor-in-chief (president) of the Crimson. He took his degree in June, but remained for a fourth year to discharge his editorial responsibilities. His professors advised him to enter graduate school. “Great fight in my mind between it and Law School, but latter too much with outside duties,” FDR recorded in his diary.54 That fall he enrolled as a graduate student in history but had no intention of pursuing a degree. “The paper takes every moment of time,” he informed his mother in early October.55 As Arthur Schlesinger noted, editing the Crimson crowned FDR’s Harvard career. Both at the time and in retrospect, it was extremely important to him.56 In later years he enjoyed joking with reporters that he was a former newspaperman. Visiting Portland, Oregon, as the assistant secretary of the Navy in 1914, he told a press photographer that he too had been “a reporter in Boston ten or twelve years” before and had often lined folks up for the camera.57

  Sara, meanwhile, found life at Springwood oppressive without James. “I try to keep busy, but it is all hard,” she confided to her diary the following spring.58 Sara stepped into James’s role—managing the estate, supervising the workmen, handling business affairs—and for the most part made do. FDR returned to Springwood for Christmas, but in contrast to previous years the celebration was muted. In January the social season accelerated. On the first weekend in the new year, Franklin journeyed to Washington to attend the gala coming-out party given by TR and his wife, Edith, for their daughter, Alice, at the White House. It was the premier social event of the season. FDR spent three crowded days in Washington attending formal dinners, a reception at the Austrian Embassy, and the dance itself, held in the East Room. There was also tea with Cousin Theodore, lunch at Cousin Bamie’s house on N Street, and a second private talk with the president. “One of the most interesting and enjoyable three days I have ever had,” Franklin wrote Sara.59

  FDR returned to Cambridge, and soon afterward Sara joined him. The winter at Hyde Park had become too melancholy. She took an apartment in Boston and discreetly joined the social and cultural life of the city. Sara wanted to be “near enough to the University to be on hand should [Franklin] want me and far enough removed not to interfere with his college life.”60 Franklin seemed delighted. He came frequently to dine and sometimes spent the night. The following winter Sara returned to Boston for another three months. She participated vicariously in FDR’s success and cushioned whatever disappointment came his way. “His father and I always expected a great deal of Franklin,” she once said. “After all, he had many advantages that other boys did not have.”61

  Socially, FDR’s dance card at Harvard was fuller than most. He kept a horse and a runabout, and there was scarcely a weekend when he was not attending a dinner or a party somewhere in the Boston area.62 He was not admitted to Porcellian, the most prestigious of the final clubs, but he did make Fly (Alpha Delta Phi) and Hasty Pudding, served as librarian of each, and began his lifelong habit of collecting naval Americana. Years later, with typical hyperbole, he told a distant relative that his failure to make Porcellian was “the greatest disappointment he ever had.”63 Yet, as his roommate, Lathrop Brown, noted, “Franklin was not a typical club man of his generation. He had more on his mind than sitting in the Club’s front window, doing nothing but criticizing the passers-by. His not ‘making’ the Porcellian meant only that he was free of any possible restraining influences of a lot of delightful people who thought that the world belonged to them and who did not want to change anything in it.”64

  Roosevelt received his degree from Harvard in 1903. But in the tradition of the Ivy League he was always a member of the Class of ’04. At graduation he was elected permanent chairman of the class committee, the linchpin of alumni affairs. Roosevelt won no prizes and did not make Phi Beta Kappa, yet he had prospered intellectually. His university experience imparted renewed confidence and enhanced the innate optimism that James and Sara had so carefully nourished. As one biographer has written, “At Groton, Roosevelt learned to get along with his contemporaries; at Harvard he learned to lead them.”65

  THREE

  KEEPING THE NAME IN THE FAMILY

  Nothing is more pleasing to the eye than a good-looking lady, nothing more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one.

