FDR - Jean Edward Smith [9]
The Roosevelts divided their time between Springwood, an elegant town house at 15 Washington Square in New York City, and long vacations abroad. When in the city, whether on business or for the social season, James frequented the Union League, the Metropolitan, the Century, and the University clubs. Travel was facilitated by a private railroad car, the Monon, which stood on a siding off the main Hudson River line, a few hundred yards from Springwood.* The outside world rarely intruded. As a reflective biographer has written, James “seems to have enjoyed business much as he had enjoyed trotting. It was a challenge and worth working at, but it never ran his life.”17
Sorrow came gradually. In 1875 Rebecca’s health began to fail. The symptoms of heart disease were unmistakable. Doctors ordered her to stop climbing stairs. James installed elevators at Springwood and the house in New York, but the symptoms grew worse. In August 1876 James took Rebecca aboard his yacht for a cruise on Long Island Sound, hoping the sea air would ease her cough. Shortly after they got under way, she suffered a massive heart attack. James put in at New York harbor and carried her home to Washington Square. She died there on the twenty-first of August and was interred at Hyde Park.
Two years after his mother’s death, Rosy was graduated with honors from Columbia. Following the path laid out by his father and grandfather, he became engaged to the debutante of the year, Helen Schermerhorn Astor, the daughter of Mrs. William Astor, the fabled arbiter of New York society.18 Rosy was enormously attractive, exceedingly sociable, and utterly without ambition, save to live a life of privilege. Insofar as the Astors were concerned, he represented unassailable Knickerbocker lineage and the prestige that attached to the families of original settlers. Regardless of their lack of accomplishment, the Roosevelts were prominent members of New York’s old guard, and a Dutch pedigree still counted for much among the city’s social elite.
Rosy and Helen were married in the autumn of 1877. Helen brought with her a trust fund of $400,000 (roughly $7 million today) and a mansion on Fifth Avenue.19 Rosy shelved plans to study law and like father and grandfather settled in to manage the matrimonial estate. He and Helen bought a smaller property adjacent to Springwood, where betwixt the social season in New York and annual pilgrimages to Europe, the couple enjoyed the leisure their wealth permitted.
James had been forty-eight when Rebecca died. After a suitable period of mourning he commenced a one-sided courtship of his favorite cousin, Anna “Bamie” Roosevelt, TR’s older sister. Bamie was just twenty-two and by all odds the most talented of the Long Island tribe. Alice Roosevelt Longworth insisted that if Bamie had been born a man, she, not Theodore, would have become president. Bamie was fond of James, appreciated his company, but never considered him a romantic interest. When he proposed marriage in early 1880, she was stunned. Not wishing to hurt him directly, she passed the proposal to her mother, Mittie, who, being an old friend of James, let him down gently.20
Perhaps because she felt sympathy for James, Mittie now played matchmaker. Two months after his proposal to Bamie had been rejected, she invited James to a small dinner party at the Roosevelt home on West Fifty-seventh Street. Bamie and her sister Corinne were there, along with an old family friend, Richard Crowninshield of Boston. So was a young woman whom Bamie introduced as one of her closest friends, Sara Delano. James was captivated. Sara was twenty-six, one of five spirited daughters of Warren Delano of Newburgh