The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (8 page)

During this time I had begun to see occasionally my cousin Franklin Roosevelt, who was at college, and also his cousin, Lyman Delano, and various other members of his family and some of his college friends. His mother, Mrs. James Roosevelt, was sorry for me, I think.

Mrs. Roosevelt and her husband, who died in 1900, had been fond of my mother and, particularly, of my father, who had crossed on the steamer with them when he was starting his trip around the world. They were so fond of him that when their son, Franklin, was born they asked my father to be his godfather.

When I was two years old my father and mother took me to stay at Hyde Park with them. My mother-in-law later told me that she remembered my standing in the door with my finger in my mouth and being addressed as “Granny” by my mother, and that Franklin rode me around the nursery on his back. My first recollection of Franklin is at one of the Orange Christmas parties, later a glimpse of him the summer I came home from school when I was going up to Tivoli in the coach of a New York Central train. He spied me and took me to speak to his mother, who was in the Pullman car. I never saw him again until he began to come to occasional dances the winter I came out and I was asked to a house party at Hyde Park where the other guests were mostly his cousins.

I did not stay so much in Tivoli the summer after I came out. I was there part of the time but paid a great many visits, for by that time I had made many friends and Mrs. Parish was kind to me as always. In the autumn when I was nineteen my grandmother decided that she could not afford to open the New York house, and the question came up of where Pussie and I were going to live. Mrs. Ludlow invited Pussie to stay with her and Mrs. Parish offered me a home.

I had grown up considerably during the past year and had come to the conclusion that I would not spend another year just doing the social rounds, particularly as I knew that my cousin’s house would mean less ease in casual entertainment than I had known in the 37th Street house. She still lived with a great deal of formality and punctuality and the latter was now not one of my strong points.

Cousin Susie (Mrs. Parish) told me that I might occasionally have guests for tea down in a little reception room on the first floor, but there was no feeling that I could ask people in casually for meals. I had my maid, however, and everything was arranged so that I could go out as much as I wished, and she was more than kind in entertaining at formal lunches and dinners for me.

One thing I remember vividly. I had run over my allowance considerably and had many overdue bills, and finally Mr. Parish took me in hand and painstakingly showed me how to keep books. He would not allow me to ask my grandmother to pay these bills, but he made me pay them myself gradually over a period of time. This was probably my only lesson in handling money, and I have been eternally grateful for it.

He was tall and thin and distinguished looking, with a mustache, and while rather formal in manner he was the kindest person I have ever known.

That winter I began to work in the Junior League. It was in its early stages. Mary Harriman, afterwards Mrs. Charles Cary Rumsey, was the moving spirit. There was no clubhouse; we were just a group of girls anxious to do something helpful in the city in which we lived. When we joined we agreed to do certain pieces of work, and Jean Reid, daughter of Mrs. and Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and I undertook to take classes of youngsters in the Rivington Street Settlement House. Jean was to play the piano and I was to keep the children entertained by teaching calisthenics and fancy dancing.

As I remember it, we arrived there as school came out in the afternoon and it was dark when we left. Jean often came and went in her carriage, but I took the elevated railway or the Fourth Avenue streetcar and walked across from the Bowery. The dirty streets, crowded with foreign-looking people, filled me with terror, and I often waited on a corner for a car, watching, with a great deal of trepidation, men come out of the saloons or shabby hotels nearby, but the children interested me enormously. I still remember the glow of pride that ran through me when one of the little girls said her father wanted me to come home with her, as he wanted to give me something because she enjoyed her classes so much. That invitation bolstered me up whenever I had any difficulty in disciplining my brood!

Once I remember allowing my cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, at that time a senior at Harvard, to come down to meet me. All the little girls were tremendously interested.