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  LESS THAN A YEAR after graduating from Harvard, FDR married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin once removed, the orphaned daughter of his godfather, Elliott—a tall, striking young woman variously described by an adoring New York press as “beautiful,” “regal,” and “magnificent,” with “greater claim to good looks than any of the Roosevelts.”1 Franklin was an impressionable twenty-three. Eleanor was twenty: the same age her mother had been, yet still innocent of the birds and the bees. As she later informed her son James, the kiss she and Franklin exchanged at the close of the wedding ceremony was their first in more than two years of courtship.2*

  Throughout his adult life FDR relished female companionship. Yet he was late discovering it. At Springwood for fourteen years his contact with the opposite sex was limited. At Groton he relied on his mother to organize his social life: “I wish you would think up some decent partner for me for the N.Y. dance, so that I can get someone early, and not get palmed off on some ice-cart.”3 At Harvard he was on his own but hesitated to take an unguided step. “What do you think of my taking M.D.R. [Muriel Delano Robbins], Helen [Roosevelt], and Mary Newbold to see the Harvard–West Point game Saturday afternoon?” he asked Sara. “If you approve make arrangements as to trains.”4

  Gradually, his diffidence faded. By the end of sophomore year FDR was charming and relaxed, eager to ingratiate himself with the eligible young women of upper class Boston and their families. This was 1902—the apogee of Victorian restraint. Unlike John F. Kennedy and his classmates in the 1930s, who took a direct approach, the men of FDR’s generation were oblique. In refined circles contact with the opposite sex was strictly chaperoned. Touching was risqué, kissing stretched the limit, and premarital sex was absolutely prohibited. There were two outlets: the company of loose women who traded in sex, or marriage. For someone of FDR’s straitlaced upbringing, the former was unthinkable.* As a consequence Franklin proposed not once but three times to young women who caught his attention at Harvard.

  FDR’s first love in Cambridge was Frances Dana, granddaughter of both Richard Henry Dana (Two Years Before the Mast) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Reportedly, Sara talked her son out of marriage because Miss Dana was Catholic and thus unacceptable to the Protestant Delanos and Roosevelts.5 After Frances, FDR was smitten with Dorothy Quincy, daughter of an equally prominent Brahmin family. Then Alice Sohier, the exceptionally beautiful daughter of an old North Shore family. Alice’s mother was an Alden, a Massachusetts clan that predated the Delanos, and her father was an astute New England businessman with a town house in Boston, an estate in Beverly, and summer homes in Maine an
d New Hampshire. At some point in 1902 Alice and Franklin discussed marriage. FDR was twenty; Alice just seventeen. Having been an only child, Roosevelt told Alice he wanted a large family—at least six children. That evidently alarmed Alice, who later told a friend she had decided not to marry Franklin because “I did not wish to be a cow.”6 The bond between FDR and Alice was not severed that easily, however. They continued to see each other, and in the autumn of 1902 Alice’s parents sent her to Europe—an insurance policy against teenage infatuation. Many years later, FDR put a different gloss on their breakup:

  Once upon a time when I was in Cambridge, I had serious thoughts about marrying a Boston girl and settling down in the Back Bay.… By the grace of God I took a trip at that time, meeting a number of real Americans, i.e. those from the west and south. I was saved, but it was an awfully narrow escape.7

  As with many of FDR’s stories, fact and fiction mingle freely. It was Alice, not he, who backed away from marriage, and it was she who undertook the decisive trip in 1902.8

