Eleanor and Franklin (27 page)

Groton helped shape Franklin's outlook, but it was not as liberating an influence on him as Allenswood was upon Eleanor. Because Franklin's regard for Endicott Peabody equaled Eleanor's for Marie Souvestre, the differences between headmaster and headmistress—not wholly to be explained by Groton's being a school for boys and Allenswood for girls—are not without interest.

Mlle. Souvestre was an agnostic—indeed, she called herself an atheist—who insisted that no area of human belief should be immune from critical inquiry and objective study. The Reverend Peabody “was by nature a believer rather than an inquirer. Theological perplexities and subtleties simply did not affect him.”
¹²
In politics, Souvestre frequented the great Liberal houses, was a friend of Beatrice Potter Webb and a follower of Harrison's religion of humanity. Peabody was a conservative with an abiding faith in the status quo who shaped Groton into a splendid mechanism for instilling into the sons of the old-stock, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class the elements of a “manly Christian character” that would make them worthy and capable of ruling America. Souvestre sided with the oppressed minorities everywhere. Peabody believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, especially the English, and considered the Spanish-American War “the most righteous war that has been undertaken in this country.” Souvestre's closest friends were in the artistic community and her library was adorned with avant-garde works. Peabody distrusted art and artists, and Groton boys with serious artistic interests had to hide them if they did not wish to be labeled outsiders. Souvestre was impatient with pupils who studied by rote and mechanically repeated what they had heard from her or had read in a book. Interest should motivate study, the rector agreed, but if interest was not aroused “the work should be done as a matter of duty.” Souvestre, a Dreyfusard was prepared to uphold the truth even if it meant undermining authority. At Groton “obedience came before all else”; rules and good form were
upheld at the price of curiosity, sometimes of truth. In short, Peabody's values were those of order, hierarchy, discipline, and power; Souvestre's were those of heart, vision, and spirit.
¹³

When Franklin left Groton he was attuned to the rector's admonitions that Groton boys should go into politics and public service. But service to whom, politics for what ends? To uphold the established order, as the rector preached, or to change it in favor of the victim, as Mlle. Souvestre believed? Roosevelt's answer in the great crisis of the thirties would be to conserve the system through the institution of change, a course that reflected the teachings of the rector tempered by those of Mlle. Souvestre as transmitted through Eleanor Roosevelt.

Sara's hopes that her son would lead the quiet life of a country gentleman were undermined from another quarter—Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin's enthusiasm as a boy at Groton and a young man at Harvard for “Cousin Theodore” was undisguised. Indeed, it was in connection with the Theodore Roosevelts that young Franklin showed that, devoted as he genuinely was to his mother, he could be as stubborn and determined as she. At the end of his first year at Groton (1897), while his parents were taking the annual cure at Bad Nauheim, Bamie wrote and asked whether Franklin could spend the Fourth of July week end with her at Oyster Bay. When his mother refused the invitation for him, he wrote back, “Please don't make any more arrangements for my future happiness.” A few days later Theodore came to Groton to talk about his adventures as New York police commissioner—a talk that Franklin called “splendid”—and while there he also invited Franklin to Oyster Bay. The young man promptly accepted and wrote his parents: “I hope you will not refuse that too.”

Theodore Roosevelt's compelling personality made a large impact upon the younger generation, and his influence was particularly felt at Harvard, which Franklin entered in 1900, where Theodore's example counteracted the Gold Coast cult of “Harvard indifference.” He was a “great inspirer,” said Eleanor, and Franklin was one of those whose inclination to enter politics definitely matured under his influence. At Harvard, Franklin was a clubman, went out for the crew, and took a heavy schedule of courses, but he spent most of his time on the
Crimson
, which he later said was probably “the most useful preparation I had in college for public service.”

An undergraduate paper that he wrote on the Roosevelts in New Amsterdam should also have warned his mother that he would go
with her as far as he could but that he was independent, self-reliant, and thought for himself. To Sara, the Roosevelt and Delano family trees—which she knew in every detail and which she would frequently expound (in later years, much to the irritation and impatience of her daughter-in-law)—were the basis for her feeling of caste and exclusiveness. Franklin's genealogical researches, however, had a democratic emphasis. In a sophomore essay, “The Roosevelt Family in New York before the Revolution,” he wrote:

Some of the famous Dutch families in New York have today nothing left but their name—they are few in numbers, they lack progressiveness and a true democratic spirit. One reason,—perhaps the chief—of the virility of the Roosevelts is this very democratic spirit. They have never felt that because they were born in a good position they could put their hands in their pockets and succeed. They have felt, rather, that being born in a good position, there was no excuse for them if they did not do their duty by the community, and it is because this idea was instilled into them from their birth that they have in nearly every case proved good citizens.
¹⁴

It is true that Franklin was as strong a traditionalist as his mother, and later became a founder and pillar of the Dutchess County Historical Society, but he recognized what his mother did not, and the recognition was implicit in his Harvard essay, that in order to survive America's aristocracy had to justify itself by its works and a willingness to accommodate to change. This was Eleanor's feeling, too, although genealogy never had the fascination for her that it did for Franklin.

Franklin knew his own mind, and was determined to shape his own destiny. Although he was a devoted and loving son, if his views differed from his mother's in matters that he considered important to himself, he held his own course. He preferred to achieve his objectives by diplomacy, patience, and charm, but if it came to a direct collision, he, too, could be stubborn. That was the case with his decision to marry Eleanor.

