Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  It was the elder Roosevelt’s view that bodily infirmities were to be conquered by a strenuous outdoor life and Spartan discipline. He had told the frail and asthmatic Theodore in 1870: “You have the mind but not the body. . . . You must make your body.” And that was exactly what Theodore proceeded to do. Outdoor life was now to cure Elliott; he was sent to Fort McKavett, a frontier post in the hill country of Texas, where the Roosevelts knew many of the officers, including the commander, General Clitz. This may seem to have been an inappropriate treatment for a medical ailment, but in wealthy families of that era travel was the standard prescription for illnesses, nervous disorders, and unhappy love affairs, and Elliott did seem to function more effectively away from his family and school. With an unusual ability to fit into any situation and a zest for adventure, the sixteen-year-old quickly and without complaint made the transition from the comfortable, closed, and protected life of New York society to the rough equalitarianism of the frontier.

  Graham, Young Co., Texas

  Jan. 12th, 1876

  Dear Father:

  I have gone through some regular roughing since I last wrote you at Weatherford. After we left there we came on slowly camping at night and shooting all that we wanted to eat for we have never been on short rations yet thank goodness. The weather up to last night was very warm and pleasant but suddenly one of those frightfully cold north winds sprang up and from being too warm with our coats off, the addition of blankets, ulsters and mufflers of all kinds did not keep us even tolerably warm. Ed and I left them: that is the two wagons; at about half past five and went on for three or four miles and made a camp fire and prepared everything for them, but we waited and watched and no wagons so at last we concluded that they had gone on to Graham not having seen the fork we turned up it being so dark. We were camped by a house so as we had no blankets and it was most fearfully cold we tied our horses to the gate post and left the saddles on to keep them warm and as Ed said I had a “persuasive air with me” I went up to the little log hut and knocked. The door was opened and the master appeared and I talked with him for a while and then a friend of his appearing on the scene he offered to take Ed with him and the first fellow took me in. The hut was crowded and a single fire burning so although there were chinks on all sides and a cold wind blowing still we kept fairly warm. There were three girls two quite good looking so I made the rest of the evening pass quite pleasantly only I was a little worried about the other chaps not having turned up. At about ten o’clock the landlord or rather ranch man came in with “Gentlemen your beds are ready” where at, as I had been riding since seven o’clock and not had a mouthful to eat either I got up and making my good night to the ladies, the elder of which being the mistress sat pipe in mouth in the chimney corner; I rose followed by some six others all pretty rough looking chaps and followed mine host into an adjoining room no roof but logs and the merest frame work of walls. Three rolls of blankets on the floor, three men took one, two another and a cow boy from way out west and I took the third. I used Tar who had stuck to my heels all the evening in mortal terror of two other dogs belonging to the house, for a pillow partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bed fellow. In this manner I shivered through the night up to five when “breakfast gentlemen” brought us all to our feet and without more ado we ran for the fire in the next room and were served by the old lady still pipe in mouth with bacon and bread a frugal meal but if you laugh at it think I had not a mouthful since six a.m. the day before, roughing it! eh? . . .

  Your affectionate

  Son.

  In two visits Elliott spent over a year with the 500 men, women, and children who lived in Fort McKavett. Officers and enlisted men delighted in regaling the attractive young easterner with tales of Mexican War days and Indian fights. There were elaborately organized wild-turkey shoots in which Elliott did his “fair share of the shooting, also of the eating.” He became “chums” with the post commander, boxed, sat on the piazza listening to the post band, read every paper he could lay his hands on, and argued politics. “So Hayes is really counted in,” Elliott wrote his father, March 4, 1877. “I wish you could hear the dismal forebodings that the Democratic members of our party (I was the only Republican) have for the ‘Old Union’ we have had some glorious pitched battles, ‘you bet’!” There were also whist parties until three in the morning, and although he assured his family that he neither smoked nor drank, “for wine we drink catawba and the General knows what a good bottle of that is like I can tell you.”

  The old trouble with his head seemed to be gone but all his attempts to follow an organized course of reading and study came to naught. “It strikes me it’s just a sell my being down here . . . altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying,” he confessed to his father. He was troubled, but not enough to resist the temptations of the “glorious” life at the fort.

  Soon after Elliott returned to New York in 1877, his father became ill with what was later diagnosed as intestinal cancer. For weeks Elliott scarcely left his father’s room. That winter, wrote Corinne, “Elliott gave unstintingly a devotion which was so tender that it was more like that of a woman and his young strength was poured out to help his father’s condition.” Elliott wrote in his diary of his father’s “cries for ether,” the mercy of “a chloroform sleep,” and new agonies on awakening until the final release of death on February 10, 1878, at the age of forty-six.

  The family was devastated, and the children vowed to lead lives that would reflect credit on their father’s name. “We have been very fortunate,” Theodore Jr. wrote Bamie after he returned to Harvard, “in having a father whom we can love and respect more than any other man in the world.”

