But on this occasion, Franklin had proved as stubborn as his mother, insisting that the alcohol remain in open and ready condition. When the king came into the library, Franklin greeted him with a twinkle in his eye: “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea.” The king reflected for a moment and then observed, “Neither does my mother.” Whereupon the president and the king raised their glasses to one another in an unspoken bond and proceeded to drink their martinis.
There were occasions when Sara’s strength failed, when she was tormented by stomach pains or suffered keenly from the heat. At such times, she told her son, she wondered, “Perhaps I have lived too long, but when I think of you and hear your voice I do not ever want to leave you.” She thought of him almost all the time, Sara had written Franklin right after his May 16 address to the Congress, “and realize a little of the feelings of responsibility you have, with all the horror of what is going on and the wish to help. I am very proud of the way you keep your head.”
There was an extraordinary bond between mother and son. “Nothing,” Eleanor observed, “ever seemed to disturb the deep, underlying affection they had for each other.”
The president had no special plans for this June weekend beyond rest and relaxation. In the mornings, he slept late; at lunchtime, he lingered longer than usual at the table; and in the afternoons, he took long leisurely rides through his estate and through the surrounding countryside. The unhurried pace was just what he needed to regenerate his energies and refocus his brain. Time and again, Roosevelt confounded his staff by the ease with which, even in the darkest hours, he managed to shake off the burdens of the presidency upon his arrival at Hyde Park, and emerged stronger and more confident in a matter of days.
• • •
“All that is in me goes back to the Hudson,” Roosevelt liked to say, meaning not simply the peaceful, slow-moving river and the big, comfortable clapboard house but the ambience of boundless devotion that encompassed him as a child. As the adored only son of a young mother and an aging patriarch, Roosevelt grew up in an atmosphere where affection and respect were plentiful, where the discipline was fair and loving, and the opportunities for self-expression abundant. The sense of being loved wholeheartedly by his parents taught Roosevelt to trust that the world was basically a friendly and agreeable place.
Photographs of Sara Delano, twenty-six years old at the time of his birth, reveal a young woman conscious of her beauty, with lustrous upswept hair, high cheekbones, a long, sleek neck, and large brown eyes. She had spent most of her childhood in a forty-room country estate, Algonac, high above the Hudson River, near Newburgh, New York. There, under the protective wing of her autocratic but loving father, Warren Delano II, she had led a life of elegance and ease, with private tutors, dancing lessons, and trips to the Orient. Her summer days were spent in the country, rowing on the river, riding horseback through the woods, and picnicking on the shore; her winters were divided between social life in Manhattan and the outdoor life of Algonac, complete with sleighrides in the fields and skating on the ponds. It was a tranquil life, producing within Sara the deep sense of privilege and place which she passed on to her son.
Years later, Sara recognized that her parents had deliberately kept from their children “all traces of sadness or trouble or the news of anything alarming.” So highly did the Delanos value the outward appearance of tranquillity, Sara proudly recalled, that no one was ever allowed to complain or to cry, even if there was something terribly wrong. At age four, Sara had fallen on the sharp corner of a cabinet. The deep wound was sewed shut with needle and thread. That Sara never flinched or cried drew her father’s praise. But in casting a positive light on this aspect of her childhood, Sara failed to appreciate, as her great-grandson John Boettiger, Jr., later put it, that “pain-killing can itself be a lethal act.” When she married, she would strive to shelter her son in the same way as her father had sheltered her. “If there remained in Franklin Roosevelt throughout his life,” Boettiger, Jr., observed, “an insensitivity towards and discomfort with profound and vividly expressed feelings, it may have been in part the lengthened shadow of his early sheltering from ugliness and jealousy and conflicting interests.”
Franklin’s father, known as “Mr. James,” was nearly twice Sara’s age when she married him. Tall and slender with full muttonchop whiskers, he, too, had grown up in an environment of wealth and privilege. Like the Delanos, the Roosevelts defined themselves primarily as country gentlemen, adopting the habits, the hobbies, and the love of the outdoors that characterized the English gentry. Mount Hope, the country estate on which James was born, was twenty miles upstream from Algonac. The Roosevelt family money had been made years before in dry goods, real estate, and trade, primarily the West Indies sugar trade. As a young man, James, after graduating from Harvard Law School, had taken an interest in coal and the railroads, but never was he more content than when he was in the country, hunting, fishing, or riding. At the age of twenty-five, he had married a second cousin, Rebecca Howland, and the following year a son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt, known as “Rosy,” was born. It was, from all accounts, a peaceful marriage, which lasted for nearly twenty-five years, until Rebecca suffered a fatal heart attack.
Four years later, Mr. James was introduced to Sara Delano at a small dinner party hosted by the family of his fourth cousin Theodore Roosevelt. Both James and Sara knew at once that they wanted to marry; the courtship lasted just ten weeks. On October 7, 1880, as the autumn sun was just beginning to set, James took his new bride to Springwood, the rambling house in Hyde Park he had bought two decades earlier, when Mount Hope burned to the ground.
