Category Archives: Eleanor Roosevelt

Living with Moses

03 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler, Robert Moses, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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Alfred E. Smith, seen here at age four in 1877 at Coney Island, became governor of New York State in November 1918 five days before the Armistice. He was a good friend and mentor to master builder Robert Moses.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday. Looking out the window right now I see it is clear and bright blue. How cold it might be is another story. I’ll find out when I run some errands in a bit. I spent a good portion of the morning preparing lesson plans for the week, which includes a sizable number of images to accompany the talks. My colleague and I decided to focus our course this semester on Robert Moses, who for good and ill gave New Yorkers most of the city we live in today. What we most want students to get from the class is an understanding of the complexity of Moses’s legacy, that Moses was less a psychotic power broker and more a flawed and complicated public servant who did the best he could within his circumstances to build New York City and State as he believed proper within the historical moment.

In a sense the course picks up where my book manuscript, Incorporating New York, ends. I finish my manuscript about Theodore Roosevelt Sr., Louisa Lee Schuyler, and their cohorts in 1923 with the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace. Moses gets his first position of genuine authority in 1924, when his friend and mentor Governor Alfred E. Smith appoints him leader of the Long Island State Park Commission. By this time the balance has shifted in New York City from the old Dutch and British families to the Italians, Jews and others who had arrived from the Old World over the previous several decades. The major exceptions to that of course are Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, whose stars are rising in this period and would carry on until Eleanor’s death in 1962. Moses himself holds on until six years after that, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller relieves him of the remainder of his duties in 1968. Over the years the Roosevelts would be friends, allies, and sometimes adversaries of Smith and Moses. I have been rolling up my sleeves and digging in since the start of the year and will proceed thusly until Memorial Day Weekend. It has been a great deal of work but a blast at the same time.

(image/Museum of the City of New York)

December 30, 1918: Sara Collier weds Charles Fellowes-Gordon

30 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Franklin Roosevelt carries his young cousin, Sara Collier (the future Sara Fellowes-Gordon), at a family estate in Fairhaven. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Sara Roosevelt Price Collier married Frederick Charles Fellowes-Gordon, a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, at St.Thomas’s Church in Washington D.C. on this date in 1918. The two became engaged in mid-November just after the Armistice and were supposed to wed on Saturday December 14 but for reasons that are unclear that did not come to pass. The bride, known as Sallie, was the daughter of Hiram Price Collier, a former minister at First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn and later a writer who died in Copenhagen Denmark in 1913. Sallie’s mother was Katharine Delano Price Collier, Sara Delano Roosevelt’s sister. There to give the bride away was her godfather and cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Sara Fellowes-Gordon, misidentified as Mrs. Gordon Fellowes in a 1940 New York Times caption, as she was volunteering with a motor ambulance unit in London during the Second World War. The cat was the unit mascot. Her cousin and godfather Franklin Roosevelt walked her down the aisle at her December 30, 1918 wedding just before he left for Europe.

The wedding plans were necessarily hasty, as the bridegroom was scheduled to return to England within just a few days. Sallie and Charles, as he was usually called, lived primarily in Great Britain after they married, raising a family while Charles rose in the ranks. The maritime connection between the two sides of the family was strong. Franklin loved the sea and, like his uncle Theodore, had served as assistant secretary of the navy; the Fellowes-Gordon clan was long prominent in the Royal Navy. The families remained close. In June 1934, by which time Franklin was president, Sallie and Charles accompanied Sara Delano Roosevelt aboard the Europa to Europe with two of their sons. Later that year, in September, Sallie and Charles were at Hyde Park to celebrate Aunt Sara’s 80th birthday with the extended family.

