Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Anna returned to New York in the autumn, determined to start a new life for her children and herself, a life that would be more than a waiting for a transformation in her husband that deep down she knew would never happen and that would provide a buttress against the now pleading, now threatening letters with which Elliott bombarded her. She moved to a new house at Sixty-first Street and Madison Avenue, two blocks away from Bamie. Her gracious hospitality and charm quickly attracted a widening circle of admiring friends who gathered round her while she presided over the silver tea urn. But no matter how busy her day, she explained to friends, the evening hours from six to seven o’clock were resolutely and dutifully devoted to her children. “If anyone comes to see me during that hour, they must understand they are welcome, but the children are of the first importance then, and my attention must be given to them. I play with them any way they may want. I get down on the floor and we play horse or we play tag, or I read for them—anything, that they may remember the hour happily as ‘mother’s hour,’ and feel assured that nothing whatever is to interfere with it.”2

  A friend was present one day when the children were brought in at six o’clock sharp. “She took the baby in her lap, kissed ‘Josh’ and moved the footstool for Eleanor to sit upon. A bit of biscuit was given to each, and then they were kissed goodnight ‘as tonight Mamma is very tired’ and waved to bed, only little Eleanor remaining at her mother’s feet.”

  Anna began to plan her children’s education. Little Ellie would go to kindergarten next year, so that was easy; but Eleanor presented a problem. Anna was sure that Eleanor should have a good basic education. She felt keenly her own lack of systematic study, and lamented that her knowledge of history and science was so scanty that she was not able to answer Eleanor’s questions. She no longer accepted the premise that beauty and breeding were all that a girl of wealth needed—and, besides, Eleanor would not have beauty to help her succeed as a woman.

  At seven Eleanor had had a smattering of reading and writing which had been taught to her by various relatives. Great-Aunt Gracie had tried to teach Eleanor and Alice to read, as she had their fathers. Eleanor adored her, was fascinated by her expressive hands as she told them B’rer Rabbit tales and stories of the vanished ante-bellum life on the Rosewell plantation in Georgia, but she did not learn to read. Another great-aunt, Mrs. Edward Ludlow, whose Hudson River estate bordered her grandmother’s, was dismayed to find, when Anna and the children returned from Paris, that seven-year-old Eleanor could not read and hadn’t the slightest knowledge of the elementary household tasks that little girls usually learn by playing house in the nursery. Great-Aunt Maggie scolded the embarrassed Anna and sent her companion over every day to make sure that the child got her lessons. And to Eleanor’s great sorrow, the nurse, an Alsatian woman whom Eleanor feared, was directed to teach Eleanor to cook and sew, which quite possibly is the reason that Eleanor never was interested in cooking or learned much about it. She did not like Madeleine.

  Mrs. Ludlow’s reprimand confirmed Anna in her decision to begin Eleanor’s formal schooling immediately. In the fall of 1892 she turned part of the upper floor in her house into a schoolroom for Eleanor and a few other girls her age, and invited Frederic Roser, whose classes for the daughters of the highest society were then very fashionable, to teach the little group. Mr. Roser did not like to teach the youngest girls and assigned his assistant, Miss Tomes, to the class.

  Eleanor remembered her first days in school as a time of agony and mortification. She was asked to spell simple words such as “horse” that her mother knew she knew, but frozen by shyness and the presence of her mother, who sat in on the class, she misspelled every one. Her mother reproached her—she did not know how Eleanor would end up, she said. Forty years later Eleanor still remembered vividly her feeling of utter misery because of her mother’s disgust with her. “I was always disgracing my mother.” Perhaps her behavior in the classroom was also a rejection and punishment of her mother, whom she blamed for exiling her beloved father.

