Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Your Father

  Elliott Roosevelt

  The next day Elliott had a fall, was knocked unconscious, and died with none of his family about him, moaning in his delirium for his sister Corinne.

  From the World, August 16, 1894:

  The curtains of No. 313 West 102nd Street are drawn. There is a piece of black crepe on the door-knob. Few are seen to pass in and out of the house, except the undertaker and his assistants. The little boys and girls who romp up and down the sidewalk will tell you in a whisper; “Mr. Elliott is dead,” and if you ask, “Who is Mr. Elliott?” “We don’t know, nobody knows,” they will answer.

  At the door a sad-faced man will meet you. “Mr. Roosevelt died at 10 o’clock Tuesday evening,” he will say. In a darkened parlor all day yesterday lay a plain black casket. Few mourners sat about it. Beneath its lid lay the body of Elliott Roosevelt. Few words will tell of his last days. . . .

  The physician and a valet were the only watchers at the end. The first of the family notified was James K. Gracie of Oyster Bay, an uncle of Elliott Roosevelt. To him was left the duty of breaking the news to the others. Many of them did not know that Elliott Roosevelt was in New York. Few of them had seen him for a year. At the clubs no one knew his address. Even the landlord from whom he rented his house knew him only as Mr. Elliott. Under that name he has lived there with his valet for over ten months. He sought absolute seclusion.

  Many people will be pained by this news. There was a time when there were not many more popular young persons in society than Mr. and Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt. . . .

  Elliott was buried at Greenwood, the Roosevelt burial place. Grandma Hall did not take Eleanor to her father’s funeral, and even the flowers she sent from herself and the children arrived too late. Grandma Hall was deeply sorry about that: “Elliott loved flowers and always brought them to us, and to think not one from us or his dear ones went to the grave with him grieves us deeply.”

  There was one comfort in his death—the harsh and bitter memories were washed away, Theodore wrote Corinne.

  I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now. He is just the gallant, generous, manly loyal young man whom everyone loved. I can think of him when you and I and he used to go round “exploring” the hotels, the time we were first in Europe; do you remember how we used to do it? And then in the days of the dancing class, when he was distinctly the polished man-of-the-world from outside, and all the girls from Helen White and Fanny Dana to May Wigham used to be so flattered by any attention from him. Or when we were off on his little sailing boat for a two or three days’ trip on the Sound, or when we first hunted; and when he visited me at Harvard. . . .

  Elliott had spent a few weeks of that final tormented summer with the woman who had been his mistress in Paris, who had summoned the doctor to her house on the New England shore and tried to make Elliott rest. He had often spoken to her of his sister, Corinne Robinson, and she now wrote Mrs. Robinson,

  will you not tell me how he died? He seemed so much stronger when he left, that even the physician was astonished at his vitality, and I hoped for his children, he would try to take care of himself. He was so strong, and had such a gay, sweet nature, that I could not realize seeing him with my children, so interested in their work and play, that he was mentally and physically so worn out.

  I do beg of you to have his children’s memory of him—a beautiful one; his tender courtesy, his big—generous heart and his wonderfully charming sweet nature, ought to be kept before them. If in saying this, I am overstepping the line of discretion or courtesy, I beg you to forgive me.

  Believe me, dear Mrs. Robinson, your brother suffered greatly, only as a big tender man like him could suffer—and while he was here, and I watched him sick and half wandering in his mind while he slept, he spoke constantly of you, how you had held to him and alone had given him the love he needed. Of course you do not need for a stranger to tell you this, but I know what a grief your brother’s death must be to you, and it may be a little consolation to you to hear this.

  I cannot forgive myself for not keeping him here, where he was loved and guarded, and where he might have regained some strength so as to have gone back a little more able to meet his lonely fight there—but it is too late to even regret. One thing you can do for him—see to it that he does not lose the place he deserves in his children’s lives. He loved them, and ought to have been with them.

