Eleanor and Franklin (5 page)

“Has not our dear Thee done well at home this winter,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir, “and his plans for occupying the position he should as Father's son and namesake seem [to be] going so splendidly smoothly—all success to him.” Elliott diagnosed correctly that he lacked “that foolish grit of Theodore's.” And while he, too, was interested in politics and had helped his brother found the City Reform Club to interest “respectable, well-educated men—young men especially” in the political questions of the day, and he, too, loved being with the Newsboys, and he, too, had a literary flair, as was evident in his letters, he was incapable of sustained effort except in sports, and followed the easier and ever more tempting path of achieving success and approval through his charm and his accomplishments as sportsman and man-about-town.

He would make frequent “new starts” in his short life, but the question of “paterfamilias” was settled for good.

His trip to India was a series of glittering triumphs. On shipboard to England the James Roosevelts of Hyde Park, just married, asked him to make their rooms in London his headquarters. He had “long talks and walks” with Thomas Hughes, the author of
Tom Brown's School Days
, and agreed to dine with him in London. His partners at whist were “kind enough to wish me to go to Cannes to play whist with them
all winter!” And most important to Elliott, Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter and second Gordon Cummings has taken me under his especial wing—given me a dozen letters to India and I breakfast with him next Sunday at twelve and on Monday we buy my guns, etc.”

From the moment of his arrival in Bombay he was treated like a “grand prince.” He could hardly account for it, he wrote his mother, “for if ever there was a man of few resources and moderate talents I am he, yet all events and people seem to give me the best of times on my holiday visit. . . . I am ‘up' at the club and have ‘dined,' ‘Tiffined' and breakfasted ‘out' every meal.”

The officers of His Majesty's Forces in India, the princes of India, and the Society of the Bombay Club were charmed by this young man from New York and pressed invitations upon him. Nevertheless, he retained a certain critical detachment. He exulted over an intoxicating feast at Sir Sala Jung's, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, to which they were driven in a cortege that was itself a princely pageant and were escorted into dinner “through long lines of motionless blacks holding flaming torches.” But he also commented, “This is a picture of a native state—under, unwillingly, British protection. England in power—natives high and low discontented.”

“Oh! these people,” he wrote en route to Kashmir and the Himalayas,

what a puzzle to me this world becomes when we find out how many of us are in it. And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what
we
call right, right all the world over and for all time?

He was appalled by the “ocean of misery and degradation” that he found on the subcontinent, such total degradation that it

might teach our “lovers of men” to know new horrors and sadness that the mortal frames and still more the Immortal Souls of Beings in God's image made, should be brought so low. The number and existence of these some millions of poor wretches has upset many preconceived notions of mine.

The journey to Tibet along the Astor Road was shadowed by mishap. In Srinagar he was held over for a week by fever. Impatiently, he
pushed on and reached Thuldii in the highest Himalayas, but “that beastly fever” clung to him and he was forced to abandon the expedition and return home without having hunted the ibex and markhor that he had sought.

India had made him deeply conscious of his lack of education. “How I do crave after knowledge, book learning . . . education and a well-balanced mind,” he exclaimed in the Himalayas as he tried to catch hold of “finer subtleties” of description, history, and analysis. Few Americans had had his opportunity, and he wanted to write about his experiences, which would have made as colorful a book as Theodore's about the West. He drafted an account of a tiger shoot in Hyderabad and an elephant hunt in Ceylon. The drafts were good, but he did not persist. The manuscripts did not see the light of day until 1933 when they were edited, along with his letters, and published by Eleanor under the title
Hunting Big Game in the Ei
ghties
.

While the youthful Elliott was disturbed by the way the British held India “in a grip of iron,” the way of life of the British rulers—hunts, polo, racing—suited him quite well. “I am very fond of this life, Bammie,” he wrote at the end of his trip.

No doubt about it. I thought to rather put a slight stop to my inclinations by a large dose of it, but—for the great drawback that none of you are with me to enjoy it, it would be very nearly perfect in its way. Not, I think, “our way” for that means life for an
end
. But this for the mere pleasure of living is the only life.

He found it necessary to justify his trip—“There seemed little for me to do in New York that any of you my own people could be proud of me for, and naturally I am an awfully lazy fellow”—and he faced his return to New York with some anxiety.

I know Sister Anna will keep her eyes open and about her for chances for the boy. If some of the wise and strong among you don't make a
good
chance for me on my coming home I'll make but a poor one for myself I fear. . . .

But fate now intervened in the form of a sparkling debutante, Anna Rebecca Hall.

 

*
Holograph letter in Halsted File at Franklin D. Roosevelt Library with spelling and punctuation as in the original.

2.
HER MOTHER

E
LLIOTT WENT INTO REAL ESTATE ON HIS RETURN FROM
I
NDIA
, and even though he dutifully reported to his office on lower Broadway his real life was as man-about-town. Because of his Himalayan exploits he seemed more glamorous than ever and had a kind of Guardsman masculinity that captivated young and old alike. He had the ability when talking with you, said Fanny Parsons, a friend of Corinne's, of shutting out the rest of the world and making you feel as if you were the most important thing to him.

If he noticed me at all I had received an accolade, and if on occasion he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible. But all the time I knew that his real worship was at the shrine of some mature and recognized belle of the day.

The leading debutante the winter Elliott returned was Anna Hall. He described her excitedly as “a tall slender fair-haired little beauty—just out and a great belle.”

