The streets of New York’s Greenwich Village were wet and slippery, and a light rain splashed on passers-by. An old woman walked along the pavement, her head bowed and covered with a headscarf, lost in her thoughts. On that April morning in 1960, the air was cold and the weather unfriendly. Lost in her thoughts, the woman stepped off the pavement and did not see the car approaching her. The brakes squealed, the woman fell to the ground, hit, and a young man stepped out of the car, startled. The old woman quickly got up as if she was not hurt and told the young man to drive on. He was a black man and she knew the trouble that could arise if the police got involved. Did the young man recognise her? He should have, because Eleanor Roosevelt was known to many people all over the world. After all, she was the widow of a popular American President.
She limped on, as she was giving a speech at a charity event. She only allowed the doctor to bandage her swollen ankle. She was used to pain in her life and often used it to her advantage.
A swollen ankle was the beginning of Eleanor Roosevelt’s long physical decline. Doctors told her she had aplastic anaemia, for which there is no cure because it destroys the bone marrow. Over the following months, she was hospitalised, given several painkilling infusions and suffered from depression. Delirious, she dreamt of her brother, her son, and probably her husband, her cousins, her uncle, her lover and certainly her father. She was haunted by family secrets and lies that she had to live with for decades.
The Roosevelt dynasty changed America, became extremely important at the end of the 19th century and had a profound impact on life in the following century. But the Roosevelts did not achieve their influence without struggle and sacrifice. Eleanor watched her family struggle, first her uncle’s fight with her father, then her nephews’ and her husband’s. She saw how the strong and ambitious destroyed the weaker. She could have succumbed to the struggles herself, but life hardened her and she proved to be stronger than all of them. She had a grip on politics and public opinion, yet sometimes she did not understand her extended family.
She has already written three books of her memoirs and, when she heard the end was near, she decided to write another. She hired an elderly freelance journalist, Elinore Denniston, and started telling her stories. Will she be able to make peace with her ghosts after her confession? She told not only of her family’s successes, but also of tragedies. Her uncle Theodore was the first modern American President, but during his rise to power he destroyed her father and left behind children who competed and quarreled with each other. Her husband Franklin overcame the Great Depression and won the World War, but disappointed and betrayed her on a personal level. Her cousins tortured her and she left her lover. But Eleanor also disappointed her children, who were cold and alienated from her.
Two brothers
Theodore Roosevelt was a stocky man with a square face, bristly moustache, blue eyes, broad shoulders and a powerful chest. As he walked down the stairs with a determined stride, everyone knew that he was not deviating from his plans. Rumours circulated in Washington that he had fought a grizzly bear and survived a stampede of wild bison on his North Dakota ranch. He had done a number of government jobs, but today he had something personal planned. He had to reckon with his brother, with whom he had competed since childhood and who now threatened his plans. He knew that one day he would be President of the United States and he would not let his brother Elliott interfere with his plans.
A few days ago, he received a letter from his lawyer in New York informing him that his brother had impregnated a maid in his house and that she was now demanding money. Elliott has also been drinking too much and causing scandals at receptions. He was currently travelling in Europe with his wife Anne, who supported his behaviour, but was spending money extravagantly and living extravagantly. Theodore knew that political careers were quickly ruined when such family matters were the talk of the New York drawing rooms. No one would support a candidate with a black sheep in the family.
He, Theodore Roosevelt, portrayed himself to the public as a new breed of politician; moral, principled and incorruptible. He was known as the enemy of backroom games and bad behaviour. He had worked hard for years as a Republican Party operative, had failed in the New York mayoral election and now wanted the success that the party bigwigs had promised him. All his life he wanted to be better and more successful than others. His wife Edith has been totally supportive and has given him three children, Alice, Ted and Kermit, who was still in his cradle. They were considered a true American family.
In his youth, his brother Elliott was better than him at everything – a better rider, hunter, swimmer and runner. But Theodore began to lift weights, box, run and sabre. He set up a gym in his five-storey house and trained there almost every day, strengthening his shoulders, building strong arms and a muscular torso. People and things could only be good or bad, right or wrong, strong or weak in his view, and he tolerated no intermediate stages. He was convinced that Elliott was shirking his responsibility and would be better suited to a stay in some mental institution.
