But aside from these dreamy moments serving her mother, Eleanor felt most of the time “a curious barrier” between herself and the rest of her little family. In the late afternoons, she recalled, her mother sat in the parlor with her two brothers. “Little Ellie adored her, the baby [Hall] sat on her lap . . . . [I can] still remember standing in the door, very often with my finger in my mouth—which was, of course, forbidden and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said, ‘Come in, Granny.’ If a visitor was there she might turn and say: ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, we always call her Granny.’ I wanted to sink through the floor in shame, and I felt I was apart from the boys.” The painful memory of these afternoons in the parlor remained with Eleanor, reappearing thirty years later in a fictional composition in which she wrote of “a blue eyed rather ugly little girl standing in the door of a cozy library looking in at a very beautiful woman holding, oh so lovingly, in her lap a little fair haired boy.”
For most of Eleanor’s eighth year, her father remained in exile in Abingdon, Virginia, where her mother and her uncle Theodore had sent him in the hope that the forced separation from his family would motivate him to take hold of himself. “A child stood at a window . . . ,” Eleanor wrote in her composition book. “Her father [was] the only person in the world she loved, others called her hard & cold but to him she was everything lavishing on him all the quiet love which the others could not understand. And now he had gone she did not know for how long but he had said ‘what ever happens little girl some day I will come back’ & she had smiled. He never knew what the smile cost.”
On her eighth birthday, Eleanor received a long and loving letter from Abingdon, addressed to “My darling little Daughter.” “Because Father is not with you is not because he doesn’t love you,” he wrote. “For I love you tenderly and dearly. And maybe soon I’ll come back all well and strong and we will have such good times together, like we used to have. I have to tell all the little children here often about you and all that I remember of you when you were a little bit of a girl and you used to call yourself Father’s little ‘Golden Hair’—and how you used to come into my dressing room and dress me in the morning and frighten me by saying I’d be late for breakfast.”
These letters, filled only with love for her, Eleanor later wrote, were the letters she loved and kissed before she went to bed. But there were other letters, filled with news of the life he was leading in Abingdon, that inadvertently brought her pain and reinforced her feeling of being an outsider. In these newsy letters he often spoke of riding horseback with a group of little children near where he lived. “I was always longing to join the group,” Eleanor later wrote. “One child in particular I remember. I envied her very much because he was so very fond of her.”
A month after Eleanor’s eighth birthday, her mother contracted a fatal case of diphtheria. Her father was told to return from his exile in Virginia, but Anna died before he was able to get home. “I can remember standing by a window when Cousin Susie told me that my mother was dead,” Eleanor later wrote. “Death meant nothing to me, and one fact wiped out everything else—my father was back and I would see him very soon.”
When Elliott finally arrived, Eleanor recorded, “he held out his arms and gathered me to him. In a little while he began to talk, to explain to me that my mother was gone, that she had been all the world to him and now he only had my brothers and myself, that my brothers were very young and that he and I must keep close together. Some day I would make a home for him again, we would travel together and do many things. Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether my brothers were to be our children or whether he felt that they would be at school and college and later independent. There started that day a feeling which never left me—that he and I were very close together and some day would have a life of our own together . . . . When he left, I was all alone to keep our secret of mutual understanding.”
The decision was made to send Eleanor and her brothers to their grandmother Hall’s while Elliott returned to Virginia. From then on, Eleanor admitted, “subconsciously I must have been waiting always for his visits. They were irregular and he rarely sent word before he arrived, but never was I in the house even in my room two long flights of stairs above the entrance door that I did not hear his voice the minute he entered the front door.” During these precious visits, Elliott painted a picture for his daughter of the valiant, gifted, upright little girl he expected her to be, and Eleanor did her best, she later wrote, despite her consciousness of her ugly looks and her many deficiencies, to make herself into “a fairly good copy of the picture he had painted.”
The year after her mother died, Eleanor’s four-year-old brother, Ellie, also fell ill with diphtheria and died. Though she was a child herself, Eleanor tried to comfort her father. “We must remember,” she wrote him, “Ellie is going to be safe in heaven and to be with Mother who is waiting there . . . .”
But then, when Eleanor was ten, the visits and the letters from her father stopped. The years of heavy drinking took their final toll. Suffering from delirium tremens, Elliott tried to jump out of the window of his house, had a seizure and died, at the age of thirty-four. “My aunts told me,” Eleanor recalled, “but I simply refused to believe it, and while I wept long . . . I finally went to sleep and began the next day living in my dream world as usual. My grandmother decided we children should not go to the funeral and so I had no tangible thing to make death real to me. From that time on . . . I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.”
From the melancholy lives of both her parents, as she would learn again in her own marriage, Eleanor had come to understand that promises were made to be broken, and that no one’s love for her was meant to last. The legacy of repeated loss as a child left her prey to the recurring depressions she suffered as an adult. Always waiting in the wings, depression was for Eleanor a dark companion that strode to center stage whenever there were turnabouts in the established pattern of her life.
