FDR - Jean Edward Smith [26]
Whether this was vouchsafed to Eleanor is unclear. Franklin may have written and she may have replied, but no early letters survive. In 1937, when she was at work on the first volume of her autobiography, Eleanor burned all of Franklin’s letters, finding his youthful avowals of constancy too painful to reread.11 FDR carefully preserved Eleanor’s letters to him, but none date from this period. In the Victorian era correspondence between a young man and a young woman was not undertaken lightly. As Eleanor later recorded, “It was understood that no girl was interested in a man or showed any liking for him until he had made all the advances. You knew a man very well before you wrote or received a letter from him … and to have signed one in any other way than ‘very sincerely yours’ would have been not only a breach of good manners but an admission of feeling which was entirely inadmissible.”12
Eleanor’s cramped view reflected an upbringing even more sheltered than FDR’s. Her mother, Anna Rebecca Hall, died of diphtheria when Eleanor was only eight. Less than two years later her father, Elliott, succumbed to alcoholism. From the death of her mother until her marriage to Franklin, Eleanor was in the care of her maternal grandmother, first at the Hall estate at Tivoli on the Hudson, then at boarding school in England. Apart from vacations, when she occasionally met a Roosevelt cousin, she was virtually removed from the company of men. In material terms, Eleanor was well provided for. But a nunnery novitiate would have met more men than she did.
Franklin saw Eleanor off and on during the summer of 1903, always well chaperoned, and that autumn he invited her to Cambridge for the Yale game, traditionally the last football game of the season. After the game, Eleanor went to Groton to visit her younger brother. FDR followed the next morning and spent Sunday with Eleanor. As they strolled along the bank of the Nashua River, Franklin proposed and Eleanor accepted: “A never to be forgotten walk,” FDR noted that evening. Eleanor said, “It seemed entirely natural.”13
The next weekend Franklin journeyed to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, to observe Thanksgiving with the Delanos. When he took his mother aside and broke the news, Sara was stunned. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” she wrote in her journal. Sara did not object to Eleanor, whom she knew well and had often entertained at Springwood. She simply believed Franklin too young. Her father had been thirty-three when he married and had already established himself as a major player in the China trade. He could offer something to his wife. FDR was still in college. He would not enter law school until the following fall. He was largely dependent upon his mother for support, and had she wished, Sara very likely could have forbidden the marriage. Instead, she extracted a commitment from Franklin and Eleanor that they would keep their engagement secret for a year, not see each other unless properly chaperoned, and keep sufficient distance so as not to arouse suspicion. Sara played for time. She knew from experience how fragile young love could be. Twenty-seven years before, her own romance with Stanford White had dissolved when they were kept apart, and a year now might cool the couple’s ardor. For their part, Franklin and Eleanor believed the interval of a year would erode Sara’s resistance. They accepted the arrangement and resolved to make the best of it.
Franklin and Eleanor shared a common heritage. Both were Roosevelts. But Eleanor’s maternal forebears placed her in a celestial constellation of Livingstons and Ludlows, Ver Plancks and Stuyvesants—families who traced their provenance