But this was difficult to do, so he thought it would be better to send him on a long trip around Europe and suggest that he stay there and divorce his unpredictable wife Anne. But Anne was pregnant and so was his maid. If this had become public, a terrible scandal would have broken out.
So Elliott and his family travelled around Europe, a welcome change for him. He stopped drinking and had a good time with his wife, but without alcohol he often fell into deep depressions. He adored his two children, six-year-old Eleanor and not yet two-year-old Elliott Junior. Eleanor was an unusual child. She did not inherit her mother’s beauty, she was clumsy and clumsy, but she had a vivid imagination and her father adored her for it. But his third child was on the way, and Elliott knew he would need money, so he sent a letter of reconciliation to his brother from Europe.
A reckoning with my brother
In March 1891, a tall pregnant girl and her mother moved into a two-storey wooden building owned by friends of the Roosevelt family. This alone should have been a sign that the maid, Catherine Katie Mann, was carrying Elliott’s child. The twenty-nine-year-old moved from Europe to the New World six years ago, hoping for a brighter future. Knowing a few words of English, she took a job with the Roosevelts. She fell in love with Elliott, who wrote her beautiful letters and gave her gifts. The courtship resulted in a pregnancy.
When she told him, he never contacted her again, travelling around Europe with his family and pretending nothing had happened. Her lawyers asked the Roosevelts for $10,000 in support, as Catherine could not support the baby boy who was born on her per diem salary. The officials wrote illegitimate in the father of the child section. This was to condemn the boy, Elliott Jr., to anonymity forever. Eleanor, of course, did not know that she had a half-brother. The family travelled around Europe and rarely received any news from America.
Eleanor didn’t know why they had to travel, but Theodore did, and he wanted to make sure that his brother was kept out of the public eye in any way he could. The pressure was intense and Theodore sent his sister Bye to Austria and instructed her to put pressure on Elliott and get him into a three-month “cure” at a sanatorium for nervous diseases near Graz, Austria.
Elliot accepted the offer, not knowing that Anna was expected to return to America with the children and divorce him immediately after giving birth. The plan was for him to stay in Europe.
The family moved to Paris, but Theodor’s pressures did not end there. Elliott grew irritable, occasionally drank again and again ended up in a three-month stay in a sanatorium near Paris. Theodore consulted his lawyers about whether it would be possible to declare his brother mentally ill without having him examined by doctors in America. The lawyers gave him different advice and finally he realised that he would have to decide what to do.
At the end of June, Anne Roosevelt gave birth to a son, Hall. Under an avalanche of threats from her brother-in-law to withhold financial support from the family and Elliott’s increasingly irritable behaviour, she returned with her family from Paris to New York. Eleanor watched the coast of Europe disappear into the distance and mourned that her father had not gone with them.
Theodore decided to finally get even with his brother, who was nothing but an embarrassment to him, and set off for Paris. The two brothers stood opposite each other, hard words were exchanged and in the end the more determined Theodore won. Elliott will return to America, go to Illinois for several months of “treatment”, and then stay away from his family for at least two years.
But my brother couldn’t stand it and started drinking again. Meanwhile, Catherine Mann and her son Elliot Mann were struggling to survive. She had not seen a penny of the money she had been promised by Theodore’s lawyer, only promises to hold out a little longer. Finally, she learned that the lawyer had disappeared and the police were looking for him.
The big house, called Sagamore Hill, stood at the end of the Long Island peninsula. It was Theodore Roosevelt’s refuge when he wanted to escape Washington and New York. It was also where the extended family gathered to listen to his educational measures. His control over the family has been described by some as brutal. His children, Alice, 10, Ted, 7, Kermit, 4, Ethel, 3, and Arechie, an infant, had to play games that Eleanor, 9, did not like.
She had almost no contact with her father, only getting a letter from him now and then. “Don’t forget your father completely”, he wrote to her, and it was from him that Eleanor learned that the country was in an economic crisis, that the stock market had fallen in 1893, and that a million people were already unemployed. She, of course, was not interested in all that. She felt lonely because her mother Anne had died the previous year.
