Roosevelt (6 page)

Franklin Roosevelt could not escape this “condition of excitement and irritation in the public mind,” as Uncle Ted once described it. The man who had won the boy’s admiration as a Rough Rider kept it as a reformer. Franklin saw the President at the White House on a number of occasions both before and after his marriage to the President’s niece. He must have speculated on the parallels between his career and his cousin’s early one: Theodore had gone to Harvard, had failed there to win election as class marshal, had gone on to Columbia Law School—and then into politics. Franklin could hardly miss the potential parallel. One day in 1907 he told his fellow law clerks that he had his career well in mind: first a seat in the state assembly, then assistant secretary of the navy, then governor of New York—and then the presidency. His friends did not laugh at him; he seemed in earnest, and had not Cousin Theodore had just such a career?

But one great parallel was missing. Theodore had always been a Republican, but Franklin—what was Franklin? His father, believing that the national government should be honest, frugal, and limited in scope, had been a Cleveland Democrat, and so was the son. But these were difficult times for a Roosevelt who was a Cleveland Democrat. In 1896 James, an eastern capitalist, certainly could not have supported Bryan; he probably voted for McKinley. In 1898 James campaigned for Theodore for governor of New York, and Franklin wrote from Groton that “we were all wild with delight when we heard of Teddy’s election.” In 1900 Franklin joined the Harvard Republican Club and marched miles through Boston in a torchlight procession for the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket. In 1904 he cast his first ballot for Theodore. Again family ties were strongest.

Was Franklin a Democrat during his early years? By inheritance yes, but when it came down to specific cases he supported Republicans. Actually his party leanings were as amorphous as his ideological ones. Why did he not enter politics as a Republican? He then could have put himself directly in line for Theodore’s political inheritance. The most likely explanation seems to be that Theodore’s power in the Republican party, thanks partly to his flat statement in 1904 that he would not run for another term, was waning when Franklin finished law school, and so was progressivism in the Republican party. In 1910 Franklin, probably by chance more than by design, was in a position to run for office on either major party ticket. It was less by conviction that he became a Democrat than
by virtue of the fact that the Democratic party needed him and went to him.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother, Elliott, and of Anna R. Hall. Franklin was her fifth cousin once removed. It was by no means unimportant to Franklin that she was the niece of Uncle Ted, with all the glamour that went with membership in the presidential family. But this was the least of it. Growing up she had been a gawky, pensive girl, with a brace and the prominent Rooseveltian teeth. Suddenly, during his later college years, Franklin saw a tall willowy girl with a sweet, expressive face under a great mass of hair. He fell in love, and late in 1903 proposed to her. She accepted. Franklin was only twenty-two years old and Eleanor only nineteen, but, she said later, “it seemed an entirely natural thing and I never even thought that we were both rather young and inexperienced.”

But Sara did. She was stunned by her son’s sudden announcement. Having lost her husband only three years before, she had looked forward to companionship with her son, who, she hoped, would settle down at Hyde Park. They were far too young to get married, she told Franklin. But her son was firm—and diplomatic. “I know my mind …” he wrote her. “And for you, dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have always been & always will be to each other—only now you have two children to love & to love you.…” And from Eleanor came a plaintive note that was also a truce offer: “… I do so want you to learn to love me a little. You must know that I will always try to do what you wish for I have grown to love you very dearly during the past summer.”

Sara tried to delay things by taking Franklin on a Caribbean cruise early in 1904 to think things over. When he returned he was as determined as ever to marry Eleanor. Sara gave in. She did not object to Eleanor as a person. Indeed, she was pleased at Franklin’s choice, if he had to choose so early. The engaged couple, carefully chaperoned, spent a few weeks together at Campobello getting to know each other better.

