Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (5 page)

As he looked out on the expectant faces, Roosevelt remembered another audience, gathered half a decade earlier, to which he had declared that the current generation of Americans had a rendezvous with destiny. He had been thinking then of the challenges facing the country at home: a gravely disordered economy, a society showing years of strain. He had been calling his compatriots to figurative arms against the opponents of the changes he deemed essential to America’s political and social development. The changes had commenced during his first term and had dramatically altered Americans’ expectations of their government. He intended for the changes to continue and to become a permanent part of the American moral landscape.

But now he summoned his fellow citizens to literal arms. In a manner not even he could have guessed, as a result of events he couldn’t have foreseen, his prediction of a special role for his generation of Americans had acquired a new and far broader significance. To them, as to no generation before them, had been entrusted the fate of the world. On them rested the hope of humanity, the belief in personal freedom and national self-government.

He took a breath. In a few seconds he would lead Americans across the threshold of a future radically different from anything they or their forebears had ever known. Some in his audience appreciated the magnitude of the task they were about to undertake; all understood the gravity of the moment.

The chamber was quiet. The nation listened.

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941,” he began, “a date which will live in infamy…”

P
ART
I

Swimming to Health

1882 
 1928

1.

W
ARREN
D
ELANO SPOILED ALL HIS CHILDREN BUT
S
ARA ESPECIALLY.
Delano was a New Bedforder who, like some others of that intrepid seaport, became a China merchant, which in the mid-nineteenth century meant he dealt in opium. He amassed a fortune in the East and retired to a handsome estate on the Hudson River where Sara was born in 1854. Yet the Panic of 1857 caught Delano out, and he found himself on the verge of ruin. He returned to China, redoubled his energies, and sold more opium than ever. He fetched his family from America and settled them in Hong Kong, where they lived in Oriental opulence. Seven-year-old Sara found the experience at once overwhelming and mundane: overwhelming in its initial foreignness, mundane in the way everything attached to family eventually becomes for children.

Her worldly education continued when the family returned home. Though legal, the opium trade wasn’t respectable, and after Delano decided he’d accumulated enough to weather future downturns, he worked himself away from the business. The family took various routes home. Sara sailed with a brother and sister to Singapore and then Egypt, where the Suez Canal was under construction. They visited France and England before crossing the Atlantic to America. Along the way—if not earlier—she discovered that travel agreed with her, and during the next decade she returned to China and France, lived in Germany, and transited the completed Suez Canal.

By the time she finally resettled into life along the Hudson, she felt herself a person apart. Few of her neighbors had seen so much of the world; almost none of her contemporaries had partaken of such exotic experiences. She might not have said she was too good for the neighborhood—but her father said it on her behalf. Warren Delano took special pains to protect his daughter from the young men of the Hudson Valley. The military academy at West Point comprised the closest collection of bachelor males; the cadets found Sara, who had grown into a tall, slender, self-composed beauty, most enchanting. They came courting, only to be rebuffed by Sara’s father, who understood that West Point, which provided a free education to young men clever and pushy enough to win the approval of their states’ elected officials, appealed to the ambitious but impecunious among the nation’s emerging manhood—precisely the sort from whom Sara should be protected.

Warren Delano had other suspicions of his daughter’s suitors. As a staunch Republican he distrusted individuals of the opposite persuasion. “I will not say that all Democrats are horse thieves,” he declared in a moment of magnanimity. “But it would seem that all horse thieves are Democrats.” One young man was vetoed on account of his red hair.

Sara seemed not to resent or resist her father’s intrusion into her love life. On the contrary, because she idolized him she accepted the high standards he set for her suitors. Years slipped past and she remained unattached to any save him. By the time she reached twenty-five she was well on the way to spinsterhood, a fate she viewed with outward equanimity.

But one day she accepted a dinner invitation from an old friend. During her peripatetic childhood Sara had lived in New York City for a time and become close to Anna Roosevelt, called Bamie (pronounced “Bammie” also called Bye), the older sister of Theodore Roosevelt, the future president. Brilliant but afflicted by a spinal ailment, Bamie was, like Sara, a spinster-in-progress, and her widowed mother hosted a party for her and her sister, Corinne.

