The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

On August 17, 1891, Theodore Roosevelt opened the New York Sun and read a headline he had feared was coming but had hoped never to see: ELLIOTT ROOSEVELT INSANE. There had been potential scandal in the Roosevelt family at least once before: Theodore’s uncle Robert had fathered two sets of children, one legitimate, one with a longtime mistress whom he married after his first wife died. But that story had never reached the newspapers. This was different.

  The story of Elliott Roosevelt’s sad decline embarrassed Theodore and wounded his sisters, but its impact on Elliott’s daughter, Eleanor, would shape the way she saw the world and her role within it.

  At first, Elliott had seemed the more promising of the Roosevelt boys. But in his teens he had begun to fall behind. Crushing headaches, inexplicable seizures, and an opaque diagnosis of “congestion of the brain” ended his schooling. He couldn’t seem to find a focus or hold a job even in businesses run by understanding relatives, and spent his time yachting, hunting big game, playing polo, riding to the hounds—and drinking.

  Theodore had hoped Elliott’s marriage to Anna Hall would “give the dear old boy … something to work for,” and when Elliott’s first child, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, was born on October 11, 1884, Theodore was her proud godfather. Elliott was delighted at her birth, and called her “Little Nell” after the relentlessly virtuous orphaned heroine of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. But her mother seems to have been disappointed in her almost from the first. Anna was herself a celebrated beauty while Eleanor was plain, grave, shy. She called her daughter “granny” and once explained to her that since she had “no looks” she would need to have especially good manners.

  Anna would bear two more children, Elliott Jr. and Gracie Hall, but she was a distracted mother, hurt and baffled by her husband’s increasingly strange behavior, soon worsened by fresh addictions to drugs as well as drink. “It is all horrible beyond belief,” Theodore told Bamie. “He is a maniac morally as well as mentally … a flagrant male swine.” Elliott took at least two mistresses; threatened his wife, then begged for forgiveness, then threatened her again; vowed to kill himself; finally got a family maid pregnant. To keep that scandal out of the newspapers, the Roosevelts had to pay thousands of dollars to the woman’s family, had Elliott committed to a French asylum for a time, and afterward insisted he stay away from his wife and children unless he changed his ways. He could not do it.

  Meanwhile, migraines forced his anguished wife to spend days in her darkened bedroom, where seven-year-old Eleanor was allowed to sit with her and stroke her head for hours at a time. “The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced,” she remembered. That would be true all her life. To be useful was to feel that she belonged to someone; if she could not be loved, she could at least be needed.

  In December 1892, at the age of twenty-nine, Anna Hall Roosevelt died of diphtheria, and Eleanor and her brothers were sent off to live with their maternal grandmother—pious, grim, dutiful. An unstable aunt lived at home. So did two drunken uncles. None of them was much interested in Eleanor. Within six months, three-year-old Elliott Jr. would die of the same disease that had taken his mother. Eleanor was a lonely girl, she remembered, timid, withdrawn, and “frightened of practically everything”—mice, the dark, other children, “displeasing the people I lived with.” Her only solace was dreams of her banished father, who sent her letters full of promises he could never keep: she would come and care for him someday; they would travel the world together; he would show her the Taj Mahal by moonlight. “Somehow,” she remembered, “it was always he and I.”

  Elliott was now drinking half a dozen bottles of brandy and champagne a day. “He can’t be helped,” Theodore wrote, “and he must simply be let go his own gait.” On August 13, 1894, suffering from delirium tremens, he tried to climb out a second-floor Manhattan window, raced hysterically up and down the stairs, collapsed with a seizure, and died the following day. He was only thirty-four. When Theodore went to see his brother’s body, his sister Corinne recalled, “he was more overcome than I have ever seen him—cried like a little child.”

  Eleanor’s memories of her parents left her with a mixed legacy. She remembered most her preoccupied mother’s severity and distance that ill-equipped her to be a nurturing mother when the time came. She worked hard to embody the qualities her father had encouraged—“unselfishness, generosity, loving tenderness and cheerfulness”—but his example also helped distort her perceptions of people; she tended to exaggerate their virtues at first, and then was inordinately disappointed later on when, inevitably, they failed to act as she had dreamed they would. From the sad lives of both her parents she also learned that no one’s love for her was likely to last, that those upon whom she counted most were sure to let her down.

  During her infrequent visits to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt was always warm toward his late brother’s daughter: he once hugged her so hard he tore the buttonholes out of her petticoat. But he was also fearsome: when he learned she could not swim, he ordered her to jump into Oyster Bay anyway. She plunged to the bottom, came up gasping for air, and was left with a lifelong fear of water. “Poor little soul, she is very plain,” Edith Roosevelt told Bamie after one of Eleanor’s visits. “Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future.” It seems to have occurred to no one in the family to see to it that her crooked teeth were straightened.

  Bamie would indirectly prove Eleanor’s salvation. She had spent a season overseas in a girl’s school run by an extraordinary woman named Marie Souvestre. When Eleanor’s grandmother Hall thought she might benefit from a year or two away from her increasingly erratic uncles, Bamie suggested she be sent to Allenswood, Souvestre’s boarding school, now located just outside London.

