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her trade names, “Dutch Sadie” and “Sadie of the Tenderloin.” The press had a field day (to the chagrin of the Roosevelts and Astors); Rosy tried to have the marriage annulled, but Taddy, who had just turned twenty-one and come into half ownership of his late mother’s Astor legacy, held tight. After a brief stay in Florida, Taddy and Sadie returned to New York, where they took two rooms over a garage in which he repaired automobiles. They remained together until Sadie’s death in 1940. Taddy never touched his legacy and on his death in 1958 left his millions to the Salvation Army. FDR blamed Taddy for bringing on James’s fatal heart attack in 1900. “One can never again consider him a true Roosevelt,” he wrote Sara. “It would be well for him not only to go to parts unknown, but to stay there and begin life anew.” FDR did not see or speak with Taddy again. Letter, FDR to SDR, October 23, 1900, FDRL.

* Bamie, whose real name was Anna (Bamie was short for “bambino”) was born in 1855; TR in 1858; Elliott in 1860; and a fourth child, Corinne, in 1861.

* With the exception of a brief period during the Civil War, there was no federal income tax until 1894, when a Democratic Congress amended the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act to provide for a general tax of 2 percent on incomes above $4,000 (28 Stat. 509, 553 [1894]).

The following year, a sharply divided (5–4) Supreme Court struck down the income tax as unconstitutional. Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust, 157 U.S. 429 (1895). “We are reversing one hundred years of error,” said Chief Justice Melville Fuller, speaking for the Court. Fuller’s reference was to the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions in Hylton v. United States, 3 Dallas (3 U.S.) 171 (1796), and Springer v. United States, 102 U.S. 586 (1881), both of which would have sustained the tax. As a result of the Court’s decision in Pollock a federal income tax was not instituted until after adoption of the Sixteenth (“Income Tax”) Amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

* After FDR was elected president in 1932, Elliott Roosevelt Mann and Katy wrote Eleanor to congratulate her. ER replied, “I was very interested to receive your letter and to learn that you were named after my father.… I shall hope sometime to see both you and your mother.” No invitation was ever extended, nor was any further correspondence from the Manns answered by ER. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 65n. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).

* James Kearney, an early biographer, suggested that when Eleanor wrote This Is My Story in 1937 she deliberately emphasized the unhappy aspects of her childhood because she wished to identify with the “agonizing insecurity and aspirations of American youth in the thirties.” Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: The Evolution of a Reformer 6 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).

* Sitting opposite the formidable Marie Souvestre, then in her seventies, was considered the place of honor. According to ER, “The girl who occupied this place received [the headmistress’s] nod at the end of the meal and gave the signal, by rising, for the rest of the girls to rise and leave the dining room.” Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 26 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

FOUR

ALBANY

Frank, the men that are looking out of that window are waiting for your answer. They won’t like to hear that you had to ask your mother.

—ED PERKINS (DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN OF

DUTCHESS COUNTY) TO FDR, 1910

FDR LED A PERILOUS LIFE as a first-year law student. His classmate General William Donovan, who headed the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, later said that Roosevelt’s most prominent characteristic at Columbia was his “daring”—a remarkable observation from a man who won the Medal of Honor leading New York’s “Fighting Sixty-Ninth” in the Meuse-Argonne.1 What Donovan meant was that after Groton and Harvard, Franklin had enormous confidence in himself—perhaps overconfidence—and he never let law school interfere with his personal life.

Following his wedding on Saint Patrick’s Day, he and Eleanor departed for Springwood and a week’s honeymoon.