FDR - Jean Edward Smith [37]
In the summer of 1909 Sara gave Eleanor and Franklin a second house—a thirty-four-room, three-story, seaside “cottage” nestled on ten acres of prime Campobello shoreline. The expansive house, constructed along the lines of the Arts and Crafts Movement, had been built in 1898 by the Hartman Kuhn family of Boston and stood next to the Roosevelt house, separated by a tall hemlock hedge. This time Sara transferred full title to Franklin: “a belated wedding gift,” as she expressed it. For Eleanor the house was a godsend, the first dwelling she felt she owned. Mrs. Kuhn had left all the furnishings, linen, crystal, and silver, and ER spent weeks rearranging things. “I have moved every room in the house around,” she wrote Franklin, “and I hope you will like the change.” Eleanor never tired of the place. “There was no telephone … no electricity,” she remembered. “There was a little coal stove on which you did all your cooking, and the lamps sometimes smoked, and you went to bed by candlelight. But it had great charm.”22*
Financially, Franklin and Eleanor were well provided for. Between them, they had trust-fund income of a little over $12,000—the rough equivalent of $240,000 after-tax dollars one hundred years later.* Yet their combined incomes were insufficient to support their lifestyle. Eleanor and Franklin were not members of the fastest, richest set in New York, but they lived in three different houses at various seasons of the year, always employed at least five servants, maintained a large yacht and numerous smaller boats, automobiles, and carriages, dressed in fashion, belonged to expensive clubs, traveled extensively, and gave generously to political and charitable causes. Sara subsidized the shortfall. As her grandson Elliott recalled, “Granny was generous to a fault. Whenever Father needed help, he had only to ask for it, and he usually had no need to ask, because Granny anticipated what he or Mother wanted and was ready with a check, cash or a gift in kind.”23
Midway through his third year at Columbia, Franklin took the grueling eight-hour New York bar examination and passed handily. He was immediately admitted to practice and at that point dropped his courses at Columbia and never took a degree. Twenty-two years later, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, was invited to address the Columbia Law School Alumni Dinner. Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, sat next to him, chatting affably. At some point Butler was overheard joking with FDR on his failure to obtain an LL.B. “You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual until you come back to Columbia and pass your law exams.” Franklin flashed his famous grin: “That just shows how unimportant the law really is.”24
The young Roosevelts spent the summer of 1907 relaxing at Campobello and Hyde Park. Anna, their firstborn, was a one-year-old toddler. Eleanor was pregnant once more, and their second child, James, named for FDR’s father, would be born in December. In their first ten years of marriage, Franklin and Eleanor would have six children, one of whom would die in infancy.† Later, Eleanor would write, “For ten years I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have one, and so my occupations were considerably restricted.”25
Unlike Sara, who handled every detail of FDR’s childhood, Eleanor delegated the raising of her children to a succession of nurses and caregivers. “I had never any interest in dolls or little children,” she wrote, “and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” Having heard that fresh air was good for babies, Eleanor ordered a small chicken wire cage constructed and, placing Anna in it, hung the contraption out a rear window at the town