• • •
But the legacy of Eleanor’s childhood also produced resilient strength. No matter how many times her father disappointed her, Eleanor knew, at bottom, that he loved her profoundly, that he had chosen her as his favorite child. And this knowledge was something that neither alcoholism nor death could destroy. “It was her father who acquainted Eleanor with grief,” Joe Lash has written. “But he also gave her the ideals that she tried to live up to all her life by presenting her with the picture of what he wanted her to be—noble, studious, religious, loving and good.”
“We do not have to become heroes overnight,” Eleanor once wrote. “Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.” So, step by step, Eleanor willed herself to become the accomplished daughter her father had decreed her to be, the fearless woman that would make him proud. Every inch of her journey was filled with peril and anxiety, but she never stopped moving forward. “The thing always to remember,” she said, is that “you must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
As a young girl trapped in the austere household of her grandmother after her parents died, Eleanor used to hide books under her mattress so she could wake up in the middle of the night to read them, defying her grandmother’s edict that she be allowed to read only at set times and in set places. Her passionate reading of Dickens and Scott awakened within her a romantic belief that, no matter how grim everything seemed, there was always some way out.
Hers came when her grandmother sent her away to a boarding school in London run by an inspired teacher, Mademoiselle Souvestre. From the moment Eleanor arrived at Allenswood and looked into the smiling eyes of the seventy-year-old headmistress, she felt that she was starting “a new life,” free from all her earlier troubles. In Mademoiselle Souvestre, Eleanor found the maternal love she had never enjoyed as a child, and in the power of that love, the young girl
blossomed. Excelling at everything she did—at her lessons in every subject, at poetry recitations, even at field hockey—Eleanor quickly became “everything” at the school, the most respected student among faculty and students alike. Step by step, Eleanor later said, Allenswood “started me on my way to self confidence.” Her three years there, she said, were “the happiest of my life.”
Not long after her return to New York, Eleanor began seeing her cousin Franklin at parties and dances. They had first met when they were two and four, but now, fifteen years later, a special bond developed between them. Eleanor was unlike any girl Franklin had met. She was serious and intelligent, free from affectation, and wholly uninterested in the world of debutante balls. Though her interest in philosophy and ethics seemed ridiculous to her cousin Alice Roosevelt, Teddy’s daughter, who noted sarcastically that Eleanor “always wanted to discuss things like whether contentment was better than happiness,” Franklin was intrigued. He enjoyed her company immensely. He invited her to Campobello in the summer, to dances and football games at Harvard in the fall, and to Hyde Park in the spring, where they rode together in the woods and sat on the porch at twilight reading poetry to one another.
While Franklin completed his studies at Harvard, Eleanor was happily ensconced at the Rivington Street settlement house in New York, where she supervised a class of immigrant children in exercise and dance. From her early childhood, when her father had taken her to a newsboy clubhouse which his father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., had started, Eleanor found herself “tremendously interested in all these ragged little boys and in the fact which my father explained, that many of them had no homes and lived in wooden shanties.” Her work at the settlement house was tremendously stimulating to her, and she was delighted to feel that she could be of some help.
One afternoon when Franklin was in New York, she asked him to pick her up at the settlement house. Just before they were ready to leave, a young girl suddenly fell ill, and Eleanor enlisted Franklin’s help to take the child home. Nothing in Franklin’s sheltered life had prepared him for the grating sounds and sour smells of the dilapidated tenement where the young girl lived. “My God,” he told Eleanor, “I didn’t know anyone lived like that.”
How easy Eleanor felt in Franklin’s presence! Her awkwardness seemed suddenly to disappear, her old dejection passed away. The inferiority she had always experienced in the presence of men vanished as she came to trust that he thought her better and more interesting than all the other young women in the world. The letters she wrote during the first months of their romance reveal an absolute delight at the experience of falling in love, combined with a fervent wish to be with her lover every moment of the day.
“Though I only wrote last night,” she told him one autumn day when she was seventeen, “I must write you just a line this morning to tell you that I miss you every moment & that you are never out of my thoughts dear for one moment . . . . I am so happy. Oh! so happy & I love you so dearly.”
And she knew that he loved her as she loved him. “It is impossible to tell you what these last two days have been to me,” Eleanor wrote after a weekend together at Hyde Park, “but I know they have meant the same to you so that you will understand that I love you dearest and I hope that I shall always prove worthy of the love which you have given me. I have never before known what it was to be absolutely happy.”
As the days and months passed, Eleanor recalled, she came to realize that the hours they were together meant the most to her. She was happiest when she was with him. Though she was only nineteen when he asked her to marry him, she was absolutely sure that it was right. “When he told me that he loved me and asked me to marry him, I did not hesitate to say yes, for I knew that I loved him too.” A week later, Eleanor was still filled with joy. “I was thinking last night of the difference which one short week can make in one’s life. Everything is changed for me now . . . . I am so happy.”
