Eleanor also failed to perceive Franklin’s own problematic traits: an only child’s self-centeredness, a core of unquenchable ambition that would lead him to put career ahead of family, and a tendency to see the women in his life primarily as support mechanisms. None of this made any difference in the autumn of 1903. Franklin was a fine-looking, wealthy, charming young man less than three months from his twenty-second birthday when he proposed marriage. Eleanor was a sensitive and appealing young woman of nineteen, longing for a happier personal life. Youth and mutual attraction prevailed.
Sara’s emotional attachment to Franklin and her clear reluctance to share him with another woman complicated her practical qualms. She asked him to reconsider, arguing that he and Eleanor were both young and needed to give the rest of their lives deliberate consideration. Franklin and Eleanor agreed only to push the marriage into the future and not to announce the engagement for a year. Time, Sara hoped, would change her son’s mind.
Franklin and Eleanor persevered for nearly a year and a half, enduring Sara’s obvious opposition, stealing a few moments alone now and then, and remaining unyielding in the conviction they had a future together. They exchanged many letters. None of his survive—Eleanor destroyed them. Franklin preserved Eleanor’s, and they leave no doubt that the two were deeply in love. He sent her poetry, and she responded in kind. She had achieved, she told him, the greatest happiness of her life. For the moment, Eleanor’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook has written, “their affinity was chemical, intellectual, total.”7
In the fall of 1904, Franklin began law school at Columbia University, following a plan Sara had laid out in a letter he received at the beginning of his third year at Harvard:
I still have a few friends of your dear father’s who would take an interest in you when you come to New York, and I want you to think seriously of coming to the Columbia law school. . . . I know Brother Rosy feels that after your college course is over you ought to be in your own city and get to be known among the best men, also be nearer Hyde Park. I feel so very strongly. . . . I merely wish you to think seriously of it, and to realize how much it will be for you and for me, for you to be near your own home.8
After Franklin’s matriculation at Columbia, Sara rented a town house on Madison Avenue. Eleanor, still living with the Parishes, continued to pursue her settlement work and other reform causes. Occasionally, Franklin escorted her back uptown. Once he helped her take a sick girl back to her apartment in a squalid tenement and came out shocked by the living conditions of the urban poor.9
Cousin Ted, easily elected to a second term as president in November 1904, agreed to attend their wedding and give the bride away. His scheduled review of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade determined the date, March 17, 1905, just thirteen days after Eleanor and Franklin were among the guests at his inauguration in Washington, DC. The wedding ceremony and reception were held in the adjoining town houses occupied by the Parishes and Mrs. Ludlow. Large sliding doors connecting the homes were opened to provide ample space.
By the standards of high society, the affair was a small one, with only about two hundred invitees, the majority just for the reception. Reverend Endicott Peabody officiated over the much smaller family wedding rites. Franklin’s best man was Jake Brown; other Grotonians served as ushers. Eleanor, stunning in a long, white wedding gown, was attended by six bridesmaids, among them TR’s daughter Alice. After the young couple had been pronounced man and wife and positioned themselves to receive congratulations, TR remarked, “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.” He then moved across to the reception buffet, followed, to the consternation of the bride and groom, by most of the guests. Late in the afternoon, the newlyweds departed for Hyde Park and a honeymoon week alone at Springwood, after which they returned to New York and lived in a hotel apartment provided by Sara while Franklin finished his first year of law school.10
That summer, they took a traditional honeymoon, a three-and-a-half-month grand tour of Europe, including Scotland, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Booked in London at Brown’s Hotel, they found themselves identified as close relatives of the president of the United States. With his usual flamboyance, Franklin wrote to his mother, “We were ushered into the royal suite, one flight up, front, price $1,000 a day. . . . Our breath was so taken away that we couldn’t even protest and are now saying ‘Damn the expense.’” (The actual rate was £7, about $35 a day.)11
The trip was not without its frictions. Eleanor obsessed over correct etiquette in the British country homes they visited. Too flustered to give the welcoming talk at a local flower show in Scotland, she had to be rescued by Franklin. His refusal to let her use her superior Italian in bargaining with book dealers annoyed her. The coolest patch came in Cortina, Italy. After Eleanor decided against going on a climbing expedition with him, Franklin made the trek in the company of Miss Kitty Gandy, a thoroughly modern, cigarette-smoking New York milliner. “Though I never said a word I was jealous beyond description,” Eleanor wrote more than thirty years later.
Franklin displayed stress of his own. A case of hives bothered him for much of their time abroad; he sleepwalked on ship and experienced nightmares. The dissatisfactions were ephemeral. The two returned to the United States after a long and generally happy trip, bringing back many purchases, including a Scottish terrier puppy they named Duffy. To all appearances they were pleased with their life together.12
The young couple set up housekeeping in a rented town house at 125 East Thirty-Sixth Street, paid for and furnished by Sara, whose own Madison Avenue house was about three blocks away. Referring to the width of the frontage, Franklin called the place his fourteen-foot mansion. It was crowded from the beginning; Eleanor and Franklin employed at least three servants, a housekeeper, a cook, and a waitress. Soon there was a fourth, a nurse for their first child, Anna, born May 3, 1906. Three other children followed in quick succession: James, December 23, 1907; Franklin Jr., March 18, 1909; and Elliott, September 23, 1910. During this period, Eleanor continued to serve as a surrogate mother to her younger brother, Hall, by then a star pupil at Groton.