Franklin and Eleanor were married March 17, 1905. Endicott Peabody officiated, and Uncle Ted, just inaugurated president in his own right, came up from Washington to give his niece away. Inevitably T.R. stole the show; guests clustered around the genial chief executive, leaving the newlyweds standing quite alone. “When he goes to a wedding he wants to be the bride, and when he goes to a funeral he wants to be the corpse,” remarked a relative sourly as he watched the proceedings. Franklin and Eleanor had a European honeymoon in the grand tradition: Brown’s hotel in London,
art galleries in Paris, moonlight gondola rides in Venice, a leisurely trip north through the Alps, visits with family friends on estates in England and Scotland.

The woman Franklin married had had as unstable and unhappy a childhood as his had been sunny and secure. Her early life in gloomy brownstone houses in New York City was of the stuff of an Edith Wharton novel. Her mother, a somber unsympathetic person racked by violent headaches, died when Eleanor was eight. A brother died a few weeks later. She adored her father, a radiant, warmhearted man who called her “Little Nell” and became the object of her dreams. But he was an alcoholic who spent long periods in sanitariums, and he died in Eleanor’s tenth year. “My aunts told me, but I simply refused to believe it,” she remembered, “and while I wept long and went to bed still weeping, I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dream world as usual.” She was reared by her mother’s family, who made no effort to build up the child’s self-confidence. Her mother, annoyed by Eleanor’s solemn face and graceless ways, had called her “granny” to her face; an aunt said that she was an old maid who could never hope to marry. To make matters worse, another aunt had a series of desperately unhappy love affairs, an uncle drank heavily, and the whole Hall family carried on a dizzy social life that was far beyond their means.

In her mid-teens Eleanor had three years of schooling in England, and she came back to New York a far more secure and poised person. But her early years had given her a sympathetic interest in fellow sufferers that she was never to lose. She was haunted for months by the face of a wretched-looking man who had tried to snatch a purse from a woman sitting near her. She was interested in the ragged little newsboys to whom she had helped her father serve Thanksgiving dinner. By the age of nineteen she was teaching in a settlement house and investigating working conditions of women for the Consumers’ League. Inevitably her qualities of compassion and sensitivity added a new dimension to Franklin’s social outlook.

But this was a long-term process, and the couple were concerned with more immediate things when they returned from their honeymoon in the fall of 1905. They moved into a house on East 36
^th
Street, which had been rented and furnished by Sara, and they lived here for two years until Sara had finished building two adjoining houses on 65
^th
Street, one for herself and one for her son and daughter-in-law. Their first child, Anna, was born in May 1906. Five more children would be born during the next ten years, including one who died in infancy from the flu. These were hard years for Eleanor. She was not ready for many domestic responsibilities. She reproached herself bitterly over the baby who died,
although she was not at fault. Her mother-in-law tried to plan her life for her, and often succeeded.

Wanting desperately to share in her husband’s activities, Eleanor tried to learn to drive Franklin’s little Ford car and to ride Franklin’s horse Bobby. But she ran the car into a gatepost, and she could not control Bobby. She practiced golf by herself for days and then ventured on the green with her husband, who, after watching her cut at the ball for a few minutes, said that she might just as well give it up. She did.

Franklin seemed insensitive to his young wife’s feelings of inadequacy, her restlessness under Sara’s maternal domination, her wish to share more of his life. When he found Eleanor once weeping at her dressing table at their—or Sara’s—house on 65
^th
Street, he reacted more with bewildered dismay than with anxious compassion. “What on earth is the matter with you?” he demanded. Though he gave his wife and family warm affection and plunged into family picnics and yacht trips with zest and vigor, he could spend many a Saturday afternoon playing poker at the University Club in New York City. Like his father, he seemed able to compartmentalize his life with ease.

Roosevelt had begun Columbia Law School in the fall of 1904 and he entered his second year soon after returning from his honeymoon. Here he repeated the pattern of Harvard, minus the extracurricular activities. Although the Columbia faculty included a distinguished group of law professors, the courses failed to interest Franklin. His grades once again averaged C. He failed two courses—one of them Pleading and Practice I—and had to take make-up examinations. After passing the New York bar examinations before the end of his third year he promptly dropped his courses, thus failing to win his LL.B. degree. Clearly the study of the law did not challenge young Roosevelt.