Both families were obviously active when the Second World War came, though Franklin of course did not live to see the war’s conclusion. Sara Fellowes-Gordon was present at Westminster Abbey on November 12, 1948, thirty years after her wedding and three years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, to help unveil a plaque in memory of her cousin and godfather. There that day as well were Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill. Eleanor continued seeing the Fellowes-Gordon family well into the 1950s on her many trips abroad. Sara died in 1969 and Charles in 1972. They are buried in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Saturday morning coffee

05 Saturday May 2018

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Great War centennial

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Lewis Hine image of Cantigny battlefield, April 1919

I’m wrapping up my coffee before heading to work to teach my last bibliographic instruction class of the semester. A friend and I were looking at these Lewis Hine images that The Atlantic posted this week and I thought I would share on this weekend morning. Apparently the American Red Cross commissioned Hine to take these images as a means of drumming up support back home for the Red Cross’s important work attending the sick, the wounded, and the hungry. We actually used the one above in the film we made last fall. It is hard to believe that we are now almost four years into the Great War centennial. I suppose it is difficult to comprehend from an American perspective because we did not join the war until April 1917 and really did not become fully involved until Spring 1918. The Battle of Cantigny, where the First Infantry Division fought so tenaciously, was in May 1918. Hine took the photo above almost a full year later.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt sailed for Europe on January 1, 1919, around the time Hine was taking the images that The Atlantic published this week as part of a series over the course of the centennial. It was not the first time Eleanor or Franklin had been on the Continent. Now in their 30s, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and his wife were already well-traveled and had seen much of the world. Still, they were shocked at what they saw in those months after the Armistice. Eleanor wrote at the time that “I never saw anything like Paris. The scandals going on would make many a woman at home unhappy. It is not place for the boys [the impressionable doughboys], especially the younger ones . . . All the women in the restaurant look to me exaggerated, some pretty, all chic, but you wonder if any are ladies.”

Though given the subject matter I don’t know if one can “enjoy” the photographs, they are indeed poignant and striking. Here they are one more time.

(Image/Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress)

Merry Christmas

25 Monday Dec 2017

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.

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Merry Christmas, everyone. I saw this 1942 Christmas card from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and fell in love with it for so many reasons. Judging by his white suit and her white dress the image would have been taken in that summer of 1942, seventy-five years ago. Franklin and Eleanor spent the Great War years in Washington and now here they are back in the District of Columbia as President and First Lady with the world at war a second time. One can only imagine the burden. In this image they seem to be trying to project an air of calm and tranquility in a troubled world. The white card stock is perfect for the photograph of two solitary figures sitting in white clothes on a veranda of the White House. There is no clutter on the table. Visually the picture is in balance with the concise message in simple black lettering on the right. Note that the card wishes the beholder a “happier” New Year, a subtle but telling word choice. The Roosevelts’ Christmas card went out to about 400 individuals.

Enjoy your day, all.

(image/White House)

A small Christmas Eve detective story

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Film, Sound, & Photography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Roosevelt family, Christmas 1939

I hope everyone is enjoying their holidays. I came across the image you see above, which appears to an official Roosevelt Family Christmas portrait. Here is the image as I found it on Wikimedia Commons. It is titled Christmas 1941. For a few minutes I could not put my finger on it, but I knew something was off. The caption at the bottom reads 25 December 2041, with someone adding an addendum noting that “This date is not correct.” That is obvious true but something was still off. At first I noticed the relaxed poses of everyone in the picture; remember, this would have been just a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even at Christmas, they would not have been so casual. The poses are a tip, but still just circumstantial.

After another minute or so I got it: that is Sara Roosevelt, Franklin’s mother, sitting next to Eleanor on the left. Sara died in September 1941, so for this Christmas photograph to have been from 1941 is obviously incorrect. So when was it? I then looked at the baby, not quite yet a toddler, seated to FDR’s left. That’s John Roosevelt Boettiger, standing on the lap of his mother Anna. An internet search informs us that John is Franklin and Eleanor’s grandson and that he was born in March 1939. A retired professor, he is still alive today. Here he is the center of attention. Everyone is looking at the little tyke. With Sara in the picture we know definitively that this is not 1941. For this photo to be taken in 1940 little John would have been well over 21 months old. That seems unlikely. 1939, when he would have been nine months, is a far better bet.  Sure enough, outtakes conclusively show that this Christmas family photograph was taken in 1939.

I found this image in several places where they get the date incorrect, which is inevitable but always a little dismaying. Were it not Christmas Eve, I would go into that more depth. The point in analyzing the image today is to have a little fun. Merry Christmas, all.