In 1907, Sara commissioned the construction of adjoining six-story town houses—one for her, one for Franklin and Eleanor—at 47 and 49 East Sixty-Fifth Street. In the style of the Parish-Ludlow homes that had hosted the wedding, large sliding doors connected the residences. Moving into them in the fall of 1908, the Roosevelt family was big, growing, rambunctious, and increasingly troubled. Franklin enthusiastically played with the two children he had fathered and looked forward to several more. (Cousin Theodore, after all, had brought six into the world.) Eleanor, however, was increasingly unhappy. She had come to her marriage with only the vaguest notions about sexual intercourse and unprepared for the realities of homemaking and motherhood. Many years later, her daughter Anna remembered her mother telling her that sex was a wife’s burden to bear.13
Eleanor also felt a sense of impotence as her mother-in-law seemed to control her everyday life, arranging their living accommodations and engaging nurses for the children. In the beginning stages of her third pregnancy, she broke into tears in front of an uncomprehending Franklin. “I said I did not like to live in a house that was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.” He soothed her, telling her gently that she was “quite mad” and would be better after a bit. Feeling dominated and helpless, she dealt with her situation not by demanding more control over the details of her life but by resorting to “Griselda moods” of sullen, passive acquiescence.14
Recorded a quarter century later, her memories of those years were mostly of personal failure. She gave herself no credit for keeping track of the family expenses—after all, Franklin (and Mr. Parish before him) had taught her how to do it. Nor did she have a sense of achievement in handling numerous minor crises. She scolded herself for being unable “to manage an o
ld-fashioned coal range and . . . cook a whole meal.” She was both intimidated by the severe English nurses Sara hired and ineffective in managing her children by herself. Having picked up the idea that fresh air was good for them, she had them put in “a kind of box with wire on the sides and top” and hung it out a window for their naps. The practice came to an abrupt end when a neighbor, roused by Anna’s frantic crying, threatened to report Eleanor to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Unable to control Franklin’s horse at Hyde Park, she gave up riding for years rather than insist on having a separate mount. When she banged the family automobile into a gatepost, she foreswore driving. Induced to give up her settlement house work for fear that she might bring home one of the numerous diseases that raged through the crowded slums of the Lower East Side, she found herself miserable at home with the children.15
Franklin provided little in the way of sympathy or support. Away during the day, he spent frequent evenings out at club dinners and meetings, poker parties, and social gatherings with relatives. He was a convivial social drinker, and the smell of liquor on his breath horrified a wife who was the child of a tragic alcoholic. Their sharply contrasting attitudes toward the cocktail culture became a lifelong emblem of the gap between his self-indulgent, confident extroversion and her puritanical insecurity.16
The greatest trauma came when their cherished baby, Franklin Jr., died at only seven months old in October 1909. He was buried in the churchyard at Hyde Park. “How cruel it seemed to leave him out there alone in the cold,” Eleanor wrote years later. Falling into a deep depression, she was convinced she somehow had been responsible. Franklin was more stoic. Bad things happen in life, he told her; one had to move on. His efforts merely persuaded her that he was uncaring and left her feeling “bitter” toward him.17
Albeit a terrible loss, an infant’s death was not unusual at the beginning of the twentieth century. Eleanor and Franklin dealt with their grief as best as they could and got on with their lives. Eleanor soon became pregnant again with the boy they would name for her father, Elliott. Their happiest times seem to have been during the long summer vacations at Campobello, especially after they acquired their own thirty-four-room brick cottage, purchased for them in 1910 by Sara. More often, Eleanor suffered in silence. Without quite realizing it, she was moving toward a recognition that she would have to establish independence not only from her mother-in-law but also from her husband.18
The pattern of Franklin’s life was predictable: law school and then the daytime practice of law, numerous evening social events, Hyde Park on weekends and long summer vacations at Campobello—more play than work with many more happy days than sad ones. Ultimately lacking was a sense of purpose and achievement. Although far from depressed—his capacity for enjoyment was too great—he had developing ambitions and an increasing need to work toward them.
He approached his law studies much as he had his Harvard education. Most courses were a bore. A Roosevelt did enough to earn a gentleman’s C. Employment, if one desired it at all, would come through contacts. On the return leg of his honeymoon, he and Eleanor had checked into their Paris hotel to find waiting a letter from Columbia University Law School informing him that he had failed two of his spring semester courses. Unruffled, he cabled for his books to be sent to London. He crammed on the way back across the Atlantic and passed makeup exams with relative ease. In June 1906, at the end of his second year at Columbia, he took the state bar examination. In February 1907 he received official notice that he had passed. Wholly uninterested in finishing a final semester of classes and securing another diploma, he dropped out of law school.
