FDR - Jean Edward Smith [38]
Years later Eleanor acknowledged that she had been completely unprepared to be a practical housekeeper, wife, or mother. “If I had it to do over again, I know now that what we should have done was to have no servants in those first few years.… However, my bringing-up had been such that this never occurred to me, and neither did it occur to any of the older people who were closest to me. Had I done this, my subsequent troubles would have been avoided and my children would have had far happier childhoods.”27
For his part, Franklin, like his father, left the child rearing to his wife. “Father’s attitude on nurses and other household affairs was strictly hands off,” said his son James.28 When the children were older, FDR enjoyed roughhousing with his “chicks,” taking them riding at Hyde Park, and sailing at Campobello. “Father was fun,” said Anna. “He would sometimes romp with me on the floor or carry me around on his shoulders.”29 The children adored “Pa,” who seemed much warmer than their straitlaced mother. He was like a favorite uncle who entertained them, while Eleanor was the disciplinarian.*
In September 1907 Franklin joined the distinguished Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn as one of five unsalaried apprentices. “I know you will be glad to start,” wrote Sara. “Try to arrange for systematic air and exercise and keep away from brokers’ offices, this advice free gratis for nothing.”30
Carter, Ledyard and Milburn was one of the most prestigious law firms in the nation. It had a large general practice and was executor of the Astor estate, but its major source of income was corporate law, at which it had few equals. James Carter, the firm’s founder, was so highly respected at the appellate bar that the attorney general of the United States engaged him to argue the government’s case before the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust in 1894, the great income tax case.31 Louis Cass Ledyard, an intimate of J. P. Morgan, played a vital role in arresting the Wall Street Panic of 1907, served as counsel for both the Morgan Bank and United States Steel, and later represented the American Tobacco Company in antitrust litigation before the Supreme Court.32 John G. Milburn, the third senior partner, was counsel for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil cartel in an equally well publicized antitrust suit in 1911.33 Milburn himself had clerked for Grover Cleveland in his Buffalo law office, and it was at Milburn’s home in Buffalo that William McKinley died after being shot by an anarchist in 1901.34
FDR had little passion for the law, but he was a fast learner blessed with an avuncular, ingratiating personality. “He had a sanguine temperament, almost adolescent in its buoyancy,” a fellow clerk recalled.35 Franklin wrote Sara that he was a “full-fledged office boy.” Like his fellow apprentices, he kept dockets for the partners, looked up cases for them, answered calendar calls, recorded deeds, and ran all manner of errands. After a while he took on minor cases in the municipal courts, and during his second year he was made managing clerk in charge of municipal cases.* The following year he moved on to the firm’s admiralty division, one of the nation’s most lustrous. As numerous observers have noted, there was always a whiff of the sea at Carter, Ledyard. Cass Ledyard succeeded J. P. Morgan as commodore of the exclusive New York Yacht Club, and Edmund L. Baylies, head of the admiralty section, was president of and principal fund-raiser for the Seamen’s Church Institute. Franklin became a director of the institute and a member of the Yacht Club. But even the laws of the sea had little appeal for FDR. He was perpetually good-humored and energetic but made little