  The three years Eleanor spent there were the happiest of her life, she remembered. It was at Allenswood, a cousin recalled, “that [she] for the first time was deeply loved, and loved in return.” Eleanor was especially proud when she was elected captain of the field hockey team and eventually became the most admired girl in the school.

  But it was her relationship with Mademoiselle Souvestre that meant the most to her. The headmistress was intellectually alive, socially conscious, independent minded. “Why was your mind given you,” she liked to ask her students, “but to think things out for yourself?” She devoted herself to the tall, diffident American orphan and brought out all the tact, intelligence, discipline, energy, and empathy that would characterize Eleanor later in life. “Whatever I have become,” Eleanor would say many years later, “had its seeds in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and strong personality.”

  Five-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt and her father, Elliott Roosevelt, 1889. Elliott was erratic, unfaithful to his wife, and alcoholic, but to his daughter he would remain always “the love of my life.”

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  Anna Hall Roosevelt, Eleanor’s mother, was thought so beautiful that one summer when she and her husband were in Europe Robert Browning begged just to be permitted to read aloud to her while she was having her portrait painted. “She never entered a room as others did,” a woman friend recalled, “she seemed almost to float forward.”

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  Eleanor at two and a half in 1887. Her parents had left her with relatives for six months that year, hoping a long vacation would calm her father’s unpredictable behavior. She felt abandoned and asked her aunt, “Where is baby’s home now?”

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  “Little Nell Scolding Elliott,” Elliott Roosevelt’s favorite photograph of his daughter. She herself remembered that she had been “very solemn” even as a small child, “entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth.”

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  Eleanor and her father at the home he built in Hempstead, Long Island, in the late autumn of 1889. In constant pain from a shattered ankle, he was now addicted to morphine and laudanum as well as alcohol.

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  Eleanor and her brothers, Elliott Jr. and Gracie Ha
ll Roosevelt, 1891. They were now living with their mother in New York; their father was living with his mistress in Paris. Eleanor knew only that “something was wrong with my father, and from my point of view nothing could be wrong with him.”

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  Eleanor at ten, with the pony that was a gift from her absent father. By the time this photograph was taken, at her grandmother Hall’s summer home in 1894, her mother and her little brother Elliott Jr. were dead, and she wished only to be left alone to live in what she called “a dream world in which I was the heroine and my father the hero.” Within weeks, her father, too, would die.

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  Eleanor at fourteen, with her surviving brother, Gracie Hall Roosevelt. She wrote to him nearly every day when he was sent off to Groton School because, she said, she wanted him to feel that he belonged to someone.

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  Fifteen-year-old Eleanor (back row, third from right), surrounded by her schoolmates during her first year at Allenswood School. Her headmistress had already singled her out as “Excellent. The most amiable girl I have ever met; she is nice to everybody, very eager to learn and highly interested in all her work.”

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  Tiger-claw necklace: Elliott Roosevelt shot the tiger from which these claws were taken in 1881, and had them mounted in India as a gift for his mother. Eleanor inherited it and wore it at formal occasions throughout her life.

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  Midnight Rambles

  At eight thirty in the morning on Monday, May 6, 1895, thirty-seven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt started up the steps of New York police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street. A knot of eager reporters rushed along behind, trying to keep up. “Where are our offices?” he shouted. “What do we do first?”

  It was a rhetorical question. The New York Police Department was famously corrupt, and the new Fusion mayor of New York had appointed Roosevelt one of four police commissioners with orders to clean it up. He was elected president of the board but was powerless to act without the consent of his three fellow members.

  At first, Roosevelt was wildly popular. His favorite exclamations became his watchwords—“Bully!” and “Dee-lighted!” Roosevelt forced the police commissioner and his chief lieutenant to resign rather than have him look into their finances. Newspapermen couldn’t get enough of him. “Mr. Roosevelt … shows a set of teeth calculated to unnerve the bravest of the Finest,” wrote Arthur Brisbane of the New York World. “They are broad teeth, they form a perfectly straight line. The lower teeth look like a row of dominoes.… They seem to say tell the truth … or he’ll bite your head off.… But Mr. Roosevelt’s voice is the policeman’s hardest trial. It is an exasperating voice, a sharp voice, a rasping voice. It is a voice that comes from the tips of the teeth and seems to say in its tones, ‘What do you amount to anyway?’ ”

  He sometimes affected a distinctive costume—straw hat, pink shirt, black sash with tassels—and he took reporters with him as he prowled New York at night, on the lookout for policemen who dared doze or drink on duty. “These midnight rambles are great fun,” he said. “My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people.… I get a glimpse of the real life among the swarming millions.”

  But things began to go wrong when Roosevelt took it upon himself to “rigidly enforce” a Sunday law that was supposed to shutter all of Manhattan’s fifteen thousand saloons on the Sabbath. In doing so, he struck at the heart of police graft, but he also alienated German workingmen who looked forward to a stein of beer on their one day off. When thirty thousand of them paraded to protest, Roosevelt insisted on attending, and when an angry marcher called out, “Wo ist der Roosevelt?” he leaned forward in the reviewing stand and shouted back, “Hier bin ich!” A reporter asked how he could uphold a statute the public opposed. “I do not deal with public sentiment,” he said. “I deal with the law.”

