How, one wonders, was this possible?
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“Temperament,” Richard Neustadt argues in his classic study of presidential leadership, “is the great separator.” Four days after Franklin Roosevelt took the presidential oath on March 4, 1933, he paid a call on former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was celebrating his ninety-second birthday. After Roosevelt left, Holmes famously opined: “A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.” Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt’s self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.
If temperament is the key, the answers to our questions take us back to Springwood, the rural estate in Hyde Park, where the very bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s temperament was formed. “All that is in me goes back to the Hudson,” Roosevelt liked to say, meaning not simply the tranquil river and the big country house but the atmosphere of love and affection that enveloped him as a child. The boy’s personality flourished in the warmth of his environment. Those who knew him as a child invariably use the same adjectives to describe him—“a very nice child,” “bright and happy,” radiant, beautiful, uncommonly poised.
For his first eight years, Franklin enjoyed a childhood of extraordinary stability and balance. From all accounts, James and Sara Roosevelt had a genuine love marriage despite the difference in their ages; James, courtly, well-educated, and gentle, was fifty-two when Franklin was born; Sara, beautiful, strong-willed, and confident, was but half his age. The Roosevelt money had been made years before in real estate and the sugar trade, allowing Mr. James, as he was known, to lead the life of a country gentleman, adopting the habits and hobbies that imitated the English landed gentry. Franklin’s still vigorous father introduced him to the masculine outside world while his mother supervised the inside world of books, hobbies, and governesses. “Never,” Sara claimed, did Franklin observe conflict between his parents regarding his upbringing, for at all times they presented “a united front” in dealing with him. With but a single child, Sara suggested, “the problem of juvenile squabbles virtually dispensed with itself.” Franklin alone was the focus of his parents’ lives, their joint vocation, heir and hub of the place that was both a landed estate and a state of mind, a place from which all unpleasantness and discord seemed banished.
In casting back her thoroughly idealizing light upon Franklin’s upbringing, Sara failed to appreciate, as her great-grandson John Boettiger Jr. later observed, that “pain-killing can itself be a lethal act.” Children are strengthened through sibling relationships; they learn to play, bicker, fight, and play again, to accept criticism and bounce back from hurt, to tell secrets and become intimate. “If there remained in Franklin Roosevelt throughout his life,” Boettiger Jr. continued, “an insensitivity towards and discomfort with profound and vividly expressed feelings it may have been in part the lengthened shadow of his early sheltering from ugliness and jealousy and conflicting interests.”
Yet, when Franklin was young, the impression that he was the center of the world produced a remarkable and lingering sense of security and privilege. For the rest of his life, Roosevelt remembered the peacefulness and regularity of his childhood days with great affection. Each passing season brought its unique cluster of outdoor activities. In winter, father and son went sledding and tobogganing down the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of the estate to the wooded bluffs of the river far below, maneuvering every curve with perfect ease. “We coasted!” Franklin needled his mother. “Nothing dangerous, yet, look out for tomorrow!!” With his father by his side, Franklin learned to ice-skate and ice-boat on the frozen Hudson. Then, with the first signs of spring, Franklin rode with his father each morning to survey the various constructions under way on the estate (he graduated from a donkey when he was two to a pony at six and a horse at eight). “Went fishing yesterday after noon with papa, we caught a dozen of minnows,” Franklin enthusiastically wrote his mother when he was only six. Beyond lessons on how to fish, Mr. James taught his son how to observe birds and identify trees and plants in the woods, fostering a lifelong love of nature. In summers, the family went to the island of Campobello off far Downeast Maine, where Franklin learned to sail on Passamaquoddy Bay and to navigate the massive tides of the Bay of Fundy. In the fall, father and son went hunting together. With few playmates his own age, Franklin viewed his indulgent and protective father as a companion and friend.
While James nourished Franklin’s love of the outdoors, Sara organized a carefully scheduled indoor regimen of regular mealtimes and specified hours for study and hobbies. Once, when Sara saw her five-year-old son uncharacteristically melancholy, she asked him why he was sad. He refused to answer at first, so she repeated her question. “Then,” Sara recalled, “with a curious little gesture that combined entreaty with a suggestion of impatience, he clasped his hands in front of him and exclaimed: ‘Oh, for freedom!’ ” Worried that her rules and regulations were cramping her son’s spirit, she proposed a day without rules so he could meander the estate as he chose. Straightaway, she reported, “quite of his own accord, he went contentedly back to his routine.”
“We never subjected the boy to a lot of unnecessary don’ts,” Sara maintained. “We were never strict for the sake of being strict. In fact, we took a secret pride in the fact that Franklin never seemed to require that kind of handling.” If the young boy’s independence was compromised by the protective care of both his parents, if there was little of the spontaneous explorations that enlivened Theodore’s childhood, the disposition and temperament of Franklin Roosevelt would bear the indelible stamp of his optimistic spirit—a general expectation that things would turn out happily, testament to the immense self-confidence developed during this perfectly balanced time of his life.