Anna, then almost nineteen, was the eldest of four Hall sisters. All four—Anna, Elizabeth (Tissie), Edith (Pussie), and Maude—were society belles, and all were considered slightly but attractively mad. Anna was the most competent, and she was also a little cold. Elliott was all spontaneity and tenderness, while beneath her youth and beauty Anna was a creature of rules and form. She belonged to Edith Wharton's “old New York,” an ordered and hierarchical society “which could enjoy with discrimination but had lost the power to create.”

The Halls were descendants of the landed Livingstons and Ludlows, and their Tivoli home on the Hudson was on property originally deeded to the lords of Livingston Manor through letters patent of Charles II, James II, and George I. The marriage of Anna's father, Valentine G. Hall, Jr., and her mother, Mary Livingston Ludlow, represented a merger of a wealthy mercantile family of New York City
with the landed gentry of the Hudson. The first Ludlow had settled in New York in 1640, and as early as 1699 a Ludlow was one of provincial notables, meaning men of property, and had sat as a member of the Assembly of the Province of New York. The Ludlow social standing, patriot or Tory, was of the highest, but along the upper reaches of the Hudson, from Tivoli to Germantown, they were overshadowed by the Livingstons.

Anna Hall's grandmother, Elizabeth Livingston, the granddaughter of Chancellor Livingston, eloped with Edward H. Ludlow, a doctor. Imperious and strong-willed, she made her young husband give up his profession because she did not like a doctor's hours. He went into real estate where values were booming and in the period after the Civil War became the city's most respected realtor. That did not soften his wife's disdain for those who carried on the world's business. Once when some business associates came to see him at their house on fashionable Fourth Avenue, she stormed into the parlor, turned off the gas, and announced, “Gentlemen, my husband's office is on lower Broadway.” They retired in confusion.

Eleanor remembered her great-grandmother as a very old lady whom she, her Aunt Maude, and Grandma visited regularly on Sundays. One Sunday Grandma Hall was ill and Eleanor and Maude went alone. The old lady refused to accept their explanation for Mrs. Hall's absence and told them to go right back and summon “Molly,” which they did. Mrs. Hall dutifully got out of bed. When one of Eleanor's cousins, who was also the old lady's granddaughter, inherited some blue Canton china, she asked her father why so many pieces were missing. “Well, my mother used to throw the plates at my father and myself and so a good many of them were broken,” he explained. When Mrs. Ludlow wanted something or felt irate, she banged the floor with her cane, which Eleanor remembered as a very long one. “I was terrified of her,” Eleanor later said, adding half in amusement, half in admiration, “she was
char
acter
.”

A picture of this iron-willed lady shows a plain but strong mouth, and if the upper half of her face is covered, the mouth and chin are those of Eleanor Roosevelt.

She and Edward Ludlow had two children—Edward, “the gentlest of men,” and Mary, who was mild, submissive, and beautiful. Both married children of Valentine G. Hall.

The senior Valentine Hall was an Irish immigrant. He settled in Brooklyn and by the time he was twenty-one had become a partner in
one of the largest commercial houses in the city and had married his partner's daughter. The firm—Tonnele and Hall—enjoyed “unlimited credit” throughout the world. “He had remarkable business ability,” his contemporaries said, and before he was fifty retired from business “with a large fortune” that included considerable real estate from Fourteenth to Eighteenth Streets along Sixth Avenue. He lived another thirty-five years but contributed little to civic welfare except for his support of religious enterprises.

His son, Valentine G. Hall, Jr., was a gentleman of solemn dignity who, after some sowing of wild oats and a period of penitence that included attending a theological school, assumed his place in society and executed its obligations and those of his church with punctilious regard. He did not go into business but lived the life of a leisured gentleman. He fathered six children—four daughters and two sons, Valentine and Edward; the Ludlows said he was good for little else. That was not his opinion of himself. In 1872 instead of building a larger town house, he built Oak Terrace at Tivoli, next to the house of his brother-in-law.
*
Its finest room was the library, presided over by a bust of Homer. There, together with a resident clergyman whom he supported, he pursued his interests in the classics and in theological doctrine.

Valentine Jr.'s preoccupation with theology gave a puritanical tone to Tivoli life that was unusual for the Hudson River gentry. He was troubled by man's innate depravity. “I awoke this morning about half-past seven,” he wrote in his journal when he was twenty-seven. “Instead of getting up immediately as I should have done, I gave way to one of my many weaknesses and lay instead until the clock struck eight building castles in the air. Oh! how much time, precious time, we waste in worldly thoughts.” His austere ways reminded a neighbor of “one of the olden Christians,” and the family clergyman later wrote
that “no one could ever forget the morning and evening devotions, the Sunday afternoon recitation of favorite hymns.”

In the Roosevelt household religion was seen as the affirmation of love, charity, and compassion; in the Hall household at Tivoli it was felt that only a ramrodlike self-denial was acceptable to God. Religion was also used to justify domestic tyranny. Valentine Hall, Jr., was a despot who had little intellectual respect for his wife. He had married her when she was quite young and had always treated her like a child. He alone decided the education, discipline, and religious training of his children. He did not even permit his womenfolk to go into the shops to choose their own clothes. He ordered dresses to be sent home where they were strewn around the parlor, and the women were allowed to make their choices. At Tivoli youthful spirits constantly rubbed against externally imposed standards. While the Roosevelts welcomed “joy of life” as the greatest of heaven's gifts, the Halls considered pleasure of the senses to be sinful and playfulness an affront to God. As the Hall children grew up, their instincts were often at war with their moral precepts, and they had an especially strong sense of duty and responsibility.