(image/National Archives)

Snow day redux

14 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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As the caption on the image suggests, Eleanor Roosevelt was still finding herself when this image was taken in her early middle-age

We had the second and presumably last snow day of the winter today. With April almost here I imagine we won’t be getting many more blasts like this one. New York City itself was spared the worst of it. That said, I did not leave the house all day. It looked pretty slick out there. I had grand visions of writing today but it did not come to pass. I don’t think I realized until getting up this morning how tired I was. I would rather be busy than not but with the semester in full swing there has been so much to get done. Now I’m charged up for tomorrow.

This morning I began part one of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s three-volume history of Eleanor Roosevelt. The first installment goes from 1884-1933. Part one came out in 1992, twenty-five years ago. It was interesting to read the introduction, in which Dr. Cook discusses what in the early 1990s were still fairly new trends in historiography that incorporated Women’s Studies and other aspects of social history into scholarship. The third installment came out late last year. I intend to read all three works over the late winter and early spring and am curious to see how if at all the author’s perspective changes over time.

I am only up to the wedding of her parents Anna and Elliott but apparently Dr. Cook’s thesis is that it was Eleanor’s 1918 discovery of Franklin’s relationship with Lucy Mercer after he came home from visiting the battlefields in Europe during the Great War that led to the new phase in her life. She was only 34. Any marriage is more complicated than it appears to outsiders but the Mercer discovery unquestionably changed Franklin and Eleanor’s relationship. It is reasonable to assume that it also sparked her increased confidence and willingness to reach out and build a wider social and political support network for herself.

(image/New York Public Library)

Sunday morning coffee

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, National Park Service

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I’m sorry about the lack of posts in recent weeks but with the semester in full swing it has been a grinding period at work. I’ll have more posts in the coming days and weeks. Last Saturday I was in Oyster Bay for the Theodore Roosevelt Association conference. It was great seeing some folks again and meeting new people as well. The talks were great. After lunch I took a cab to Sagamore Hill with a couple from Texas who I had met that very morning. The three of us had split an earlier cab getting from the Glen Cove train station to the conference hall. I had never been to Sagamore before. It was rewarding to share the experience with others who have a strong knowledge of the topic. Because there is so much to see–I am fully aware that I missed a great deal in just our 2-3 hour jaunt–I’ll probably go back during a warmer weekend this winter.

Quentin Roosevelt memorial, Sagamore Hill: 29 October 2016

Quentin Roosevelt memorial, Sagamore Hill: 29 October 2016

Yesterday I finished Hissing Cousins: The Lifelong Rivalry of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. I don’t know untold the story was, but the authors did a fine job of conveying the complicated relationship between the two women who between them lived in the White House for twenty years. I saw the co-authors (and married couple) speak at the Roosevelt House on East 65th Street a few years ago and spoke briefly to one of them. One thing the Ken Burns’s Roosevelt documentary did well was show how the two sides of the family interconnect in all its human complexity. The authors of this dual Alice and Eleanor biography have done the same.

This weekend I began James MacGregor Burns’s  Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. The book came out a full sixty years ago, in 1956,and straddles a line between history and current events. It is volume one of an eventual two volume work and ends in 1940 on the cusp of the Second World War. Volume two came out out in 1970. I’m reading it with the awareness and caveat that James Burns was an open admirer of FDR. As a cog in the political/academic nexus of the 1940s-60s though, I suppose this was inevitable. My impression however is that Burns did not lapse into the role of court historian the way Arthur Schlesinger Jr. did. The Lion and the Fox is a political biography and I am looking forward to hearing what Burns has to say about young Roosevelt as assistant navy secretary during WW1.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember, Woodrow Wilson

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A youthful Franklin Roosevelt as he was circa 1916 in his mid-30s. He loved performing these types of duties as assistant secretary of the Navy

A youthful Franklin Roosevelt as he was circa 1916 while in his mid-30s. He loved performing these types of duties as assistant secretary of the Navy

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this day in 1882. It’s interesting how we commemorate Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays and then it drops off from there. I suppose with Washington commemoration had much to do with binding the tenuous nation together through the early decades of the republic; Lincoln then joined pantheon as the first president to be assassinated. That’s pretty much it. I thought it would be interesting to see what FDR was doing a century ago. His tenure as assistant secretary of the Navy is one of the least studied periods of his life, probably because he was not making policy per se but carrying out the orders of Naval Secretary Josephus Daniels and President Wilson.

In January 1916 Roosevelt was campaigning hard for Preparedness. He gave a talk in Binghamton, New York 100 years ago this week in which he averred that the U.S. Navy should give up “not one dollar” in appropriations. He was in accord with Wilson in many respects; the sinking of the Lusitania that past May had hardened Wilson’s stance. What is more, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was gone by this time, having resigned over what he saw as Wilson’s belligerent stance. In many ways Franklin Roosevelt was making the case better and more forcefully than Wilson, whose appeals to Congress and elsewhere were largely met with skepticism from all sides. FDR’s cousins Theodore Roosevelt for one was not impressed with Wilson’s proposals and called them “half-preparedness.” Of course as a former president he had more leeway than his cousin did to call it as he saw it.

Franklin Roosevelt returned to Washington after his Binghamton speech to get back to work and attend to Eleanor and his kids. He needed to be close to home. He and Eleanor’s last child, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, would be born just six weeks later. It is lost on us how young he was when so much of this was going on.

(image/Library of Congress)

Deconstructing Alice & Eleanor

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt

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Authors Timothy Dwyer (center) and Mark Peyesrer discuss their new book about the relationship between Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Eleanor Roosevelt, 28 July 2015

Authors Timothy Dwyer (center) and Marc Peyser (right) discuss their new book about the relationship between cousins Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Eleanor Roosevelt, 28 July 2015

I just got back from the final public event of the season at Roosevelt House on East 65th Street. This was fortunate because it spared me from having to watch the Deflategate coverage, the avoidance of which is alway a plus but especially now as the sorry episode enters its Baroque phase. Anyways, Roosevelt House saved the best for last by hosting the authors of Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. I have not read their book yet, but if the tonight’s discussion is any indication Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer have written the most penetrating account of the relationship between these first cousins.

There was something that brought out the lesser aspects of the two when it came to dealing with one other. Part of it, as the authors and the moderator noted, was the similarities between them. Each were married to spouses who were unfaithful; each had controlling mothers-in-law; and each were cold & indifferent parents but warm & affectionate grandparents. At the same time they were extremely different. Alice was dismissive of Eleanor’s do-goodism for one thing. During the First World War, by which time the two were now women in their 30s, Eleanor and Alice contributed to the effort through the Red Cross. Eleanor was intent on doing all she could for any doughboy in need. Alice eventually gave up, famously claiming a case of canteen elbow. It was a sign of how things would go until Eleanor’s death in 1962.

If you interested in the life and times of the Roosevelts, this one is worth a close look.

Sunday morning coffee

12 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Those we remember

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Eighty Aprils after Lincoln's funeral the country mourned the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Note the bloom on the trees in the upper left hand corner.

Eighty Aprils after Lincoln’s funeral Americans mourned the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Note the bloom on the trees in the upper left hand corner.

Doing my tours at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace yesterday I did not fail to mention that April 12–today–marks the 70th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s passing.

It was not until I began volunteering at the TRB that I realized how intertwined the two sides of the family were, and indeed remain today. To give one example: when Franklin was himself assistant secretary of the navy, in the Wilson Administration, he and Eleanor rented a Dupont Circle house from Anna Roosevelt Cowles. Mrs. Cowles was Theodore’s older sister and Eleanor’s aunt. Throughout much of World War One, Theodore himself used to drop in to that N Street home to discuss preparedness and how the war was going. FDR learned much in Washington from 1913-1921 that served him well as commander-in-chief thirty years later.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's final resting place, Hyde Park, New York. The Roosevelt Library and Museum are in the background.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s final resting place, Hyde Park, New York. The Roosevelt Library and Museum are in the background.

One thing I always mention is how young many of the Roosevelts were when they died. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was 46 and his wife Martha Bullock just 48. Their son Elliott, Eleanor’s father, was all of 34 when his demons finally caught up with him. Elliott’s son Hall had just turned 50 when his own difficult life came to an end in 1941. Theodore Roosevelt was a mere 60. Then there was FDR himself. All presidents age while in office but Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked considerably older than his 63 years when, after months of failing health, he succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at his Warm Springs, Georgia retreat seventy years ago today.

(top image/Library of Congress)