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Roosevelt’s ability in later years to adapt to changing circumstances, to alter his behavior and attitudes to suit new conditions, proved vital to his leadership success. Adaptability was forced upon him at the age of eight, when the tranquil world of Springwood was shaken to the core. In November 1890, Mr. James suffered the heart attack that left him essentially an invalid for the remaining decade of his life and forever disrupted the family equilibrium.
The outdoor activities the father and son had shared were necessarily curtailed, pulling Franklin and his mother into a conspiracy to keep the father’s life untroubled, free from anxiety. Ever after, Franklin’s innate desire to placate, to mollify, and to please by being “a very nice child,” was intensified by the fear that if he appeared sad or troubled he might be responsible for damaging further his father’s heart. When a steel curtain rod fell on him, producing a deep gash on his scalp line, Franklin insisted that his father not be told. For days, he simply pulled his hat down over his forehead to hide the wound. The need to navigate the altered dynamic of Springwood required new measures of secrecy, duplicity, and manipulation—qualities that would later prove troubling but were at this juncture benign, designed only to protect a loved one from harm.
Consequently, in the absence of his father’s companionship, and with the lack of nearby playmates, Franklin spent more and more time inside the house, devoting hours each day to what became an impressive assembly of collections: stamps, maps, model ships, birds’ nests, coins, naval prints. His stamp collection came to be his central hobby. Sara started him off with the collection she had built up as a child, and then his uncle Frederic Delano, seeing how earnestly the boy pursued his hobby, gifted Franklin with his own valuable collection. In an essay on the nature of genuine collectors, Walter Benjamin suggests that collecting is a way of ordering a disordered world. He notes that collecting holds a special meaning for children, offering a small corner of the world where the child is in charge, experiencing “the thrill of acquisition” and the pride that comes with unifying and mastering a hodgepodge of assorted items. The quiet time Franklin spent each day poring over stamp catalogues, selecting and arranging
his stamps into albums, furnished a haven, a protected space where he could be on his own, free from the demands of a mother who had developed an increasing dependence on her son in the aftermath of her husband’s diminished state. Mr. James had been their protector; together, she and her son were now responsible for protecting him.
Roosevelt’s childhood hobbies would serve in later years as invaluable tools nourishing his leadership—providing a meditative state, a space in which he could turn things over in his mind, the means by which he could relax and replenish his energy. On a visit with Roosevelt during World War II, Winston Churchill recalled sitting by the president’s side one evening as Roosevelt sorted and arranged his stamps, placing each one “in its proper place,” forgetting “the cares of State.” Roosevelt’s secretary Grace Tully recalled the “feeling of calm” that invariably descended on her whenever she saw her boss, “a magnifying glass in hand, Scott’s Stamp Catalogue, scissors, and packages of stickers,” for she knew that for a short of period of time, at least, he could escape “the problems that beset him.”
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Compared to the philosophical and poetic depths of Lincoln’s mind or the scintillating breadth of Theodore’s intelligence, Franklin’s intellect might seem, as it did to Oliver Wendell Holmes, “second-rate.” That presumption is seriously misleading. An uncommon intuitive capacity and interpersonal intelligence allowed him as a child to read the intentions and desires of his parents, to react appropriately to shifting household moods—gifts that he would nurture and develop in the years ahead. While he did not learn as a fledgling academic often does—by mastering vast reading material and applying analytical skills—he possessed an incredibly shrewd, complicated, problem-solving intelligence, coupled with a supple, and often jaunty, verbal capacity.
All his life, Franklin learned more from listening than from reading in solitude. He was able to absorb great quantities of information by hearing people talk. When he was young, his mother regularly read to him. One night, Sara recalled, she was reading to him while “he lay sprawled on his tummy, sorting and pasting” his beloved stamps. Thinking that he was not listening, she put the book down. “I don’t think there is any point in my reading to you anymore,” she said. “You don’t hear me anyway.” He looked up, “a whimsical smile on his face,” and “quoted verbatim the last paragraph of the essay.” With “a mischievous glint in his eye,” he said, “Why, Mom, I would be ashamed of myself if I couldn’t do at least two things at once.” Years later, Roosevelt told his cabinet secretary Frances Perkins that as he grew older, he much preferred to read aloud to someone than to read by himself. “There was something incurably sociable about this man,” she observed, “he was sociable in his intellectual as well as his playful moods.” Instead of reading documents or memos, White House counselor and speechwriter Sam Rosenman observed, Roosevelt “generally preferred to get his information orally; he could interrupt and ask questions: it was easy for him to get the gist right away.”
In contrast to the vigorous education Thee had given Theodore and his siblings both at home and during their sojourns abroad, Franklin’s education was casual and haphazard. A series of governesses tutored him in childhood, but even this intermittent instruction was interrupted by three lengthy stays in Europe, where James and Sara sought the healing powers of mineral spas at Bad Nauheim, Germany. Focused entirely on restoring his health, James could not take his son on the expeditions to battlefields and famous literary landscapes that Thee had chosen to enliven both history and literature for his children. Franklin attended a local German school for a short time, where his acutely receptive ear allowed him to pick up the German language with remarkable ease. When Franklin turned twelve, Mr. James wrote to Endicott Peabody, headmaster at the Groton School, asking if he could recommend “a gentleman” tutor who could also “be my boy’s companion.” Mr. James finally found the young man he wanted in Arthur Dumper, a Latin and mathematics master at St. Paul’s prep school.