My father was only able to visit her briefly after my mother’s death. “We have to stick together,” he whispered to her, and she hasn’t seen him officially since. Sometimes he would visit her secretly in the city, when the teacher allowed it. After her mother’s death, Eleanor and her brothers were sent to live with their widowed, autocratic and deeply religious grandmother. Her only comfort, therefore, became her father’s letters.
In the last presidential election, Democrat Grover Cleveland won the presidency, but held off Republican Roosevelt on the Public Affairs Committee. Roosevelt was not particularly popular in Washington because of his fight against corruption, but the press was full of praise for him and he was convinced that he had to become popular in the countryside and not just in the capital. He was a remarkable orator and his vision of America was in keeping with a time of great change and innovation, when such wonderful things as elevators, electric furnaces, light bulbs, phonographs and the railroad, which had penetrated every corner of the country, were happening. Theodore Roosevelt presented the doctrine of American exceptionalism to the public, saying that he was the man to make it happen.
That’s why he was in Sagamore Hill, building up the strength he needed. Financially, he was doing quite badly. The crisis hit him too and he had to sell some of his properties. Paper money became so scarce that he sometimes paid his servants in gold. Even worse was Catherine, now Katie Mann, who had to look after little Elliott Mann. With the promised money nowhere to be found, she decided to visit Elliott Roosevelt.
But she hardly recognised the man standing in front of her. His face was bloated from drink, his feverish eyes sunken in. He didn’t recognise her immediately and Katie left empty-handed, because Elliott had no money. He lived in a world of illusions. In August 1894, he stepped onto the windowsill of his flat and tried to jump into the deep, but was prevented in time. He was put to bed, but convulsions seized him in the night and he died in agony. He was only 34 years old.
Theodore never accepted responsibility for his brother’s misguided life. At that time there was no understanding of the physical and psychological causes of the inclination to alcohol and Theodore saw it as nothing more than a scandal. But he was not immune to grief either. Standing by his dead brother’s bedside and looking at his lifeless face, he wept like a little child for a long time.
Katie Mann again asked him for financial help to support her son, but he refused and she never tried to contact the Roosevelts again. Eleanor took the news of her father’s death calmly, but after it she changed completely. She became withdrawn and often dreamt that her father visited her at night and placed a cold hand on her hot forehead. She still wrote letters to him secretly and hid them in a drawer.
Being President of America
On New Year’s Day 1905, at exactly 11 o’clock, the Navy Band played The Stars and Stripes Forever and US President Theodore Roosevelt and his genteel wife came down the White House steps to accept and give thanks for the New Year’s greetings. Theodore first became US President in September 1901, when his predecessor, President McKinley, was assassinated. At that time, he was US Vice-President and automatically became President of the United States. But this was a Pyrrhic victory for him, because he knew that he had not been elected.
The 1904 elections were very different. He was elected by the American people. The road to this success was a long one. Standing on the steps, looking on with admiration, was 20-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, the President’s fifth cousin. He was a student at Harvard and just as ambitious as the American President. Theodore had carefully planned his way to the White House. Already in 1895, he accepted the post of Chairman of the New York Police Commission and immediately reformed it. He went some way to improving the situation of the emigrant poor and tried to be accepted by the electorate as “one of our own”.
He became Assistant Secretary of State for the Navy. It was he who formed a battalion of volunteers and went with them to Cuba, returning home a war hero after the Spanish defeat and winning election as Mayor of New York. This convinced the Republican leadership to send him to fight for the Presidency of America.
Franklin Roosevelt came to the White House ceremony at the invitation of his cousin Alice, and his cousins Christine and Elfrida were also there, but he only had eyes for the plain and skinny cousin Eleanor. He had known her virtually all his life, as her father had been his godfather, and they had sometimes met by chance.
Eleanor slowly integrated into the social life of the American elite, even though she was the niece of the US President. She was not as beautiful as her cousin Alice, nor as skilled in conversation. But she had something that Alice did not have; a continental upbringing, having recently returned from her education in England. She was distinguished by intelligence and seriousness, the result of reading and acquiring knowledge. However, she accepted the courtship of her cousin Franklin hesitantly and awkwardly.
