Eleanor and Franklin (3 page)

I

CHILDHOOD
AND
YOUTH

1.
ELEANOR'S FATHER

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT WAS BORN ON
O
CTOBER
11, 1884. A
NNA
Hall Roosevelt, her mother, died when she was eight and her father, Elliott Roosevelt, when she was ten.

“He was the one great love of my life as a child,” Eleanor wrote about her father almost forty years after his death, “and in fact like many children I have lived a dream life with him; so his memory is still a vivid, living thing to me.”

Seeking to give some shape and meaning to his brief existence, she called him a “sportsman.” He was that, but as one contemplates the promise of his early years, it is the pathos of wasted talents, the stark tragedy of an enormously attractive man bent on self-destruction that reaches across the decades to hold us in its grip.

Elliott's brother Theodore became president of the United States, one of its outstandingly “strong” chief executives. What made Theodore resolute and Elliott weak? It was a question the many who loved Elliott sought to answer all their lives, for the pain of Elliott's death remained in their hearts to the end of their days, such was the spell this man cast over those around him.

It was her father who acquainted Eleanor Roosevelt, his gravely gay Little Nell, with grief. But he also gave her the ideals that she tried to live up to all her life by presenting her with the picture of what he wanted her to be—noble, brave, studious, religious, loving, and good.

The story of Eleanor Roosevelt should begin with him.

Elliott Roosevelt was the third of four children born to Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha Bulloch. They were a remarkable group. Of Anna, the oldest, born in 1855, whom the family called “Bye” or “Bamie,” her niece Alice was to say, “If Aunty Bye had been a man, she would have been President.” Theodore Jr., born in 1858, was followed two years later by Elliott, who was called “the most lovable of the Roosevelts.” Corinne, the youngest, born 1861, called “Conie” or “Pussie” by her brothers, was described by Clarence Day, whose
family's Madison Avenue brownstone adjoined Corinne's in the 1880s, as “a dignified but lively young lady who . . . knew how to write poetry, turn cartwheels and stand on her head.”

A childhood friend, recalling the family, spoke of their “gusto,” “explosions of fun,” “great kindliness and generosity of nature,” their “eager friendliness.” They were all unabashedly demonstrative in their affections. “Oh! my darling Sweetest of Fathers I wish I could kiss you,” a thirteen-year-old Elliott wrote. His southern grandmother's outbursts of affection were so embarrassingly effusive, they were called her “melts.”

Their mother, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt, was a flirtatious southern belle whose dark hair glowed and whose complexion seemed to young Corinne like “moonlight.” A vivacious hostess, a spirited and daring horsewoman, she made as lively an impression on New York society as she had on the ante-bellum Savannah society of the early fifties. In the years after the Civil War, Martha Roosevelt was among the five or six gentlewomen of such birth, breeding, and tact that people were “always satisfied to be led by them,” acknowledged Mrs. Burton Harrison, one of New York's smartest hostesses.

The children adored her. To Elliott she was “his sweet little China Dresden” mother, and Bamie spoke glowingly of “darling little mother's exquisite beauty.” She told stories better than anybody, said Corinne, and her way of describing things was inimitable. Many of these stories were about her “little black shadow,” a slave she had been given at birth. She was, however, completely helpless when faced with the smallest everyday task. She was habitually, almost compulsively tardy, and household accounts were a mystery to her. Even when they were very young, her children felt protective toward her, and Theodore Sr. insisted that Bamie, when she was fourteen, take over the reins of the household.

Mittie's Savannah friends later said that the younger Theodore “got his splendid dash and energy” from his southern mother, but the children themselves never doubted that it was from their father that they inherited their zest for life and love of people. The male Roosevelts were solid, industrious, worthy Dutch burghers, and—also in the Dutch tradition—they were a humorless, sobersided lot. But Theodore Sr., who belonged to the seventh generation of American Roosevelts, was also blessed with vivacity and tenderness, and in him there began to emerge that special blend of grace, vitality, courage,
and responsibility that is called charisma and that his contemporaries found irresistible.

A big, powerful, bearded man, he moved easily and comfortably in the worlds of Knickerbocker society, business, philanthropy, and civic enterprise. Her father, Corinne said, was “unswerving in duty . . . yet responsive to the joy of life to such an extent that he would dance all night, and drive his ‘four-in-hand' coach so fast . . . that his grooms frequently fell out at the corners!” When Bamie came out in the winter of 1873–74, she had a hard time getting her father—he was then forty-two—to go home from a dance, and he was so popular that she felt like a wallflower.

Theodore Sr. was only twenty-nine when the Civil War broke out, but in deference to the feelings of his wife, whose grandfather had been the first post-Revolutionary governor of Georgia and whose brothers served with the Confederacy, he bought a substitute and limited himself to noncombatant work with the Union armies. Even though this was of sufficient importance to earn him the friendship of Lincoln and a lifelong intimacy with John Hay, the fact that his father did not enlist in the Union fighting forces remained a sore point with young Theodore.