Franklin, Arthur Dumper later remarked, went about learning in a curiously “unorthodox” manner. He preferred to engage his tutor in conversation, talking over what he was learning, spending more time with his stamps than with his books. Through that passionate interest in stamps, however, Franklin assimilated a great deal of knowledge, cobbling together bits and pieces of information to form a complicated tissue of associated interests. Each stamp told a story—beginning with the place and date of issue, the image represented on the front, postmarks providing the time and location of its travels—stories as alive in Franklin’s fantasy life as the adventure tales of James Fenimore Cooper had been for Theodore Roosevelt or Aesop’s Fables for Abraham Lincoln. Sara’s original collection had been assembled during her family’s protracted sojourn in Asia. Other stamps came from Europe; still others from South America. When asked years later how he had gained such familiarity with obscure places in the world, Roosevelt explained that “when he became interested in a stamp, it led to his interest in the issuing country.” Digging through the encyclopedia, he would learn about the country, its people, and its history. Finding words he didn’t understand, he carried Webster’s unabridged dictionary to bed at night, at one point telling his mother he was “almost halfway through.”
He was learning in his own way, revealing a unique transverse intelligence that cut naturally across categories, a characteristic mode of problem solving, and a practical mastery of detail that would last a lifetime. A fascination with maps and atlases developed next, fixing in his mind an astonishing range of facts about the topography of countries, their rivers, mountains, lakes, valleys, natural resources—information that would prove invaluable when he was called upon in future years to explain to his countrymen how and where two wars would envelop the entire world.
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Franklin’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances was put to a punishing test when he was sent to boarding school at Groton at the age of fourteen. Most boys started at twelve, but Sara, unable to part with him, had kept him back for two years. “The other boys had formed their friendships,” Franklin later told Eleanor. “They knew things he didn’t; he felt left out.” Unaccustomed to the ordinary give-and-take of schoolmates, the studied charm and mannered gentility that had impressed adults struck fellow students as stilted, foppish, affected, insincere. Nor did he possess the athleticism to shine or even participate in varsity team sports. He later confessed that he “felt hopelessly out of things.” He fiercely desired to be popular but had no idea how to court the favor of his fellow students, mistakenly assuming that he would be respected if he had no black marks for minor infractions.
Never once, however, did the lonely boy divulge his true feelings to his mother. On the contrary, in a string of cheerful letters, he insisted he was adjusting splendidly “both mentally and physically,” that he was “getting on very well with the fellows,” receiving good marks in his classes. Sara was relieved and thrilled. She had feared that arriving so late he might be seen as “an interloper,” but “almost overnight,” she proudly noted, “he became sociable and gregarious and entered with the frankest enjoyment into every kind of school activity.” The image he projected was meant to placate his mother but also to hearten himself, blurring the distinction between things as they were and things as he wished them to be.
The ingrained expectation that things would somehow turn out positively allowed him to move steadily forward, to adjust and persevere in the face of difficulty; and in time, he found his own niche as a member of the debate team. In keeping with Groton’s mission to educate young men for public service, all students were required to participate in debates before an audience. Franklin prepared hard and long for each of his debates, asking his father for advice, information, and pointers. His excellent memory put him in good stead, allowing him to speak directly to the audience without notes. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who shunned debating societies, believing they encouraged insincerity by training young men to take a position counter to t
heir own feelings and beliefs, Franklin enjoyed considering an issue from different points of view, demonstrating a persuasive reasoning to express whatever side he was given. He connected emotionally with his audience and reveled in victory. “Over 30 votes were cast out of which our opponents received three!” he gloated to his parents. “I think it is about the biggest beating that has been given this year.” He began to relax more with his classmates, and by his final year, he had made some good friends. Though failing to distinguish himself in his academic studies, he achieved high scores on the entrance examinations for Harvard, making his parents “immensely proud.”
Nonetheless, these accomplishments did little to mark him as a leader among his schoolmates. It was not until the end of his first year at Groton that he realized how little he gained from being a well-behaved, well-mannered young man. “I have served off my first black-mark today [for talking in class] and I am very glad I got it,” he told his parents, “as I was thought to have no school-spirit before.” Three decades later, after Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932, headmaster Endicott Peabody observed: “There has been a good deal written about Franklin Roosevelt when he was a boy at Groton, more than I should have thought justified by the impression that he left at school. He was a quiet, satisfactory boy of more than ordinary intelligence, taking a good position in his form but not brilliant. Athletically he was rather too slight for success.” Ostensibly accurate, such an assessment failed to recognize that upon his entry to Groton, the cosseted young boy had never experienced the jostle of relationships with boys his own age. He had been accorded the center of attention wherever he went, simply by being Franklin Roosevelt. Not yet a leader of the boys, not even accepted as one of the boys, he was learning to project a confident good cheer, to mask his frustrations, which, at this stage of his development, was a great achievement in itself.
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