  Roosevelt’s action led to a mass exodus of German Americans to the Democrats at the next New York election—and added to the enmity of the man who controlled the state’s Republican Party. Ex-Senator Thomas Collier Platt was known as the “Easy Boss” because of his hushed, courteous manner, but behind the scenes he was cold-eyed and immovable. Platt saw Roosevelt as “a perfect bull in a china shop,” and tried to have him removed from his post. Roosevelt’s fellow commissioners also eventually grew to resent his noisy prominence and began to vote down his proposals.

  When Republican Senator William McKinley of Ohio was elected president in 1896, Roosevelt lobbied him hard for a new federal post: assistant secretary of the navy. He’d been interested in the sea—and sea power—since boyhood. McKinley was an amiable, cautious conservative, privately worried that Roosevelt was “too pugnacious … always getting into rows with everybody.” When McKinley asked Platt for his opinion, the Easy Boss said he’d be delighted to see Roosevelt return to Washington.

  Commissioner Roosevelt at his desk, the floor around him littered with discarded paper representing decisions made, actions undertaken. Previously, the law had been enforced with “corrupt discrimination,” he liked to remember. Now, “everyone was arrested alike and I took special pains to see … that the big men and the men with political influence were treated like every one else.”

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  In this three-panel cartoon, a thirsty officer pays an urchin to stand lookout while he ducks into a saloon that’s supposed to be closed on Sunday. The boy soon sounds the alarm, assuming the big spectral grin emerging from the darkness must belong to Roosevelt. It turns out to be a giant jack-o’-lantern being carried by three boys.

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  Policemen like this corpulent officer, walking his beat on the Lower East Side, lived in fear of being called before Commissioner Roosevelt for some infraction at which his predecessors would have winked.

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  The Peacefulness and Regularity of Things

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was fifteen that spring and finishing up his first year at Groton School. It had not been easy for him. Nothing in his upbringing had prepared him for life among other boys away from home. “In thinking back to my earliest days,” he once remembered, “I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things.… Hyde Park was the center of the world.”

  Some children are loved; Franklin Roosevelt was adored. His mother kept him in dresses and long curls until he was nearly six, and then dressed him in kilts and miniature sailor suits. She gave him his daily bath until he was almost nine. Nannies and tutors came and went. His infrequent playmates were mostly the children of other country gentlemen up and down the river.

  When he and his father rode around the farm each morning, the Roosevelt tenants doffed their hats and called the boy “Master Franklin.” His father taught his son to shoot and sled, to sail an iceboat on the frozen Hudson, and to steer the family yacht through the cold Canadian waters around their summer home on Campobello Island off the coast of Maine. And he passed on intact his unfailing good humor. Franklin called him “Popsy.”

  A reporter would one day ask Sara if she had always wanted her son to become president. “Never, oh never!” she answered. Her ambition for him had been loftier, she said: “The highest ideal I could hold up before our boy—to grow up to be like his father, straight and honorable, just and kind, an upstanding American.”

  Then, in 1890, when Franklin was eight, Mr. James suffered a heart attack. He recovered, but his doctors warned that his survival depended on being shielded from all unnecessary worry. That warning brought Sara and her son still closer together in a loving conspiracy to keep Mr. James alive.

  From birth, Franklin had been what his grandfather Delano called “a very nice child, always bright and happy.” Now, his impulse toward unwavering cheer intensified. Unpleasantness was not to be acknowledged. The Roosevelts spent four summers at a German health spa, Bad Nauheim, where Mr. James took the waters and Franklin did his best to entertain himself while pretending not to notice his father’s fello
w patients—“half-crippled sufferers,” one remembered, “with pallid ghastly faces, limping to the springs on crutches, and looking as if their next step will be into their graves.”

  Back at Springwood, his parents encouraged him to fill his time with hobbies—photography, and collecting coins and stamps and books about the navy. Like his increasingly celebrated cousin, he shot and classified birds, but then had them professionally preserved. His mother dusted his exhibits once a week. “I dare not trust it to anyone [else],” she said.

  When, in September of 1896, his parents escorted him to Groton and left him there, he remained “dry-eyed and resolute” though “white-faced,” Sara noted in her diary, but “James and I feel this parting very much. It is hard to leave my darling boy.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES The parents of five-year-old Franklin talked him into wearing a kilt before dropping into a Washington, D.C., photographer’s studio in 1887. A few days later, they visited Mr. James’s friend Grover Cleveland in the White House. As they were leaving, the weary president shook Franklin’s hand and said, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”

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  Master Franklin and Mr. James at Springwood in 1891. Franklin rides his pony Debby; his father sits astride Doolittle, the last of the stable of trotters he had once maintained.

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  Franklin was lovingly photographed at every stage of his childhood: at six, at the helm of his father’s yacht; wearing a sailor suit to please his mother on his tenth birthday; and with his camera on his way to Groton at fourteen.