The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (2 page)

In
This Is My Story
I covered my early years, the vanishing world in which I grew up, the influences and the values that dominated that era.

In
This I Remember
I dealt with a broader and more vital period, concerned for the most part with my husband’s political life during one of the most dramatic and eventful times in history, and with the gradual broadening of my own activities.

In
On My Own
I tried to give some picture of the changing world as I have seen it during recent years and of the various jobs into which I plunged in the hope that, by building international understanding and co-operation, we could hold at bay the ugly stupidity of war and learn to substitute for it, however slowly or painfully—or reluctantly—an era of brotherhood.

In the final part of this book,
The Search for Understanding
, I have added new material, covering the past few years. They have been busy years, with every half hour of every day filled and with my working day often extending from eight in the morning until well past midnight. These crowded hours have been interesting and stimulating. They have, I hope, been useful. They have, at least, been lived to the hilt.

In the long run an autobiography is valuable only if it accomplishes one of two things, or preferably both. It may help to preserve, through the eyes of an individual, a record of a way of life that has vanished, or of people who were historically important in their own era, and so add, even minutely, to our understanding of the background. Or, in a more personal way, it may help other people to solve their problems. There is nothing particularly interesting about one’s life story unless people can say as they read it, “Why, this is like what I have been through. Perhaps, after all, there is a way to work it out.”

Let me hasten to say that I do not suggest that my solutions should or could prove a guide to anyone. About the only value the story of my life may have is to show that one can, even without any particular gifts, overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable if one is willing to face the fact that they must be overcome; that, in spite of timidity and fear, in spite of a lack of special talents, one can find a way to live widely and fully.

Perhaps the most important thing that has come out of my life is the discovery that if you prepare yourself at every point as well as you can, with whatever means you may have, however meager they may seem, you will be able to grasp opportunity for broader experience when it appears. Without preparation you cannot do it. The fatal thing is the rejection. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

E. R.

Hyde Park
December, 1960

PART I

This Is My Story

One
    

Memories of My Childhood

MY MOTHER WAS
one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her father, my grandfather Hall, never engaged in business. He lived on what his father and mother gave him.

He had a house in New York City at 11 West Thirty-seventh Street, and he built another on the Hudson River about five miles above the village of Tivoli, on land which was part of the old Chancellor Livingston estate. My grandmother’s mother was a Miss Livingston, and so we were related to the Livingstons, the Clarksons, the DePeysters, who lived in the various houses up and down the River Road.

My grandfather Hall’s great interest was in the study of theology, and in his library were a number of books dealing with religion. Most of them were of little interest to me as a child, but the Bible, illustrated by
Doré
, occupied many hours—and gave me many nightmares!

My grandmother Hall, who had been a Miss Ludlow, a beauty and a belle, was treated like a cherished but somewhat spoiled child. She was expected to bring children into the world and seven children were born, but she was not expected to bring them up. My grandfather told her nothing about business, not even how to draw a check, and died without a will, leaving her with six children under seventeen years of age, a responsibility for which she was totally unprepared.

The two eldest children, my mother and Tissie—whose real name was Elizabeth and who later became Mrs. Stanley Mortimer—bore the marks of their father’s upbringing. They were deeply religious; they had been taught to use their minds in the ways that my grandfather thought suitable for girls. He disciplined them well. In the country they walked several times a day from the house to the main road with a stick across their backs in the crook of their elbows to improve their carriage. He was a severe judge of what they read and wrote and how they expressed themselves, and held them to the highest standards of conduct. The result was strength of character, with definite ideas of right and wrong, and a certain rigidity in conforming to a conventional pattern, which had been put before them as the only proper existence for a lady.

Suddenly the strong hand was removed, and the two boys and the two younger girls knew no discipline, for how could a woman who had never been treated as anything but a grown-up child suddenly assume the burden of training a family?

I have been told that my mother, for the first year or so after my grandfather died, was the guiding spirit of the household, but at nineteen she was married to my father.

My mother belonged to that New York City society which thought itself all-important. Old Mr. Peter Marié, who gave choice parties and whose approval stamped young girls and young matrons a success, called my mother a queen, and bowed before her charm and beauty, and to her this was important.

In that society you were kind to the poor, you did not neglect your philanthropic duties, you assisted the hospitals and did something for the needy. You accepted invitations to dine and to dance with the right people only, you lived where you would be in their midst. You thought seriously about your children’s education, you read the books that everybody read, you were familiar with good literature. In short, you conformed to the conventional pattern.

My father, Elliott Roosevelt, charming, good-looking, loved by all who came in contact with him, had a background and upbringing which were alien to my mother’s pattern. He had a physical weakness which he himself probably never quite understood. As a boy of about fifteen he left St. Paul’s School after one year, because of illness, and went out to Texas. He made friends with the officers at Fort McKavit, a frontier fort, and stayed with them, hunting game and scouting in search of hostile Indians. He loved the life and was a natural sportsman, a good shot and a good rider. I think the life left an indelible impression on him. The illness left its mark on him too, on those inner reserves of strength which we all have to call on at times in our lives. He returned to his family in New York apparently well and strong.

My grandfather Roosevelt died before my father was twenty-one and while his older brother, Theodore, later to be President of the United States, fought his way to health from an asthmatic childhood and went to Harvard College, Elliott, with the consent of an indulgent mother and two adoring sisters, took part of his inheritance and went around the world. He hunted in India when few people from this country had done anything of the kind.

