FDR - Jean Edward Smith [406]
Mary Newbold [Hyde Park neighbor]
Mary Soley [cousin]
Muriel [Delano Robbins—cousin]
Helen [Roosevelt—Rosy’s daughter and FDR’s niece].
As you know very few girls you ought to make haste.” FDR to SDR, December 4, 1898; SDR to FDR December 6, 1898, 1 The Roosevelt Letters 213–214, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1949).
4. FDR to SDR, October 16, 1901, ibid. 396.
5. Elliott Roosevelt, Untold Story 33–34; James Roosevelt, My Parents 18. After the romance disintegrated, Frances Dana married FDR’s classmate Henry de Rahm. Roosevelt remained on friendly terms with both and spent much time with them in Florida in the 1920s, when he was recovering from polio.
6. The account of FDR’s relationship with Alice Sohier is derived from Geoffrey Ward’s original research with the Sohier family and described in detail in Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt: 1882–1905 253–255 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Alice’s 1910 marriage to Herbert Bramwell Shaw, an insurance executive, ended in divorce in 1925. All her life she remained a Republican, professing not to be surprised that FDR was “so careless with the country’s money since he had always overspent his allowance as a youth.” Alice died in 1972, having made sure that all of FDR’s letters to her had been burned. Ibid. 255n.
7. FDR to Robert D. Washburn, August 18, 1928, FDRL. There is no record of FDR traveling to the West or the South in 1902.
8. FDR was an usher at Alice’s coming-out ball, January 13, 1904. Thirty years later, Alice’s father came across a photograph of the ushers and mailed it to the president. FDR wrote back immediately, “That photograph brings back many delightful memories. I well remember Alice’s coming out dance. Of all the debutantes of that year she was the loveliest.” FDR to Colonel Sohier, March 21, 1934, FDRL.
9. FDR diary entry, November 17, 1902, FDRL.
10. Corinne Robinson Alsop, unpublished memoir, Alsop Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
11. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 101 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
12. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 41 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Eleanor’s first letter to Franklin, or at least the first that survives, was October 3, 1905, a matter-of-fact note that she signed “yours in haste.” FDRL.
13. ER, Autobiography 41. “It was years later before I understood what being in love or what loving really meant,” wrote Eleanor. Ibid.
14. Eleanor Roosevelt Genealogy, FDRL.
15. Philip Livingston (1716–1778) was one of four New York signatories to the Declaration of Independence; Brockholst Livingston, then the nation’s leading authority on commercial law, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson in 1806 and served until 1823; Robert R. Livingston was the first U.S. secretary of foreign affairs under the Continental Congress, 1781–1783; his brother, Edward, served as Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state from 1831 to 1833. William Livingston, who signed the Constitution, served as governor of New Jersey from 1776 to 1790.
16. Anna (1863), Elizabeth, known as “Tissie” (1865), Valentine, Jr. (“Vallie”) (1868), Edward (1870), Edith (1873), and Maude (1877).
17. According to Joseph Lash, who examined the medical records, there were reports of epilepsy, “but there is no other record of epilepsy in the family and the seizures … were too infrequent to fit such a diagnosis. Some doctors … have noted that Elliott’s seizures occurred when he was confronted with demands that evidently were too much for him and have suggested that they may have been … a form of escape.” Eleanor and Franklin 8. Also see Ward, Before the Trumpet 261; Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 33–35 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
18. Dollar conversion factors are based on the table prepared by