  Anna realized that her already shy and awkward daughter suffered deeply under the discord in the family and tried to comfort her, making a special effort for her. Anna read to her daily, and Eleanor listened silently and politely but without the rapt attention she had always given to her father. Years later Eleanor’s strongest childhood reading memories were associated with her father. “I had a special interest in The Old Curiosity Shop, becauses my father used to call me ‘Little Nell’ after the child in that story, and I first really learned to care for Longfellow’s poems because my father was devoted to Hiawatha.” At the age of eight she learned almost the entire poem because she was eager to surprise her absent father when she saw him again.3

  Her sons were a comfort to Anna. “Ellie is a saintlike child, simply perfect, never grumbles or complains of anything and is so loving and attractive,” while Baby Hall was a “lovely boy with a strong will” who “rules Ellie even now.” Only Eleanor was a problem. She was now so afraid of “strange children” that when her mother took her to children’s parties on Saturday afternoons she would break into tears and have to be brought home. Anna arranged to have some boys and girls come in on Friday afternoons to play and stay for tea so that Eleanor could begin to make some friends, but the plan was never carried out. Anna had her operation and Eleanor spent her eighth birthday with the Gracies. “Mother wishes she could be with you,” Anna wrote her. “I enclose a letter from Father to you.”

  Abingdon, Va.

  Oct. 9/92

  My darling little Daughter,

  Many happy returns of this birthday little Nell. I am thinking of you always and I wish for my Baby Girl the greatest of Joy and the most perfect happiness in her sweet young life.

  Because Father is not with you is not because he doesn’t love you. For I love you tenderly and dearly. And maybe soon I’ll come back all well and strong and we will have such good times together, like we used to have. I have to tell all the little children here often about you and all that I remember of you when you were a little bit of a girl and you used to call yourself Father’s little “Golden Hair”—and how you used to come into my dressing room and dress me in the morning and frighten me by saying I’d be late for breakfast.

  I gave a doll to the little girl you sent the Doll’s jewelry to, small Lillian Lloyd and she has called it Eleanor and another little friend of mine the daughter of my good and dear friend Mr. Blair of Chicago has named her most precious doll Eleanor too; after you they are both named. Some day you must meet little Lillian and little Emily and they will be glad to know you in person; they say they know your photograph so well.

  Now I must stop writing dearest little Nell, do take care of yourself and little Brothers, Ellie and Brudie, and kiss them for me. Love dear Mother for me and be very gentle and good to her ’specially now while she is not well. Goodbye my own little Daughter. God bless you.

  Give my best love to Aunt Gracie and Uncle.

  Your devoted Father

  Elliott Roosevelt.

  From Aunt Gracie’s, Eleanor went to Tivoli and from there wrote her father.

  Oak Terrace

  Tivoli-on-Hudson

  My dear Father:—

  Your present which you and Mamma sent me was lovely. It is just what I want for washing the doly’s clothes which Aunt Pussie and Auntie Maud gave me. I got a ball, walking doll, violin, music boxes, and a bell to draw around the piaza. The candy Auntie Tissie brought up looks lovely, but I have not tasted it as I do not eat between meals, but will have some after dinner. Elsie, Susie and Kittie Hall are coming to dinner and Auntie Maud is going to have Punch and Judy after dinner which I think will be great fun don’t you. I was very glad to get your letter and please thank the clerk for the picture. I thank you again for the present you sent me. I hope you are all well and now I must close dear Father from your little daughter

  Baby

  Eleanor received two other birthday letters from friends in Abingdon. One was
from Lillian Lloyd, daughter of the Episcopalian rector.

  Dear Eleanor:

  I want to write so badly that Mother is holding my hand. Your nice letter came today. I wish I could play with you. Wont you come down and play with my pretty doll and my brother Hubard and spend a week? I named my pretty doll ELEANOR ROOSEVELT LLOYD. . . . I love your papa dearly, better than any man but Father. He has my picture with my Maltese cats in it. They are dead.

  Send me your picture, Eleanor, if you can’t come soon. . . .

  The other was from the daughter of Daniel Trigg, whose farm was just outside Abingdon. She also mentioned how often Eleanor’s father spoke of his daughter, how fond she was of Eleanor’s father, and how she hoped Eleanor would soon come down to Abingdon. The letters from the Abingdon children were loving and innocent, but for Eleanor they made the pain of separation from her father almost unbearable.

