FDR - Jean Edward Smith [15]
This was a time of enormous growth in the United States. The population, which stood at 35 million at the close of the Civil War, had jumped to 53 million—a 51 percent increase in little more than fifteen years. The American birthrate, 39.8 per thousand in 1882, was almost twice that of Great Britain and three times that of France. Immigration had soared to 800,000 people annually. In the year of FDR’s birth, more than a quarter of a million potential new citizens arrived from Germany and an almost equal number from Scandinavia and the British Isles.6
America’s gross domestic product (GDP) had doubled since 1865 and was now the largest in the world: one third larger than Britain’s, twice that of France, and three times as great as Germany.7 The production of steel, less than twenty thousand tons in 1867, totaled almost 2 million tons in 1882. Coal production had tripled. On the negative side, more than five hundred miners lost their lives in deep-pit accidents each year.8
Within a decade of FDR’s birth, the electric light, the telephone, and the automobile were invented. The continent would be spanned by not one but six transcontinental railroads. This was the age of Social Darwinism and robber barons: Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, and William Vanderbilt in transportation; the steel trust of Andrew Carnegie; John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil; and the mother of all trusts, the great sugar trust of Henry Havemeyer. Chester Arthur was in the White House, the Republicans controlled the House, the Democrats the Senate, and civil service reform, a belated reaction to the assassination of President Garfield, was just around the corner.
Few of the worries of American life intruded at Springwood. FDR grew up in a privileged, carefree environment of comfort and security. “In thinking back to my earliest days,” he said many years later, “I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things both in respect to places and people. Up to the age of seven, Hyde Park was the center of the world.”9
Families as wealthy as the Roosevelts usually entrusted newborn babies to the care of experienced nurses and old family retainers. Not Sara. As soon as she recovered from childbirth, she insisted on doing everything herself: “Every mother ought to learn to care for her own baby, whether she can afford to delegate the task to someone or not.” And although a wet nurse was available, Sara nursed Franklin for almost a year.10
Mittie Roosevelt, who had introduced James to Sara two years before, spent a week at Hyde Park in June 1882. To her son Elliott she wrote, “I held your dear little godson and enjoyed him intensely. He is such a fair, sweet, cunning little bright five-months-old darling baby.… Sallie [is] devoted and looks so very lovely with him, like a Murillo Madonna and infant.”11
Sara was determined to raise Franklin as a Delano—which meant to raise him as she had been raised under the benign discipline of her father. When the Roosevelts made their first pilgrimage to the Delano ancestral home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, FDR was placed in the same hooded cradle in which his grandfather had slept seventy-three years earlier. Warren Delano eventually had seventeen grandchildren, yet none of the others was ever permitted such indulgence.12
Because of Franklin’s difficult birth, Sara was advised to avoid a second and possibly fatal pregnancy. The Roosevelts, like many couples in the nineteenth century faced with a similar problem, adopted abstinence as a remedy, and from time to time that led to marital tension.13