A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, 1905-1928 - Softcover

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Geoffrey C. Ward is the coauthor of The Civil War (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns), and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize. He lives in New York City.

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CHAPTER 1

THE WONDERFUL HUSBAND

T HE CAPTAIN of a transatlantic liner was his ship’s social arbiter as well as her commander. In consultation with the purser—and often only after contacting the home office—he carefully surveyed the passenger list, selecting from it for his own table in the great dining saloon that handful of men and women whose prominence was so obvious that even the most socially ambitious travellers would be willing to accept assignment elsewhere.

This was often delicate work, but not when preparing the seating for the June 7, 1905, sailing of the White Star liner Oceanic from New York. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were aboard, on their way to England and the Continent for a delayed honeymoon. Young Mrs. Roosevelt was the favorite niece of the President of the United States, the daughter of his late younger brother, Elliott Roosevelt; Theodore Roosevelt himself had given her away at her wedding. She was only twenty and unusually tall—nearly as tall as her husband—and surprisingly diffident, with a habit of gazing down at her hands while waiting for others to speak to her. But there was no question of her social preeminence. Franklin Roosevelt was not only her husband but the twenty-three-year-old son of the late James Roosevelt, who had been a frequent passenger aboard the ships of the White Star line and a good friend of its late founder, Sir Thomas Ismay.

Eleanor was seated in the place of honor at Captain J.G. Cameron’s right, Franklin assured his mother, in one of the first of the steady, reassuring stream of letters he and his bride would write home to Sara, “and 1 next….”

The young Roosevelts had been married for nearly three months before they sailed. They had put off their honeymoon so that Franklin could complete his first year at Columbia Law School and take his examinations. At Sara’s urging, they had started their lives together with a week at Hyde Park—”just where my great happiness began,” she told them.

We know little of how happy the young Roosevelts were that week. Franklin characteristically left no record of it, while what seems to have remained with Eleanor were a jumble of proofs of her own crippling timorousness. She remembered most vividly that Elspeth McEachern—”Elespie,” who had been the Springwood housekeeper since long before Franklin was born—had coldly looked her up and down as she arrived, as if “wondering if 1 would come up to her expectations as the wife of ‘her boy.’ “

The morning after their first night together as man and wife, standing in the Springwood parlor near the fire that took the edge off the March wind blowing around the house, Franklin had shown Eleanor one of his most precious first editions. Somehow—“in some inconceivable way,” she recalled half a century later, still horrified at the memory—she slightly tore one of the pages. (Perhaps, like a good many of the volumes on her husband’s shelves, its pages had never been cut; he was always a collector, not a reader.) In any case, she wrote, “I held it in my hands, frozen with fear…. Finally, I made myself tell him what I had done. He looked at me with bewilderment and some amusement. ‘If you had not done it,’ “ he assured her, “ ‘I probably would [have].’

“What I had dreaded, I don’t know,” Eleanor wrote, “but I remember my vast relief. That was the beginning of my becoming more mature about my fears of displeasing people.”

If so, it was just the beginning, and the depth of her fears must have honestly baffled her husband, whose own eagerness to please was accompanied by an inbred sense of his own importance at once strong and unexamined. The orphaned daughter of an erratic, alcoholic father and a distant, self-absorbed mother, and raised by relatives whose interest in her was for the most part merely dutiful, Eleanor had never been able to count on anyone’s unshakable affection, was always worried that she would somehow offend those who she hoped would love her, that her failings would drive them to abandon her. Her own lack of self-confidence had been a revelation to Franklin, she once told an interviewer: “He had always been secure in every way, you see, and then he discovered that I was perfectly insecure….”

Franklin began to call Eleanor by a pet name, at once fond and faintly patronizing—”Babs,” short for “Baby.”

After their week together at Hyde Park, Franklin and Eleanor moved into a small furnished apartment Sara found for them on West 45th Street. “Went to F. & E’s apartment at Hotel Webster,” she wrote the evening after they moved in, “arranged flowers and went to my French lecture. Returned to find my children and brought them home to lunch with me.”

The young couple spent just over a month on 45th Street. Eleanor’s insecurities were again apparent. She could sew—a childhood nurse had seen to that—but she knew nothing of cleaning or cooking, could not even order a meal properly, or so she remembered. The hotel staff and its kitchens helped, but it was not easy. She was humiliated by her own incompetence, fearful that she was already proving inadequate as wife and daughter-in-law. And when her younger brother, Hall, now a big hearty adolescent, came down from Groton to spend a few days with his sister and her new husband, she was embarrassed by him, too. “He seemed to fill the whole apartment,” she recalled, even though he had a room of his own.

Franklin offered her what reassurance he could, while doing his best to keep up with his studies. But it may have been with some relief that the young Roosevelts shifted to Sara’s empty, rented brownstone at 200 Madison Avenue when she moved up to Hyde Park at the end of April. Elespie was sent down from Springwood to manage their little household and supervise the cook and waitress. Eleanor was not to worry; Sara would take care of things, and while her children were abroad she would do her best to find them a house to rent for the coming year. The young wife was almost pathetically grateful. “Thank you so much dear for everything you did for us,” she wrote to her mother-in-law that spring. “You are just the sweetest, dearest Mama to your children. . . .”

More than anything in the world, that was what Sara wanted to hear. For she, too, was then full of fears. She had long before lost the father she revered, and, more recently, the husband she loved. To the end of her life she would keep near at hand the miniature leatherbound Episcopal Book of Common Prayer she had gripped helplessly the night Mr. James died; a sepia photograph of him in his last days was carefully pasted to the flyleaf, and across from it, written in her hand, the place and date of his death: “10 W. 43; December the Eighth, 1900.”

Her great worry now was that she would also somehow lose the son who was all she had left. “How can I be thankful enough to God for you,” she once wrote Franklin, “when He has taken from me the love & devotion that have so long been mine?” Nelly Blodgett, Franklin’s godmother and Sara’s closest friend since girlhood, understood his all-importance: “... now, dear Franklin,” she told him shortly after his father died, “you are everything to your dear mother.”

That was not an exaggeration. Sara had faithfully kept a...