FDR - Jean Edward Smith [14]
* Seven years later White married Bessie Springs Smith of Smithtown, Long Island. By then McKim, Mead and White had become the leading architectural firm in America, setting the pace in both public and private building, and driven by the manic energy of Stanford White. Warren Delano’s forebodings to the contrary, White became exceedingly wealthy. But on one point Warren may have been correct: White was probably unsuitable as a husband. His philandering was notorious, and in 1906 he was shot and killed by a jealous husband, Harry Thaw, while watching the floor show at the rooftop restaurant at Madison Square Garden—which White had designed. Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White 33–34, 372–373 (New York: Free Press, 1989).
TWO
MY SON FRANKLIN
I have always been a great believer in heredity.
—SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT was born late in the evening of January 30, 1882. Sara was in labor twenty-six hours and narrowly survived an overdose of chloroform administered by a solicitous country doctor. That night, in the diary Sara kept, James wrote, “At quarter to nine my Sallie had a splendid large baby boy. He weighs 10 lbs., without clothes.”1 For the next two months the baby went unnamed as James and Sara delicately struggled for control. Roosevelt tradition dictated the boy be named Isaac. By naming Rosy after himself twenty-eight years earlier, James had disrupted that tradition. He now wished to restore it by naming the baby in honor of his father. Sara, who was expected to defer to her husband’s wishes, declined to do so in naming her son. She detested the name Isaac. Before the child was born she had decided that if it were a boy, he would be named for her father: Warren Delano Roosevelt. The toing and froing continued through February. Eventually James gave way. His commitment to Roosevelt tradition was no match for Sara’s determination.2
Sara’s father was delighted. The baby, he wrote, was “a beautiful little fellow—well and strong and well-behaved—with a good-shaped head of the Delano type.”3 But there was a problem. A brother of Sara’s had recently lost a young son who had been named Warren Delano IV. Out of sympathy, Sara agreed it would be untimely to name her baby Warren as well. “We are disappointed, and so is Papa,” she wrote, “but of course there is nothing to say.”4 As an alternative, Sara proposed to name the baby for her favorite uncle, Franklin Delano, who had married Laura Astor and lived a few miles north at a baronial estate known as Steen Valetje in Barrytown. Her father worried that some might think the name was selected “with an idea of possible advantage” since Uncle Frank and Aunt Laura were childless, but Sara brushed the objection aside.5
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was christened on March 20, 1882, at a small family ceremony in the chapel of Hyde Park’s St. James’ Episcopal Church. Nelly Blodgett, one of Sara’s closest friends since childhood, was godmother. There were two godfathers: Will Forbes, Sara’s brother-in-law (Dora’s husband), and Elliott Roosevelt, the younger brother of Sara’s friend Bamie and TR, and soon to be the father of Eleanor. Had he lived, Elliott, in addition to being Franklin’s godfather, would also have become his father-in-law.
The world appeared remarkably peaceful when FDR was christened. The “Concert of Europe,” in place since the Napoleonic wars, provided unprecedented international stability. Christianity, capitalism, and colonialism cemented the cohesion of the Great Powers. German unity had been achieved by Bismarck without rending the fabric of consensus, and few shed a tear for the demise of the papacy’s temporal authority in Italy. In Britain, Queen Victoria ruled majestically in the fifth decade of her seemingly endless reign. Emperor Franz Josef was well into his fourth decade on the Hapsburg throne; Republican France appeared to have found its footing; and north of the U.S. border a newly autonomous Dominion of Canada greeted the United States as a full-fledged North American partner.
Beneath the