Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children

by Dorie Mccullough Lawson

  Well, that's that. If you are the boy I still hope you are, despite evidence to the contrary, then this letter should make you think, and so much good will come of it for us both. If you are not—well, then it's just too bad.

  Carlotta is glad you liked the Japanese robe. And we are both happy that you are so pleased with the new school. It sounds grand. And it's your luck to be away from that damned hookworm Florida joint. That country, with its rotten debilitating climate did more than anything else to wreck my health and lead to the long stretch of hospital and illness I went through last winter and spring. I am feeling fine again now and will be able to start hard work again, I hope, by the first of next year—or when we move into the new home we are building in the San Ramon Valley (near Oakland) which will be finished sometime in January. At present, we are living in a small rented house. I like California immensely. Carlotta joins in love to you.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD TO

  FRANCES SCOTT “SCOTTIE” FITZGERALD

  “I never wanted to see again in this world women

  who were brought up as idlers.”

  In July 1938 F. Scott Fitzgerald was forty-one years old. Five years had passed since his last novel was published and he was having trouble financially, so he took a job writing screenplays in Hollywood. With his wife, Zelda, institutionalized for schizophrenia, he felt the responsibility of raising Scottie was his alone. The following letter was written to sixteen-year-old Scottie after a series of episodes of bad behavior, including her expulsion from the Ethel Walker School, a Connecticut boarding school, for sneaking away from campus to hitchhike to Yale. Less than two years later Fitzgerald was dead from a heart attack following years of heavy drinking.

  July 7th, 1938

  Dearest Scottie:

  I don't think I will be writing letters many more years and I wish you would read this letter twice—bitter as it may seem. You will reject it now, but at a later period some of it may come back to you as truth. When I'm talking to you, you think of me as an older person, an “authority,” and when I speak of my own youth what I say becomes unreal to you—for the young can't believe in the youth of their fathers. But perhaps this little bit will be understandable if I put it in writing.

  When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided and one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her, but being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided—she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity and the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

  It was too late for me to recoup the damage—I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years until my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink and forgetting.

  The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds—she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn't have the strength for the big stage—sometimes she pretended, and she pretended beautifully, but she didn't have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy—she passed that failing on to you.

  For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit—nothing but “getting by” and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

  My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don't want to change you. But I don't want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energy and my earnings for people who talk my language.

  I have begun to fear that you don't. You don't realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this. People like Rosalind and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.

  You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks at old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore—(and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you)—represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother's illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school; less willingly after that. There began to be an unsympathetic side to you that alienated first Mrs. Owens, then your teachers at Bryn Mawr. The line of those who felt it runs pretty close to you—adults who saw you every day. Among them you have made scarcely a single close friend, with all your mastery of exterior arts of friendliness. All of them have loved you, as I do, but all of them have had reservations, and important ones: they have felt that something in you wasn't willing to pull your weight, to do your part—for more than an hour.

  This last year was a succession of information beginning as far back as December that you were being unfair to me, more frankly that you were cheating. The misfortune about your standing in your class, the failure to tutor at the Obers at Christmas, the unwillingness to help with your mother at Easter in golf or tennis, then the dingy outbreak in the infirmary at the people who were “on to you,” who knew you had none of the scholar in you but lived in a babyish dream—of the dance favors of a provincial school. Finally the catastrophe which, as far as I am able to determine, had no effect except to scare you because you knew I wouldn't maintain you in the East without some purpose or reason.

  If you did not have a charm and companionability, such a blow might have chastened you, but unlike my Uncle Phil you will always be able to find companions who will reassure you of your importance even though your accomplishment is a goose-egg. To the last day of his life Phil was a happy man, though he loafed always and dissipated a quarter of a million of his own and his sister's money and left his wife in poverty and his son as you saw him. He had charm—great charm. He never liked me after I was grown, because once he lost his charm in front of me and I kicked his fat backside. Your charm must have not been in evidence on the day Mrs. Perry Smith figuratively did the same to you.

