* * *
The ambitious striving for achievement that had served as powerful catalysts to both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt was not visible in Franklin Roosevelt’s behavior when he entered Harvard College. In later years, when Sara was asked if she ever imagined that her son might become president, she replied: “Never, no never! That was the last thing I should ever have imagined for him, or that he should be in public life of any sort.” Both she and her son, she insisted, shared a far simpler ambition. “It might even be thought not very ambitious, but to me, and to him, too, it was the highest ideal—to grow to be like his father, straight and honorable, just and kind, an upstanding American.”
Sara could not fathom that her eighteen-year-old son was beginning to form dreams of his own, visions of a life beyond that of a country squire, who would lead a regular seasonal existence, managing the estate, summering in Campobello, dabbling in local affairs. Beneath his insouciant exterior, the young man who had held center stage the first decade of his life harbored desires to replicate that experience in the world at large, to accomplish something worthy of attention.
During his first semester at Harvard, the elements that had held Franklin’s life in compliant balance careened out of joint when his father suffered a fatal heart attack. Suddenly, Franklin was forced to take stock of his position, desires, and ambitions. The college student was now expected to be the man of the family. He had already developed a profound, reciprocally dependent bond with his mother. Without the focus and buffer of the father/husband, they were alone together. Unable to bear the “unthinkable” idea of living by herself at Hyde Park, Sara rented a townhouse in Boston to be near her son. “She was an indulgent mother,” observed a family friend, “but would not let her son call his soul his own.” Franklin’s quest to achieve autonomy without wounding his mother required new levels of manipulation, nimbleness, and guile, a deeper resourcefulness, persistence, and willfulness—self-preserving qualities he would add to his developing capacities.
For the first time, he began to chart his own course, seeking a place where he could shine on his own, free from parental imposition and expectation. He found that place at the Harvard Crimson. He began at the lowest level, one of seventy freshmen vying for a position on the staff. “The competition was tough,” a classmate recalled, “the drain on the candidate’s thought and time exhausting.” The challenge demanded his full attention, providing legitimate reasons to decline his mother’s constant invitations for dinner or the theater. He worked harder than he had ever worked before, harder than he did on his studies, where he settled into a gentleman’s C average. “My Dearest Mummy,” he wrote, “I am working about 6 hours a day on [the Crimson] alone and it is quite a strain.” Though he failed to make the first group of five freshmen selected in February, he refused to give up.
A combination of luck, initiative, boldness, and privilege opened the door two months later. After reading in the Boston newspapers that Theodore Roosevelt, who was then vice president, was coming into town, he contacted his famous relative to see if they could get together. Franklin had met Theodore a number of times during family outings at Oyster Bay. He had reveled in the stories Roosevelt told at a Groton chapel lecture about his days as police commissioner—stories that “kept the whole room in an uproar for an hour.” Having developed a special fondness for Franklin, Theodore arranged to meet him directly after his guest lecture scheduled for Professor Lawrence Lowell’s class the following morning. The lecture, intended only for the students in the class, had not been made public. Franklin hurried to the Crimson to break the news.
“Young man,” the managing editor told him, “you hit page one tomorrow morning.” Professor Lowell was livid when the front-page article brought two thousand people clamoring to get into the hall, but Theodore Roosevelt, never one to slight publicity, took it in stride. Weeks later, Franklin was elected to join the Crimson staff. Flush with his first electoral success, a more independent Franklin wrote his mother as summer approached: “I don’t want to go to Campo; neither do you.” It would be too sad. Instead, he suggested a trip abroad. “We both will enjoy seeing new places & new things and it will quite take us out of ourselves.” Landing back in New York in September, they learned that President William McKinley had been assassinated and that cousin Theodore Roosevelt was now president of the United States.
Returning to Harvard, Franklin slowly worked his way up the Crimson ladder—his sophomore year he was elected secretary, then assistant managing editor, then managing editor, and finally, his senior year, to editor in chief of the newspaper. Franklin’s ascent at the Crimson was such a landmark in his developing sense of himself as a leader that he chose to take graduate courses in order to extend his position at the paper’s helm. While many of his editorials reflected typical college concerns with flagging school spirit and athletics, in one revealing piece he recommended that students interested in politics would learn more “in one day” by venturing into Boston to observe ward politics—“the machinery of primary, caucus, convention, election and legislature”—than by listening to abstract lectures on government. Though he had “read Kant and a little of Rousseau,” he confessed that in neither philosopher had he found “the decisive leader.” Experience, he believed, was the “best teacher.”
Roosevelt would look back in later years with prideful nostalgia on this first leadership position, much as Abraham Lincoln considered his first election as captain in the Black Hawk War the success that had given him more pleasure than any other in his life. While a few fellow editors found Franklin “conceited” and “cocky,” more self-assured than his writing skills deserved, the majority agreed that he was “quick-witted and capable as an editor” and “a very good companion,” with an optimistic spirit and an infectious sense of humor. “There were traits of his, which, as one looks back on them, become significant,” one colleague recalled. “He had a force of personality . . . he liked people, and he made them instinctively like him. Moreover, in his geniality there was a kind of frictionless command.”
