Eleanor and Franklin (8 page)

He was to shatter precedent as well by his enlightened approach to the rights of the workingman, and it was in the year of Eleanor's birth that he began to question the interpretation of the laissez-faire doctrine to which he and most of the members of his class had always subscribed. In 1884 Samuel Gompers of the Cigarmakers Union took Theodore on a tour of the slum sweatshops, and the young assemblyman agreed to sponsor a bill to prohibit the manufacture of cigars in tenements even though it violated his laissez-faire principles. And when the courts, quoting Adam Smith, invalidated his bill saying that they could not see “how the cigar-maker is to be improved in his health or his morals by forcing him from his home and its hallowed associations,” Theodore began to be aware, as he wrote later, that complete freedom for the individual could turn out in practice “to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak.” He would be the first president since Jackson to use the power of government against Big Business—in the 1902 coal strike.

The trade-union movement in the eighties was in its infancy. Labor was cheap. The propertied wanted to keep it that way and rationalized their privileged position by arguing that any man worth his salt could improve his status. The day Eleanor was born, an Episcopal congress met in Detroit to answer the question
Is Our Civilization Just to Workingmen?
“Labor's complaint is poverty,” said the keynote speaker, the Reverend Dr. R. H. Newton. “Poverty is the fault neither of the laborer nor of nature. The state crosses the path of the workingman and prevents him from making a fair fight. Labor fails to get favorable legislation; capital secures all it asks.”

To the respectable and the upstanding, whether wealthy or not, this was “rot” and heresy. Their laissez-faire individualism was not troubled by the fact that at a time when half-a-million-dollar yachts and million-dollar mansions were being built, thousands of unemployed were looking for work, bread, and shelter, that the average income of eleven million out of the twelve million American families was $380 a year. They approved of industrialists like Pullman, who proclaimed that “the workers have nothing to do with the amount of wages they shall receive.” In 1893 they were relieved when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a 2-per-cent tax on income of $4,000 and over; a good friend and Roosevelt family adviser, Joseph Choate, had argued the case, denouncing the tax as “a communist march on private property.”

“Unfair” taxes and the threat of the nascent labor movement may have invaded the after-dinner conversations of the men, but matters involving politics were of no concern to gentlewomen.
Godey's Lady's Book
, the widely read arbiter of feminine taste and interest in the 1880s, made it a matter of policy to avoid references to public controversy and agitating influence. In 1884 the closest it came to discussing a woman in public life was “Queen Victoria as a Writer.” Women's suffrage had become an important issue, but it had no supporters in the Roosevelt family among either the men or the women.

F
AMILY LETTERS
and recollections provide few glimpses of Eleanor's childhood, yet they were obviously critical years. In Eleanor's later portrayal of these years she emerges as a child who was full of fears—of the dark, of dogs, horses, snakes, of other children. She was “afraid of being scolded, afraid that other people would not like me.” She spoke of a sense of inferiority that was almost overpowering coupled with an unquenchable craving for praise and affection. She described her mother as the most beautiful woman she ever knew but also as
representing cold virtue, severity, and disapproval, while her father embodied everything that was warm and joyous in her childhood.

Her contrasting memories of her mother and father emerged in a brief account of her first visit to Hyde Park that she included among the explanatory footnotes to her father's letters, in
Hunting Big Game in the Eighties
. On January 30, 1882, “a splendid large baby boy” (Sara Roosevelt's description) had been born to the James Roosevelts. They asked Elliott to be one of the godparents of Franklin Delano, as they decided to name him.

To see this godchild, Eleanor wrote, was the reason

for that visit which I paid at the age of two with my parents to Hyde Park and I am told that Franklin, probably under protest, crawled around the nursery (which has since been our children's), bearing me on his back. Also, I am told, that I was sent down at tea time to the library in a starched white frock and stood bashfully at the door till my Mother saw me and called “Come in, Granny.” She often called me that, for I was a solemn child, without beauty and painfully shy and I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth.
⁴

From her mother Eleanor received the indelible impression that she was plain to the point of ugliness. As a young woman Anna had been captivatingly beautiful, her face and head so classic in outline that artists had begged to paint her. Anna had been, a friend of the family said, “a little gentlewoman.” Eleanor, in her anxiety for people to do right, was more the little schoolmistress, saved from primness only by her grave blue eyes and the sweetness with which she admonished the grownups. To paraphrase Carlyle, who was speaking of the founder of one of the world's great religions, she was one of those who “cannot but be in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere.” She is so “old-fashioned,” her mother said apologetically. Eleanor, who sensed her mother's disappointment in her, considered this a reproach, but behind the reproach was a mother's bafflement over her little girl's precocious sense of right and wrong and the sadness in her appraising eyes. But these same traits amused and charmed her father, who called her his “little golden hair.”