  All this was the long preparation for the despair I experienced ten days ago. That you did or did not know how I felt about Baltimore, that you thought I'd approve of your meeting a boy and driving back with him unchaperoned to New York by night, that you honestly thought I would have permitted that—well, tell it to Harold, who seems to be more gullible.

  The clerk from the Garden of Allah woke me up with the
telegram in which I mistook Simmons for Finney and I called the Finneys—to find them gone. The result was entirely a situation of your own making—if you had any real regret about the Walker episode you'd have respected my wishes for a single week.

  To sum up: what you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been.) In your career as a “wild society girl,” vintage 1925, I'm not interested. I don't want any of it—it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are “going somewhere,” your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life—a real dream of your own—and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too late—as it was too late for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge—now your conversation is as commonplace as if you'd spent the last two years in the Corn Hollow High School—what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.

  I shall come East in September to meet your boat—but this letter is a declaration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn't likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will—or want to—remains to be seen.

  Daddy

  P.S. If you keep the diary, please don't let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten-franc guide book. I'm not interested in dates and places, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don't try to be witty in the writing, unless it's natural—just true and real.

  P.P.S. Will you please read this letter a second time—I wrote it over twice.

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT TO

  JAMES ROOSEVELT

  “This is the kind of high-handed, pompous action

  which loosens family ties . . .”

  Likely the most influential woman of the twentieth century, Eleanor Roosevelt was a first lady like no other. She was kind, independent, tough, self-confident, and a sympathetic and effective advocate for those with no voice. After her husband's death in 1945, she remained an active force both nationally and internationally as a columnist and a delegate to the young United Nations. During these years she became known as the First Lady of the World.

  As the mother of five and a steadfast and devoted friend, she loved a house to be filled with family and comrades. “The people I love mean more to me than all the public things . . .” she wrote. She held fast to family traditions, admonished her children “never to say anything derogatory about each other,” and nothing depressed her emotions more than the troubles of her children, or quarrels among them.

  In September 1949, James Roosevelt and his wife, Rommie, sent out a letter asking to be taken off Christmas gift lists as they felt the holiday spirit could “better be fulfilled in other ways.” Mrs. Roosevelt was incensed. Here the United States delegate to the United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt, responds sharply to her eldest son, a forty-two-year-old man preparing to make a run for the governorship of California.

  Sept. 22, 1949

  Dearest Jimmy:

  I am deeply hurt by your letter of the 16th and also frankly I was very angry. Through all the years Christmas at home was a joy to me and I hoped I had given to you all the feeling that it was a time for thinking of others even if we were far apart. It is never a burden to me. If you and Rommie find the expense too great or the burden too great of thinking beyond each other and the children, I shall accept your decision. In fact now no presents from you would be acceptable but I think it strange that you want to deprive me and others of the pleasure of thinking and showing our thought of you and your children in a tangible way.

  This is the kind of high-handed, pompous action which loosens family ties and does not bind them closer. When I was young and could only give little, I made things for family and friends but I gave and if I leave you and yours out of my Christmas thought and giving then I don't want to talk to you on Christmas Day.

  Your letter does not sound like you. How could you have dictated it?

  Also, how could you have sent it without mention of Sis when you know my deep anxiety and I hope are sharing it.

  I have decided to send Rommie a copy of this letter. One must do things for people one loves or love dies and you are moving in the direction of narrowing your affections, one has less to give that way.

  My love to you, dear

  Mother

  In November Jimmy Roosevelt acquiesced and asked the family to “forget we ever mentioned the subject.”d

  The first page of President Harry Truman's letter

  from Potsdam to his daughter Margaret

  A Place in Time

  GEORGE WASHINGTON TO

  JOHN “JACK” PARKE CUSTIS

  “I have been called upon by unanimous voice

  of the Colonies to take the command of the Continental Army . . .”