Law practice was something else. Through his connections he got a clerkship at the old Wall Street law firm of Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn. It was an unpaid job the first year and his work was rather routine. But cases came his way—many of them from his rather litigious family—and he enjoyed the practical higgle and haggle of legal negotiation. He was surprised and depressed at the gap between legal education and legal practice. He saw little connection between legal “grand principles” and the problems of a relative’s trunk destroyed on a Le Havre dock, the interpretation of a will, or a deed of transfer of land.

Roosevelt was not excited by the broader points of law. If he had been, his future at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn—and his whole career—might have been much different. The firm defended such clients as Standard Oil of New Jersey and the American Tobacco
Company against the government’s attacks on the trusts; it was saturated with the spirit of sober, responsible defense of corporate interests in the face of progressivism. As it turned out, Roosevelt was influenced far more by his everyday contacts with clients, lawyers, claimants, and the politicians and would-be politicians around the courts than he was by office ideology.

After a time, however, he was bored by the law. Something inside him was pushing him to wider fields of action.

The six years after Harvard were outwardly uneventful ones for Roosevelt, aside from family affairs. They were years of intellectual latency. But beneath the surface was a flux and flow, stirred by the nature of the times, by his wife and associates, and by the demands of his work. The year 1910 brought this period to a close and found Roosevelt ready for any opportunity that lay ahead.

The average American politician follows a well-trod path to elective office. He strikes deep roots in a likely community. He joins countless organizations where he can make useful contacts: Masons, Grange, Elks, veterans’ groups, and the like. He is active in his church, in charities, in civic affairs. Carefully skirting controversies that divide people, he quickly puts himself at the head of any movement that commands wide community backing. Above all he makes a point of being a good “mixer” with all classes of people.

Roosevelt did virtually none of these things. He may have dreamed of running for office, but certainly he made little preparation for it. In 1910 he had not lived the year round in Hyde Park since leaving for Groton fourteen years before. He stayed at his mother’s house many week ends and summers, but he saw little of the townspeople. He became vice-commodore of the Hudson River Ice Yacht Club and vestryman of the St. James Episcopal Church—activities hardly calculated to bring him in touch with a cross section of the people. To be sure, he joined Hyde Park’s Eagle Engine Company No. 1 and Rescue Hook and Ladder Company No. 1—but only
after
he was elected senator.

Roosevelt did not create his first great opportunity. That opportunity came to him.

It first came to him early in 1910 in New York City when John E. Mack, district attorney of Dutchess County and a leading Poughkeepsie Democrat, visited Roosevelt on a legal errand. It seemed possible, Mack said, that Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler, a prominent socialite politician, might quit his current post of state assemblyman. Would Roosevelt be interested in running? Roosevelt was highly responsive. At party functions later in the year Dutchess
County Democrats looked over the young man. They had mixed feelings about him. His patrician and somewhat supercilious bearing and speech, his slight acquaintance with the district, his youth and inexperience, above all his unpredictability were a source of worry. On the other hand, he bore the magic name of Roosevelt. And he had money—money for his own campaign and perhaps enough left over for the party treasury.

Roosevelt had few qualms. He wanted to try his hand at politics. He was eager to return to Hyde Park to live. Most important, he had a good chance to win. Poughkeepsie with its Irish and other Democratic forces made up much of Chanler’s district. To be sure, his mother was dubious about the idea, and so were a number of friends and relatives. It struck them a bit like an English gentleman’s going “into trade.” But Uncle Ted was pleased, even though Franklin was entering politics on the Democratic side. As for Eleanor, now pregnant for the fourth time, she merely acquiesced; it never occurred to her that she had any part to play. By early summer Roosevelt was intent on running.

Then came a blow. Chanler, it seemed, had no intention of giving up his assembly post. Elected lieutenant governor in 1906, and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor in 1908, he was not ready to quit the political arena. In vain Roosevelt took Chanler out to dinner and urged him to run for state senator. Embracing several agricultural counties, the senatorial district was traditionally Republican. Only once since 1856 had the Democrats won the district, and that occasion had been a three-cornered contest. Chanler would not take the risk.