  Two years later, when Mrs. Hall asked that his body be moved to the family vault at Tivoli, Corinne was grateful. “I want to write you a few lines to thank you for having let me know that all was safely accomplished and that Elliott now lies by Anna and his boy. I cannot help but feel glad that it is so, and I must tell you once more how deeply I appreciate the feeling which led you to wish him brought to Tivoli, a feeling which I dared not think could be there, or I should never have laid him at Greenwood.”

  With her father’s death, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in 1933, “went for me all the realities of companionship which he had suggested for the future, but as I said in the beginning he lived in my dreams and does to this day.”3

  Perhaps it was fortunate for Eleanor that her father died when he did. As Theodore Roosevelt said, now he could again think of Elliott as “the gallant, generous, manly, loyal young man whom everyone loved.” By his death Elliott made it possible for his daughter to maintain her dream-picture of him. But somewhere, rarely admitted to conscious awareness, Eleanor carried another picture of her father—the father who sent her messages that he was coming and did not appear, who left her in the cloakroom of his club, who aroused her hopes that she would be coming home to him, hopes that were always disappointed, the father who lacked self-control, who could not face responsibility, who expected to be indulged. Repressing this picture exacted a price: her own sense of reality was impaired. She tended to overestimate and misjudge people, especially those who seemed to need her and who satisfied her need for self-sacrifice and affection and gave her the admiration and loyalty she craved. Just as her response to being disappointed by her father had been silence and depression because she did not dare see him as he really was, so in later life she would become closed, withdrawn, and moody when people she cared about disappointed her.

  Although idolization of her father exacted a price, it was also a source of remarkable strength. Because of her overwhelming attachment to him, she would strive to be the noble, studious, brave, loyal girl he had wanted her to be. He had chosen her in a secret compact, and this sense of being chosen never left her. When he died she took upon herself the burden of his vindication. By her life she would justify her father’s faith in her, and by demonstrating strength of will and steadiness of purpose confute her mother’s charges of unworthiness against both of them.

  7.THE OUTSIDER

  “POOR CHILD,” MRS. HALL WROTE CORINNE AFTER ELLIOTT’S death; she “has had so much sorrow crowded into her short life she now takes everything very quietly. The only remark she made was ‘I did want to see father once more.’”

  Her father’s death deepened Eleanor’s feeling that she was an outsider. She was a shy, solemn, insecure child, tall for her age, badly dressed, with blonde hair falling about her shoulders, and did not make friends easily. She would have to regain her trust in the world before she could act upon the lesson her Grandfather Theodore had impressed upon his children—receive people’s love and people will love you.

  To some extent her separateness was self-imposed. She wanted to be left alone “to live in a dream world in which I was the heroine and my father the hero.” At school her first compositions reflect this fantasy life.1

  THE TEMPEST*

  We were all crowded in the cabin, no one had dared to go to bed for it was midnight on the sea, and there was a dreadful storm raging. It is a terrible thing in winter to be tossed about by the wind, and to hear captain calling through the trumpet “Cut away the mast.” So we all sat there trembling, and none of us dared to speak, for even the bravest among us
held our breath while the sea was foaming and tossing, and the sailors were talking death. And while we sat there in the dark, all of us saying our prayers, suddenly the captain rushed down the stairs. “We are lost!” he shouted. But his little girl took his cold hand and said. “Is not God on the ocean just as well as on the land?” Then we all kissed the little girl, and we spoke more cheerfully, and the next day we anchored safely in the harbor when the sun was shining brightly.

  This little sketch reversed what had actually happened at sea in 1887 during the collision of the Britannic and the Celtic, when Eleanor had been terrified and her father had acted as the strong and confident captain. In making the girl the heroine, she betrayed what she wished had happened—that she had been calm and brave and had won the approval of her father and all the passengers so that all would have “kissed the little girl.” The poignant tale underscored again how greatly she craved admiration and affection, and yet the reversal of roles also reflected what had happened between the time of the collision and her father’s death. In those years her father had been the one who needed help and in reality as well as in fantasy, she had been the one to sustain and comfort him.