There, at Springwood, in a bedroom overlooking the snow-covered lawn, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882. It was a difficult birth, so difficult that the doctors advised Sara not to have any more children. Unable to produce a large family, Sara focused her prodigious energies on shaping the life of her healthy, handsome son.
“No moment of Franklin’s day was unscheduled,” Roosevelt biographer Geoffrey Ward has written. “His mother oversaw everything, followed him everywhere . . . . Hers was a loving even adoring autocracy but an autocracy nonetheless,” in which the boy’s natural longing for a bit of privacy was felt by his mother to be a deliberate shunning of her company. Once, when Franklin was only five years old, his mother noticed that he seemed melancholy. When she asked him why he was sad, he did not answer at first, so she repeated her question. “Then,” Sara recalled, “with a curious little gesture that combined entreaty with a suggestion of impatience, he clasped his hands in front of him and exclaimed, ‘Oh, for freedom!’”
The incident made Sara wonder if perhaps she was regulating her son’s life too closely, but after a short experiment in which he was given no rules for an entire day and allowed to roam at will with absolutely no attention from his mother, Sara reported, he “of his own accord went contentedly back to his routine.”
Everything about the boy’s childhood seemed structured to make him feel that he was the center of his parents’ world. In the early years, Mr. James spent hours every day with his son, teaching him how to row and sail, and skate and sled. Wherever his parents went—whether to visit friends in their carriage or for long walks along the river or to Europe for vacations—Franklin went with them. Surrounded by older people, the young boy developed early on a remarkable ease with adults, an unusual poise, an excellent set of manners which earned him much praise. Relatives consistently remarked on what a “nice child” he was, so adaptable, so uncomplaining, so “bright and pleasant and happy.”
Relaxed relationships with children his own age were harder to come by. Most of Franklin’s boyhood friends were the children of other River families who were brought to his house to play at scheduled hours and then taken back home. Only with the children of families who worked on his parents’ estate did he have what approached spontaneous relationships, and even then everyone involved always knew that
the young Roosevelt was ultimately in charge.
An intuitive child, Franklin learned to anticipate the desires of his parents even before he was told what to do. “It never occurred to me,” Sara wrote, “to caution him against hazardous undertakings . . . . Franklin had proved himself such a responsible little boy that I never for a moment believed he would undertake anything he was not fully equipped to handle.” The mother’s confidence built confidence in the son; he rarely disappointed his parents’ high expectations. “We never were strict merely for the sake of being strict. We took secret pride in the fact that Franklin instinctively never seemed to require that kind of handling.”
Yet one consequence of early adaptation to a parent’s wishes is the fear that all the love captured with so much effort is simply admiration for the good manners and the achievements and the good nature, not truly love for the child as he really is. What would happen, the precocious child wonders, if I appeared on the outside as I really am on the inside—sad, angry, rude, jealous, scared? Where would my parents’ love be then? The child’s fear of exposure can remain in the adult. This would explain Franklin Roosevelt’s lifelong tendency to guard his weaknesses and shortcomings as if they were scars, making it difficult for him to share his true feelings with anyone.
As the boy’s world widened beyond his house, his sense of confidence deepened. Accompanying Mr. James on daily rounds of his estate, walking with him in the tiny village of Hyde Park, sitting next to him at St. James Church, the boy could not help observing the deferential treatment his father received, the respect accorded the Roosevelts almost as a matter of right. So, too, when he rode in the carriage with his mother as she dispatched food and clothing to the sick and poor, he recognized at once that his family was in the position of having more than enough for themselves so they could give to others. These early observations instilled in the boy the confident belief that the Roosevelts were special people, inheritors of a proud tradition.
When Franklin was eight, his father suffered a serious heart attack that would leave him essentially an invalid for the remaining ten years of his life, unable to play tennis, ride horseback, or even enjoy the long walks in the woods he had once loved so much. More than any other event in Franklin’s childhood, his father’s heart attack had an indelible impact on the development of his personality. From that point on, the boy’s built-in desire to please his parents by being a “nice little boy” was amplified by the fear that if he ever appeared other than bright and happy it might damage his father’s already weakened heart. The story is told of a ghastly injury the young boy received when a steel rod fell on his head, leaving an ugly gash in his forehead. Refusing to worry his father, Franklin found a cap to cover the wound and insisted that Mr. James never be told.
In later years, Roosevelt’s anxiety to please would become so finely tuned that he would be able to win the hearts and minds of almost everyone he met. “By the warmth of his greeting,” Sam Rosenman wrote, “he could make a casual visitor believe that nothing was so important to him that day as this particular visit, and that he had been waiting all day for this hour to arrive. Only a person who really loved human beings could give that impression.” It seemed at times as if he possessed invisible antennae that allowed him to understand what his fellow citizens were thinking and feeling, so that he could craft his own responses to meet their deepest needs.