But one day, Franklin was the only thing that saved her from shame. At an event, her peers were dancing, and she was sitting alone in a corner, wearing an old-fashioned dress and mismatched shoes. Franklin approached her and asked her to dance. He did not ask any of the pretty girls, of whom there were enough, but her. Eleanor never forgot that. But she did not believe that Franklin was really interested in a girl as inconspicuous as she was. She knew that the boy was boundlessly ambitious, because he had never been discreet about it, and sometimes, when he boasted that he was the President’s relative, it hurt him. However, Franklin never told her either that the President’s family did not like him and that he had to listen to the remarks that he was Mummy’s boy. Eleanor also felt that Franklin was not fully accepted into the ‘inner circle’ of the most sanctified.
US President Theodore Roosevelt soon realised that Sagamore Hill was no longer a pleasant retreat to which he could retreat after a hard day’s work. Here, too, he had policies to make, letters to write and decisions to take. He was aware that everyone in the Republican leadership disliked him, ever since he had declared that natural resources were the property of all citizens and since he had first used the law against trusts. The big industrialists and landowners were furious with him.
The eldest sons, Ted and Kermit, went to the prestigious Groton School, but Ted worried their father. Theodore always insisted that male offspring must be honed in what he called manhood. They must not be swords and they must excel in all sports and bear pain manfully. All of which Ted almost never managed. His father put pressure on him and Ted had constant headaches as a result.
Theodore, too, tried to prove that he was still a real man at his age, but failed miserably. He was thrown from a carriage and permanently injured his leg. For many months he was in a wheelchair and then on crutches. Then he broke his arm playing tennis. At only 44 years old, he felt strongly that he was no longer the man he had once been. He also realised what it meant to be the “first family” in the country. The newspapers were full of stories about what his descendants were doing and how they were living.
But people have realised that the President cares about them. When a major fire devastated the business district of Baltimore, Theodore sent his daughter Alice to visit the abandoned city. Of course, she could do nothing more than express her father’s distress on the ground, but that was enough to give rise to the cult of the “First Daughter”, a beautiful and fashionably dressed 20-year-old. Newspapers were filled with headlines such as Beauty among the ruins and Princess watching the smoke. Everything she did was carefully recorded by journalists. She was her father’s emissary in Puerto Rico, christening big ships and carrying his messages.
At the time, it was still unusual for a President to use his family members as envoys. Everyone thought that Alice was enjoying her role, but that was not the case at all. When she returned home to the White House, she locked herself in her room and stayed away from her family. She was caught smoking both cigarettes and pipes in the White House, dancing in her nightgown on the roof of the Vanderbilt House, meeting boys in dark corners and generally behaving inappropriately, much to the chagrin of her mother.
That’s why people adored her. “There is no hope for Alice”, she wrote in her diary, and she knew she didn’t care what people thought of her. “My father doesn’t care about me,” she continued, “he loves me one eighth as much as he loves the other children.”
Eleanor was as lonely as Alice, so she was the ideal companion, always in the background, waiting to hear what Alice would say. But she still didn’t tell her that her shy cousin Franklin had asked her to marry him in the spring of 1904. They kept the engagement a secret for a while, but when the Roosevelt clan found out, there was a lot of unhappiness. After all, Eleanor was the daughter of Eliott Roosevelt, the drunkard and womaniser who had caused so much trouble for his brother Theodore. How would Eleanor behave among the Roosevelt elite?
She will have to be submissive but not weak, intelligent, non-competitive, able to thrive but with some limitations, not allowed to show emotion, least of all to allow herself to outdo her husband. Eleanor was not dissatisfied. If her aim was to live an intelligent life, Franklin was the best a woman in 1904 could hope for. Until now, only her 13-year-old brother Hall had been in her life. Yet her relationship with Theodore Roosevelt was largely formal. Of course, she probably knew that her father Elliott had another child, her half-brother Elliott Mann, but she did not know where he was or what he was doing.
To stop herself thinking such thoughts, she turned her sense of charity to the newly founded Junior League, an organisation of women from elite circles who wanted to initiate social reform among the working class. She taught dance and a kind of gymnastics designed to strengthen motor movement. Her pupils were the children of Italian and Jewish emigrants and they adored her. “It was not very important work,” she wrote, “but it kept the children off the streets.”
She was also involved in the Consumers League, an organisation that campaigned for better living conditions for workers. She visited factories and watched girls toiling behind large sewing machines. “Until I saw them, I never imagined that they could be tired, standing like that all day behind the machines, with no chairs to sit in for a moment.”