  Eleanor lived with her grandmother in the brownstone on Thirty-seventh Street, a fashionable part of New York. In addition to the Roser class and French lessons with Mlle. LeClerq, she now attended a music class taught by Frank Damrosch and was brought by her governess to the exclusive Dodworth’s, where girls in velvet curtsied to boys in blue and learned the waltz, the two-step, and the polka. But despite her busy life, she was a child as bereaved and lonely as Antoine Lemaire, the hero of another of her early compositions who is cast out of his home by his parents and is befriended by a musician who teaches him to play the violin. Antoine is a “born genius” and plays superbly, but, wrote Eleanor, “the thing which the boy yearned for most was love.”

  Grandma Hall was well disposed and kindly, but her hands were full with her own rather unruly children, Eleanor’s aunts and uncles—Pussie, twenty-one; Maude, sixteen; Vallie, twenty-five; and Eddie, twenty-two. Grandma was only fifty-one, but her temperamental family exhausted her and she withdrew—or, as Eleanor later put it, she was “relegated”—to her own bedroom where her children expected her to sit by the window and mend their clothes. She did everything within her comprehension for Eleanor and Hall, yet they were neglected youngsters, starved for the thousand little parental attentions that build up the security and self-esteem of children.

  That is the way some of Eleanor’s schoolmates in the Roser classes remembered her.2 She attended them until she was fifteen. Her classmates were Helen Cutting, Margaret Dix, Jessie Sloane, Gwendolyn Burden, Ruth Twombly, Valerie Hadden, and Sophie Langdon.

  “It must have been in our early teens,” Helen Cutting (Mrs. Lucius Wilmerding) recalled. “She was visiting me in Tuxedo.”

  “‘Let’s go out and do something,’ I urged.”

  Eleanor put her off. “I’ll finish the letter I’m writing to Hall. Then we can go out.”

  “But you wrote him yesterday.”

  “I write him every day. I want him to feel he belongs to somebody.”

  Her stay with Helen was one of the rare occasions she was allowed to be away from home. The less her grandmother was able to control her own children, the more rigidly she sought to rein in Eleanor and Hall, and guidance usually meant saying “no.” When the father of another of Eleanor’s Roser classmates, Jessie Sloane, invited Eleanor to spend a summer out West with his daughter, Eleanor begged to be allowed to go. She had never wanted to do anything as much. Jessie was the prettiest girl in class, and Eleanor, who was gawky, her prominent teeth in braces, admired her for her loveliness. Her grandmother said no.

  The girls were reaching the age when they were sensitive about their clothes. Margaret Dix (Mrs. Charles Lawrance), the daughter of the rector of Trinity, “the oldest, wealthiest and most fashionable” parish in the country, first made her appearance in the classroom in a DePinna sailor dress. “A titter in the class—my skirt’s too short!” she later wrote.

  Eleanor’s skirts were always too short. She had few dresses and those she did have were shapeless and fell straight from the shoulders. She wore black stockings and high button shoes, and her grandmother insisted on long flannel underwear from November to April.

  “A group of us girls would go to Central Park to skate and play,” Helen Cutting has said. “In the spring we went without our coats. Eleanor played very hard and like all of us would fall into puddles and get covered with mud and grime.

  “‘Couldn’t you put on a clean dress?’ we asked her the next day.

  “‘My other dress is in the wash,’ she answered.”

  One day she spilled ink on her dress. When she took it off and tried to wash it in a basin, the ink spot spread all over the dress. “But she had to wear it,” said Helen. This was not because of a lack of money but because of a lack of attention and care. Although Grandfather Hall had died intestate and thereby created financial problems for his wife, she received more than $7,500 a year for the care of Eleanor and Hall from various trusts left in their name.

  The Thirty-seventh Street house was a dark, gloomy place, “grim and ill-kept,” as Helen Cutting remembered it. “Nobody cared how it looked. Eleanor did not have her little friends there often. I don’t remember having a meal there.”