My father was always devoted to me, however, and as soon as I could talk, I went into his dressing room every morning and chattered to
him often shaking my finger at him as you can see in the portrait of me at the age of five which we still have. I even danced for him, intoxicated by the pure joy of motion, twisting round and round until he would pick me up and throw me into the air and tell me I made him dizzy.
⁵

Eleanor's first nurse was French. “My mother had a conviction that it was essential to study languages, so when I was a baby, she had a French nurse for me, and I spoke French before I spoke English.” What this nurse was like, Eleanor nowhere said, but in later life she spoke French as fluently as English, which suggests that this first nurse had the baby's confidence.

While Eleanor's own warmest memories of her early childhood years were all associated with her father, that attractive man was, in fact, putting his little family through a grim ordeal. Nervous and moody, he spent much of his time with the Meadow Brook men, often in reckless escapades and drinking sprees that worried his family and mortified Anna. In the spring of 1887, dissatisfied with himself and his business prospects, he gave up his partnership in the Ludlow firm. Anna prevailed upon him not to risk another Long Island summer. An extended stay in Europe, away from his cronies, she hoped, would enable him to get hold of himself and regain his health. So, on May 19, the Elliott Roosevelt family, a nurse for two-and-a-half-year-old Eleanor, and Anna's sister Tissie sailed for Europe on the
Bri
tannic
.

One day out, the
Britannic
was rammed by the incoming
Celtic
in a fog. “The strain for a few minutes,” Anna wrote Bamie, “when we all thought we were sinking was fearful though there were no screams and no milling about. Everyone was perfectly quiet. We were among those taken on life boats to the
Celtic
.” Eleanor's recollection of “wild confusion” was significantly different, and closer to reality.

As passengers described the collision to newspapermen, the prow of the
Celtic
struck the
Britannic
a slanting blow, glanced off and then struck again, her nose entering the
Britannic
's side fully ten feet. Several passengers were killed, a child beheaded, and many injured. The sea foamed, iron bars and belts snapped, and above the din could be heard the moans of the dying and injured. Grownups panicked. Stokers and boiler men emerging from the depths of the
Britannic
made a wild rush for the lifeboats until the captain forced them back at the point of his revolver. The air was filled with “cries of terror,” Eleanor's among them. She clung frantically to the men who were trying to drop her
over the steep side of the ship into the outstretched arms of her father, who stood in a lifeboat below. Although the sea was calm, the lifeboats were pitching, and the distance seemed vast to Eleanor. The transfer was finally completed despite Eleanor's struggles, and they were rowed to the
Celtic
, which took them back to New York.
⁶

Anna and Elliott decided to go through with their plans, because Elliott's health depended on it. But Eleanor, in terror, refused to go and remained unmoved even by her father's endearments and pleas. The puzzled young parents turned to the Gracies, and Eleanor was left to spend the summer with them. “We took a cab,” Aunt Gracie wrote to Corinne,

and called for our sweet little Eleanor and brought her out here with us. She was so little and gentle & had made such a narrow escape out of the great ocean that it made her seem doubly helpless & pathetic to us. . . . She asked two or three times in the train coming out here, where her “dear Mamma was, & where her Papa was, & where is Aunt Tissie?” I told her “They have gone to Europe.” She said “where is baby's home now?” I said “baby's home is Gracewood with Uncle Bunkle & Aunt Gracie,” which seemed to entirely satisfy the sweet little darling. But as we came near the Bay driving by Mrs. Swan's she said to her uncle in an anxious alarmed way “Baby does not want to go into the water. Not in a boat.” It is really touching. . . .