The other Roosevelts were appalled by her voluntarism. “You’ll catch some emigrant disease”, they told her, but what mattered most to her was what Franklin would say. For the time being, he was tolerant, because he had seen for himself the miserable circumstances in which some people lived and had never forgotten it.
On St Patrick’s Day in 1905, Eleanor put on her wedding dress, put on her pearl collar (a gift from her mother-in-law-to-be) and went to the wedding. Police blocked Madison Avenue in anticipation of US President Theodore Roosevelt, who was to give the bride away to the groom. The newspapers joked. “Miss Eleanor Roosevelt, daughter of Eliott Roosevelt and niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, is to be married to the son of James Roosevelt, who is a half-brother of J. Roosevelt Roosevelt, and whose half-niece, Miss Helen Roosevelt, is to be married to a nephew of President Roosevelt.” Of course, many others could be seen at the wedding who spelled their names Roosevelt.
The President and his wife Edith arrived in New York for the wedding ceremony on a special train from Washington and were greeted by cheers and waves from the crowd. Theodore walked Eleanor down the aisle and everyone could see that he was a head shorter than the bride. When the priest pronounced Franklin and Eleanor husband and wife, Theodore said out loud, “All right Franklin, nothing like keeping the name in the family.” Then he turned and hurried to the reception in the library, where food and drink were waiting for the guests.
The crowd of guests followed him and the newlyweds were left almost alone. They had no choice but to follow the President alone. When they arrived at the library, the crowd was already laughing at the jokes and stories with which the President had entertained those present.
Failed return
On the night of 14 October 1912, a crowd gathered outside the Grilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee to hear Theodore Roosevelt speak. The former President was passionate about his re-election as White House Master. He was challenging both the incumbent President, the Republican William Howard Taft, and the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.
The President, Republican Taft, whom Theodore had helped to enthrone because they were friends, was a great disappointment to Theodore. When he became President, under the influence of the big corporations, he slowly began to undo all the progressive measures that Theodore had so painfully put in place. To forget all this, Theodore went on a safari to Africa with his son Kermit after his presidency ended, but even there he had to listen to rumours of what the new President was doing.
That is why he has decided to run again for the presidential nomination after four years. But the Republican Party did not give him the nomination, so he decided to form the National Progressive Party and run as an independent candidate. The new party held its convention in August, where he was enthusiastically welcomed by his supporters and, for the first time, women delegates were allowed to attend.
But Theodore was disappointed that few prominent members of the Republican Party had joined the new party. Apparently, they did not want to risk their political careers by jumping into the unknown. “All the corrupt CEOs and all the corrupt financiers in the land and all the newspapers they control have sworn to defeat me”, he complained. He believed in victory only at rare moments, knowing that he did not have the backing of big capital, but hoped that he would at least do better than Taft. After all, he was only a popular former President and Nobel Peace Prize winner for his intervention in the Russo-Japanese war, and he had many supporters.
When he finished his speech at the Grilpatrick Hotel, he sat in an open limousine and then stood up again to greet his supporters crowded around the car. At that moment, a man standing nearby reached into his pocket, pulled out a Colt revolver and put his finger on the cock. The thirty-four-year-old’s name was John Schrank. He was convinced that Roosevelt wanted to become a dictator. “God appointed me as his tool,” he later told the police. Theodore Roosevelt represented a strong administration, which frightened conservatives, individualists and loners like Schrank.
The shot echoed off the walls of neighbouring buildings. First there was complete silence, then people started screaming. Theodore Roosevelt grabbed his chest and collapsed on the car seat. He was not fatally injured as he shouted to security to bring his assassin. The two men stared into each other’s eyes, and Theodore later recalled only that the shooter’s eyes were expressionless. The bullet had hit him in the right side of the chest and blood was seeping through his shirt, but when he coughed there was no blood on his handkerchief, a sign that his lungs were not affected.
Since he became President eleven years ago, Theodore has been ready for anyone to take a shot at him. After all, he was also the one who was brought to the White House by the bullet that took the life of President McKinley. He refused medical attention and insisted that he wanted to speak to the people again. “Friends, you may not understand that I was shot,” he began. He unbuttoned his vest and showed his bloody shirt. The crowd was speechless. “But it takes more than that to kill a buffalo.”
