FDR - Jean Edward Smith [33]
On March 4, 1904, Franklin and Eleanor sat just behind the president and his family at the east front of the Capitol and heard TR’s characteristic call for vigor and effort, “without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away.”64 Afterward they went to the White House for lunch with the president, watched the parade with him, and went to the inaugural ball that evening in the atrium of the old pension building.
The wedding was held in the twin town houses of Eleanor’s great-aunt, Elizabeth Livingston Ludlow, and her daughter, Cousin Susie (Mrs. Henry) Parish, at 6–8 East Seventy-sixth Street. The formal drawing rooms of the two houses opened into each other and could accommodate two hundred guests, an elegant yet understated New York setting often used by the family on ceremonial occasions. Outside, on Fifth Avenue, the Saint Patrick’s Day parade wound its way northward, the Ancient Order of Hibernians filling the air with “The Wearing of the Green.” Moments before 3:30, the clatter of carriage horses signaled the arrival of the president, top-hatted and buoyant, a shamrock in his lapel, to give the bride away. As the orchestra commenced the wedding march from Lohengrin, Eleanor’s six bridesmaids descended the circular staircase. Each wore a white silk gown, its sleeves embroidered with silver roses, with a demiveil and three silver-tipped ostrich feathers (the Roosevelt crest) in her hair. The six ushers wore tie pins with three Roosevelt feathers depicted in diamonds. Franklin and Lathrop Brown, his Harvard roommate who was standing in for Rosy as best man, wore formal morning attire.65 The bride’s satin wedding gown was covered with Grandmother Hall’s rose-point Brussels lace, which Eleanor’s mother had worn at her wedding. Her veil was secured with a diamond crescent that had belonged to her mother as well. As fate would have it, March 17 was also Anna’s birthday.
When Reverend Peabody asked, “Who giveth this woman in marriage?,” TR answered emphatically, “I do!” Hands were joined, rings and vows exchanged, and the rector pronounced Franklin and Eleanor man and wife. The president reached out to kiss the bride. “Well, Franklin,” he exclaimed, “there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.” TR then strode off to find the refreshments and the guests followed in his wake. Franklin and Eleanor trailed along. “We simply followed the crowd and listened with the rest,” said Eleanor.66 TR had upstaged the stars of the wedding and stolen the audience. Even the cutting of the wedding cake failed to attract many onlookers until the president was persuaded to come and get a slice. As TR’s daughter Alice observed, “Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”67
* Eleanor’s cousin Alice, who was the same age yet far more worldly, reports trying to impart the facts of life to Eleanor, but “I almost came to grief.… She suddenly leapt on me and tried to smother me with a pillow, saying I was being blasphemous. So I shut up and I think she probably went to her wedding not knowing anything about the subject.” Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 57 (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
Eleanor was not alone in her naiveté. Corinne Robinson Alsop, ER’s younger cousin, remembered having once been kissed by a boy in the stable of her family’s home in Orange, New Jersey. “It frightened me to death, and I discussed with my intimate friends whether I would immediately have a baby.” Alsop Family Papers, Harvard University.
* FDR’s resolve was reinforced by the behavior of his nephew Taddy (James Roosevelt Roosevelt, Jr.), the son of Rosy and Helen Astor. Almost three years older than Franklin, Taddy dropped out of Harvard in 1900 to marry Sadie Messinger, a habitué of the Haymarket Dance Hall in New York, better known by