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Franklin
Delano Roosevelt by Roy Jenkins Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Eloquent I continue to sample and enjoy reading the
brief books in the American Presidents series. Roy Jenkins died just before
finishing Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, and the final thirty or so pages were completed by
Richard Neustadt. Earlier in the book, I was able to count on Jenkins’
ability to expand my vocabulary. Thanks to him, I reached page 80 and
confirmed the meaning of “contumaciously.” At page 92, I knew the translation
of “sansculottes,” but looked it up to understand the meaning. Jenkins’
mastery of the language makes reading any of his books a pleasure. Who else
could do justice to the remarkable life of FDR? Here’s an excerpt from the
beginning of Chapter 3, “From Albany to the White House,” (pp. 47-51): The
years from 1924 to 1928 were a semi-lacuna in Roosevelt's life. Less happened
than in almost any other four years, and thus in retrospect the time seems to
have gone by remarkably quickly, although maybe the years themselves seemed
to have been dragging. Put briefly, there were four main aspects to his life.
He gave first place to an increasingly Utopian attempt to recover full use of
his legs. This involved spending much of the winters (and some other seasons,
too) at a dilapidated resort in western Georgia called Warm Springs, which he
discovered in 1924. Warm Springs, about eighty miles south of Atlanta and
fairly close to the Alabama state line, quickly replaced the long houseboat
cruises in the semitropical Florida waters that had been his previous habit. At the same time, Roosevelt kept up a sporadic New
York business life. His bonding firm, Fidelity and Deposit, did rather well,
mainly because of FDR's exploitation of his contacts from public life, which
were important to that specialized insurance business. He also indulged
during that get-rich-quick decade in a number of highly speculative separate
enterprises, some of them involving the setting up of companies to develop
very doubtful new products. Most of these failed, probably canceling out any
profits he made from Fidelity and Deposit, and exemplifying the sound general
principle that there is an almost inverse relationship—save for John Maynard
Keynes—between those who improve the performance of national economies and
those who look after their own finances well. The third development of these years was that
Eleanor created for herself an increasingly independent life, devoted in a
sense to Franklin's interests in that she worked indefatigably for the
Democratic party in New York State and also kept alive his political
contacts, reporting their views and inviting the most favored to go and see
him at Warm Springs. She built up an intense network of female friends, of
which the camaraderie is well illustrated by a contemporary photograph. Her
second surviving son, Elliott, named after her adored but feckless father and
having at least some of his unsatisfactory characteristics and therefore not
a totally reliable witness, although often close to his mother, described
this group by saying that Eleanor "had a sort of compulsion to associate
with fellow sufferers in frustration, women like herself who had found it
impossible to get along with the opposite sex." However, her closest
relationship of this sort, with Lorena Hickok, a journalist who began by
interviewing Eleanor during the 1932 presidential campaign and then became an
inseparable companion, did not start until that later date. Sara Roosevelt did not much like this nest of
women, but Franklin gave no sign of disapproval, and indeed encouraged the
building ofVal-Kill Cottage, on his mother's Hyde Park estate, although
satisfactorily separated from the big house by being two miles away on the
landward side of the old post road to Albany. There, in ungrandiose but
comfortable circumstances, Eleanor held her own female court. One of the
courtiers, Nancy Cook, an efficient lady in mannish suits arid with cropped
curly hair, but with a much better aesthetic eye than Eleanor, set up a
successful cottage industry, making good reproductions of Early American
furniture. In a quiet way it prospered more than Franklin's bolder but more
ill-judged ventures. Meanwhile the Roosevelt children were growing up,
and not wholly satisfactorily. In 1927 Anna was twenty-one, James twenty,
Elliott seventeen, Franklin thirteen, and John eleven. Their education was
more conventional than successful. Endicott Peabody had to cope with the four
boys at Groton, despite Elliott's strong preference for going to the local
high school at Hyde Park. Harvard received three (Elliott again being the
refusenik, and on this occasion a more effective one), but did not achieve
much academically for any of the three. Anna made an unsuccessful marriage to
a New York stockbroker at the age of twenty, and divorced him six years
later. James, at twenty-one, got himself engaged to Betsey Gushing, one of
the three daughters of a Boston surgeon, who were notable equally for their
beauty and for their marriages. Eleanor, when she first met Betsey, described
her as "a nice child," a mildly patronizing description of her
first daughter-in-law, who in Eleanor's many absences was to be a cosseting
hostess for FDR in the White House, and then, her marriage to James having
proved as impermanent as most of the Roosevelt unions of that generation,
became Mrs. John Hay Whitney and a notable ambassadorial hostess in London in
the 1950s. But Eleanor was perhaps more generous than Sara Roosevelt, who on
her first encounter with Miss Gushing is reported to have said: "I
understand your father is a surgeon—surgeons always remind me of my
butcher," thereby showing that American snobbery could at least hold a
candle to the allegedly much more extreme English version. Franklin, partly by nature, partly by geography,
remained aloof from most of the adolescent and postadolescent problems of his
children. It could be said that the main function of the boys was to provide
an arm on which he could lean for his dramatic advances to oratorical
podiums. James did it for the 1924 Democratic convention, Elliott for the
1928 one, and Franklin Junior and John on several notable later occasions.
