Eleanor and Franklin (42 page)

It was fortunate that Miss Spring came early and also that Franklin dashed up for a visit, for on the sixteenth Eleanor felt the baby was about to appear. She awakened Franklin, and he sailed over on the
Half Moon
to get old Dr. Bennett from Lubec. The doctor arrived, but the baby did not. For almost a day everyone sat around while Eleanor felt guilty over the trouble she was causing and sought to persuade Dr. Bennett to leave and take care of his other patients. Finally, late on the seventeenth the second Franklin Jr. made his appearance—another better-than-ten-pound baby. Afterward Dr. Bennett expressed surprise to Miss Spring that when it came to having babies summer people were no different from Down-Easters: “She is just like one of us.”

As soon as Franklin was sure Eleanor and the baby were all right he hurried back to his primary fight. Her letters mixed reports about bowel movements with political encouragement. They had put up the poster Franklin had sent them; James wanted more campaign buttons; “I have a little more milk.” The baby thrived but Franklin's six-week bid for the Democratic nomination did not—Tammany's candidate, James W. Gerard, defeated him. “I wonder if you are disappointed,” his mother wrote consolingly. “I hope not. You made a brave fight and now you can return to the good and necessary work of the Navy Department which must have missed you all these last weeks.” Eleanor was so involved with the new baby that the campaign made little impression upon her, but like Sara she thought that Franklin was quite content to get back to his desk at the Navy Department.

Eleanor's last baby, John Aspinwall, was born March 13, 1916. In February she was still dining out almost every night and being hostess at large Navy receptions—“as 225 came last time I don't think there is anyone left to come!” Caroline Phillips, who was also pregnant, dined with her the evening of March 13. After dinner Franklin went out, and at ten Caroline left. Shortly afterward Eleanor called Miss Spring, who summoned the doctor, and by the time Franklin returned the baby had almost arrived—“born at 11 p.m. in Washington,” Sara recorded in her diary. John's was the only birth Sara was not on hand for. Later, John, like the other boys, was brought to St. James Episcopal
Church in Hyde Park and christened in his father's christening dress. Henceforth Washington matrons who complained that they could not run their households were told it could be done: “Eleanor Roosevelt . . . has five children and moves them all six times a year—and does everything else besides!”

In later years Eleanor blamed herself for the way she brought up her children: she had been too stern with them; she had not done enough things that they wanted to do and too many that she had thought it was good for them to do; she had deferred too much to nurses and to Sara.
²
The results of this training were described by Mrs. Frances Theodora Parsons, a friend of Eleanor's parents and a well-known writer of books on nature. She was at Susie Parish's when Eleanor was there with Anna and James. Eleanor admired Mrs. Parsons' creativity and sweetness with the children, but Mrs. Parsons was less complimentary about Eleanor. She met James and Anna “primly parading on the asphalt drive with their nursery-governess one June morning,” she recalled in
Perchance Some Day
. “I invited them to join me in a hunt for wild flowers up the mountain path. But they were too much appalled by steep curves and outcropping rocks to derive any pleasure” from the expedition.
³
That was before Eleanor had become an independent woman, Mrs. Parsons explained. “I can remember at twenty-two expecting my year old baby to sit on the sofa beside me while I poured tea with all kinds of good things on the tray. Her manners had to be so perfect that she would never even reach or ask for these forbidden goodies!” Eleanor later wrote.
⁴

Eleanor's nurses and governesses were supplied by agencies that traditionally served New York's upper-class families, and the schools to which she sent Anna, James, and Elliott were the accepted ones in her milieu. Before she moved the children to Washington in 1913, Anna, then seven, briefly attended classes in New York. Maude had suggested the progressive Ethical Culture school, but Anna was sent to Miss Davidge's. In Washington Anna went to the Misses Eastman, and James and Elliott to the Potomac School. These schools were well-staffed and highly exclusive.

