Eleanor and Franklin (26 page)

But young love prevailed over filial affection. However Franklin managed it, he and Eleanor spent Sunday as well as Saturday with each other. “We have had two happy days together,” she wrote him after he had returned to Cambridge, “and you do not know how grateful I am for every moment which I have with you.”

“She had already lived through so much unhappiness,” a cousin commented, “and then to have married a man with a mother like Cousin Sally.”
¹
James Roosevelt had died in 1900 when Franklin was in his freshman year at college, and from that time on the forty-six-year-old Sara had focused all her thoughts, love, and energy on Franklin. For two winters she had rented a house in Boston to be close to him; they had traveled abroad together; when they were apart he wrote to her with a remarkable faithfulness. There was almost nothing she would not grant him except what was perhaps beyond the power of a lonely woman to grant an only child—independence.

“She was an indulgent mother but would not let her son call his soul his own” was the way a loyal friend of Eleanor's, quoting P. G. Wodehouse, sought to describe the strong-willed dowager's relationship with her son.
²
Except for Eleanor, no one ever exercised so strong a sway over his development, and Eleanor would always insist that not even she had so great an influence. Sara claimed Franklin as her own, even against her husband: “My son Franklin is a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all,” she would assert with a proprietary air after he became president, and, strangely, in his final years his face came more and more to resemble his mother's. But the kinship was more than physical. In his will James Roosevelt had written: “I wish him
[Franklin] to be under the influence of his mother.” It was an unnecessary stipulation. He already was.

Handsome Sara (Sally) Delano was twenty-six, half as old as James Roosevelt, a widower of quiet dignity, when they were married in 1880. The marriage united two of the great Hudson River families, but the disparity in their ages had caused some astonishment in society, an amused surprise that had been reflected in a letter that Eleanor's father wrote home from London in 1880.

The sly old chap took great pleasure as indeed “Aunt Sara” (they passed for my Aunt and Uncle) did also, in relating to me the incidents and course of The Love Affair. When he slipped off before breakfast while he used to visit us in the country and say it was for his a.m. walk, the gay young dog went to post billets to his fair mistress. But truly they are a devoted couple and very kind to me.

The Delano family lived at Algonac, a stately brown and buff Victorian mansion with wide lawns overlooking the Hudson at Newburgh. Sara was born in 1854, the seventh child in a brood of eleven—six boys and five girls. Three years later her father, having lost his first China-trade fortune in the panic of 1857, returned to China to make “another million.” This time it took him six years, and in 1862 he sent for his family, and Mrs. Delano and her children, including eight-year-old Sara, embarked on the square-rigger
Surprise
for the 128-day voyage. After their return to the United States at the end of the Civil War, Warren Delano invested his new wealth judiciously in coal and other securities; Sara's share of the legacy at his death was over a million dollars.
³

Warren Delano was a patriarch, and everyone in his large Algonac household gave him unquestioning obedience. That was the custom of the times, said Sara later. But the Delano children went beyond custom: they were sure their father was infallible and knew best about everything. If her father frowned upon a young man, said Sara, that was the end of him, and she even permitted her father to help her with the letter so telling the gentleman. Perhaps James Roosevelt, twice her age, reminded her of her father, and perhaps that was a strong part of his attraction for her.
⁴

James was a seventh-generation Roosevelt. His grandfather, born in 1760, also named James, had been the first of the Jacobus line to settle on the Hudson, after an attempt at gentleman-farming in Harlem
had to be abandoned because of its rocky soil. The elder James died in 1847—“a highly respectable gentleman of the old school,” wrote Philip Hone—and his son Isaac (1790–1863) completed his family's withdrawal from New York—and from public activity. Isaac was an eccentric. He attended Princeton and obtained a medical degree at Columbia, but never practiced because he was unable to stand the sight of blood or human pain. He turned instead to botanical research and led a secluded country existence in Dutchess County.