  Elliott had wanted to come north for Anna’s operation but was asked to stay away. To explain why Anna did not want him to come even though she was seriously ill, Corinne relayed to Elliott what she had heard from Anna’s mother. Elliott responded by writing directly to Mrs. Hall.

  Did she say she wanted to die, that I had made her so utterly miserable that she did not care to live any more. And did you say that was what your poor child had been suffering in silence all these past killing months?

  He was relieved when he heard that Anna was better but insisted that “in danger my place and my right is to be near her.” But Anna did not want him. A new illness at the end of November was diagnosed as diphtheria. “I ought to be with her unless my presence is actually distasteful to her,” Elliott wrote imploringly, but Mrs. Hall telegraphed “Do not come,” which Elliott understood to be Anna’s command.

  Letters crossed in the mail. Mrs. Hall again wrote sharply that he should not come. Her letters hurt him, he wrote on December 6. They had no right to doubt his word, “and I have pledged it to my wife never to force myself upon her. . . . You need not fear that even if called to my wife’s deathbed that if not at her request I would present myself there.” The next day he wrote again.

  I am only terribly sad that I should be so repugnant to her. . . . It is most horrible and full of awe to me that my wife not only does not want me near her in sickness or trouble but fears me. And, before God I say it, I am honestly worthy of her trust and Love—for even in my drinking I never did a dishonorable thing, nor one cruel act towards my wife or children.

  Resigned to staying away from New York, he begged Mrs. Hall to telegraph C.O.D. about his wife’s condition. She died that day, and the message reached him while he was at Daniel Trigg’s, several miles out in the country. Hurriedly driving over the muddy road to town, he packed a bag hastily and flagged the night train to New York.

  Eleanor’s account of her mother’s death, written almost forty-five years later, did not dwell on the loss of her mother but on the return of her father. “Death meant nothing to me, and one fact wiped out everything else—my father was back and I would see him very soon.” Her mother died on December 7, 1892. Her father did not come to see her immediately. Later she realized, she wrote, “what a tragedy of utter defeat” her mother’s death meant for her father. “No hope now of ever wiping out the sorrowful years he had brought upon my mother—and she had left her mother as guardian for her children. My grandmother did not feel she could trust my father to take care of us. He had no wife, no children, no hope!”4

  She wept for her father, not for her mother. Yet that engaging man’s capacity for love and devotion was fatally flawed: it was totally self-centered, without steadiness or altruism. He made large promises, was full of warmth, charm, and affection, but there was no follow-through, no constancy, little on which his family could build.

  Eleanor refused to recognize this, but the rest of the family, especially Bye and Theodore, saw him clearly and approved Anna’s decision, stated in her will, to make her mother the children’s guardian. “Good as I firmly believe your advice to have been,” Elliott informed Mrs. Lloyd, the wife of the Episcopalian rector in Abingdon,

  and sorely as I think myself I need my little ones with me, I will return without them. I have not found one person in either my wife’s or my connection who encourages me in the slightest degree when I propose that the children join their Father. If I have a comfortable home they might come down and visit me for a while during the summer. But all seem to think the proper place for them now is with their Grandmother and surrounded by everything in the way of luxury and all the advantages, both educational and otherwise to which they have been accustomed.

  Elliott sought to comfort his daughter as well as himself with a gleaming vision of their making a home together again.

  After we were installed (at Grandma Hall’s house) my father came to see me, and I remember going down into the high ceilinged dim library on the first floor of the house on West 37th Street. He sat in a big chair. He was dressed all in black, looking very sad. He held out his arms and gathered me to him. In a little while he began to talk, to explain to me that my mother was gone, that she had been all the world to him, and now he had only my brothers and myself, that my brothers were very young, and that he and I must keep close together. Some day I would make a home for him again; we would travel together and do many things which he painted as interesting and pleasant, to be looked forward to in the future together.

  Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether my brothers were to be our children or whether he felt that they would be at school and college and later independent.

  There started that day a feeling which never left me—that he and I were very close together, and some day, would have a life of our own together. He told me to write to him often, to be a good girl, not to give any trouble, to study hard, to grow up into a woman he could be proud of, and he would come to see me whenever it was possible.