He pulled a written speech from his vest and showed the crowd that he had been pierced by a bullet. He explained to the crowd that the glasses case and the speech had slowed the bullet down and prevented it from reaching his lungs. As he spoke, his shirt became bloodier and bloodier and he grew paler and paler. Only when he had finished speaking was he taken to hospital.
As soon as she learned of the assassination, the whole family rushed to Mercy Hospital in Chicago, where he was brought. Only the youngest members of the family remained in school. An X-ray showed that the bullet had stopped at a rib. One rib was fractured, but the patient’s condition was otherwise stable. The medical board was convinced that it was best to leave the bullet where it was and not risk surgery. So Theodore Roosevelt carried the bullet for the rest of his life, unable to use his right arm as he once could.
His daughter Alice, who has been married for several years to Nick Longworth, the slightly older, chubby and already bald Senator from Ohio, also came to stay with her father. Theodore was quite relieved to see his daughter’s marriage, hoping that her name would now disappear from the pages of the yellow press. But before she moved out of the White House, Alice buried a wooden voodoo doll, her talisman, in the ground in the garden, hoping that one day she would return.
The marriage worked well enough in the beginning, although Alice hoped it would provide her with the domestic embrace and peace she craved. But her husband was an ambitious politician who had no regard for her wishes. For six years, they somehow maintained the appearance of being happily married, but then rumours began to circulate of her husband’s infidelity and even that she had an illegitimate child. Alice wrote in her diary, “He hates me and I hate him.”
At his father’s bedside was his son Ted, who had been so brutally pressured by his father in his youth. At his father’s request, he struggled to finish his studies at Harvard and then decided that he had to make a career for himself, without the help of his family and their money. He was driven by the feeling that he had to become worthy of his father’s reputation and his name. With the help of a friend, he found a job in a spinning mill at a wage of eight dollars a week, an unusual decision for a Harvard graduate. Once again, journalists flocked to Thompsonville to see Roosevelt earning his bread as a common labourer. He worked from dawn to dusk, hauling wool and running machinery.
His father understood and wrote to his son Kermit: “Ted’s boss called me today and said he was progressing well.” But Ted was just not the same as the other workers. He did not live in one of the overcrowded workers’ shacks, but in the comfortable house of his father’s friend, where servants abounded. He also had more money than he earned in the spinning mill. In 1910 he married a banker’s daughter and moved to San Francisco, where Theodore’s first granddaughter, Grace, was born. He started selling bonds, knowing that he had to enter the world of finance if he wanted to succeed.
But there was no other son at his father’s bedside, Kermit, who was at that very moment struggling with poisonous snakes and humid weather in Brazil. He was employed by a company that built railway lines, tracing a route through the Brazilian rainforest. Kermit was a dreamer by nature, sometimes deeply thoughtful, he wanted to explore and did not care about social rules; he did not want to spend his life in a bank or an investment company.
When Theodor was discharged from hospital, he was forbidden to take part in the election campaign for a while. His wife Edith followed the instruction to the letter. The assassination of a presidential candidate greatly increased his popularity and Theodore sometimes genuinely thought he could win.
At the time, Franklin Roosevelt was already 30 years old and running for a second term in the New York Senate. But he chose the Democratic Party over Theodore Roosevelt’s Republicans. Nevertheless, Franklin had something in common with his uncle Theodore. Like him, he wanted to clean up the corruption in the Democratic Party, but he did not cut his ties with his own party to do so.
One day, Franklin got a mysterious fever and collapsed on the floor of his house. The windows were immediately blacked out and the servants talked only in whispers. Eleanor went up and down the stairs, bringing her husband fresh linen. They discovered that she was suffering from typhoid fever. The couple had three children; Anna, James and Elliott. Fearing infection, they had to move out of the house. Franklin was delirious, coughing and sweating on soaked sheets.
November finally arrived and Theodore and Franklin were able to get out of bed and gather their last strength for the presidential campaign. Theodore was greeted at Madison Square Garden by an enthusiastic crowd of people shouting, “Four more years!” Franklin Roosevelt went to Oklahoma to pledge his word for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
On 5 November, Theodore gathered his supporters in Sagamore Hill to await the results of the election. Woodrow Wilson won, Theodore Roosevelt came second and Taft, a Democrat, third.