His son James (1828–1900), Franklin's father, was more enterprising. He went to Union College and then for two years did the Grand Tour, at one point in the turbulent year of 1848 even enlisting in Garibaldi's Red Shirts, who were then besieging Naples. But a siege can be a tedious affair, and James soon returned to the States. After attending Harvard Law School, he devoted himself to his investments and to cultivating a life of dignified rural amenity on the Hudson in the manor style of the British nobility, whom he much admired. He made several bids for great financial power by putting together mergers in coal and railroads, and even though the mergers failed his fortune was large enough to enable him to sustain the leisured life of a Hudson River gentleman at Springwood, his 1,000-acre Hyde Park estate. “English life to perfection,” said Ward McAllister, who passed through Hyde Park and was enchanted with the avenue of old trees, the little village church, the gracious estates, and well-appointed houses.

Not the least of Hyde Park's English flavor came from James Roosevelt himself, a tall man with mutton chop whiskers who was rarely without his riding crop. He bred trotters and built a famous herd of Alderneys that he crossed with Jerseys and Guernseys.
⁵
He took the cure annually at a German spa, hunted in Pau, shot grouse in Scotland, and as a patriarch was among those who decided who belonged in New York society. While declining to take part in politics as not quite gentlemanly, he fulfilled a squire's obligation to the village, where he was a member of the Democratic caucus, belonged to the Volunteer Fire Company, was warden and vestryman of the church, and served as town supervisor. And as president of a small railroad he was entitled to take his private railroad car, the “Monon,” to any part of the country. Such was the man and style of life to which Sara Delano happily accommodated herself.

James' first wife, Rebecca Howland, had died in 1876, and their son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt (“Rosy”), was a river grandee much in the mold of his father. Rosy and Sara were the same age but it was
the widower who courted her, and in her eyes James Roosevelt was a delightful gentleman—high-minded, courteously persistent, and well descended. They worshiped the same household gods, had the same convictions about education and manners,
noblesse oblige
, and honor. They shared a love for the tranquil, secluded life of Hudson Valley and agreed that its old families, to most of whom they were related, embodied and defended the precious old standards in which they had been bred.

Warren Delano was not at all pleased with his daughter's choice. Although he was fond of the Hudson River squire—“the first person who has made me realize that a Democrat can be a gentleman”—he felt that James was too old for Sara. But this time she would not be swayed by his wishes, and on October 7, 1880, they were married at Algonac in a ceremony that, according to a New York paper, was witnessed “by a small number of the best representatives of New York Society.” That afternoon they drove the twenty miles to Hyde Park, and by evening Sara, installed as mistress of Springwood, contentedly set about giving her husband the worshipful devotion and care she had bestowed upon her father—and removing all traces of her dead predecessor, Rebecca Howland.

Her diaries reflected the sedate, patterned existence into which she slipped without, if one is to judge by what she wrote there, pang or travail.

We drove to church in our new Victoria. In the afternoon James rowed me down to Rosedale. We hung our new water colors. The neighbors all have been to see us . . . so we are busy returning a visit or two each day which gives an object for our drives. James keeps busy. He goes to town at least once a week and has school meetings, etc. I always go to the train with him and go for him again so he is not so long away from me. James is too devoted to me.

If their life together was not as bland as these entries suggest, if the realities were different, the code under which she had been reared would have obliged her to pretend otherwise. It would have been an affront against form and manners to have acknowledged the truth if the truth were unpleasant. This same attitude would be bred into her son Franklin. “If something was unpleasant and he didn't want to know about it, he just ignored it and never talked about it. . . . I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough it would
settle itself.”
⁶
James adored her and she leaned on him, endowing his every action with an almost cloying significance. Yet she was no Grandma Hall, satisfied to be cherished, protected, and helpless; she was a woman of dominating will and active mind. When James died she assumed management of Hyde Park and, over her son's protests, kept it as a gentleman's estate rather than farming it as a business. She astutely used the money she had inherited to bolster her position as matriarch. It was perhaps an ideal marriage: she was wholly reverential, always deferred to her husband's wishes, and had everything her own way.

