FDR - Jean Edward Smith [400]
* The reference is to FDR’s 1937 speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution. 5 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 214–217, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillian, 1939).
* The exception came after a particularly stressful session on February 8 when Poland was discussed. Bruenn reported that the president suffered pulsus alternans (alternating strong and weak beats) that night but soon recovered. Howard G. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes on the Illness and Death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” 72 Annals of Internal Medicine 589 (1970). Also see Jay Kenneth Herman, “The President’s Cardiologist,” 82 Navy Medicine 6–13 (1990).
Notes
THE INITIAL EPIGRAPH is from Mario Cuomo’s keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 1984. The Preface is written without endnotes. The quotations appear elsewhere in the text and are fully cited at that point. I am indebted to Michael Barone for the final observation concerning FDR.
ONE | Heritage
The epigraph is from Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 18–19 (New York: Doubleday, 1981). As governor and later as president, Franklin enjoyed teasing his mother about the family’s forebears. According to FDR’s son James, when important people were dining at Hyde Park, the president would often hint that “old Claes left Holland because he was a horse thief or worse … or would take off on the subject of the Delanos who went into the China trade, implying that they smuggled everything from opium to immigrants. Sometimes he sounded as if he were taking his text, chapter and verse, from the columnist Westbrook Pegler.” James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 18 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
1. The most accessible sources for the history of the Roosevelt family are Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 17–26 (New York: Putnam, 1972); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 5–9 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952); Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 13–60 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Also see Karl Schriftgiesser, The Amazing Roosevelt Family: 1613–1942 (New York: W. Funk, 1942); Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 1979); Alvin Page Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Colonial Ancestors (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1933); Allen Churchill, The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Bellamy Partridge, The Roosevelt Family in America (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1936). The Herald Tribune quotation is by Gerald W. Johnson. A more disparaging observation is by Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, who in her History of New York in the Seventeenth Century noted that “at no pre-Revolutionary period was the Roosevelt family conspicuous nor did any member of it attain distinction.”
2. Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1913). TR’s emphasis.
3. Clara and Hardy Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park 38–39 (New York: Viking, 1950).
4. The quotation is from Dr. Isaac’s brother-in-law, William Henry Aspinwall, reported in Ward, Before the Trumpet 21. Also see Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 46.
5. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 27 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
6. Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 40. John Aspinwall Roosevelt, Dr. Isaac’s second and last child, was born in 1840.
7. 3 FDR: His Personal Letters 1224, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950). Like many family stories told by FDR, the Garibaldi tale was artfully embellished. Roosevelt records show that James was in Naples in March 1849, but Garibaldi was encamped at the time at Rieti, some forty miles northeast of Rome. The siege of Naples did not begin until 1860. See Christopher Hibbert, Garibaldi and His Enemies 275–293 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).
8. For Silliman’s eminence at the New York bar, see 6 National Cyclopedia of American Biography 54–55 (New York: J. T. White