FDR - Jean Edward Smith [27]
In the struggle for American independence, few families, save perhaps the Adamses of Massachusetts and the Lees of Virginia, could duplicate the patriotic contribution of the Livingstons of New York, whose ranks included signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and two secretaries of state.15 Chancellor Robert Livingston, one of the nation’s most distinguished jurists, administered the presidential oath of office to George Washington in 1789. His granddaughter Elizabeth (Eleanor’s great-grandmother) eloped to marry Edward Ludlow, scion of an equally prominent Hudson River family, Tory rather than patriot, and among the wealthiest in America. Edward Ludlow founded New York City’s premier real estate holding company, and in 1861 his daughter, Mary Livingston Ludlow (Eleanor’s grandmother), married Valentine Hall, Jr., heir to an even larger commercial fortune. The Halls had six children, of whom Eleanor’s mother, Anna, was the eldest.16
On the paternal side, Eleanor’s father, Elliott, was the younger sibling of Bamie and TR, children of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and his wife, Mittie.* Just as the Aspinwalls and Delanos had infused new vigor into the Hyde Park bloodline, so Mittie, an enchanting southern belle from Cobb County, Georgia, added more than a soupçon of spice to the Long Island clan. One of fourteen children and stepchildren of Martha and James Stephens Bulloch, Mittie was a vivacious hostess and daring horsewoman who enchanted New York society. Her friends in Georgia later claimed that TR inherited “his splendid dash and energy” from his southern mother.
Eleanor’s parents enjoyed a fairy-tale romance: Elliott, the playboy prince charming; Anna, the beautiful maiden swept off her feet. Yet this fairy tale ended tragically. Unlike his brother and sisters, Elliott was fatally flawed. To this day the pathology is uncertain. Whether Elliott suffered from epilepsy or mental illness, or was driven to excess by unbridled self-indulgence, cannot be positively determined.17 What is clear is that he could not handle the rigors of formal education, dropped out of St. Paul’s at sixteen, spent a year or so out West hunting and fishing, and returned to New York just before the death of his father in 1878. The elder Roosevelt left each of his four children approximately $125,000, which would have provided an annual income of about $8,000—more than twenty times that of the average American family. When their mother, Mittie, died in 1884, each received an additional $65,000. That afforded each child an annual income of about $14,000. A simple monetary conversion equates that with an income of roughly a quarter of a million dollars today, but the money went much further in the 1880s because there was no income tax.18*
Elliott remained in New York for two years after his father’s death, playing polo, drinking heavily, and leading the sporting life of a well-connected bon vivant. A note from TR to their mother, written during a hunting trip with Elliott in 1880, provides a glimpse:
As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because he was hot; a brandy mash “to keep the cold out of his stomach;” and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening, shandigaff.19
In the autumn of 1880 Elliott set out on a leisurely world tour, highlighted by several months of big-game hunting in India.20 He returned to New York in March 1882, tried his hand halfheartedly at real estate, and within months met and fell in love with Anna Rebecca Hall, widely acclaimed