  When he left, I was all alone to keep our secret of mutual understanding and to adjust myself to my new existence.5

  6.“HE LIVED IN MY DREAMS”

  ELLIOTT’S LETTERS TO HIS DAUGHTER WERE TENDER, CHIVALROUS, playful, and, above all, full of protestations of love. After his death she would carry them around with her for the remainder of her life. People who lived on in the memories of those alive, she said, were not dead. She read and reread her father’s letters, and each time it was a fresh invocation of the magic of his presence.

  “I knew a child once who adored her father,” she wrote in 1927.

  She was an ugly little thing, keenly conscious of her deficiencies, and her father, the only person who really cared for her, was away much of the time; but he never criticized her or blamed her, instead he wrote her letters and stories, telling her how he dreamed of her growing up and what they would do together in the future, but she must be truthful, loyal, brave, well-educated, or the woman he dreamed of would not be there when the wonderful day came for them to fare forth together. The child was full of fears and because of them lying was easy; she had no intellectual stimulus at that time and yet she made herself as the years went on into a fairly good copy of the picture he had painted.1

  In his letters her father addressed Eleanor as “Father’s Own Little Nell,” and that was the way she signed herself in the letters to him. His first letter after his return to Abingdon reported on his new puppies. “They are both in the armchair beside me and the old Dog is curled up at my feet in the rug dreaming, I suppose of all the rabbits he did not catch today!”

  What shall he write about, his next letter asked.

  Shall I tell you of the wonderful long rides, of days through the grand snowclad forests, over the white hills, under the blue skies as blue as those in Italy which you and I and little Ellie, though he was so little he cannot remember it, used to sail over Naples Bay to beautiful Capri. I am afraid in those young “Nell days” you were a little seasick and did not enjoy it as much as you will in the day that is coming when you have worked hard at your lessons and gotten th
at curious thing they call “education.”

  After Anna’s death “Professor Roser,” as Elliott dubbed him, had inquired of Grandma Hall about her plans for Eleanor’s education, expressing hope that he would not lose such a promising student. Mrs. Hall consulted Elliott. There was no question “as to the wisdom of Eleanor’s undoubtedly remaining in his class. Will you write therefore and have the matter attended to? The tone of his note is very nice, did you not think so? Our little girl is a good little girl and conscientious, I believe, as he says.”

  His January 20 letter sought to impress on Eleanor the importance of education.

  The next time you go walking get your maid to take you where they are building a house and watch the workmen bring one stone after another and place it on top of the one gone before or along side, and then think that there are a lot of funny little workmen running about in your small Head called “Ideas” which are carrying a lot of stones like small bodies called “Facts,” and these little “Ideas” are being directed by your teachers in various ways, by “Persuasion,” “Instruction,” “Love,” and “Truth” to place all these “Fact Stones” on top of and alongside of each other in your dear Golden Head until they build a beautiful house called “Education”—Then! Oh, my pretty companionable Little Daughter, you will come to Father and what jolly games we will have together to be sure—And in your beautiful house “Education,” Father wishes you such a happy life—But those little fact stones are a queer lot, and you have to ask your teachers to look well after the Idea workmen that they don’t put some in crooked in the walls of your pretty House. Sometimes you’ll find a rough hard fact that you must ask your teacher to smooth down and polish and set straight by persuasion, love and truth. Then you’ll find a rebellious little factstone that won’t fit where it ought to, though it is intended to go just there like the little factstone “music”—maybe you will have to get your teachers to use Instruction, maybe a great deal of it to get that small stone to fit, but it must go there and it will, if the little Idea workmen stick at it long enough. Then there are what seem to be stupid, wearisome, trying factstones that you can’t see the use of in your dear house, that the Ideas are building! Like—“Going to bed regularly and early fact stones.” “Not eating candy fact stones,” “Not telling always exactly the Truth fact stones,” “Not being a teasing little girl fact stones” instead of a precious gentle Self amusing and satisfied one.