Read Online Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash - Free Book Online Page A

individualism was not troubled by the fact that at a time when half-a-million-dollar yachts and million-dollar mansions were being built, thousands of unemployed were looking for work, bread, and shelter, that the average income of eleven million out of the twelve million American families was $380 a year. They approved of industrialists like Pullman, who proclaimed that “the workers have nothing to do with the amount of wages they shall receive.” In 1893 they were relieved when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a 2-per-cent tax on income of $4,000 and over; a good friend and Roosevelt family adviser, Joseph Choate, had argued the case, denouncing the tax as “a communist march on private property.”
    â€œUnfair” taxes and the threat of the nascent labor movement may have invaded the after-dinner conversations of the men, but matters involving politics were of no concern to gentlewomen. Godey’s Lady’s Book , the widely read arbiter of feminine taste and interest in the 1880s, made it a matter of policy to avoid references to public controversy and agitating influence. In 1884 the closest it came to discussing a woman in public life was “Queen Victoria as a Writer.” Women’s suffrage had become an important issue, but it had no supporters in the Roosevelt family among either the men or the women.
    F AMILY LETTERS and recollections provide few glimpses of Eleanor’s childhood, yet they were obviously critical years. In Eleanor’s later portrayal of these years she emerges as a child who was full of fears—of the dark, of dogs, horses, snakes, of other children. She was “afraid of being scolded, afraid that other people would not like me.” She spoke of a sense of inferiority that was almost overpowering coupled with an unquenchable craving for praise and affection. She described her mother as the most beautiful woman she ever knew but also asrepresenting cold virtue, severity, and disapproval, while her father embodied everything that was warm and joyous in her childhood.
    Her contrasting memories of her mother and father emerged in a brief account of her first visit to Hyde Park that she included among the explanatory footnotes to her father’s letters, in Hunting Big Game in the Eighties . On January 30, 1882, “a splendid large baby boy” (Sara Roosevelt’s description) had been born to the James Roosevelts. They asked Elliott to be one of the godparents of Franklin Delano, as they decided to name him.
    To see this godchild, Eleanor wrote, was the reason
    for that visit which I paid at the age of two with my parents to Hyde Park and I am told that Franklin, probably under protest, crawled around the nursery (which has since been our children’s), bearing me on his back. Also, I am told, that I was sent down at tea time to the library in a starched white frock and stood bashfully at the door till my Mother saw me and called “Come in, Granny.” She often called me that, for I was a solemn child, without beauty and painfully shy and I seemed like a little old woman entirely lacking in the spontaneous joy and mirth of youth. 4
    From her mother Eleanor received the indelible impression that she was plain to the point of ugliness. As a young woman Anna had been captivatingly beautiful, her face and head so classic in outline that artists had begged to paint her. Anna had been, a friend of the family said, “a little gentlewoman.” Eleanor, in her anxiety for people to do right, was more the little schoolmistress, saved from primness only by her grave blue eyes and the sweetness with which she admonished the grownups. To paraphrase Carlyle, who was speaking of the founder of one of the world’s great religions, she was one of those who “cannot but be in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere.” She is so “old-fashioned,” her mother said apologetically. Eleanor, who sensed her