Franklin’s letters from this period no longer exist. Eleanor burned them—most likely in 1937, Joe Lash speculates, when she was working on her autobiography and found his youthful avowals of constancy unto death too painful and uncomfortable to reread. Yet there is no doubt that he, too, had been caught in the tide of a powerful love. “I am the happiest man just now in the world,” he told his mother after Eleanor accepted his proposal, “likewise the luckiest.”
• • •
When Eleanor married Franklin, she traded the chance for deeper involvement in social work for the hope of finding happiness as a wife and mother. Six children quickly followed (one of the six died at twenty months). “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have another one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted.” At one point, she expressed a desire to return to the settlement house, but her mother-in-law dissuaded her on the grounds that she would be coming home with germs that would contaminate her own children.
Forced to remain at home while her husband went to work, Eleanor found her old insecurities returning. So painful was the memory of her own tormented childhood that she approached the task of mothering with little joy. She worried constantly about nutrition, illness, and discipline. Her lack of confidence caught Franklin by surprise. “He had always been secure in every way, you see,” Eleanor later said, “and then he discovered that I was perfectly insecure.”
It was only after her last child was born, in 1916, and after the crisis provoked by Lucy Mercer, that Eleanor found her identity. Free to define a new role for herself beyond her family, she poured all her pent-up energies into a variety of reformist organizations dedicated to the abolition of child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, and the passage of protective legislation for women workers. In the process, she discovered she had real talents for organization, leadership, and public life. Her political activities expanded still further after Franklin’s paralysis, when he turned to her to keep the Roosevelt name in the public eye while he concentrated on regaining his health. “The polio was very instrumental in bringing them much closer into a very real partnership,” Anna observed. “They were finding mutual interests on a totally different level than they had been before.”
During Franklin’s years as governor and president, the Roosevelts became so deeply involved with one another that they seemed like two halves of a single whole whose lives, as New Deal economist Rexford Tugwell put it, “were joined in a common cause.” Her astonishing travels, her strong convictions, her curiosity about almost every phase of the nation’s life, from slum clearance to experimental beehives, from rural electrification to country dances, provided fascinating material for endless conversations, arguments, and debates.
Their working partnership involved the creation of a shared emotional territory in which they could relate to each other with abiding love and respect. To be sure, on some occasions, she irritated and even exasperated him, but he never ceased to respect and admire her. Nor did she ever stop loving him. “I hated to see you go . . . ,” Eleanor wrote Franklin in the 1930s as he set out on a journey overseas. “We are really very dependent on each other though we do see so little of each other.”
Understanding the nature of their relationship, it is not surprising, then, that Eleanor anguished so much in the spring of 1940 over the fear that her partnership would break apart. The husband who had been her close friend would now be more remote, his attention directed to international concerns. The man who loved nothing more than the detailed stories of her travels, now had little time and less inclination to listen to her.
But just as she had surmounted her unhappiness in 1933 and managed to etch a role for the first lady in domestic affairs never before practiced, so now, as the imperatives of war propelled a conversion of the nation, she would slowly come to grips with her depression, rallying her forces once more to effect a transformation of her role to fit the changing times.
• • •
By the end of June, Eleanor had found her first wartime cause in the movement to open Ameri
ca’s doors to the refugee children of Europe. With the entire continent under Nazi control, and England living in fear of imminent invasion, the public cry for evacuating as many European children as possible reached a crescendo.
The chance to work on a project that mattered both to her and to the world was a tonic to Eleanor. Into her Greenwich Village apartment she brought together representatives of various relief and charitable agencies—including the American Friends Service Committee, the German-Jewish Children’s Aide, and the Committee for Catholic Refugees—to determine what could be done. The refugee crisis seemed the perfect focus for Eleanor’s abilities, combining her humanitarian zeal with her organizational skill. Clearly, there was no time to lose.
On the morning of June 20, at a hastily arranged conference at New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel, a new umbrella organization was born with Eleanor as honorary chair—the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children. The purpose of the new committee was to coordinate all the different agencies and resources available in the United States for the care of refugee children. The first goal was to get the State Department to relax its restrictions on the granting of visas; the second, to establish a network of families in the United States willing to care for the children once they arrived.
That evening at Eleanor’s apartment, the new committee held its first meeting. A number of members were anxious to have the Republican banker Winthrop Aldrich as chairman. Before endorsing him, Eleanor excused herself and called the president to see what he thought of Aldrich. Roosevelt, who was in his study when she reached him, having dinner with Harry Hopkins, was appalled at the idea. “You know, darling,” he told her, wildly overstating his case to make his opposition clear, “he would be the first to welcome Hitler with open arms.” Placed in a delicate situation by her husband’s sharp reaction, Eleanor quickly composed herself, walked back into the living room, and said in her most disarming manner, “It was kind of Mr. Aldrich to offer to be chairman, but is it not better from the point of view of geography to have someone from the Middle West?” At that, she turned immediately to the Chicago philanthropist and New Deal loyalist Marshall Field; she knew it would be a bother for him, but could he accept? Though caught somewhat off guard, Field gave his assent, and a troublesome problem was averted.