Entering the war
Franklin Roosevelt knew he had chosen the right side. The future President Wilson asked him to join his administration as Assistant Secretary of State for the Navy. But he knew something else. Now he, Franklin Roosevelt, and no other nephew, not Ted, who was still selling bonds, not Kermit, who was not particularly interested in all this, would take over the baton of power from the weakened Theodore Roosevelt. It was like personal revenge.
Since the United States entered the war the previous year, in 1917, all Eleanor’s cousins have enlisted. Ted and Archie were the first and served under General Pershing, while Kermit, who had less military training, enlisted in the British Army. Even Ted’s wife went to Europe to share humanitarian aid.
Theodore’s youngest son, 19-year-old Quentin, dropped out of Harvard and joined the First US Air Force. In July 1918, his plane was hit by an enemy shell and crashed. He was only twenty years old. When America entered the war, Theodore suggested to Franklin that he leave his cushy job as Under Secretary of State for the Navy, “take helmet and rifle” and go into the trenches of the European battlefields, but Franklin would not listen. Whether Theodore was still a “nice guy”, no one knew.
In November 1918, Alice Roosevelt Longworth put on a show at the US Food Administration office, but not the kind she had done at the White House. Now she was cooking for the assembled officials and journalists. The only strange thing was that cooking was not something she was known for, because at that time, Washington had a big problem. The vast majority of cooks, butlers and servants had been conscripted into the army, and most of the female staff had resigned to take jobs in the better-paid arms factories. Many rich ladies virtually never set foot in their kitchens. How will they feed their families now?
The armistice in Europe may have been signed, but the soldiers were not home yet, and even if they had returned, most of them would not have gone back to their old jobs. With their “food centres” set up all over the country, the state planners wanted to sell pre-prepared and ready-made food to the rich and the less rich alike.
Along with several other ladies, Alice was one of the first to present such an offer. No one could argue that she had not contributed to the war effort to the best of her ability. She had already wanted to divorce Nick a few years earlier, but divorce was unthinkable in political circles at the time and would have further undermined Therodore Roosevelt’s ideas of making another attempt to run for the White House. So she insisted on her unfaithful husband. Divorce would also have definitively destroyed her ambition to present herself as a driving force in the social life of the capital.
A cold wind howled around the corners of the nearly 50-year-old hospital named after James H. Roosevelt, a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt. On that November day, a real drama was unfolding on its premises. A nurse had the audacity to tell Theodore that he might be condemned to a wheelchair. “OK, I can live and work that way,” he finally muttered.
Theodore Roosevelt in a wheelchair would have been a sad scene indeed, but it was not to be feared, because everyone could see that he had begun to deteriorate in recent months. On the twenty-seventh of October 1918, it was his sixtieth birthday and he allowed the press to come to Sagamore Hill. In the following days almost everyone wrote that Theodore was a real “picture of health and activity”. At least, that was the impression he gave when he played on the grass with his four-year-old grandson Richard. The whole clan, except for Ted and Kermit, who were still at the front, gathered to celebrate. Archie came too, with his arm and leg bound up as a result of the fighting at the front. Theodore became a kind of father of the nation. Like many fathers, he saw his sons go to the front and one did not return.
But away from the public eye, Theodore often lost his balance. One day, his wife Edith noticed this and asked him what was wrong. He replied that he had a “strange feeling” in his head after his dental surgery. But on the day the Armistice was signed, 11 November 1918, he had such pain in his joints that he could no longer bear it and was taken to hospital. The doctors assumed that, in addition to rheumatism, he had lumbago and pemphigus.
Much of his health problems can be traced back to his journey through the Brazilian jungles five years ago, when he accompanied explorers into the unknown along the Rio da Duvida. He and Kermit overcame their difficulties, although Theodore suffered a serious leg injury and a high fever. He asked to be left there to die alone in the jungle. He had already seen what the headlines would be: Roosevelt died where no human foot had ever stood. Now he wondered whether he could run for the presidency if he was in a wheelchair. He was sure it was possible.