  Eighty-nine years later, Theodore Sr.’s granddaughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, contrasting her own style and outlook with that of her cousin Eleanor, said that Eleanor “was a do-gooder. She got that from my grandfather. It took with Eleanor, but not with me. I never did those things. They bored me.”

  Legacies of approximately $125,000 came to each of the children at the death of their father, which gave them an annual income of about $8,000. Of the $125,000, half was given outright, half a trust for life. Each of the children would receive another $62,500 at the death of their mother. And thus their annual income would be about $14,000 if they held onto their capital.

  For Elliott, the most sensitive of the children, the death of his father was not only a terrible sorrow but a disaster. Without his father’s stern, demanding, but loving guidance he was lost. Although intelligent and eager to learn, he was discouraged by the realization that he was hopelessly outdistanced by his contemporaries. Restless, spoiled by admiration and success out West, he was not prepared to start at the bottom of some business and patiently work his way up. And then there was the strong pull of the exciting world of society and sport, where he was a leader by the sheer force of his personality. His inheritance made it possible for him to live in this world.

  Theodore, whom Elliott visited frequently at Harvard, admired his younger brother’s social skills and his great popularity with the girls. Although his every instinct was combative and competitive, Theodore was so fond of his brother, he wrote an aunt, that he could “never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward Elliott” and “gloried” in his accomplishments. This did not stop him from keeping a sharp eye on who was the better man. “Nellie stayed up from town,” he wrote in his diary in 1879, “and so I spent the day with him: we rowed around Lloyd’s—15 miles, and virtually racing the whole way. As athletes we are about equal; he rows best; I run best, he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling and boxing. I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, etc., etc. . . . ” Elliott, although he wrote in 1880 that every day he was “more happy in the dear old brother’s good company,” must have been somewhat overwhelmed by a brother who, a friend noted, “always thought he could do things a little better than anyone else,” and, if he couldn’t, set out to overcome the infirmit
y with awesome resolution. The time was past when Elliott had to shield his older brother from bullies.

  The year Theodore graduated from Harvard, Elliott decided to undertake an expedition to India to hunt tiger and elephant, and to the Himalayas for the elusive ibex and markhor. He was pulled by the lure of adventure but was also pushed by the realization that Theodore, who had been his father’s favorite son, was returning to New York and would become the head of the family. Another consideration contributed to his decision to abandon New York: he had begun to drink heavily, so much so, one family report has it, that a girl whom he wished to marry refused him unless he changed his ways—which he apparently was unable to do.

  Elliott and Theodore spent two months hunting out West before Elliott left for the Orient. It was a happy trip, and they enjoyed “the return to the old delight of dog and gun,” Elliott wrote his mother, but it was also the occasion for an uneasy report by Theodore on what he called Elliott’s “epicurean” appetites. Only half in jest he reported after a week’s hunting in Iowa:

  As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy mash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach’; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweet-bread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening, shandigaff.

  When Elliott set out on his big expedition to India, aware that his glorious adventure was also a flight, he assured Bamie that the duties of paterfamilias would be attended to,

  and by a far better man. Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old Boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory but fail to put into practice.

  Even as Elliott was journeying through India his brother won election as assemblyman from the “brownstone district” of New York and completed his first literary venture, The Naval War of 1812.

  “Has not our dear Thee done well at home this winter,” Elliott wrote Bamie from Kashmir, “and his plans for occupying the position he should as Father’s son and namesake seem [to be] going so splendidly smoothly—all success to him.” Elliott diagnosed correctly that he lacked “that foolish grit of Theodore’s.” And while he, too, was interested in politics and had helped his brother found the City Reform Club to interest “respectable, well-educated men—young men especially” in the political questions of the day, and he, too, loved being with the Newsboys, and he, too, had a literary flair, as was evident in his letters, he was incapable of sustained effort except in sports, and followed the easier and ever more tempting path of achieving success and approval through his charm and his accomplishments as sportsman and man-about-town.

  He would make frequent “new starts” in his short life, but the question of “paterfamilias” was settled for good.

  His trip to India was a series of glittering triumphs. On shipboard to England the James Roosevelts of Hyde Park, just married, asked him to make their rooms in London his headquarters. He had “long talks and walks” with Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, and agreed to dine with him in London. His partners at whist were “kind enough to wish me to go to Cannes to play whist with them all winter!” And most important to Elliott, Sir John Rae Reid, “the mighty hunter and second Gordon Cummings has taken me under his especial wing—given me a dozen letters to India and I breakfast with him next Sunday at twelve and on Monday we buy my guns, etc.”

  From the moment of his arrival in Bombay he was treated like a “grand prince.” He could hardly account for it, he wrote his mother, “for if ever there was a man of few resources and moderate talents I am he, yet all events and people seem to give me the best of times on my holiday visit. . . . I am ‘up’ at the club and have ‘dined,’ ‘Tiffined’ and breakfasted ‘out’ every meal.”

