FDR - Jean Edward Smith [409]
2. FDR to SDR, August 22, 1905, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 72–73, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950). I have used the current term, “civil procedure,” rather than “pleading and practice,” as it was delineated in FDR’s time. For FDR’s law school absences, see Morgan, FDR 106.
3. Interview with Professor Jackson E. Reynolds (1949), Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University. Reynolds, a lifelong Republican, was a good friend of Herbert Hoover from their undergraduate days at Stanford. He was also president of the First National Bank of New York and a committed foe of the New Deal. See Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 62n (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
4. Of the 106 men who entered Columbia Law School with FDR, only 84 remained by third year. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 76 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
5. ER to SDR, August 29, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 79.
6. Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 151 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). “You can imagine what a speech on gardening, and the raising of vegetables in general, by your son must have been like,” FDR wrote Sara. “I will say nothing more except that my appetite for those damned weeds has since that time departed.” FDR to SDR, September 7, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 81.
7. FDR to SDR, July 3, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 35–36. “We went to two churches or so—San Toy and Santa Claus, and in one of them I drew a picture of the ceiling to be copied in the addition to the Hyde Park house,” wrote Franklin.
8. FDR to SDR, July 5, 1905, ibid. 44–45.
9. In 1903, seven years after the death of her first husband, William Howard Forbes, Dora married his younger brother, Paul Forbes, who was also associated with Russell and Company in the China trade. After thirty years’ residence in Hong Kong, the Forbeses then moved to Paris, and their spacious Right Bank apartment became the headquarters for the Delano and Roosevelt families in Paris. In 1940, with France at war, Sara returned to escort Dora back to the United States. Sara’s interviews with the French press, which she conducted entirely in French, did much to cement Franco-American relations at that critical time. See Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 61–62 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
10. ER to SDR, June 23, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 31. Madame Howland was the widow of Rebecca Howland Roosevelt’s brother. (Rebecca was James’s first wife.) After her husband’s death, James became one of the two trustees of Hortense Howland’s estate. When the other trustee absconded with all her funds, James drew upon his own resources to provide her with the means to continue her style of life in Paris. Ibid. Madame Howland repaid James’s consideration by sending home in Eleanor’s luggage a pair of diamond earrings for Sara said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 132 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
11. FDR to SDR, August 14, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 67–68.
12. ER, This Is My Story 131. This passage was omitted by ER when she republished This Is My Story in her Autobiography.
13. FDR to SDR, June 16, 22, July 8, August 14, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 24–25, 29–30, 39, 67–68.
14. FDR to SDR, July 22, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 50.
15. ER to SDR, August 1, 1905, ibid. 59. “[We] will be quite happy if the plumbing is good and the paint and papers fresh and new. If there is a telephone please don’t let it be taken out and is there a safe in the house?”
16. ER to SDR, August 8, 1905, ibid. 62. “Altogether we feel very jubilant,” wrote Eleanor,