Eleanor signed the letter she wrote Franklin after their week end together in New York “Little Nell,” her father's favorite name for her. It was a sign of how completely she had surrendered her heart to her young lover by admitting him into her most precious secrets and endowing him with all the virtues she had ascribed to her father.
“For many years,” she later wrote, her father “embodied all the qualities I looked for in a man.” But although he was her father's godson, Franklin was not like her father, nor was her father the “parfit, gentil knight” that in her dream world Eleanor imagined him to be. In this inability to see the man she loved as he really was, she set the stage for much disappointment for herself.

Franklin, like Eleanor, was caught up in the tide of young love. He copied and sent to her his favorite poem from the
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. We can only guess which one it was. It “is an old friend of mine,” Eleanor wrote back, “and queerly enough I read it over the other evening also and thought how beautiful and expressive it was.” Why did he reread her old letters? she went on. “They really are not worth it. However, I don't suppose I ought to talk as I have kept all yours and probably read them far oftener than you read mine, but you write nice letters and I love them and mine are very often dull I fear.”

She was wrapping Christmas presents and he was in the midst of class elections. He had been nominated for class marshal, but, as he had warned his family, he was not elected. The biggest prizes seemed to elude him, at Harvard as well as at Groton. He had entered Groton two years after the other boys in his form, was not a success at athletics, was not elected prefect, and was not one of the really popular boys. “He knew things they didn't; they knew things he didn't,” Eleanor later said, commenting on the consequences of his entering his form two years late. “He felt left out. It gave him sympathy for people who are left out.” At Harvard he not only missed election as class marshal but was not taken into Porcellian, Harvard's most exclusive club, which was by far “the greatest disappointment” in his life, he later confided to Bye's son, Sheffield Cowles.
¹⁵
After he became president, his Republican relatives ascribed his attacks on Wall Street and his hostility to bankers like Morgan and Whitney to his resentment about not making Porcellian. “He was getting back at them,” they maintained. He had been disappointed, Eleanor agreed, and even developed something of an inferiority complex as a result; but the blow to his self-esteem at Harvard, like his loneliness at Groton, had widened his sympathies. His childhood had been secure and happy, and his cheerfulness contrasted with Eleanor's gravity. But there was a sense in which he, like Eleanor, was an outsider, and this, too, drew them together, especially since she supported and encouraged him in his large dreams.

She was overjoyed, she wrote him when he was chosen permanent
chairman of the Class Committee, “for I know how much it meant to you and I always want you to succeed. Dearest, if you only knew how happy it makes me to think that your love for me is making you try all the harder to do well and oh! I hope so much that some day I will be more of a help to you.”

12.
JOURNEY'S END

F
OR
F
RANKLIN AND
E
LEANOR
J
ANUARY
, 1904,
WAS SHADOWED
by Franklin's impending departure for the Caribbean. If Sara had hoped that a five-week winter cruise would dampen the romance, the urgency of their meetings in January should have told her otherwise.

“I am sorry to part with the old year,” Eleanor wrote Franklin on New Year's Eve; “it has been so good to me but the new is going to bring us both I hope still more perfect joy and love, if that is possible. Twelve is striking so goodnight darling ‘a Happy New Year to you—.'”

They spent the next two days together in New York, and while Franklin jovially reported to his mother, who had returned to Hyde Park, how they had gone to a play and to church and been to Aunt Corinne's for an “uproarious lunch” and all had tea later at Cousin Susie's, there were things he did not tell her, such as how they had slipped away from Aunt Corinne's early and that he was planning on returning to New York the following week end.

Even with the prospect of seeing him again on Saturday, for Eleanor the hours seemed to drag. “What will you do when you have to stand five weeks?” Cousin Susie admonished her. Eleanor was mortified that anyone else should see how out of humor she was; it spoke badly for her self-control, she felt. She told Franklin that he should not laugh at her work in the Rivington Street Settlement. If he were in New York to take up all her time “I would not be going I'm afraid, but one must do something or not having the person who is all the world to me would be unbearable.”

Despite all their stratagems for concealing their relationship, some began to suspect. When challenged or teased, Eleanor found the slightest deviation from a truthful, candid reply excruciatingly difficult. Was she ever going to marry Franklin, her Aunt Pussie asked her flatly one day. She had no right to ask that, replied Eleanor, who was easily exasperated with Pussie; when she intended to marry, she would let
Pussie know. But since she was secretly engaged, this was an evasion and it embarrassed her. “I suppose I could have got out of it without telling such a story if I had thought and I am really quite remorseful.”

At a luncheon one day Eleanor's friends began to discuss the approaching marriage of one of their friends, Edith Poor, to a British officer. “Can you imagine loving a man well enough to go to South Africa with him?” the girl next to Eleanor asked her. “Luckily,” said Eleanor, someone else chimed in and answered for her. To dissemble made her dreadfully uncomfortable.

For the sake of appearances, Eleanor agreed to accept Lyman Delano, Franklin's cousin and also a student at Harvard, as a supper partner at a theater party and dance to be given by his Aunt Kassie. Lyman was interested enough in Eleanor to get angry when she seemed to elude him. He wrote her from Harvard that he was expecting to come to New York for Aunt Kassie's party—would Eleanor go to supper with him? To avoid difficult explanations, Eleanor accepted. But, she consoled Franklin, “I'll dance with you,” and besides, they would be together at Groton before the party and would come to New York on the train together. At the party Lyman wanted to know how she had come down from Boston and by what train, “and when I said the twelve,” Eleanor reported to Franklin later, “he said ‘why had I not let him know, as he would have met me and been delighted to come down with me!' I did not say that I was escorted by someone else.”