The Confederacy was a living presence in the Roosevelt household. Mittie's sister Anna—later Mrs. James King Gracie—the children's beloved Aunt Gracie—lived with them in New York during the war, as did Grandma Bulloch, and the three women did not hide their passionate southern loyalties, on the occasion of one southern victory, a family legend has it, even breaking out the Confederate flag. The two Bulloch brothers were not included in the post–Civil War amnesty and settled in Liverpool as exiles. From then on, the family never went abroad without visiting Uncle Jimmie and Uncle Irvine in Liverpool.

Theodore Sr. was the son of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, in whose stately house on Union Square Dutch was still spoken on Sundays. It was he who shifted the family firm into banking and investment. When Cornelius died in 1871, he left ten million dollars to his four sons.

Theodore headed the plate glass division of Roosevelt & Son, but after the Civil War he devoted more and more time to philanthropy and civic enterprise and finally withdrew from business altogether. He was one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History, helped start the Orthopedic Hospital,
contributed substantial amounts to charities, took a continuing interest in the Newsboys' Lodging House, and led a Mission Class for poor young men.

Public concern for poverty, social welfare, and reform were something new in the elder Theodore's days, as indeed unemployment, slums, and the exploitation of children were new. Fashionable New York, then centered on lower Fifth and Madison Avenues, was only a stone's throw from the tenements on the East Side and the squatters' shanties on the West Side, but most of the wealthy were content to keep them out of sight and out of mind. “At a time when most citizens of equal fortune and education” were not willing to accept any responsibility for reforming and philanthropic enterprises, Theodore “was always engaged in them,” commented a colleague in many of those undertakings.

He was not content to serve on boards; he needed to be actively involved with those he sought to help. In the Newsboys' Lodging House he knew the boys by name and was familiar with their histories, and whenever he came they would gather round and he would question each one as to what he was doing and would “give him advice and sympathy and direction.” He often brought his children with him, and they remained interested even after his death; one of Eleanor Roosevelt's earliest memories was being taken by her father to the Newsboys' Thanksgiving dinner. Theodore Sr. had a special feeling for children, was full of tenderness when speaking to them, and could not bear the thought of their being shut up in institutions. He had what he called a “troublesome conscience,” a burden or a blessing of which his granddaughter Eleanor also would complain.

First and foremost, however, Theodore Sr. was a family man fully involved in the upbringing and education of his children. It was a matter of deep concern to him that Theodore Jr., Bamie, and, later, Elliott suffered from ill health and handicaps which, if not corrected, might seriously limit their activities. The most acutely afflicted was Bamie, who suffered from a curvature of the spine, while Theodore Jr. was sickly and asthmatic. It was largely for Theodore Jr. that the upstairs back of the house was transformed into a large play and exercise “piazza” so that he could build himself up on the exercising devices. The equipment was also a source of joy for the other children, especially Elliott, who quickly became the leader in their youthful sports and won all competitions.

The children's education was centered in the home. Aunt Gracie taught them their letters and there was an occasional tutor, but it was their father who really opened up new worlds of learning for them. On picnics and rides, or before the fire in winter, he discussed authors with them and had them recite their favorite poems. He was a firm believer in the educational effect of travel, and when Elliott was nine took his whole brood on a twelve-month Grand Tour of Europe, and three years later on an even more extended and strenuous pilgrimage to Egypt, the Holy Land, southeastern and central Europe. The children were left in Dresden, where they stayed with German families for “purposes of board and instruction,” and where they remained for five months while their family's new house on Fifty-seventh Street was being built. They were getting on in German grammar, Elliott wrote his father, adding “We have learned three pieces of German poetry.” But on July 4, he rebelled against the glories of German culture being preached day after day by Fräulein. “Don't you think America is the best country in the world?” he asked his father. “Please, when you write tell me if we have not got as good Musick and Arts as the Germans have at the
present
time.” When in September, 1873, the Fifty-seventh Street house was nearing completion—though a hand-carved circular staircase had missed its connection on the second floor by three feet—the children set out for home.

Upon their return Theodore Jr. was given a tutor to prepare him for Harvard. Elliott wanted very much to enter St. Paul's, but he now suddenly began to suffer from severe headaches and dizzy spells. His father, feeling that health was more important than formal education, sent him abroad in 1874 and in 1875 south with a friend of the family who was a doctor in the hopes that two months of outdoor life and hunting would build up his constitution. He loved the shooting, but, he confessed to his “dear funny little Bamie,” he was also homesick. “Sometimes I long for Home—what a sweet word it is. I wonder what you all are doing this beautiful moonlit night. I can see you now. Conie and Thee home from dancing class and full of it have finished their storeys and are gone upstairs to study. Papa's pet or the belle of New York is entertaining some friends in the parlor and Father is in his study. And Mother?”

He was lonely, as his loving letter to his father written on his fifteenth birthday showed.

Mar 6th 1875

Saturday.

My own dear Father.
*

I got your kinde “Father” like letter with Muzes to day oh! it was so nice to feel you had thought of me on my birthday. . . .

Dear old Govenor—for I
will
call you that not in publick but in private for it does seem to suit you, you splendid Man just my ideal, made to govern & doing it so lightly & affectionately that I can call you by the name as a pet one.—its not such a long time since you were fifteen & any way as I was saying to Mrs Metcalfe today you are one of the few men who seem to remember they were boy's once them selves & therefore can excuse pieces of boyish folly committed by their boy's.