1932 by David Pietrusza

Author:David Pietrusza
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493018055
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2015-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“We always call her ‘Granny’”

TO SOME POLITICS WAS A WAR NOT ALWAYS WORTH FIGHTING.

Just before midnight Monday, September 12, Joe Kennedy and his loyal henchman Eddie Moore had accompanied FDR and his usual crew as they departed Albany aboard the Roosevelt Special.1

Eleanor Roosevelt did not. She did not even see him off. That evening she—and lame-duck “dry” Florida congresswoman Ruth Bryan Owen (the late William Jennings Bryan’s daughter)—instead delivered radio speeches from the NBC Red Network’s 50,000-watt New York-affiliate WEAF.2

And, thereby, hung a tale of very long standing.

Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was very conflicted about Mr. Roosevelt’s career. She was very conflicted about many things.

Franklin enjoyed a most enviable childhood. Handsome and loved, his family lavished upon him security and unwavering support.

Eleanor’s childhood was the stuff of gothic nightmares.

Her parents’ marriage had graced the daily press.3 Dashing and handsome and rich, they were the beautiful people of their day. But underneath glamour lay disaster. Eleanor’s father, Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt, was TR’s younger brother, but such princely genetics did little to deliver him from a multiplicity of demons: a nervous breakdown,4 opiate (morphine) addiction following a broken leg incurred while riding,5 and finally self-commitment to the famed Keeley Center for Alcoholism.6 Teddy traveled to the Dakotas to find himself—and succeeded. Elliott went off to Texas—and seemed all the more lost. “Elliott’s writings during this period reveal a remarkable gender confusion,” observed Eleanor’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook regarding his travels, “He referred to himself as a woman on the range, and wrote stories about himself in which he was disguised as a woman.”7

Marriage did little for him. He impregnated a servant girl, Katy Mann, leaving TR and the rest of the family to pay her off.8 That, and the ample remainder of Elliott’s vices, infuriated the Victorian Theodore. He cursed his sibling as “simply a selfish, brutal and vicious criminal” and “a maniac, morally no less than mentally.”

“If he is not really irresponsible,” concluded TR of his brother (Franklin’s godfather9), “then his moral condition is one of hideous depravity.”10

Elliott, often separated from wife and children, would occasionally re-enter into their life—and when not present physically faithfully corresponded with his beloved little Eleanor. Even so, his distressing faults endured. When she was six or eight, Elliott took her and his dogs out for a stroll. Passing his club, the hyper-exclusive Knickerbocker, he darted in for drinks, leaving her outside to hold the animals’ leashes—for hours. They carried him out dead drunk.11 On August 14, 1894, the increasingly dissolute Elliott tumbled to his death from the window at a mistress’s West 102nd Street apartment.12

Such a parade of horrors might have drawn daughter and mother together. They did not. “Somehow it was always he and I,” Eleanor recalled, “I did not understand whether my [two younger] brothers were to be our children or whether he felt they would be at school. . . . There started a feeling that day which never left me—that he and I were very close together, and some day we would have a life together.

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