  Eleanor’s cousin Corinne, the daughter of her Auntie Corinne (Mrs. Douglas Robinson), lived in a brownstone at Forty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. “My mother would ask me to go to have supper with Eleanor,” recalled Corinne, who was two years younger than her cousin. “I never wanted to go. The grim atmosphere of that house. There was no place to play games, unbroken gloom everywhere. We ate our suppers in silence.” It was not a house for children, Corinne added. “The general attitude was ‘don’t do this.’”3

  It was also a frightening house. Eleanor’s uncles had begun to drink heavily and she was afraid of them. She slept in a hall bedroom on the top floor next door to the room that Madeleine, the governess, occupied with Hall. Madeleine was sweet with Brudie, as Hall was called, but tyrannized Eleanor, pulled her hair “unmercifully,” and berated her so violently that if Eleanor did something wrong, she preferred punishment at the hands of her grandmother. It was not until she was fourteen that she dared to tell her grandmother how often Madeleine made her shed bitter tears and was at last taken out of her care.

  “I remember Madeleine,” said Corinne. “She was a terrifying character. It was the grimmest childhood I have ever known. Who did she have? Nobody.”

  Eleanor’s unhappiness made her even more determined to succeed. Some of her classmates considered her a “grind.” They thought she worked harder than the other girls because things did not come easily for her, yet she had a very good memory, turned in compositions that were well written and imaginative, and recited poetry quite well. If she was a grind, it was because she set herself high standards. She wanted to learn, to excel, and thereby gain approval and praise.

  Margaret Dix, the clergyman’s daughter and, therefore, in the eyes of the other girls—except Eleanor—“a thing apart,” had to win acceptance. But she was quick, gay, and mischievous. She inked in faces on her fingernails and held them up behind the teacher’s back for the other girls to see. “They would giggle,” Margaret recalled. “Eleanor would turn away. That would shock her. She only wanted to be a student.”4

  The Twombly mansion, where the Roser class met when the Cutting house was not available, was next door to St. Thomas’ Church at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street. The day the duke of Marlborough married Consuelo Vanderbilt in one of the most fashionable weddings in society’s annals, Margaret found the occasion irresistible and slipped out during the recess to watch the wedding. “Eleanor would never have stepped out of a class to watch a wedding,” she said.

  Margaret recalled her schooling in the Roser class approvingly: “Mr. Roser gave me an excellent education.” A more general verdict was t
hat voiced by Eleanor’s cousin Corinne, who was enrolled in a younger class:

  I cannot understand why on earth our mothers fell for the Roser classes. They were held at all the big houses. I wish you could have seen Mr. Roser. A Prince Albert coat. Side whiskers, Not one grain of humor. Nobody in the world as pompous as he. And the things he decided to have us learn!

  In the single paragraph that Eleanor Roosevelt devoted to the Roser classes in her autobiography she wrote admiringly of his assistant, Miss Tomes, but with reserve about Mr. Roser himself. He envisaged himself as a headmaster in the British public-school tradition, was learned in a literary kind of way, and expressed himself forcefully. The girls were obliged to stand when he came into the classroom, whereupon he would bow formally and indicate to the “young ladies” that they could be seated, addressing them as “Miss Roosevelt,” “Miss Cutting,” “Miss Sloane.” He had a quotation from some great man or writer, most often from Dr. Johnson, for every occasion. The textbooks—the Nelson School Series, most of them written by William Francis Collier, LL.D., D.D.—were imported from England. History was taught from Dr. Collier’s The Great Events from the Beginning of the Christian Era Till the Present Time, the present time being 1860, when Dr. Collier had produced this particular text, whose aim was “To give in a series of pictures such a connected view of the Christian Era as may be pleasantly readable and easily remembered.” Implausible as the Nelson textbooks appear today, they were, nevertheless, not inferior to the McGuffey reader and Webster Speller that were in use in common schools all over the United States at the time. And if the Reverend Dr. Collier presented Victorian England rather than the American Republic as history’s crowning triumph, the aberration would be corrected at home, since most of the Roser pupils came from families whose genealogy was in itself American history.