Like other young Washington matrons, Eleanor gave much thought to education, a subject that she discussed endlessly with Caroline Phillips and Lily Polk, who had children the same age as her own. She was principally concerned with what she and Franklin could do to reinforce the classroom. She believed that the early years were decisive and that the home was more important than school; if a child was not
taught habits of self-control at home and if parents did not encourage curiosity by the way they responded to a child's queries, formal education was likely to be unproductive.

Eleanor tried a number of ways to teach her children to concentrate. She spent time with them on their lessons and reading to them. She also had a French governess to help them learn French. Elliott “goes to Mlle. now for French every morning & I think has learnt a good deal though if you ask him to say anything he promptly refuses.” She had borrowed one of her methods of teaching concentration from Mlle. Souvestre. After lunch she had the children lie flat on the floor.
⁵
“Relax your muscles completely,” she softly commanded. When they were physically relaxed and, she hoped, mentally focused, she read to them. It is difficult to say whether these efforts were effective. The Roosevelt children did show an unusual ability, when interested, to concentrate on what was being said and to pick up ideas and information aurally, but their father and mother had the same faculty and it may have been an inherited rather than a learned trait.

The children did not suffer from lack of motherly care and attention. John was “three months old [and] weighs 14 lbs 13 oz.,” Eleanor noted, “which is 15 oz. more than F. jr. weighed.” She worried if she had to be away from the children. Before Eleanor left with Franklin on his inspection tour of southern naval facilities, Anna had asked anxiously what would happen if they had to buy anything “or got lost or put into prison.” Eleanor was also apprehensive about how the household would manage if a crisis developed while she was away, and the longer she was gone, the stronger her fears became. But after she returned she was able to report to Sara, “All was well here.”

Sometimes there
were
mishaps while Eleanor was away. One summer when they were at Campobello she went to St. Andrews to do some shopping, and when she returned she discovered Elliott had fallen into the smoldering ashes of a fire the children had made on the beach while the nurse had wandered off and burned his arms and legs. In the four-page letter that went to Franklin describing what had happened, Eleanor was careful not to alarm him unduly—“he only cried a little & Nurse says they are only skin burns” and they applied Unguentine.

She was as composed and cool-headed in dealing with Elliott as she was in writing Franklin, and later concluded that the spirit with which one faced life's little calamities was the important thing, since children cannot be totally shielded from misadventures. But then when Franklin, perhaps because her letter was so reassuring, made only passing
reference to Elliott's injuries, she was indignant. “You are casual about Elliott's burns . . . he is a very brave young man!”

Because she had been full of fears when she was a child, Eleanor wanted her children to be venturesome and to meet adversity with fortitude. She was pleased when Anna and James entered the swimming pool. “One thing their lessons did for them is that they'll put their heads under & go in to their necks & James seems less timid than Anna,” she reported. Since Anna was ten and James nine, it might not appear to be much of an achievement, but the point is that she was determined to have them face up to their fears. She admired spunkiness and detested sniveling. Once when Elliott bit James hard she spanked him with a slipper and explained that no matter whose fault it was, boys didn't bite. Elliott's feelings were hurt and “he made such a long upper lip he looked like a rabbit,” but she was pleased with his insistence that “it didn't hurt so very much, Mother!” Another show of defiance was also reported half approvingly: “Elliott went for me with both fists.” There were times, however, when she was not so enamored of Elliott's temper. She took him to the Spring-Rice dancing class to look on, “but he is so shy with people and you never are sure that he'll do as you tell him without a scene so it isn't an unmixed joy.” Then she added firmly, “The new baby is not going to be allowed to grow up like this!”

Sara often deplored and frequently hindered Eleanor's efforts at shaping the children's character. “Anna and James thrive and have a good time,” Eleanor wrote Franklin, “though Mama thinks them much abused.” When they all went sailing, she reported on another occasion, “the chicks became obstreperous and I most severe and Mama unhappy!” When James fell off his pony while they were visiting Hyde Park he was scratched but Eleanor did not think he was really hurt; “but of course he cried hard and Mama brought him in and had him lying down before I knew anything was wrong or I would have made him get on again if only for a minute.”