Anna, who in 1934 married John Boettiger, a Chicago journalist, was a good
alternate to Betsey in providing White House company for FDR during the war
years. Apart from keeping his oar in politics, about which
Howe and Eleanor were more determined than he was, Franklin's main interest
in these late 1920s years was in the Warm Springs spa. In 1926 he bought the
whole establishment—the spring, the somewhat primitive swimming pool to which
it gave a natural temperature of eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, the run-down
hotel, and a surrounding thousand acres with a few cottages—for $200,000.
This was a substantial sum of money at the time. It was most of the money he
had inherited from his father, although there was always his rich mother in
reserve. She could be depended upon for necessary supplements, even if only
at the price of underlining his dependence. It was therefore highly desirable
that he make Warm Springs pay, and this he broadly succeeded in doing. He
installed an orthopedic surgeon and a team of physiotherapists, built a
second, covered pool, spruced up the hotel and its surrounding buildings, increased
their capacity to sixty-one patients, and, most important, built a cottage
for himself, which became, with Hyde Park, one of his two favorite retreats.
From 1927 until he died there in April 1945, it was a crucial part of his
life. This increased his separation, physical and
emotional, from Eleanor. Her orderly temperament, which could not see a
slovenly scene without wishing to improve it, made her dislike the Deep South
with its rural squalor and, in those days, rigid racial segregation. He was still
more a product of the ordered landscape and relative prosperity of the Hudson
Valley than she was, but his more easygoing nature made him accept with
curiosity rather than distaste the disordered poverty of that part of the
South. There was also a personal factor at work. Just as Eleanor regarded
Hyde Park as Sara Roosevelt's domain and never felt at home there until she
built Val-Kill Cottage, so she regarded Warm Springs as being the domain of
Missy LeHand, who had been Roosevelt's principal personal secretary since
January 1921, and was to remain so until a stroke in 1941. Missy was pretty,
quite stylish, and utterly devoted to Roosevelt. She was almost invariably at
Warm Springs when FDR was, habitually managed the house there, and did so in
a way that he found less austere and more relaxing than was Eleanor's habit.
He was totally at ease in her company and undoubtedly very fond of her,
although (admittedly with a lot of other things on his mind at that time) he
rather forgot about her in the three years between her stroke and her death
in 1944. Eleanor, who felt half warm toward Missy and half jealous of her,
apparently had to press him to make at least Christmas telephone calls to her
during this period. The jealous half was at least sufficient to make Eleanor
avoid Warm Springs. Readers who have read more comprehensive
biographies of FDR will find nothing new in Jenkins’ book. But all readers of
Franklin
Delano Roosevelt will draw great pleasure from Jenkins’ fine writing, and
ability to get straight to the heart of the matter. Steve Hopkins, December 22, 2003 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the January 2004
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Franklin
Delano Roosevelt.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins &
Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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