My father returned from his trip for the wedding of his little sister, Corinne, to his friend, Douglas Robinson. Then he married Anna Hall, and tragedy and happiness came walking on each other’s heels.

He adored my mother and she was devoted to him, but always in a more reserved and less spontaneous way. I doubt that the background of their respective family lives could have been more different. His family was not so much concerned with Society (spelled with a big S) as with people, and these people included the newsboys from the streets of New York and the cripples whom Dr. Schaefer, one of the most noted early orthopedic surgeons, was trying to cure.

My father’s mother and his brother Theodore’s young wife, Alice Lee, died within a few days of each other. The latter left only a little Alice to console the sorrowing young father. My father felt these losses deeply. Very soon, however, in October, 1884, I came into the world, and from all accounts I must have been a more wrinkled and less attractive baby than the average—but to him I was a miracle from Heaven.

I was a shy, solemn child even at the age of two, and I am sure that even when I danced I never smiled. My earliest recollections are of being dressed up and allowed to come down to dance for a group of gentlemen who applauded and laughed as I pirouetted before them. Finally, my father would pick me up and hold me high in the air. He dominated my life as long as he lived, and was the love of my life for many years after he died.

With my father I was perfectly happy. There is still a woodeny painting of a solemn child, a straight bang across her forehead, with an uplifted finger and an admonishing attitude, which he always enjoyed and referred to as “Little Nell scolding Elliott.” We had a country house at Hempstead, Long Island, so that he could hunt and play polo. He loved horses and dogs, and we always had both. During this time he was in business, and, added to the work and the sports, the gay and popular young couple lived a busy social life. He was the center of my world and all around him loved him.

Whether it was some weakness from his early years which the strain of the life he was living accentuated, whether it was the pain he endured from a broken leg which had to be set, rebroken and reset, I do not know. My father began to drink, and for my mother and his brother Theodore and his sisters began the period of harrowing anxiety which was to last until his death in 1894.

My father and mother, my little brother and I went to Italy for the winter of 1890 as the first step in the fight for his health and power of self-control. I remember my father acting as gondolier, taking me out on the Venice canals, singing with the other boatmen, to my intense joy. I loved his voice and, above all, I loved the way he treated me. He called me “Little Nell,” after the Little Nell in Dickens’
Old Curiosity Shop
, and I never doubted that I stood first in his heart.

He could, however, be annoyed with me, particularly when I disappointed him in such things as physical courage, and this, unfortunately, I did quite often. We went to Sorrento and I was given a donkey so I could ride over the beautiful roads. One day the others overtook me and offered to let me go with them, but at the first steep descent which they slid down I turned pale, and preferred to stay on the high road. I can remember still the tone of disapproval in my father’s voice, though his words of reproof have long since faded away.

I remember my trip to Vesuvius with my father and the throwing of pennies, which were returned to us encased in lava, and then the endless trip down. I suppose there was some block in the traffic, but I can remember only my utter weariness and my effort to bear it without tears so that my father would not be displeased.

My mother took a house in Neuilly, outside of Paris, and settled down for several months, as another baby was expected the end of June. My father entered a sanitarium while his older sister, Anna, our Auntie Bye, came to stay with my mother. It was decided to send me to a convent to learn French and to have me out of the way when the baby arrived.

The convent experience was an unhappy one. I was not yet six years old, and I must have been very sensitive, with an inordinate desire for affection and praise, perhaps brought on by the fact that I was conscious of my plain looks and lack of manners. My mother was troubled by my lack of beauty, and I knew it as a child senses these things. She tried hard to bring me up well so that my manners would compensate for my looks, but her efforts only made me more keenly conscious of my shortcomings.

The little girls of my age in the convent could hardly be expected to take much interest in a child who did not speak their language and did not belong to their religion. They had a little shrine of their own and often worked hard beautifying it. I longed to be allowed to join them, but was always kept on the outside and wandered by myself in the walled-in garden.

Finally, I fell a prey to temptation. One of the girls swallowed a penny. Every attention was given her, she was the center of everybody’s interest. I longed to be in her place. One day I went to one of the sisters and told her that I had swallowed a penny. It must have been evident that my story was not true, so they sent for my mother. She took me away in disgrace. Understanding as I do now my mother’s character, I realize how terrible it must have seemed to her to have a child who would lie.

I remember the drive home as one of utter misery, for I could bear swift punishment far better than long scoldings. I could cheerfully lie any time to escape a scolding, whereas if I had known that I would simply be put to bed or be spanked I probably would have told the truth.

This habit of lying stayed with me for years. My mother did not understand that a child may lie from fear; I myself never understood it until I reached the age when I realized that there was nothing to fear.

My father had come home for the baby’s arrival, and I am sorry to say he was causing a great deal of anxiety, but he was the only person who did not treat me as a criminal!

The baby, my brother Hall, was several weeks old when we sailed for home, leaving my father in a sanitarium in France, where his brother, Theodore, had to go and get him later on.

We lived that winter without my father. I slept in my mother’s room, and remember the thrill of watching her dress to go out in the evenings. She looked so beautiful I was grateful to be allowed to touch her dress or her jewels or anything that was part of the vision which I admired inordinately.

Those summers, while my father was away trying to rehabilitate himself, we spent largely with my grandmother at her Tivoli house, which later was to become home to both my brother Hall and me.

My father sent us one of his horses, an old hunter which my mother used to drive, and I remember driving with her. Even more vividly do I remember the times when I was sent down to visit my great-aunt, Mrs. Ludlow, whose house was next to ours but nearer the river and quite out of sight, for no house along that part of the river was really close to any other.