Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands

young and scarcely more experienced than Eleanor. “She knew a considerable amount about babies’ diseases, but her inexperience made this knowledge almost a menace, for she was constantly looking for obscure illnesses and never expected that a well fed and well cared for baby would move along in a normal manner.” Yet Eleanor was too timid to complain. “For years I was afraid of my nurses,…who ordered me around quite as much as they ordered the children.”
    Sara offered assistance but on her own terms. She set up Eleanor and Franklin’s first house, and when their family outgrew that she built them another, on East Sixty-fifth Street—adjacent to her own new house, with rooms that opened into the matching rooms of her house. Eleanor had no say in the design or decorating of her house. She might have asserted herself but didn’t. As a result she felt the independence she had learned from Marie Souvestre slipping away. “I was growing very dependent on my mother-in-law, requiring her help on almost every subject, and never thought of asking for anything which I felt would not meet with her approval.” In later years she reflected on Sara: “She is a very strong character, but because of her marriage to an older man she disciplined herself into gladly living his life and enjoying his belongings, and as a result I think she felt that young people should cater to older people. She gave great devotion to her own family and longed for their love and affection in return. She was somewhat jealous, because of her love, of anything which she felt might mean a really deep attachment outside of the family circle.”
    Eleanor was usually charitable in her assessment of others’ motives, and she may have given her mother-in-law more benefit of the doubt than Sara deserved. But whatever the wellsprings of Sara’s omnipresence in the lives of Eleanor and Franklin, it ultimately provoked a breakdown. “I did not know what was the matter with me,” Eleanor wrote, “but I remember that a few weeks after we moved into the new house in East 65th Street I sat in front of my dressing table and wept, and when my bewildered young husband asked me what on earth was the matter with me, I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine, one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live.”
    If Franklin ever felt Sara’s presence to be a burden, he didn’t say so. And doubtless her demands weighed less on him, who had outlets beyond the household for his energies and emotions, than they did on Eleanor, who could never escape her mother-in-law. Yet whatever his own perception of Sara, he offered little sympathy to Eleanor. “He thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while,” Eleanor recalled. Then he left her to cry alone.
     

     
    T HERE WERE OTHER occasions for tears. The first baby, Anna Eleanor, born in 1906, was followed by a son, James, in 1907, and a second son, Franklin Jr., in 1909. Franklin Jr. was the biggest of Eleanor’s babies and appeared the most robust. His parents and grandmother fussed over all three and took the standard precaution among the well-to-do of clearing out of the city during the unhealthy summer season. They typically sojourned at Hyde Park before heading to Campobello. Eleanor would take the children by train; Franklin would gather a group of male friends and sail up the coast in the Half Moon II, the successor to his father’s boat, which had been destroyed when the naphtha tank exploded. Eleanor never quite understood the appeal of these boys’ weeks out. “They always told me what delicious things they had had to eat on the boat. Apparently their idea of perfection was a combination of sausages, syrup and pancakes for every meal, varied occasionally by lobster or scrambled eggs. My husband was the cook as well as the captain, and was very proud of his prowess.”
    Franklin was an