Luckily, the sprawling clan, which included frail Uncle Teddy, then busy body-building with no dreams of the presidency, took charge. Elliott Roosevelt was a dashing wastrel and drinker whose memory only Little Nell idealized. And in the year after that, her father, the only person who adored her, also died. The next year saw the death of a beloved little brother. Her mother, a beauty, died at 29, leaving Little Nell, then 8, convinced of her own hopeless ugliness. She suffered the kind of childhood that is the stuff of Victorian novels. Roosevelt was born Miss Roosevelt, in 1884. He kept repeating that he “simply could not believe human beings lived that way.” Thus “the Roosevelts” were born. On one of their early dates, when she was 19 and he 21, Eleanor, who was working as a voluntary teacher of calisthenics in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side, took Franklin to see some tenements. They shared a confidence in the solidity of their privileged world and a wish to help those excluded from it. Yet, as Blanche Wiesen Cook makes clear, something stronger than convention helped them stay together. They tolerated separations, disagreements and infidelities which today would send couples flying to the divorce court. They shared the cocoon of class and confidence which enveloped the New York landed aristocracy of the turn of the century. To be sure, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were very different from you and me. They respected each other’s ideals, and despite widely diverging paths, remained a team. An age that divorces readily yet expects its politicians to be blameless monogamists would do well to study the Roosevelts.
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