Mrs. Roosevelt was playing matchmaker that evening and had also invited James Roosevelt, a fifth cousin of Bamie, once removed. The Roosevelts had nothing against distant cousins marrying, as events would reveal, and Mrs. Roosevelt may have been thinking of pairing Bamie with James. But James saw only Sara. “He never took his eyes off of her and kept talking to her the whole time,” Mrs. Roosevelt recalled.

A Delano-Roosevelt match wasn’t an obvious one. James was fifty-one and Sara twenty-five. James had a son—James Jr., called Rosy—just six months younger than Sara. And James was a Democrat.

Yet if James was old enough to be Sara’s father, that stood him well in the eyes of Sara’s actual father. Warren Delano had done business with James Roosevelt’s partners and knew James from clubs they had in common. James’s years promised stability in a relationship; James’s wealth allayed concerns about fortune seeking. As for his politics, a series of visits by James to the Delano home opened Warren’s eyes. “James Roosevelt is the first person who has made me realize that a Democrat can be a gentleman,” he said later, still marveling at the thought.

For Sara’s part, she saw in James Roosevelt things she hadn’t seen in her youthful suitors. Her father was her model of what a man ought to be; James approached the model as closely as any man could and be plausibly marriageable. In 1880 Sigmund Freud was still a student at the University of Vienna and had yet to loose his theories of psychosexual development on the world; but Sara’s friends didn’t require Freud to tell them that much of what attracted her to James Roosevelt was his resemblance to the only man she had ever loved and admired. Perhaps Sara herself saw this, too.

In any case, when James Roosevelt requested of Warren Delano permission to marry his daughter, and Delano assented, Sara accepted the proposal with pleasure. A huge wedding would have been planned had James not been a widower; as it was, the prospect of the Roosevelt-Delano nuptials set dollar signs gleaming in the eyes of dressmakers, florists, coachmen, and caterers up and down the Hudson Valley. James’s son, Rosy, had recently married Helen Astor, the daughter of high-society czarina Mrs. William Astor. (The dimensions of the Astor ballroom established the numerical limit of Ward McAllister’s celebrated “four hundred.”) Meanwhile on the Delano side, Sara’s uncle Franklin Delano had married William Astor’s sister. A merger of the Roosevelt and Delano clans, under the kindly gaze of the Astors, promised to be a memorable event indeed. But Sara’s aunt Sarah Delano, for whom she was named, minus a letter, died amid the planning, and out of respect the ceremony was greatly simplified. A mere hundred guests witnessed the exchange of vows at the Delano home in October 1880. The couple departed that afternoon for the short carriage ride to Springwood, James Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park. A month later the honeymoon began in earnest when the newlyweds left for Europe on a grand tour that lasted most of a year.

S
ARA DOTED ON
her husband but even more on the son she gave him. Fittingly for one who would end his life as the arbiter of Europe’s fate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was conceived on the Continent, perhaps in Paris, where James’s father and dozens of Delanos met the honeymooners and occupied an entire floor of the Hôtel du Rhin. The couple returned home in plenty of time to ready themselves and the Hyde Park house for its new occupant. “At a quarter to nine my Sallie had a splendid large baby boy,” James Roosevelt wrote in the family diary for January 30, 1882. “He weighs 10 lbs. without clothes.”

From the beginning Sara asserted herself regarding her son. James Roosevelt wished to name the boy Isaac, after his paternal grandfather. Sara vetoed the idea. She doubtless didn’t say as much to her husband, but her actions revealed that she considered the boy more a Delano than a Roosevelt, and the names she chose reflected her view. She initially thought to name her son Warren Delano, after her father. But her brother had just buried a young son named Warren and, upon Sara’s inquiry, informed her that he couldn’t endure the idea of another child of the family, so close in age to his lost boy, carrying the same name. Consequently Sara turned to her favorite uncle, Franklin Delano, who was childless and now delighted to have a namesake.

The christening of Franklin Delano Roosevelt took place at the St. James Episcopal Chapel in Hyde Park. The godmother was Eleanor Blodgett, a long-time friend of Sara’s. There were two godfathers: Sara’s brother-in-law Will Forbes and Elliott Roosevelt, Theodore’s younger brother. Theodore might have seemed the more obvious choice between the two Roosevelt brothers, being the older and by most measures the more responsible. But Sara liked the charmingly troubled Elliott better than the earnest Theodore, and in any case she didn’t expect her son’s second godfather to play much role beyond the christening.