Aunt Gracie's hopeful interpretation of Eleanor's acquiescence may have calmed her own anxiety but showed little real understanding of the ordeal the two-and-a-half-year-old child was going through in numb silence. She had not been able to overcome her terror of the sea. She had disgraced her parents, and as a punishment they had deserted her and she had lost her home.

This violent experience made an indelible impression on Eleanor. She never lost her fear of the sea. Throughout her life she felt the need to prove that she could overcome her physical timidity by feats of special courage. Desertion of the young and defenseless remained an ever present theme—in her reading and her compositions for school; the mere suspicion that someone she loved might have turned away from her always caused the same taut, hopeless bewilderment.

Anna remained uneasy about the separation, “I do so long for her,” she wrote from Paris, “but know it was wiser to leave her.” And even
if Anna had understood how seriously the child was being hurt, she could not have acted differently, because her troubled husband needed his wife's reassuring presence and love if he was to get well.

By August he was “a thousand times better,” but he did not wish to risk exposure to his family until he was “really strong and fit to work hard.” They returned to New York after six months and Elliott, full of good intentions, joined his Uncle Gracie's banking and brokerage firm. But he also rejoined the hard-drinking, hard-riding Meadow Brook crowd. In spite of his family's misgivings he began to build a large, handsome house in Hempstead, L.I. Polo and hunting became more the center of his life than ever, and he became an ever more reckless rider. One day the hunt started from the Mineola Fair Grounds, the hounds streaking across the Jackson and Titus farms. Forty started out but by the time they were taking the fences of the Titus place only Elliott was following the huntsman. He could hear his companions shouting “don't follow that Irishman, you will be killed” when he was thrown at the third fence and broke his collar bone. On another occasion he arranged a hair-raising midnight steeplechase. “Your father was one of the greatest sports I ever knew,” Joe Murphy, the Meadow Brook huntsman, later wrote.
⁷

Anna and Eleanor shared Elliott's excitement about the new house in Hempstead—Anna because she hoped it might steady him, Eleanor because it meant she would spend more time with her father. The family rented a cottage nearby to be able to supervise the construction. “Anna is wonderfully well, enjoys everything . . . even the moving and looks the beautiful girl she is. Little Eleanor is as happy as the day is long, plays with her kitten, the puppy & the chickens all the time & is very dirty as a general rule. . . . Baby Eleanor goes up to look after it [the house] every day and calls it hers,” a delighted Elliott informed Bamie.

The idyll was brief. In June, 1888, Elliott, exhausted by his hectic life, became seriously ill, and though he rallied miraculously, his family was far from reassured. “Elliott is very much better,” Theodore wrote. “I lunched with him Wednesday, and he is now able to go out driving. I wonder if it would do any good to talk to him about his imprudence! I suppose not. I wish he would come to me for a little while; but I guess Oyster Bay would prove insufferably dull, not only for Elliott but for Anna.” Soon Elliott was back on his feet, playing polo with Theodore in Oyster Bay. “I know we shall be beaten,” Anna confided to her sister-in-law, “since Elliott can barely stay on his pony.” Elliott's team lost. “We have great fun here at polo,” Theodore wrote Cabot
Lodge. Theodore worked and played strenuously, but he found the pace set by Anna and Elliott too frantic and ultimately meaningless. “I do hate his Hempstead life,” he confided to Bye. “I don't know whether he [Elliott] could get along without the excitement now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing.”

For Eleanor, Hempstead was a happy place. She was not too far away from her cousin Alice, with whom she loved to play. “She and Eleanor are too funny together,” Anna reported. They both went to Aunt Gracie's for lessons every morning. “Alice is looking so splendidly and plays so beautifully with Eleanor,” was the report. But when Elliott left to go cruising on the
Mayflower,
the 100-foot sloop that had won the America's Cup several years before, Anna made a point of letting him know that “Baby is well but very fiendish.” Eleanor's anger did not last, however. Soon she was caught up again in the excitement of her full summer life. “Eleanor is on the piazza building a house with blocks and seems very well and happy,” Anna wrote in her next report. “She won't hear of going home as she says, she would not have Alice any more. Aunty and Uncle Bunkle took Alice and Eleanor sailing yesterday. They did enjoy it so much. They are coming over from Sagamore Hill to lunch, and tonight we tea there.”