  In the wake of Alice Sohier’s departure for Europe, Franklin met Eleanor. Each autumn, New York society launched the social season with a gala horse show at Madison Square Garden. For so long as there had been a horse show, the Hudson River Roosevelts had been prominent participants, sometimes showing, sometimes judging, but always in attendance. November 17, 1902, was no exception. The family box, now maintained by FDR’s half brother, Rosy—a connoisseur of coachmanship and fine carriages—literally bulged with Roosevelts: Franklin, Rosy’s daughter Helen, her cousin Eleanor, Helen’s fiancé, Theodore Robinson (another cousin), Mary Newbold, a neighbor from Hyde Park, and assorted uncles and aunts from Long Island and Connecticut. After the show, Rosy took the young people to dinner at Sherry’s, New York’s most fashionable restaurant. “Dinner with James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Helen Roosevelt Roosevelt, Mary Newbold and Eleanor Roosevelt at Sherry’s,” FDR recorded in his diary—his first reference to Eleanor.9 Two weeks later he lunched with Eleanor and his niece Helen in New York, and two weeks after that, in the city with Sara for last-minute Christmas shopping, he slipped away for tea with Eleanor.

  The two were together again in Washington for the nation’s New Year’s festivities. FDR stayed with Cousin Bamie on N Street; Eleanor with TR’s daughter Alice in the White House. On New Year’s Day they stood in the “inner circle” to watch Cousin Theodore shake hands with thousands of well-wishers who filed through the East Room. They took tea with Alice and Mrs. Roosevelt, dined with the president in the state dining room, then attended the theater, where, Franklin noted, he “sat near Eleanor. Very interesting day.”

  A month later, Eleanor was among those Rosy invited to celebrate Franklin’s twenty-first birthday at Sherry’s, an affair FDR described as “very jolly.” In late June, Eleanor came to Springwood for a four-day weekend, one of a group of six young people and accompanied by her maid. Three weeks later there was another house party, which Eleanor attended, again accompanied by her maid. On Saturday, July 7, after a quiet afternoon lounging on the lawn, Franklin took the group for a dinner cruise aboard the Half Moon, the family’s motorized sailing yacht. “Franklin was at his best aboard his boat,” his cousin Corinne Robinson remembered—“handsome at the tiller, a splendid sailor and completely confident.”10 That evening, after the others had gone to bed, Franklin wrote in his diary that the day had been great fun. “E is an angel.” Once again FDR was in love.

  Whether this was vouchsafed to Eleanor is unclear. Franklin may have written and she may have replied, but no early letters survive. In 1937, when she was at work on the first volume of her autobiography, Eleanor burned all of Franklin’s letters, finding his youthful avowals of constancy too painful to reread.11 FDR carefully preserved Eleanor’s letters to him, but none date from this period. In the Victorian era correspondence between a young man and a young woman was not undertaken lightly. As Eleanor later recorded, “It was understood that no girl was interested in a man or showed any liking for him until he had made all the advances. You knew a man very well before you wrote or received a letter from him … and to have signed one in any other way than ‘very sincerely yours’ would have been not only a breach of good manners but an admission of feeling which was entirely inadmissible.”12

  Eleanor’s cramped view reflected an upbringing even more sheltered than FDR’s. Her mother, Anna Rebecca Hall, died of diphtheria when Eleanor was only eight. Less than two years later her father, Elliott, succumbed to alcoholism. From the death of her mother until her marriage to Franklin, Eleanor was in the care of her maternal grandmother, first at the Hall estate at Tivoli on the Hudson, then at boarding school in England. Apart from vacations, when she occasionally met a Roosevelt cousin, she was virtually removed from the company of men. In material terms, Eleanor was well provided for. But a nunnery novitiate would have met more men than she did.

  Franklin saw Eleanor off and on during the summer of 1903, always well chaperoned, and that autumn he invited her to Cambridge for the Yale game, traditionally the last football game of the season. After the game, Eleanor went to Groton to visit her younger brother. FDR followed the next morning and spent Sunday with Eleanor. As they strolled along the bank of the Nashua River, Franklin proposed and Eleanor accepted: “A never to be forgotten walk,” FDR noted that evening. Eleanor said, “It seemed entirely natural.”13