I think it must have been this same winter that I became interested in the Consumers League, of which Mrs. Maud Nathan was the president. Luckily, I went with an experienced, older woman to do some investigation of garment factories and department stores. It had never occurred to me that the girls might get tired standing behind counters all day long, or that no seats were provided for them if they had time to sit down and rest. I did not know what the sanitary requirements should be in the dress factories, either for air or for lavatory facilities. This was my introduction to anything of this kind and I imagine that by spring I was ready to drop all this good work and go up to the country and spend the summer in idleness and recreation!

As I try to sum up my own development in the autumn of 1903 I think I was a curious mixture of extreme innocence and unworldliness with a great deal of knowledge of some of the less agreeable sides of life—which, however, did not seem to make me any more sophisticated or less innocent.

It would be difficult for anyone in these days to have any idea of the formality with which girls of my generation were trained. I cannot believe that I was the only one brought up in this way, though I imagine that I was more strictly kept to the formalities than were many of my friends.

It was understood that no girl was interested in a man or showed any liking for him until he had made all the advances. You knew a man very well before you wrote or received a letter from him, and those letters make me smile when I see some of the correspondence today. There were few men who would have dared to use my first name, and to have signed oneself in any other way than “very sincerely yours” would have been not only a breach of good manners but an admission of feeling which was entirely inadmissible.

You never allowed a man to give you a present except flowers or candy or possibly a book. To receive a piece of jewelry from a man to whom you were not engaged was a sign of being a fast woman, and the idea that you would permit any man to kiss you before you were engaged to him never even crossed my mind.

I had painfully high ideals and a tremendous sense of duty entirely unrelieved by any sense of humor or any appreciation of the weaknesses of human nature. Things were either right or wrong to me, and I had had too little experience to know how fallible human judgments are.

I had a great curiosity about life and a desire to participate in every experience that might be the lot of a woman. There seemed to me to be a necessity for hurry; without rhyme or reason I felt the urge to be a part of the stream of life, and so in the autumn of 1903, when Franklin Roosevelt, my fifth cousin once removed, asked me to marry him, though I was only nineteen, it seemed entirely natural and I never even thought that we were both young and inexperienced. I came back from Groton, where I had spent the weekend, and asked Cousin Susie whether she thought I cared enough, and my grandmother, when I told her, asked me if I was sure I was really in love. I solemnly answered “yes,” and yet I know now that it was years later before I understood what being in love or what loving really meant.

I had high standards of what a wife and mother should be and not the faintest notion of what it meant to be either a wife or a mother, and none of my elders enlightened me. I marvel now at my husband’s patience, for I realize how trying I must have been in many ways. I can see today how funny were some of the tragedies of our early married life.

My mother-in-law had sense enough to realize that both of us were young and undeveloped, and she decided to try to make her son think this matter over—which, at the time, of course, I resented. As he was well ahead in his studies, she took him with his friend and roommate, Lathrop Brown, on a cruise to the West Indies that winter, while I lived in New York with Mrs. Parish.

Franklin’s feelings did not change, however.

My first experience with the complications that surround the attendance of a president at any kind of family gathering, such as a wedding or a funeral, came when my great-uncle, James King Gracie, whose wife was our beloved Auntie Gracie, died on November 22, 1903, and Uncle Ted came to New York for the funeral.

The streets were lined with police, and only such people as had identification cards could get in and out of Mrs. Douglas Robinson’s house, where Uncle Ted stayed. We all drove down in a procession to the church, but Uncle Ted went in by a special door through the clergyman’s house, which had a connecting passageway, and left the same way.

Only afterwards did we hear with horror that, in spite of all the precautions, an unknown man stepped up to Uncle Ted in the passageway and handed him a petition. No one could imagine how the man got in or why he had not been seen by the police. Fortunately, he had no bad intentions, but he gave everyone a shock, for had he wanted to attack Uncle Ted he could have done so easily.