At Groton, he had managed to survive; at Harvard, he had begun to thrive.
* * *
The first hint of a signature component of what would characterize Franklin Roosevelt’s fundamental style—the ability to make decisions without hesitating or looking back, coupled with a propensity to keep the process of determination hidden from view—emerged during his clandestine courtship of Eleanor Roosevelt. Early on, Franklin had sensed and been wary of even the appearance of competition between his interest in other girls and his mother’s love. In letters and conversation, he would exhaustively share with his mother details of his daily activities, skillfully omitting his innermost feelings, the intimacies she might consider a trespass upon the primacy of their own relationship. In the wake of his father’s death that need for concealment intensified.
No one, not a single friend, and surely not his mother, knew that he had fallen in love with his plain cousin Eleanor in the spring of his junior year at Harvard. They had been together at horse races, house parties, sailing trips, dances, and family events, but Sara had no inkling they shared other than a friendship when, the following Thanksgiving, Franklin delivered the shocking news: he had asked Eleanor to marry him; she had accepted.
“I know what pain I must have caused you, and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it,” he wrote Sara after returning to Harvard. “I know my mind, have known it for a long time and know that I could never think otherwise. Result: I am the happiest man just now in the world; likewise the luckiest—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.”
In saying that he knew his mind, had known it for a long time and could never think otherwise, Franklin declared that his decision was not up for discussion. His mother recognized this conclusiveness. As would be true the rest of his life, once he made a deci
sion, he rarely second-guessed himself: In the end, he had sought his own counsel until the inner struggle between filial devotion and love for Eleanor had been resolved. Thereafter, he refused to squander energy by raking over and reexamining whether he had made the right choice. He would marry Eleanor and that was that. He would always love his mother. His identity and future course were the issues at stake here.
Eleanor was unlike any girl Franklin had met. She was highly intelligent, free from affectation, deeply absorbed in social causes, wholly uninterested in the privileged world of debutante balls. Eleanor’s early years had been as fraught with sorrow as Franklin’s were filled with joy. She was eight when her mother, Anna, died from diphtheria and ten when her father, Elliott, Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother, died gruesomely from alcoholism. When she began seeing Franklin, however, she had just returned from three triumphant years at a girls boarding school in England. At Allenswood, she had started “a new life,” free from the conventions and traditions of her social class. Basking in the maternal love of the legendary feminist headmistress, Mlle. Marie Souvestre, Eleanor became “everything” in the school, the most popular and respected student among faculty and students alike. “She is full of sympathy for all those who live with her,” the headmistress reported to Eleanor’s grandmother, “and shows an intelligent interest in everything she comes in contact with.”
“The surest way to be happy,” Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, “is to seek happiness for others.” When she returned to New York, at the urging of her headmistress, she became involved in social work, teaching classes to immigrant Italians at the Rivington Street Settlement in the Lower East Side. She joined a group of female activists who were investigating working conditions in factories and department stores. “I had a great curiosity about life,” she wrote, “and a desire to participate in every experience.”
In the subterfuge of their betrothal, Franklin and Eleanor shared their unfolding dreams to leave a mark on the world. Eleanor’s social consciousness and urgent sense of social justice—the awakening of a caring for the other, a championing of the underdog—far preceded and exceeded his. He admired her distaste for the debutante world she was about to enter, her rebellious desire to find something meaningful to do. She was a serious person, and so was he, despite the “featherduster” impression he sometimes left. He, too, was going through a rite of passage. The life he might lead, as reflected and encouraged in Eleanor’s eyes, was a life involving a “broad human contact” with all manner of people. One afternoon, when he picked her up from the settlement house, she enlisted his help in carrying home a young girl who had fallen ill. “My God, I didn’t know anyone lived like that,” he told Eleanor when they reached the decrepit tenement where the girl’s family lived. He was as dumbfounded and astounded as his cousin Theodore Roosevelt had been when he witnessed the squalor in which the dwellers of the cigar tenements were forced to live.
With Eleanor by his side, Franklin believed “he would amount to something someday.” After a weekend together in New York, Eleanor wrote: “It is impossible to tell you what these last two days have been to me, but I know they have meant the same to you so that you will understand that I love you dearest and I hope that I shall always prove worthy of the love which you have given me. I have never known before what it was to be absolutely happy.”
Eleanor knew, she later said, long before Franklin’s run for the State Senate, that he wanted to go into politics. The impulse, she believed, had been stimulated by his admiration for her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, whose every activity he followed with great attention. When their engagement was announced, President Roosevelt wrote Franklin: “We are greatly rejoiced over the good news. I am as fond of Eleanor as if she were my daughter; and I like you, and trust you, and believe in you. . . . You and Eleanor are true and brave, and I believe you love each other unselfishly; and golden years open before you.” Franklin and Eleanor went to Washington together on March 4, 1905, to celebrate Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration, joining the inner circle at an intimate lunch, sitting with the family at the reviewing stand during the parade, and then attending the inaugural ball. Eleven days later, President Roosevelt, standing in his deceased brother’s place, gave the bride away. “Well, Franklin,” the president said with a smile, “there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.”