  On June 16, 1775, at the Second Continental Congress, when George Washington accepted the appointment to command the Continental Army, it was not with false modesty that he said, “I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.” He didn't think he was up to the extraordinary task, but he also knew he was the best man for the job. He was forty-three years old, tall, dignified, and both patient and calm by nature. As the master of an eight-thousand-acre plantation he was accustomed to commanding a large enterprise and to making the most of what resources were available to him. In 1775 he was still remembered for his heroism twenty years before in the French and Indian War, but Washington's military experience was comparatively small and he plainly knew that the task now before him was enormous. Armed citizens were fighting the British in Massachusetts, but a Continental Army, as such, did not exist. There were few supplies, no staff, little powder, no money, and it was now Washington's duty to take charge of it all—and fight the most formidable army in the world.

  It was several days before he could bring himself to write home to tell of his new position. From Philadelphia on June 19, he wrote three letters, one to his wife, Martha; one to his brother, John Augustine; and one to his twenty-one-year-old stepson, John Parke Custis. Unbeknownst to those in Philadelphia, the first major battle of the American Revolution had just been fought at Bunker Hill and by the twenty-third of June General Washington was on his way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take command.

  Philadelphia June 19th 1775.

  Dear Jack,

  I have been called upon by unanimous voice of the Colonies to take the command of the Continental Army—It was an honour I neither sought after, or was by any means fond of accepting, from a consciousness of my own inexperience, and inability to discharge the duties of so important a Trust. However, as the partiality of the Congress have placed me in this distinguished point of view, I can make them no other return but what will flow from close attention, and an upright Intention. For the rest I can say nothing—my great concern on this occasion, is the thoughts of leaving your Mother under the uneasiness which I know this affair will throw her into; I therefore hope, expect, & indeed have no doubt, of your using every means in your power to keep up her Spirits, by doing everything in your power, to promote her quiet—I have I must confess very uneasy feelings on her acct, but as it has been a kind of unavoidable necessity which has led me into this appointment, I shall more readily hope, that success will attend it, & crown our Meetings with happiness.

  At any time, I hope it is unnecessary for me to say, that I am always pleased with yours & Nelly's abidance at Mount Vernon, much less upon this occasion, when I think it absolutely necessary for the peace & satisfaction of your Mother; a consideration which I have no doubt will have due weight with you both, & require no arguments to
inforce.

  As the publick Gazettes will convey every article of Intelligence that I could communicate in this Letter, I shall not repeat them, but with love to Nelly, & sincere regard for yourself I remain Yr Most Affecte

  Go: Washington

  P.S. Since writing the foregoing I have receiv'd your Letter of the 15th Instt—I am obliged to you for the Intelligence therein containd—and am glad you directed about the Tobacco, for I had really forgot it. You must now take upon yourself the entire management of your own Estate, it will no longer be in my power to assist you, nor is there any occasion for it as you have never discover'd a disposition to put it to a bad use.

  During the war Jack Parke Custis and his wife, Nelly, continued to reside at their own Virginia home, but visited Mount Vernon often. Martha Washington periodically joined her husband at Continental Army headquarters. From 1764 to 1785 Mount Vernon was managed by the general's cousin, Lund Washington.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TO

  WILLIAM FRANKLIN

  “. . . nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen Sensations, as to find myself

  deserted in my old Age by my only Son; and not

  only deserted, but to find him taking up Arms

  against me, in a Cause, wherein my good Fame, Fortune and Life were all at Stake.”

  Benjamin Franklin's oldest child, William, was illegitimate, but was raised in his father's household. William was at his father's side assisting with the kite experiment that led to the invention of the lightning rod, and he was the only relative to accompany Benjamin Franklin to London while he served as the American agent to Great Britain. During his years in London, Benjamin Franklin grew to hold genuine affection for England, and in this he was joined by William.

  In 1762 King George III appointed thirty-year-old William Franklin to be the Royal Governor of New Jersey and when the young man took the oath of office, Benjamin Franklin was delighted. But as the revolution mounted and the father's commitment to the people of America remained steadfast, a rift developed between them over William's devotion to the crown of England. Their divided loyalties caused an estrangement that lasted for nearly ten years.