But the desire to please became a two-edged sword in the White House, when the president’s lack of candor led to confusion. Wanting to set each caller at ease, he had a habit of nodding his head in agreement. The visitor would leave, mistakenly assuming he had garnered the president’s support. “Perhaps in the long run,” New Deal adviser Raymond Moley argued, “fewer friends would have been lost by bluntness than by the misunderstandings that arose from engaging ambiguity.”
Mr. James’ illness brought Sara even closer to her only son, so close that she could not bear to part with him when the time came for him to go to boarding school at Groton. Instead, she kept him home two additional years, not letting him go until he was fourteen. The day before Franklin finally left for school, Sara and he spent many hours together. “We dusted his birds,” she wrote in her diary, “and he had a swim in the river. I looked on with a heavy heart.” For weeks afterward, Sara could not pass his empty bedroom without breaking down in tears.
Because he started school two years later than most of his classmates, Franklin was always set apart from the rest of the boys. “They knew things he didn’t,” Eleanor said later. “He felt left out.” Unaccustomed to the ordinary give and take of schoolmates, Franklin put his fellow students off. The studied charm that impressed his parents’ friends and delighted the faculty at Groton seemed affected to boys his own age. “They didn’t like him,” Eleanor once said. “They had to give him a certain recognition because of his intellectual ability. But he was never of the inner clique.” Resentful at his lack of popularity, yearning to be at center stage as he had been all his life, Franklin turned at times to sarcasm, an unfeeling ribbing of his schoolmates, which only made things worse.
Never once, however, did Franklin admit to his mother, as he would later confess to his wife, that something had gone “sadly wrong” at Groton. On the contrary, blurring the distinction between things as they were and things as he wished them to be, his ever-cheerful letters convinced her that his career at Groton was a great success. “Almost overnight,” Sara recorded, “he became sociable and gregarious and entered with the frankest enjoyment into every kind of social activity.”
At Harvard College, Franklin faced rejection once more when he was blackballed from the exclusive Porcellian Club, but there was such a variety of things at the college to claim his attention—the rowing crew, the debutante dances, the Hasty Pudding Club, the Fly Club, the student newspaper—that the hurt was less visible. What is more, Franklin was beginning to learn from his success at the Crimson—where he was made managing editor and then president—that, if he wanted to assume center stage, he had to create situations where he was the best person to handle a particular job.
During the fall of Franklin’s freshman year, his father died. Unable to bear the loneliness of Hyde Park, Sara took an apartment in Boston for the winter so that she could be near Franklin. “She was an indulgent mother,” a family friend observed, “but would not let her son call his soul his own.” Early on, Franklin had sensed the competition between his interest in other girls and his mother’s love. Now it seemed even more important to keep his girlfriends a secret lest his mother feel betrayed. The only way he knew how to fend her off was to become evasive and vague, sharing with her all the unimportant details about his girls while reserving for himself the feelings that really mattered.
Over time, Franklin’s evasiveness became a pattern he could never break. “The effort to become his own man without wounding his mother,” Ward observed, “fostered in him much of the guile and easy charm, love of secrecy and skill at maneuver he brought to the White House.” On occasion, when his deviousness seemed to go beyond the bounds of necessity, it seemed as if he were enjoying subterfuge for its own sake.
So successful was the young Franklin at hiding his emotions that he took his mother and close friends totally by surprise when he announced that he had fallen in love with his fifth cousin Eleanor and intended to marry her. Though Sara had seen Franklin with Eleanor on numerous occasions, she had absolutely no idea the relationship was heading toward marriage.
“I know what pain I must have caused you,” Franklin wrote his mother after he told her the shocking news, “and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it . . . . I know my mind, have known it for a long time and know that I could never think otherwise . . . and you, dear Mummy, you know that nothing can ever change what we have always been and always will be to each other—only now you have two children to love and love you—and Eleanor as you know will always be a daughter to you in every true way.”
Sara was not so easily a
ssuaged. Reminding Franklin that at twenty-one he was much too young to marry, she exacted a promise from him to postpone the official announcement for a year. In the meantime, she tried to engage his interests elsewhere: first by securing a job for him in London; then, after that failed, by taking him on a Caribbean cruise. But when the trip was over, he was still in love with Eleanor. Sara was desolate. “I am feeling pretty blue . . . . The journey is over & I feel as if the time were not likely to come again when I shall take a trip with my dear boy . . . .” Sara wrote. “Oh how still the house is . . . .” With unerring intuition, Eleanor apprehended Sara’s pain. “Don’t let her feel that the last trip with you is over,” Eleanor advised Franklin. “We three must take them together in the future . . . .”
As the waiting period drew to a close, Franklin selected an engagement ring at Tiffany’s, which he gave to Eleanor on her twentieth birthday. The official announcement, made a few weeks later, produced a round of congratulatory notes. “I have more respect and admiration for Eleanor than any girl I have ever met,” Franklin’s cousin Lyman Delano wrote. “You are mighty lucky,” one of Eleanor’s previous suitors told Franklin. “Your future wife is such as it is the privilege of few men to have.” But perhaps the letter both Franklin and Eleanor treasured the most was the affectionate note from President Theodore Roosevelt, who offered to give his niece away in marriage.