Edith confided in her family, “There is no way that’s possible”. She knew what was behind her husband’s physical decline. Theodore never recovered from the death of his son Quentin. He was his pet and he was always thinking about what else he could achieve in the future. When her sister Corinne’s son fell out of a window and killed himself nine years ago, he had little understanding of his mother’s long grief. Now he understood her. Quentin was dead, Archie wounded and with shrapnel in his leg and his left arm paralysed. All his life, Theodore had pushed his sons to be men. When he found out that his son Ted had also been wounded and that his life hung in the balance, he showed no emotion. But Quentin?
He wanted to take part in the war himself. He asked US President Wilson for permission to form a battalion of volunteers to go to the front. He was very disappointed when he refused his proposal and immediately began to draw up a programme for his campaign for the American presidency. He would introduce the eight-hour working day, social insurance, old-age pensions, in short, everything to ensure the social security of citizens, he was convinced.
He was discharged from hospital on Christmas Day 1918. It was snowing heavily outside, he was bedridden and had a lot of time to think. He was convinced that all his sons, war-torn and successful businessmen, were fit for high public service and could succeed him in the highest positions. But at the moment, another Roosevelt, Franklin, was doing best. He devoted much of his thoughts to his wife Edith, who had accompanied him all these decades and had been with him through triumphs and defeats. Whether he thought anything of his late brother Elliott and his illegitimate son, no one knows. He never mentioned them.
On 3 January 1919, he spent the day dictating letters. His joints were again inflamed and doctors injected him with arsenic. Nothing helped and the pain became worse and worse. Edith got permission from the doctors to give him a shot of morphine, Theodore looked at her gratefully and fell asleep, and Edith went to sleep soothed. Around two o’clock at night, a servant keeping watch outside the patient’s room heard that he was breathing irregularly. He did not know that Theodore had just suffered a pulmonary oedema. Edith was called around 4am, but when she arrived, Theodore was already dead.
The next day, a familiar face with serious features, glasses and a bushy moustache was on the front page of the newspapers. Above him, in bold print, was the words:
ROOSEVELT DIED SUDDENLY IN HIS SLEEP. A SIMPLE FUNERAL WILL TAKE PLACE TOMORROW. THE NATION IS SHOCKED AND GRIEVING.
Epilog
Twenty-seven-year-old Elliott Roosevelt Mann, the son of the unfortunate Katie, took the train to work that morning, as he does every day, at the National Commercial Bank in Manhattan, and read an article in the Sun about Roosevelt’s death. No one on the train knew that his uncle had died and that he was the nephew of the former President. Even his colleagues at the bank did not know his personal story. They only knew him as a hard-working teller who handed money to customers behind a glass window and almost never made a mistake.
Life has not been easy for Katie Mann and her son. She saved and saved every penny she had left. She told her neighbours that she was Mr Elliott’s widow. She could marry, because she was engaged to a decent and well-to-do man. It would have changed her life, but she refused to tell him that Elliott Hall was an illegitimate son. She was ashamed of this.
Elliott’s childhood was therefore modest. All he knew was that his father was dead. It wasn’t until he grew up that Katie told him the truth and he began to feel ashamed of his illegitimate origins. He told no one that one of his names was Roosevelt. He was simply Elliott R. Mann, and when they asked him what the R stood for, he said Robert.
At the age of 15, he started looking for a job. It wasn’t easy, as he had only a primary education. But he was a hard-working and cheerful young man, and soon he was offered a job as a cashier. For the son of a seamstress and an unknown emigrant, this was a great achievement. Uncle Theodore had an account at the bank, and Elliott probably saw him there at some point and watched all the staff bowing to him.
When America entered the war, Elliott was excused from going to the front because he was his mother’s only financial support. A few months after his uncle’s funeral, Elliott was promoted in his job and transferred to the mortgage department. The higher salary allowed him and his mother to rent a small house and thus become typical of the American middle class.
The journey of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt needs no telling, as Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States for many years. Even after his death in 1945, Eleanor did not retreat into solitude. She was still a public figure. As the years passed, she began to suffer from health problems, particularly anaemia. She died in November 1962, aged 78. She lived to see her autobiography revised. Her funeral was attended by the US President and his wife, two former American Presidents and one future President. Trumpets sounded during the service, an honour reserved only for those who have served their country honourably.