* * *
Just as Theodore Roosevelt had recognized that when opportunity comes, a person has “to take advantage” of it, so Franklin, who seemed to be adrift when he entered his second year as a junior law clerk at Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, was simply waiting for the right moment to make his move. During a slack time at the office, he and his fellow clerks “fell into discussion” about their hopes and plans for the future. When Franklin’s turn came, he disclosed that “he wasn’t going to practice law forever, that he intended to run for office at the first opportunity.” Indeed, he had already visualized and privately rehearsed the steps that he would in all likelihood take: election to the State Assembly would come first, leading to an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy, before becoming governor of New York and then, with good fortune, president of the United States. No mockery greeted young Roosevelt’s hypothetical ascent, despite the fact that the twenty-five-year-old had never held a single public position. Franklin “seemed proper and sincere,” one fellow clerk recalled, “and moreover, as he put it, entirely reasonable.” After all, the career trail Franklin intended to follow was identical to the one Theodore Roosevelt had blazed to the White House.
The matter-of-fact manner in which Franklin had laid out his career course explains why he immediately embraced John Mack’s suggestion that he run, with the party’s full backing, for the Assembly seat from Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie. Even more revealing is Franklin’s reaction when, only five weeks before the election, he learned that he was no longer the party’s choice. The incumbent assemblyman, Lewis Chanler, had changed his mind, informing the Democratic chieftains that he had decided to retain his old seat in the Assembly after all. Feeling “snakebitten,” Franklin told John Mack and Edward Perkins that he had come too far to stop; he just might have to run as an independent. The local bosses responded with a counteroffer. The convention had not yet decided on a Democratic candidate for the State Senate seat—clearly, a far more prestigious position. They conceded, however, that winning in the larger and mainly rural district was a long shot. Republicans, with a single exception, had held the Senate seat for almost half a century. The incumbent Republican, John Schlosser, had beaten his Democratic opponent by a two-to-one margin in the last election. The chances for victory, Mack surmised, were one in five, but if Roosevelt wanted the nomination, he could have it. How could he be certain he would get the nomination, Franklin asked. “It was made by a committee of three,” Mack replied. He “was one,” and he “was sure of another and quite sure of the third.”
“I’ll take it,” Franklin said, with “absolutely no hesitation,” and “I’ll win the election.” His immediate response revealed the decisiveness and sublime confidence that mark his mature nature. The acceptance speech he delivered after the nomination was longer than Theodore’s thirty-three-word statement, but equally devoid of content and far removed from Lincoln’s substantial and poignant introductory circular. By saying he did “not intend to sit still,” however, he made it clear that he would give his all to the campaign.
From the start, Franklin “had a distinct feeling that in order to win he must put himself into direct personal touch with every available voter.” The horse and wagon he had hired earlier in the summer had been sufficient when he was running for the Assembly, but the three-county Senate district was thirty miles wide and ninety miles long. Furthermore, only five weeks remained before the election. As he thought the problem over, he devised an innovative strategy. He would be the first candidate to crisscross the district in an automobile instead of a horse and buggy. Veteran advisers cautioned him. “The automobile was just coming i
nto use,” Mack recalled. “Get a horse!” farmers jeered when passing frequent automobile breakdowns. Furthermore, Mack explained, “horses were terrified of the new ‘contraption’ and, when meeting one on the highway, would bolt, frequently upsetting the farmer’s wagon with occasional injuries.”
Despite such hazards, the idea of breaking precedent captivated Franklin, as it would again and again in the years ahead. Locating a driver and a splashy red Maxwell touring car, he invited two fellow Democrats running for different offices to accompany him on what turned into a rollicking circuslike adventure. People were drawn to the sight of the newfangled gadget, festooned with flags and campaign banners, traversing the rough country roads at a startling speed of 20 mph. Meanwhile, Franklin turned the potential liability into an advantage. He ordered the driver to bring the car to an immediate stop whenever they encountered a horse and buggy or wagon. Such deference not only impressed the farmers but afforded Franklin the occasion to introduce himself and shake hands.
Every aspect of the barnstorming process excited Franklin. He designed his own posters and buttons; placed ads in county newspapers; and, most importantly, reveled in direct contact with people. At crossroads, train stations, general stores, saloons, and front porches, he delivered short speeches, sometimes as many as ten a day. Franklin “spoke slowly” then, Eleanor recalled, “and every now and then there would be a long pause, and I would be worried for fear he would never go on,” but he always did, and when he finished, Democratic committeeman Tom Leonard recalled, he moved easily and naturally among the crowd, flashing “that smile of his,” introducing himself as Frank, approaching every person “as a friend.”
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