Sara should not have interfered with her daughter-in-law's decisions, but Eleanor, as she later realized, was too stern a disciplinarian. She had disliked her mother, but it was her mother's and grandmother's tendency to say “no” rather than her father's life-affirming “yes” that took charge when she was confronted by unruliness in her children. She thought the discipline she had undergone as a child had been beneficial, “and so when I found myself responsible for the bringing up of children, I enforced a discipline which in many ways was unwise.”
⁶
Having seen what self-indulgence had done to her father and uncles, she was puritanical and repressive toward herself and overly severe in curbing what she considered the “wildness” of her children. “They have been the wildest things you ever saw,” she complained to Franklin, “and about ready to jump out of their skins.” “Let the chicks run wild at Hyde Park,” he advised her. “It won't hurt them.” His reaction was the same when she appealed to him to end some roughhousing between James and Elliott: “Oh, let them scrap. It's good exercise for them.”

Franklin did not like to administer discipline. As public responsibilities more and more cut down the time he was able to spend with his “chicks,” he wanted the hours he was with them to be full of fun, excitement, and affection. His mother had always tried to run him, and he shied away from doing the same to his children. He was loath to hurt anyone's feelings, and preferred to be the agent of good tidings. When one of the children had to be punished, the task usually fell to Eleanor, and if she insisted that it was Franklin's responsibility, wrote James Roosevelt in his engaging memoir,
Affectionately, F.D.R.,
“the punishment simply was not administered.”
⁷

Sara, however, was the real culprit in undermining the children's discipline. Even the Hyde Park servants thought so. Sara overhead talk in the servants' part of the house that she spoiled the children, that she was “chicken-hearted,” and the criticism made her cross, she wrote to Eleanor. Then she added:

But one sh
^d
keep as clear of the opinion of that class as possible I am sure, for they blow hot & cold, the best of them, & if any of them speak to me of how
nice
the children are, I shall not even answer. One thing that makes for good behaviour at table is that we all know everything goes upstairs & outside.

“We ‘chicks' quickly learned,” wrote James, “that the best way to circumvent ‘Pa and Mummy' when we wanted something they wouldn't give us was to appeal to Granny.”
⁸
But Franklin was away so often that it was Eleanor who bore the brunt of Sara's interference. The older woman was motivated by darker, more complicated forces than an overindulgent love of her grandchildren: she was Eleanor's rival for the affections both of the children and of Franklin. James wrote that his grandmother was “in constant competition with Mother” over how the children should be raised. In the article that
McCall's
published
posthumously, “I Remember Hyde Park,” Eleanor at the end of her life spoke more plainly that ever about this arrangement
à trois
.
⁹
The Big House at Hyde Park was her mother-in-law's and Franklin's home, but not hers: “For over forty years, I was only a visitor there.” In the dining room Franklin sat at one end of the table, Sara at the other, and Eleanor on the side. It was the same in the large library-living room, in the new wing that Sara added to the house in 1915 after consulting Franklin but not her—the two large armchairs on either side of the fireplace were occupied by Franklin and his mother, while Eleanor “sat anywhere.”

When Sara had realized that the marriage between Franklin and herself could not be prevented, Eleanor went on, explaining why the Big House had been such an unhappy place for her, “she determined to bend the marriage to the way she wanted it to be. What she wanted was to hold onto Franklin and his children; she wanted them to grow up as she wished. As it turned out, Franklin's children were more my mother-in-law's children than they were mine.” This was partly her own fault, she admitted, for having permitted Sara to keep her “under her thumb.”

Hall understood his sister's problems with “Cousin Sally,” as he called Sara, and with the nurses and governesses that Sara selected for Eleanor. “Are the legions of law and order too strong for you or have you managed this summer without too assiduous attentions?” he sympathetically inquired.