A job came quickly thereafter, facilitated by a family friend who was a partner in the Wall Street law firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, which primarily represented leading corporations and financial establishments. The terms of employment were as penurious as the firm was prosperous: no salary for the first year and only a small one for the second. The job was to begin in September 1907. His title would be “clerk” (not “associate”). Franklin had no illusions about the position. Writing to his mother, he told her, “I shall be a full-fledged office boy.”19
He drafted a “handbill” advertising the range of his services. Aimed primarily at his mother, it lampooned several topics about which they disagreed: his habit of not attending to debts, his preference for hard-liquor cocktails over wine, Cousin Theodore’s insistence that Anglo-Saxons were on the verge of “race suicide,” Sara’s fussy little canine and dominance over the care of their children:
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Counsellor at Law
54 Wall Street
New York
I beg to call your attention to my unexcelled facilities for carrying on every description of legal business.
Unpaid bills a specialty.
Briefs on the liquor question furnished free to ladies.
Race suicides cheerfully prosecuted.
Small dogs chloroformed without charge.
Babies raised under advice of expert grandmother,
etc., etc., etc.20
Franklin’s legal career lasted three years and left no promise of greater things to come. He handled mostly small-claims cases. His greatest triumph came with his assignment by the criminal court to defend a ne’er-do-well accused of stabbing another ne’er-do-well. The judge directed a verdict of acquittal. On one occasion, after winning a case against a fellow lawyer of unpromising origins trying to support an impoverished mother, he gave his strapped opponent a sizeable personal loan. The adversary, who later became a prominent attorney, never forgot the generosity.
In the main, Franklin still seemed a lightweight; he was tall and handsome but not especially masculine, invariably well dressed, always sporting TR-style pince-nez eyeglasses, and much involved in the New York Yacht Club and other social organizations. To all appearances, he was the least serious of the firm’s five clerks. Yet he managed to handle the assignments given him, and in his second year he was made managing clerk at a salary of $10 a week. Nonetheless, the senior managing partner, Lewis Cass Ledyard, seems to have found him annoying. Once, Roosevelt and a fellow clerk, Grenville Clark, took the better part of a spring afternoon off to watch a baseball game. When they got back to the office, they encountered Ledyard, who demanded to know where they had been. Franklin, his breath redolent with ballpark beer, began a response, which Ledyard cut off with a loud “Roosevelt, you’re drunk!” He later told Sara that Franklin lacked the drive and concentration to be a successful lawyer.21
What then was the purpose of the three years at the firm? Franklin likely regarded it as a ticket to be punched along the way to other things. Years later, Grenville Clark, who had become a much esteemed leader of the moderate northeastern Republican establishment, recalled a conversation the five clerks had one afternoon when work was done at the office. Each talked about his plans for the future. Roosevelt told them he wanted to go into politics. He would start with election to the New York State Assembly, get himself appointed assistant secretary of the navy, then become governor of New York. The governor of New York always stood a good chance of becoming president of the United States. He expected to seize that chance. Clark recalled no grins or wisecracks. Something about Franklin invited caricature, but when he spoke seriously, he conveyed force and credibility.22
In 1910, Roosevelt entered his third summer as a Wall Street lawyer. He was twenty-eight years old and had endured enough of the practice of law. American politics from Washington down to the state and local level had become turbulent. Much of the country was dissatisfied with Cousin Theodore’s Republican successor, William Howard Taft, and ready for a change. The time was right for an ambitious young Democrat to make his move.
Chapter 4
Insurgent Progressive
1910–1913
On an afternoon in August 1910, Franklin Roosevelt called on Tom Leonard, a housepainter and lo
cal Democratic Party committeeman. Leonard responded to a warm “Hello, Tom” with a formal and deferential “How do you do, Mr. Roosevelt.” His caller shook hands firmly and responded, “No, call me Franklin, and I’m going to call you Tom.” With those words, the twenty-eight-year-old patrician crossed a social gap, openly embraced a consuming ambition, and indicated an intent to emulate his famous cousin, Theodore, against long odds.1
Franklin possessed no interest in law as a profession and rejected opportunities his Delano relations could have provided in one of their enterprises. Largely adopting his father’s role as a local squire, he acquired land adjoining his own, some of it worked by tenant farmers, some of it producing evergreen trees periodically harvested and sold at Christmastime. He dabbled in community activities, including involvement with the volunteer fire department and the local ice-boating club, became a director of the Bank of Poughkeepsie, and served as a vestryman at St. James Church. None of these activities satisfied an expansive ambition.2
Theodore Roosevelt’s example was clearly a driving force, and 1910 was a propitious year to enter politics. TR had become the leading figure in the multifaceted push for social and political reform that was beginning to be called the progressive movement. A reaction against big finance, large corporations, militant labor unions, and traditional political machines, progressivism respected educated expertise in public policy and maintained an attitude of benevolence toward the nation’s large impoverished class of unskilled and semiskilled workers. TR established its tone and policy with advocacy of reasonable concessions to workers, government oversight of the “trusts,” support of conservation, an arm’s-length stance toward political machines, and espousal of a “square deal” for all Americans.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 5