In 1882 the circle of her contentment was complete. A son, Franklin, was born. From then on her diaries reported equally on the doings of “dear James” and “darling Franklin.” Franklin's was a happy boyhood. His parents doted on him, and as the first grandchild in the vast Delano clan (a cousin having died) he was petted and made much of by aunts and uncles. His father loved “riding and driving, sailing and ice-boating, skating and tennis” and could not wait to have his son join him as a companion in these interests. Whatever the boy wanted, he was given. A pony? As soon as his legs were long enough to straddle its back. A boat? He had the use of his father's yacht the
Half Moon
, a Campobello sea captain to teach him how to handle it, and a twenty-one footer of his own. A gun? His father handed him one at eleven. There were the neighboring Rogers boys and Mary Newbold for him to play with, trees, cliff, and a river in which to test his mettle, and a succession of nurses, governesses, and tutors to serve and instruct him and for whom he could do no wrong. He did not require strict handling, his mother said, because “instinctively” he was “a good little boy.”
⁷
When he developed an interest in birds, he was encouraged to begin a collection, as he was with stamps. And the wishes and interests that his parents did not anticipate or were reluctant to grant, he learned to obtain by charm and persuasion. What is impressive is the steadiness and professionalism that he brought to these occupations. His interest in birds resulted in the most complete collection of Dutchess County birds in existence; his philatelic interest so impressed his Uncle Fred Delano that Fred turned over his albums to his young nephew, and their combined collection became one of the world's most famous.

In later years Franklin said, “All that is in me goes back to the Hudson.” His boyhood world was ordered and harmonious, his childhood secure, happy, and protected—so different from Eleanor's storm-tossed early years. “He never saw ugly moods or emotions,” Sara's biographer
wrote on the basis of what Sara told her. “He was never the inwardly shrinking victim of conflicting interests, envenomed jealousies or ill-tempered words.”
⁸
If anything, he was overprotected. “Much of his time, until he went to Groton, was spent with his father and me,” Sara wrote, and though she disagreed with the assessment, there were “many people who pitied him for a lonely little boy, and thought he was missing a great deal of fun.”
⁹
Geraldine Morgan, a Livingston from Staatsburgh who called herself a tomboy, said that Franklin was unable to make the Hyde Park baseball team recruited from the great houses; that, because he spent so much time with his mother and father, he found it difficult to play with the other children; and that the children who knew him felt sorry for him.
¹⁰
In the little memoir
My Boy Franklin
, Sara insisted that she had never tried to influence young Franklin against his own tastes and inclinations, and yet she also disclosed that it was only “eventually” that she had allowed his golden curls to be shorn, and that when, at the age of five, he had become melancholy he had “clasped his hands in front of him and said ‘Oh, for freedom'” when she asked him why. She had been genuinely shocked.

That night I talked it over with his father who, I confess, often told me I nagged the boy. We agreed that unconsciously we had probably regulated the child's life too closely, even though we knew he had ample time for exercise and play.

The training and discipline of young Franklin were left to Sara, who had forceful opinions on the kind of man she wanted him to become. “Never, oh never,” she confessed later, had it been her ambition for him that he should become president. “That was the last thing I should ever have imagined for him, or that he should be in public life of any sort.” She had only one goal in mind for him:

that he grow to be a fine, upright man like his father and like her own father, a beloved member of his family and a useful and respected citizen of his community just as they were, living quietly and happily along the Hudson as they had.
¹¹

If the role of a country squire ever appealed to young Franklin, he was opened to larger ideals, different styles of life, and new heroes when he entered Groton in 1896. His cubicle at Groton was austere
and cramped compared to his quarters at home, but it was his own and he loved it. The school's headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, was a stern and exacting disciplinarian, but his influence upon young Franklin was, next to his parents', greater than anyone's. Dr. Peabody's repeated theme, inside chapel and out, was service, particularly public service. “If some Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land it won't be because they have not been urged,” he would say.