  The next weekend Franklin journeyed to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, to observe Thanksgiving with the Delanos. When he took his mother aside and broke the news, Sara was stunned. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” she wrote in her journal. Sara did not object to Eleanor, whom she knew well and had often entertained at Springwood. She simply believed Franklin too young. Her father had been thirty-three when he married and had already established himself as a major player in the China trade. He could offer something to his wife. FDR was still in college. He would not enter law school until the following fall. He was largely dependent upon his mother for support, and had she wished, Sara very likely could have forbidden the marriage. Instead, she extracted a commitment from Franklin and Eleanor that they would keep their engagement secret for a year, not see each other unless properly chaperoned, and keep sufficient distance so as not to arouse suspicion. Sara played for time. She knew from experience how fragile young love could be. Twenty-seven years before, her own romance with Stanford White had dissolved when they were kept apart, and a year now might cool the couple’s ardor. For their part, Franklin and Eleanor believed the interval of a year would erode Sara’s resistance. They accepted the arrangement and resolved to make the best of it.

  Franklin and Eleanor shared a common heritage. Both were Roosevelts. But Eleanor’s maternal forebears placed her in a celestial constellation of Livingstons and Ludlows, Ver Plancks and Stuyvesants—families who traced their provenance to letters patent from either the monarchs of Restoration England or the Dutch East India Company. Eleanor’s grandmother, many generations removed, was Amy Stuyvesant, sister of Peter Stuyvesant, Director General of the New Netherland colony.14

  In the struggle for American independence, few families, save perhaps the Adamses of Massachusetts and the Lees of Virginia, could duplicate the patriotic contribution of the Livingstons of New York, whose ranks included signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and two secretaries of state.15 Chancellor Robert Livingston, one of the nation’s most distinguished jurists, administered the presidential oath of office to George Washington in 1789. His granddaughter Elizabeth (Eleanor’s great-grandmother) eloped to marry Edward Ludlow, scion of an equally prominent Hudson River family, Tory rather than patriot, and among the wealthiest in America. Edward Ludlow founded New York City’s premier real estate holding company, and in 1861 his daughter, Mary Livingston Ludlow (Eleanor’s grandmother), married Valentine Hall, Jr., heir to an even larger commercial fortune. The Halls had six children, of whom Eleanor’s mother, Anna, was the eldest.16

  O
n the paternal side, Eleanor’s father, Elliott, was the younger sibling of Bamie and TR, children of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and his wife, Mittie.* Just as the Aspinwalls and Delanos had infused new vigor into the Hyde Park bloodline, so Mittie, an enchanting southern belle from Cobb County, Georgia, added more than a soupçon of spice to the Long Island clan. One of fourteen children and stepchildren of Martha and James Stephens Bulloch, Mittie was a vivacious hostess and daring horsewoman who enchanted New York society. Her friends in Georgia later claimed that TR inherited “his splendid dash and energy” from his southern mother.

  Eleanor’s parents enjoyed a fairy-tale romance: Elliott, the playboy prince charming; Anna, the beautiful maiden swept off her feet. Yet this fairy tale ended tragically. Unlike his brother and sisters, Elliott was fatally flawed. To this day the pathology is uncertain. Whether Elliott suffered from epilepsy or mental illness, or was driven to excess by unbridled self-indulgence, cannot be positively determined.17 What is clear is that he could not handle the rigors of formal education, dropped out of St. Paul’s at sixteen, spent a year or so out West hunting and fishing, and returned to New York just before the death of his father in 1878. The elder Roosevelt left each of his four children approximately $125,000, which would have provided an annual income of about $8,000—more than twenty times that of the average American family. When their mother, Mittie, died in 1884, each received an additional $65,000. That afforded each child an annual income of about $14,000. A simple monetary conversion equates that with an income of roughly a quarter of a million dollars today, but the money went much further in the 1880s because there was no income tax.18*

  Elliott remained in New York for two years after his father’s death, playing polo, drinking heavily, and leading the sporting life of a well-connected bon vivant. A note from TR to their mother, written during a hunting trip with Elliott in 1880, provides a glimpse: