The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

Prologue

Sunday, March 5, 1933

ON THIS, HIS FIRST FULL DAY in the presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt awoke in a creaky narrow bed in the small bedroom of the White House family quarters he had chosen for himself. After his valet, Irvin McDuffie, helped him with the laborious task of putting on his iron leg braces and trousers, McDuffie lifted him into his armless wooden wheelchair for the elevator ride downstairs. The new president’s schedule called for him to attend morning services at St. Thomas’s Church with his family, host a luncheon for twenty at the White House, and then chair an emergency Cabinet meeting, where he would outline his plans to call Congress into emergency session.

None of the staff or reporters who saw him that Sunday noticed that FDR was anything other than his usual convivial self. He had stayed up past one o’clock the previous night talking with Louis Howe, his longtime chief aide and campaign strategist, while Eleanor and their five children attended the Inaugural Ball without him. The crippled president, now fifty-one years old, hadn’t wanted to sit passively while everyone else danced; passive was not his style. Besides, he and Howe had important things to discuss, beginning with how to extricate the United States from its gravest crisis since the Civil War.

The American economic system had gone into a state of shock, its vital organs shutting down as the weekend began. On Friday, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading indefinitely and the Chicago Board of Trade bolted its doors for the first time since its founding in 1848. The terrifying runs that began the year before on more than five thousand failing banks had stripped rural areas of capital and now threatened to overwhelm American cities. At dawn on Saturday, only a few hours before FDR’s swearing in, the governors of New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania signed orders closing the banks in those states indefinitely, which meant that thirty-four out of forty-eight American states, including the largest ones, now had no economic pulse. Each state’s closure had its own financial logic, but collectively they proved merciful. Without them, Saturday morning would have brought even more ruinous bank runs, with legions of depositors descending on their banks in desperation at the very moment the new president took the oath of office.

The outgoing president, Herbert Hoover, was on his way back to California, a study in failure. As late as 1:00 a.m. on Inauguration Day, he was still haggling with FDR on the telephone about the banking crisis. In late morning, they rode in uncomfortable silence to the Capitol. Hoover’s brilliant understanding of complex issues had brought him and the country nothing. For more than three years, since the aftermath of the stock market crash, he had been sullen and defensive as disease spread through the American economy.

As frightening as life had become since the Great Depression began, this was the bottom, though no one knew that at the time. The official national unemployment rate stood at 25 percent, but that figure was widely considered to be low. Among non-farm workers, unemployment was more than 37 percent, and in some areas, like Toledo, Ohio, it reached 80 percent. Business investment was down 90 percent from 1929. Per capita real income was lower than three decades earlier, at the turn of the century. If you were unfortunate enough to have put your money in a bank that went bust, you were wiped out. With no idea whether any banks would reopen, millions of people hid their few remaining assets under their mattresses, where no one could steal them at night without a fight. The savings that many Americans had spent a lifetime accumulating were severely depleted or gone, along with 16 million of their jobs. When would they come back? Maybe never. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked by a reporter the previous summer if there were any precedent for what had happened to the world’s economy. He replied yes, it lasted four hundred years and was called the Dark Ages.

Late in 1933, a prominent journalist, Earle Looker, peered backwards several months to assess the Hobbesian stakes as FDR assumed office: Capitalism itself was at the point of dissolution. Would men continue to work for profit as our forefathers understood it and as our people now understand it? This was a real question, for money was now useless. Would it be necessary soon to organize our families against the world, to fight, physically, for food, to keep shelter, to hold possessions?

Even two generations later, the terror remained indelible for those who experienced it. It was just as traumatic as Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the Twin Towers, the scholar Richard E. Neustadt, who was a teenager at the time, recalled. It wasn’t on television, but the banks were failing everywhere, so you didn’t need television to see what was going on.

Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address had begun the process of restoring hope, but not everyone caught the new mood right away. The press coverage that morning largely downplayed or ignored FDR’s line: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The New York Times and most other newspapers relegated the line to their inside pages, while focusing instead on the vivid wartime allusions he employed five times during his speech—martial metaphors that suggested that there was, in fact, plenty to fear after all. The greatest applause from the large crowd on the east side of the Capitol came when Roosevelt said: I shall ask Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis: broad executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

The United States had not been invaded by a foreign foe since 1812, but this felt like it. Arthur Krock of the Times compared the mood in Washington on Inauguration Day to a beleaguered capital in wartime. For the first time since the Civil War, armed men patrolled the entrances to federal buildings, while machine gunners perched on rooftops. Editors knew that the world war, just thirteen years in the past, had concentrated great power in the hands of Woodrow Wilson’s government. To them it looked as if FDR were proposing the same thing. And so the approving headline FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on March 5, with similar notes stuck in the Inauguration coverage of other major papers.

Exactly what was necessary? No one knew, including Roosevelt. Even before being sworn in, he had decided on a federal bank holiday (a festive term he preferred to Herbert Hoover’s moratorium) to give the people who now ran the country a few days to figure out what to do. Then what? Should he assume wartime authority on a temporary basis? Call out the Army to protect banks and maintain order? Mobilize veterans? Unrest was already growing in the farm belt, where mobs had broken up bankruptcy auctions. Four thousand men had occupied the Nebraska statehouse and five thousand stormed Seattle’s county building. The governor of North Carolina predicted a violent revolution, and police in Chicago clubbed teachers who had not been paid all school year. Everywhere, bank runs threatened to turn violent. By the Inaugural weekend, police in nearly every American city were preparing for an onslaught of angry depositors. At least some were certain to be armed.

With so many banks involved, the U.S. Army—including National Guard and Reserve units—might not be large enough to respond. This raised the question of whether the new president should establish a makeshift force of veterans to enforce some kind of martial law. The temptation must have been strong. It hardly seems a coincidence that FDR decided that the first radio speech of his presidency would be specially addressed to a convention of the American Legion, the million-member veterans’ organization co-founded after World War I by his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt.

The short speech was scheduled for that Sunday evening at 11:30 p.m. EST, with all radio networks carrying it live across the country. In preparing for the broadcast, someone in the small Roosevelt inner circle offered the new president a typewritten draft of suggested additions that contained this eye-popping sentence:

As new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.

This was dictator talk—an explicit power grab. The new president was contemplating his right to command World War I veterans—mostly men in their late thirties—who had long since reentered civilian life. It was true that they had sworn an oath to the United States on entering military service and that the 1919 founding document of the American Legion pledged members to help maintain law and order and show devotion to mutual helpfulness. But the commander in chief had no power over them. Here Roosevelt would be poised to mobilize hundreds of thousands of unemployed and desperate men by decree, apparently to guard banks or put down rebellions or do anything else he wished during any phase of the crisis, with the insistence that they were dutybound to obey his concocted command.

That word—dictator—had been in the air for weeks, endorsed vaguely as a remedy for the Depression by establishment figures ranging from the owners of the New York Daily News, the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, to Walter Lippmann, the eminent columnist who spoke for the American political elite. The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers, Lippmann had told FDR during a visit to Warm Springs on February 1, before the crisis escalated. Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic nominee for president in 1928, recalled with some exaggeration that during the World War we wrapped the Constitution in a piece of paper, put it on the shelf and left it there until the war was over. The Depression, Smith concluded, was a similar state of war. Even Eleanor Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband, privately suggested that a benevolent dictator might be what the country needed. The vague idea was not a police state but deference to a strong leader unfettered by Congress or the other inconveniences of democracy. Amid the crisis, the specifics didn’t go beyond more faith in government by fiat.

Within a few years, dictator would carry sinister tones, but—hard as it is to believe now—the word had a reassuring ring that season. So did storm troopers, used by one admiring author to describe foot soldiers of the early New Deal, and concentration camps, a generic term routinely applied to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps that would be established by summer across the country. After all, the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini, in power for a decade, had ginned up the Italian economy and was popular with everyone from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers to Lowell Thomas, America’s most influential broadcaster. If ever this country needed a Mussolini, it needs one now, said Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, outgoing President Hoover’s closest friend on Capitol Hill. The speech draft prepared for FDR brought to mind Mussolini addressing his black-shirt followers, many of whom were demobilized veterans who joined Il Duce’s private army.

Roosevelt came to office just as the appetite for strong leadership seemed to be surging worldwide. For Americans, German chancellor Adolf Hitler was worrying but new, his leadership to be ratified in a legal election held across Germany that very day, March 5. While Hitler was already seen in the United States as a reckless buffoon, almost no one in the country yet focused on the threat posed by fascism.

The most powerful American publisher, William Randolph Hearst, seemed to favor dictatorship. The Hearst empire extended to Hollywood, where Hearst that winter had personally supervised the filming of an upcoming hit movie called Gabriel Over the White House that was meant to instruct FDR and prepare the public for a dictatorship. The movie’s hero is a president played by Walter Huston who dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad. FDR not only saw an advance screening of the film, he offered ideas for script rewrites and wrote Hearst from the White House that he thought it would help the country.

There was a thunder in the air as when the Fascisti marched upon Rome, wrote one journalist close to the Roosevelt camp, of the fevered climate that chilly March weekend. It was the same tension that quivered about the Kremlin at the beginning of the Five Year Plan. Insiders thought there was to be a peaceful revolution involving a dictatorship.

FDR knew the consequences of failing to seize the day. A visitor—unidentified in the press—came to him not long after the Inauguration and told him, Mr. President, if your program succeeds, you’ll be the greatest president in American history. If it fails, you will be the worst one. If it fails, the new president replied, "I’ll be the last one."

This sounds melodramatic to Americans in the 21st century, when freedom is flourishing in so many parts of the world. But during the 1930s, democracy was on the run, discredited even by subtle minds as a hopelessly cumbersome way to meet the challenges of the modern age. At the time, history offered little precedent for a leader taking power amidst a severe military or economic crisis without seizing more authority for himself. The few republics ever established—from ancient times to modern Europe—had eventually bent before such demands. So did the American system. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and twisted the Constitution in order to save the nation.

But on March 5, 1933, an astonishing thing happened—or more precisely, did not happen. The draft of that American Legion radio address was destined not for the ears of millions of veterans and other Americans, but for nothing more than the speech files of the Roosevelt Library, where it lay unexamined for more than seventy years.* The five-minute speech that FDR delivered that night built on the military tone of the Inaugural. He argued for the sacrifice and devotion of wartime and noted that it was a mistake to assume that the virtues of war differ essentially from the virtues of peace. But there was no hint of the need for a private army.

No one knows who wrote the unused draft or why FDR discarded the suggested additions, but something inside the man kept him from moving in an extraconstitutional direction. Some combination of personal and democratic conviction set him on a different course, at once more traditional and bold. This most pragmatic of modern American presidents sensed the unworkable nature of untrammeled power, even in the hands of the only person he completely trusted—himself.

In the days ahead, FDR moved in the opposite direction, passing the word on Capitol Hill that he did not believe in a constitutional dictatorship and asking his friend Felix Frankfurter to tell Lippmann to stop hawking dictatorship and disrespect of Congress in his columns. It was not as if Roosevelt was letting the cup pass; for the next twelve years, he would fully exploit the authority of the presidency, sometimes overreaching to the point where his enemies accused him of becoming a dictator. He would flirt with fascistic (or at least corporatist) ideas like the National Recovery Administration and in 1937 try to pack the Supreme Court. But even then, he would do so in the context of democracy, without private armies or government-by-decree. Even at his worst, he would eventually submit his schemes for the approval of Congress. Instead of coercion, he chose persuasion; instead of drawing the sword, he would draw on his own character and political instincts. He would draw, too, on the subconscious metaphor of his own physical condition. Although it was only rarely mentioned in the press, the American people knew at the time that he had polio (though not the extent of his disability) and it bound them to him in ways that were no less powerful for being unspoken: If he could rise from his paralysis, then so could they.

The deeper questions would take time to plumb. If character was to be FDR’s weapon for confronting the crisis, how was it forged and then deployed? Which complex combination of temperament, background, and experience allowed Roosevelt to bring off his act in his famous Hundred Days? Whatever the verdict of history on his expansion of government and particular policy prescriptions, this much is clear: Rather than succumbing to dictatorship or chaos, the United States underwent a laughing revolution, as a reporter covering FDR put it, the projection of one man’s faith in his own performance and in the capacity of democratic institutions to confront the terror of the unknown.

That March of 1933, the new president did not have to mobilize aging members of the American Legion under martial law. Franklin Roosevelt mobilized himself and his latent talent for leadership. He found his voice, and his voice defined America.

*To the author’s knowledge and that of the FDR Library, this draft of the American Legion speech has never been referred to or quoted by historians before.

Part One

Lightweight Steel

BEFORE MAN MET MOMENT in 1933, there was little on the public record to recommend Franklin Roosevelt as a world-class leader. He had thought about being president at least since Harvard at the turn of the century, when his distant cousin Theodore moved into the White House. Young Franklin consciously imitated TR’s idiosyncrasies by wearing a pince-nez and pronouncing himself dee-lighted! But this hardly made him seem closer to his extraordinary relative or a plausible future president; if anything, it caused his sophisticated classmates to laugh at him. And with good reason. Beyond possessing a Roosevelt gene for exuberance, FDR did not seem a compelling and formidable figure until much later.

Yet in the half century from his birth in 1882 until 1933, certain legacies, experiences, and relationships shaped his political character in ways that would prove decisive in a crisis. His family background offered enormous security and a sense of ease and confidence that he learned to convey to others. The manipulative skills he developed to handle his father’s illness and his mother’s meddling were essential emotional equipment. His marriage to a strong-willed woman, Eleanor, and his political marriage to a talented handler, Louis Howe, showed self-knowledge, even wisdom. In Woodrow Wilson’s sub-Cabinet from 1913 to 1921, he became an effective operator with an understanding of the levers of power. Although effete and seemingly out of touch, he stood up to the streetwise and widely respected governor of New York, Al Smith, which provided him a critical psychological lift. Most of all, the polio he contracted at age thirty-nine in 1921 changed the way he related to other people; the iron braces on his legs helped to forge his iron will. He learned to reject received opinion and respect the common man who had previously escaped his attention. His establishment of a rehabilitative clinic at Warm Springs, Georgia, offered Franklin matchless experience in lifting the spirits of afflicted people even if he could not greatly change their medical condition—the perfect preparation for the Hundred Days, when he restored hope without changing the material condition of the country.

This unusual combination of being underestimated yet well seasoned, calculating yet intuitive, would help FDR’s grand debut in 1933. It was as if he had been preparing for a life in the theater: the theater of the modern presidency, with its emphasis on dramatic entrances, perfect timing, and an instinct for performance.

Chapter One

Security

F DR COULD CONVINCINGLY EMBODY a sense of security for millions of Americans in part because he possessed so much of it himself. Even when he felt a trifle insecure among his dismissive peers at school, he could always fall back on his proud heritage and storied name as a source of strength. Character development is always a mystery, but in Franklins case the combination of the entrepreneurial success of his mother’s family, the Delanos, and the old-money stability and impeccable social standing of the Roosevelts seemed to protect him behind a double-bolted door of invulnerability, reinforced by the unusually strong love and attention of his parents.

Security for his family was Warren Delano’s aspiration when he first sailed for China in 1833, a hundred years before his grandson was sworn in as president. Delano could trace his roots back to a Huguenot, Philippe de la Noye (eventually shortened and conjoined), who arrived in Plymouth Colony just months after the Mayflower. But lineage has never been a convertible currency in the United States; even the most aristocratic American families must replenish the family fortunes every few generations, as Warren Delano did by trading opium and other commodities in China. Delano was an autocrat and what later came to be known as a rock-ribbed Republican. He liked to say that while not all Democrats were horse thieves, it was his experience that all horse thieves were Democrats.

Delano’s daughter Sara accompanied her father to China as a girl and would pass on her family’s sense of adventure to her son. As a young woman, she had fallen for the famous architect Stanford White, but her father disapproved and it seemed for a time as if she might not marry. Sara was twenty-six, with impeccable posture and a strong will, when she met a country squire named James Roosevelt, whose mutton chops made him look less like the British lord he aspired to be, sniped one relative, and more like the lord’s coachman. Mr. James was twice her age—fifty-two—a widower and father (his first son, James Rosy Roosevelt, was FDR’s little-remembered and much older half brother) who had found success in business and become a reliable Democrat, thanks in part to a post–Civil War friendship with General George B. McClellan, the 1864 Democratic presidential candidate.

James was descended from the Dutchman Claes Van Rosenvelt, who arrived in the New World about 1650. The family fortune was founded when James’s great-grandfather, Isaac, imported sugar from the West Indies to make rum, then used the profits to invest heavily in New York real estate. FDR would boast that Isaac led George Washington’s horse in the first Inaugural Parade, though this was likely one of his embellishments.

James’s father (Franklin’s paternal grandfather, whom he never knew) was a medical doctor afraid of the sight of blood, insecure to the point of being a shut-in. James learned not to say anything that might upset the old man, a sense of discretion passed on to Franklin. Perhaps rebelling against his father’s nervous disposition, James also developed an easy equanimity. This, too, would be bequeathed.

To opium dealing in the Delano line, add draft avoidance among the Roosevelts. James had been thirty-two when the Civil War began, still young enough to take part. Like many gentlemen of his day, he paid a substitute to serve for him in the Union Army. FDR’s Hudson River Valley branch of the Roosevelt family felt none of the embarrassment experienced by cousin Theodore over his father having shirked service in Lincoln’s war. In fact, after two decades of ambitious ventures in the business world—including an abortive effort to finance a canal through Nicaragua and the presidency of the largest railway in the South—James developed a sense of ease about his position in the world. Recriminations, his son later learned, were for others.

Buffeted by the Panic of 1873 and forced to resign as president of the coal company he founded, James Roosevelt’s fortune slipped below that of other prominent families in the Hudson Valley. But he appeared unflappable amid this personal setback, perhaps because he still held enough assets to assure that his branch of the family would remain relatively wealthy for at least another generation. Outside the business world, James was perhaps best known for breeding horses at Spring-wood, as he called the estate he built near the tiny village of Hyde Park, New York, ninety miles north of New York City. With sweeping views of the Hudson River, the house at Hyde Park would become the anchor of this branch of the Roosevelt family for the next two generations. By the 1880s, he had also bought a fifteen-room Victorian summer cottage on Canada’s Campobello Island, just off the coast of Maine.

The circumstances of FDR’s birth may have contributed to his sense of security because the trauma made him all the more precious to his parents. Sara was in labor for twenty-five hours and nearly died. To save her, chloroform was administered, with the assumption that the baby would be stillborn. When the boy was born on January 30, 1882, he was blue and not breathing; the nurse was sure he was gone. But the doctor began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and he came around. He was named after Sara’s childless uncle, Franklin Delano.

Chapter Two

My Boy Franklin

THE INTENSITY OF SARA’S LOVE for her son was destined to make him either a basket case or the most self-possessed of men. It proved to be the latter. Sara was a walking advertisement for the benefits of ceaseless, even suffocating devotion—the only source of consistent affection in her son’s life, a rock not just of financial security but of the deep maternal love so central to instilling genuine self-confidence. Although a self-satisfied and often imperious woman of the 19th century, she nonetheless possessed a warmth and generosity that held her family together.

Roosevelt was Sara’s only child,* so the bond went far. She breast-fed Franklin for nearly a year, bathed and dressed him, and took him everywhere, holding and carrying him with a constancy highly unusual for women of her station, who normally left such duties to wet nurses. She couldn’t bear to leave her baby behind, in part because he seemed to have been born with such a nice disposition. Baby Franklin crows and laughs all the time, Sara wrote. He is always bright and happy and never cries, which, if true, suggests that some of his famous temperament may have been present from birth.

When he was two and a half, the age when first memories are often formed, Franklin experienced his greatest childhood shock. It occurred during a visit he made with his mother to the Delano estate at Algonac, New York. As the Delanos dressed one morning, they heard an explosion, then Sara’s younger sister, Laura, screaming. She had been heating curling irons over an alcohol lamp, a common household task more often performed by servants. When the lamp was somehow knocked over, burning alcohol spilled all over her robe. Her father Warren later wrote: Laura flashed down the stairway a cloud of fiery flame. Outside on the grass, others in the household, including Sara, tried to smother the flames with a carpet, too late.

There is no record of Roosevelt ever writing or even speaking of his aunt’s death, but he almost certainly heard her shrieking and may have witnessed the gruesome scene on the lawn. After contracting polio, he admitted that the possibility of fire haunted him; he sometimes practiced crawling out of his bedroom to safety. As he told his son James on the night of his 1932 election as president, fire was the only thing he ever truly feared in life.

A few months after Laura’s death came another moment of trauma, though this one ended differently. James, Sara, and Franklin were on the way home from England on the ocean liner Germania, when the ship plunged sharply beneath a huge freak wave. As passengers shrieked in terror, Mr. James said calmly, We seem to be going down. Franklin called out for his toy jumping jack as it floated past their berth.

I never get frightened, Sara later recalled. And I was not then. According to family lore, she took her fur and wrapped it around three-year-old Franklin, who had awakened as water began to fill their compartment. Poor little boy. If he must go down, he’s going down warm. The captain was knocked unconscious by the force of the wave, but he was revived and eventually righted the ship, which made it back to Liverpool. This scene—and his parents’ calm fatalism—left enough of an impression on Franklin that he recalled it often to friends.* Whether the shipwreck story helped shape Roosevelt (it did nothing to dampen his love of the sea), his associates over the years would consistently remark on his calmness in a crisis.

But if Franklin was surrounded by family love, he grew up with few playmates and little company beyond parents and tutors. The Roosevelts were snobs. They reminded the historian Richard Hofstadter of secondary characters in Edith Wharton novels who provide the climate of respectable and unfriendly opinion in which her characters live. (Wharton, a resident of the Hudson River Valley, was an acquaintance of the Roosevelts.) Although they lived practically next door, Mr. James and Sara declined an invitation from the far wealthier Vanderbilts to dine, for fear of having to invite the arrivistes back.

However, unlike many aristocrats, the Roosevelts never wrote off politicians as socially inferior. When Franklin was older, Sara told her son it was a fallacy that anyone could be too refined or well-bred for the White House. If Roosevelt was not bred to be president, he was raised to believe that the presidency was entirely within reach, should he be interested. In the winter of 1887, the Roosevelts lived in Washington, D.C., for a few months, where they socialized with James’s old friend from upstate New York Democratic politics, President Grover Cleveland. Just before leaving town, James dropped by the White House to say good-bye to the president with his five-year-old son. My little man, I am making a strange wish for you, the president, besieged by political problems, told Franklin, patting him on the head. It is that you may never be president of the United States. Fifty years later, FDR enjoyed telling that story when children visited him in the White House.

Another family story told by Sara (who, unlike her son, usually resisted embellishment) reflects Franklin’s almost supernatural confidence that fortune would always smile on him. One day, Franklin came in the house looking for his gun. He had spotted a winter wren in a tree by the river and wanted to shoot it for his taxidermy collection. His mother laughed at the idea of the wren waiting patiently for him to return. He looked surprised but quite unperturbed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said confidently. ‘He’ll wait.’ And the bird did.

Sara was clearly obsessed with her son but took pains to assert that she was not overprotective. In My Boy Franklin, an odd little memoir she wrote with a ghostwriter (and with plenty of help from FDR) just before the 1933 Inauguration, Sara couldn’t quite decide how Franklin had developed his sense of social command. The same child who ordered playmates around was self conscious when he talked to anyone other than members of the immediate family.

These are the classic signs of a mama’s boy. Here was a solitary, bossy child who developed perfect pitch in telling his parents what they wanted to hear. He played instinctively on the knowledge that his mother would do anything for him, even sacrificing much of the socializing of others in her set. Despite chafing occasionally under Sara’s rigorous schedule for him and the schooling of private tutors, he doesn’t seem to have been lonely, and he developed none of the brooding quality of the lonely affluent child.

Most of the time, he preferred the company of adults, particularly his father. Mr. James took Master Franklin skating, horseback riding, and on his rounds of civic activities in Hyde Park and Poughkeepsie, where his quiet authority and Episcopalian reverence left an impression on the townspeople and on his son. Even so, FDR’s burgeoning sense of noblesse oblige may have come less from his father directly than from the image of his father that was built within his family.

At the other extreme, FDR’s much older half brother, Rosy, became an object lesson, playing an underappreciated role in Franklin’s later development. Rosy married an Astor and led a life of conspicuous languor, punctuated by outbursts of embarrassingly crude anti-Semitism (he complained endlessly about having to see Jews in New York and on vacation). Sara, who took a second wife’s view of her grown stepson, often used Rosy as a prod to make FDR aspire to something more useful and noble in life and to sound less vulgar in his opinions. Whatever the explanation, FDR’s early correspondence, unlike Eleanor’s, contains little of the casual anti-Semitism that characterized their social class.

There’s also no record in their correspondence of any grief or other unpleasantness. The Roosevelts wrote scores of letters each year throughout FDR’s youth, and several mention a boy named Archie Rogers, a Hyde Park neighbor who had become Franklin’s best friend. But there’s no mention of Archie’s death from diphtheria when Franklin was nearly eight. This suggests a childhood devoted to keeping up appearances and masking one’s true feelings behind a screen of tranquility and good humor. The Roosevelts did so not out of status anxiety but because poise and propriety were so highly valued in their family circle. This couldn’t have been much comfort for a child, but it offered exquisite training.

*Many American presidents have been the products of exceptionally strong mothers. Lincoln’s frontier stepmother, Sarah, was a critical influence. The same goes for Rebekah Johnson, Hannah Nixon, Lillian Carter, Nelle Reagan, and Virginia Kelley, mother of Bill Clinton. George W. Bush is often described as inheriting more from his mother, Barbara, than his father, the former president. But none beside FDR were only children.

*It may have left a deeper mark. In her studies on war and children, Anna Freud examined the London Blitz during World War II and found no difference in the trauma experienced by the children who dodged bombs in London versus that of children removed to the safety of the countryside. The only variable was the mood of the mothers. A child will shake and tremble with the anxiety of its mother, but if the mother was calm, the child stayed calm.

Chapter Three

Miss Nancy

THE VALUES OF THE ROOSEVELT FAMILY were put to the test in 1891, when Mr. James suffered a heart attack and recurring angina. Although he would live another decade, the effect of his illness would bind his wife and nine-year-old son even closer. Just as strong mothers have often bred strong presidents, so the absent or weak father appears again and again in presidential family history, often as pitied by their sons.*

For FDR, his father’s decline left a different imprint. From age nine, Franklin saw Mr. James not as his protector but as someone to be protected, an early lesson in the imperative to tend the lame and repay debts of gratitude to once strong figures who have fallen into trouble. FDR’s notion of the country as a family with basic responsibility for its most vulnerable members—the animating spirit of the New Deal—could well have begun inside his own small nuclear family.

Franklin and Sara routinely conspired to shield James from anything upsetting. When Franklin found a nanny perfectly awful, he hid his feelings because his father had taken the trouble to hire her. When a steel curtain rod fell aboard their private railroad car and cut his forehead deeply while his father was in another compartment eating breakfast, young Franklin made his terrified mother promise not to tell James. He put on a cap to cover the bloody wound and spent the rest of the day on the observation platform, avoiding his father. And when a friend at Campobello Island accidentally knocked out his front tooth with a stick meant to bat pebbles, Franklin wouldn’t cry or open his mouth to show his mother the exposed nerve, much less tell his father.

Franklin was showing not just physical courage and a talent for deception but the guts to play the angles on his parents without actively rebelling. His new approach allowed him to maintain freedom of movement and yet be seen as respectful and concerned about his father. At an early age, Franklin was self-reliant and a bit of an operator. In later years, he liked to recount the story of how as a fourteen-year-old he was denied admission to London’s Museum of Natural History in South Kensington, which was closed that day to the general public. He pulled out a membership card from the New York Museum of Natural History and somehow convinced the guard that he was a scientist. Even if the story was exaggerated, it reflected his pride in improvising to get his way.

The combination of fortitude and guile would turn up again and again, from Roosevelt’s response to polio to his handling of Herbert Hoover to deceiving the public about how far he would go to aid Britain in 1940 to riding through New York City in the rain at the end of the 1944 campaign, drenched to the bone, knowing his health was shot, fortified only by a swig of brandy and his old grit. Like John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, Roosevelt was a compartmentalized president, able to put his life into separate sealed boxes. This ability to separate or integrate great warmth and utter detachment—depending on the context—would prove a superbly useful trait.

Though his temperament was largely inborn, some authors have offered tentative Freudian speculations about Franklin and Sara. John Gunther, who became friendly with the family, wrote that of course Roosevelt had an Oedipus complex as big as a house. But he was spared by his father’s age. Had James been younger than fifty-three when Franklin was born, Gunther wrote from the distance of the more psychoanalytic 1950s, Franklin might have turned into a very neurotic and unstable child. What Franklin most liked about his father, Gunther heard from a family member, was that he controlled his mother, who in turn controlled him.

Actually, Sigmund Freud, contrary to reputation, did not focus much on mothers in his case histories. But his conclusions—still persuasive despite the challenge to so many of his theories—were clear. A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feelings of a conqueror, he wrote. That confidence of success often induces real success. While Sara was never what Carl Jung calls a power devil, whose smothering attention incapacitates her son, she drove him to seek refuge within himself. Franklin developed a lifelong habit of not letting his mother or anyone else know much about what he was thinking—a habit that could be maddening but gave him an edge in handling other people. One thing he wasn’t thinking about was what might go wrong. He seemed to be missing the normal emotional equipment that produces worry.

For all of his attachment to home and family, Franklin quickly came to think of himself as cosmopolitan, and not just because his extensive stamp collection made him a whiz at geography. The Roosevelts sailed for Europe eight times during his first twelve years, often bound for the baths of Bad Nauheim in Germany to take the cure with other wealthy invalids. Franklin grew accustomed to being around sick people all searching for the curative power of water, a foreshadowing of his life in Warm Springs. Where another child might have retreated into surliness, he was compassionate on these trips—a younger English boy confined to a wheelchair remembered his kindness many years later—but he was also clearly ready for at least some measure of independence from his parents.

When he left, it was to Groton, an elite boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts that was only a decade old when Franklin entered. He had, in fact, been enrolled at birth before the school even opened. Such was the respect that James and his circle had for the founder and headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, an ambitious Episcopal clergyman whose preparatory school, based on the British model (minus the flogging), appealed to their anglophilia. Peabody, who later performed the marriage of Eleanor and Franklin, preached a muscular Christianity in the raising of boys. The rigorous schedule was academically challenging, but the rector was suspicious of intellectuals and he emphasized athletics and spartan living, including open cubicles for sleeping and cold showers, even in winter.

While Peabody would be a lifelong influence, Groton was not an experience Franklin looked back on with much nostalgia. He wasn’t popular, in part because he entered at fourteen, two years behind the rest of his classmates, whose parents, unlike James and Sara, were willing to part with their sons when they were twelve. As a result, he had to work hard to win the approval of his schoolmates, which may have intensified the anxiousness to please that is so characteristic of politicians. His summers abroad had left him with an accent the other boys considered too English. He seemed affected, perhaps a trifle effeminate, and his ingratiating manner annoyed many of his classmates.

More important, skinny Uncle Frank, * as he was nicknamed, was neither a scholar nor an athlete. He excelled only at Latin and high kick, a game favoring long-legged students that entailed kicking a tin pan strung from the ceiling and enduring embarrassment after the inevitable and painful falls. The game was emblematic of his desperate attempts to win favor, even if it meant hurting himself. Franklin may have been secure in background but not in his ability to make his way in the world. He was off-key with schoolmates, and even as an adult his gaiety and sociability always had a slightly forced quality to it.

For the next decade, F. D. Roosevelt would be seen as effete even by the standards of the nation’s most effete subculture. His own cousins mocked him as Miss Nancy or the man on the handkerchief box, a reference to a drawing of a snooty-looking gentleman on a toiletry they all recognized. To imply something not quite manly about this Roosevelt cousin was a particular slur in the testosterone world of Theodore Roosevelt and his brood. Alice Roosevelt, daughter of TR and an acerbic wit (until her death in 1980 she kept a pillow on her couch with the embroidered line: If you don’t have anything nice to say…come sit by me), was particularly vicious, especially after it became clear that FDR had eclipsed the Oyster Bay branch of the family. He was the kind of boy whom you invited to the dance, but not the dinner, she recalled, a good little mother’s boy whose friends were dull, who belonged to the minor clubs and who was never at the really gay parties. She and