In the winters of 1903 and 1904, Auntie Bye, with whom I had already stayed in Farmington, Connecticut, asked me to come to Washington to stay with her. By this time I had gained a little self-confidence and so I really enjoyed meeting the younger diplomats and the few young American men who were to be found in the social circles of Washington. I was invited to the White House to stay for a night, but I was always awed by the White House and therefore preferred to stay with Auntie Bye, where one felt more at ease. She arranged everything so well for me that I did not feel responsible for myself.

I went with Auntie Bye on her rounds of afternoon calls, and though I was aghast at this obligation, I found it entertaining. The dinners, luncheons and teas were interesting, and people of importance, with charm and wit and
savoir-faire
, filled my days with unusual and exciting experiences.

The chief excitement of the winter of 1904-05 was the marriage of Pussie to W. Forbes Morgan, Jr. It took place on February 16, in Mrs. Ludlow’s house, where Pussie was staying. Pussie looked beautiful but no one was happy. Forbes was a number of years younger than Pussie, and we knew she was temperamental and wondered how they would adjust themselves to the complicated business of married life.

Uncle Ted’s campaign and re-election had meant little to me except in general interest, for again I lived in a totally unpolitical atmosphere. In Washington, however, I gradually acquired a faint conception of the political world, very different from my New York world. I also acquired little by little the social ease which I sorely needed.

Uncle Ted came occasionally to Auntie Bye’s house informally, and those visits were interesting events. She went, now and then, to walk with Aunt Edith, or perhaps Uncle Ted would send for her to talk over something, showing that he considered her advice well worth having. He was devoted to both his sisters, and Auntie Corinne (Mrs. Douglas Robinson) came down to see him or he went to see her in New York or in the country. They all talked on political questions, literature or art, and his wife and his sisters, all in their own ways, made their contributions to what was always stimulating talk.

Auntie Bye had a great gift for homemaking. Some of her furniture was ugly, but wherever she lived there was an atmosphere of comfort. The talk was always lively, and there was friendliness in her unstinted hospitality. The unexpected guest was always welcome, and young or old, you really felt Auntie Bye’s interest in you.

This may have been why I loved to be with her, for I was still shy and she gave me reassurance. She once gave me a piece of advice which must have come from her own philosophy. I was asking her how I could be sure that I was doing the right thing if someone criticized me. Her answer was, “No matter what you do, some people will criticize you, and if you are entirely sure that you would not be ashamed to explain your action to someone whom you loved and who loved you, and you are satisfied in your own mind that you are doing right, then you need not worry about criticism nor need you ever explain what you do.”

She had lived for many years according to this principle herself. When J. R. (“Rosy”) Roosevelt’s wife died while he was first secretary to our embassy in London, she went over to be his hostess and take care of his children. There she met and was married to Captain William Sheffield Cowles, who was our naval attaché, and on her return to this country William Sheffield Cowles, Jr., was born. Because of her deformity and her age, everyone was anxious about her, but courage will carry one through a great deal and the baby arrived perfect in every way and both mother and baby progressed normally to health and strength.

Uncle Will, Auntie Bye’s husband, was now an admiral in the Navy, and I began to learn something about the services and to realize that these men who are our officers in the Army and Navy, while they receive little financial compensation, are enormously proud to serve their country. They and their wives have a position which is their right by virtue of their service, regardless of birth or of income. Quite a new idea to a provincial little miss from New York!

In June of 1904 I went with Franklin’s mother and most of his cousins to his commencement at Harvard, the first commencement I had ever attended. That summer I paid my aunt, Mrs. Douglas Robinson, a long visit in Islesboro, Maine, where she had a cottage, and then I went up to stay with Franklin and his mother at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada. Franklin came down to get me, and we made the long trip by train, changing at least twice and getting there in the evening. Of course, I had to have my maid with me, for I could not have gone with him alone!

Once there, however, we walked together, drove around the island, sailed on a small schooner with his mother and other friends, and got to know each other better than ever before. This yacht seemed to me, who was not much accustomed to any of the luxuries of life, the last word in extravagance.