  The officers of His Majesty’s Forces in India, the princes of India, and the Society of the Bombay Club were charmed by this young man from New York and pressed invitations upon him. Nevertheless, he retained a certain critical detachment. He exulted over an intoxicating feast at Sir Sala Jung’s, regent of the Nizam of Hyderabad, to which they were driven in a cortege that was itself a princely pageant and were escorted into dinner “through long lines of motionless blacks holding flaming torches.” But he also commented, “This is a picture of a native state—under, unwillingly, British protection. England in power—natives high and low discontented.”

  “Oh! these people,” he wrote en route to Kashmir and the Himalayas,

  what a puzzle to me this world becomes when we find out how many of us are in it. And how easy for the smallest portion to sit down in quiet luxury of mind and body—to say to the other far larger part—lo, the poor savages. Is what we call right, right all the world over and for all time?

  He was appalled by the “ocean of misery and degradation” that he found on the subcontinent, such total degradation that it

  might teach our “lovers of men” to know new horrors and sadness that the mortal frames and still more the Immortal Souls of Beings in God’s image made, should be brought so low. The number and existence of these some millions of poor wretches has upset many preconceived notions of mine.

  The journey to Tibet along the Astor Road was shadowed by mishap. In Srinagar he was held over for a week by fever. Impatiently, he pushed on and reached Thuldii in the highest Himalayas, but “that beastly fever” clung to him and he was forced to abandon the expedition and return home without having hunted the ibex and markhor that he had sought.

  India had made him deeply conscious of his lack of education. “How I do crave after knowledge, book learning . . . education and a well-balanced mind,” he exclaimed in the Himalayas as he tried to catch hold of “finer subtleties” of description, history, and analysis. Few Americans had had his opportunity, and he wanted to write about his experiences, which would have made as colorful a book as Theodore’s about the West. He drafted an account of a tiger shoot in Hyderabad and an elephant hunt in Ceylon. The drafts were good, but he did not persist. The manuscripts did not see the light of day until 1933 when they were edited, along with his letters, and published by Eleanor under the title Hunting Big Game in the Eighties.

  While the youthful Elliott was disturbed by the way the British held India “in a grip of iron,” the way of life of the British rulers—hunts, polo, racing—suited him quite well. “I am very fond of this life, Bammie,” he wrote at the end of his trip.

  No doubt about it. I thought to rather put a slight stop to my inclinations by a large dose of it, but—for the great drawback that none of you are with me to enjoy it, it would be very nearly perfect in its way. Not, I think, “our way” for that means life for an end. But this for the mere pleasure of living is the only life.

  He found it necessary to justify his trip—“There seemed little for me to do in New York that any of you my own people could be proud of me for, and naturally I am an awfully lazy fellow”—and he faced his return to New York with some anxiety.

  I know Sister Anna will keep her eyes open and about her for chances for the boy. If some of the wise and strong among you don’t make a good chance for me on my coming home I’ll make but a poor one for myself I fear. . . .

  But fate now intervened in the form of a sparkling debutante, Anna Rebecca Hall.

  * Holograph letter in Halsted File at Franklin D. Roosevelt Library with spelling and punctuation as in the original.

  2.HER MOTHER

  ELLIOTT WENT INTO REAL ESTATE ON HIS RETURN FROM INDIA, and even though he dutifully reported to his office on lower Broadway his real life was as man-about-town. Because of his Himalayan exploits he seemed more glamorous than ever and had a kind of Guardsman masculinity that captivated young and old alike. He had the a
bility when talking with you, said Fanny Parsons, a friend of Corinne’s, of shutting out the rest of the world and making you feel as if you were the most important thing to him.

  If he noticed me at all I had received an accolade, and if on occasion he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible. But all the time I knew that his real worship was at the shrine of some mature and recognized belle of the day.

  The leading debutante the winter Elliott returned was Anna Hall. He described her excitedly as “a tall slender fair-haired little beauty—just out and a great belle.”

  Anna, then almost nineteen, was the eldest of four Hall sisters. All four—Anna, Elizabeth (Tissie), Edith (Pussie), and Maude—were society belles, and all were considered slightly but attractively mad. Anna was the most competent, and she was also a little cold. Elliott was all spontaneity and tenderness, while beneath her youth and beauty Anna was a creature of rules and form. She belonged to Edith Wharton’s “old New York,” an ordered and hierarchical society “which could enjoy with discrimination but had lost the power to create.”

  The Halls were descendants of the landed Livingstons and Ludlows, and their Tivoli home on the Hudson was on property originally deeded to the lords of Livingston Manor through letters patent of Charles II, James II, and George I. The marriage of Anna’s father, Valentine G. Hall, Jr., and her mother, Mary Livingston Ludlow, represented a merger of a wealthy mercantile family of New York City with the landed gentry of the Hudson. The first Ludlow had settled in New York in 1640, and as early as 1699 a Ludlow was one of provincial notables, meaning men of property, and had sat as a member of the Assembly of the Province of New York. The Ludlow social standing, patriot or Tory, was of the highest, but along the upper reaches of the Hudson, from Tivoli to Germantown, they were overshadowed by the Livingstons.