Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash Read Free Book Online Page B

Hall.
    Your kind letter we received today and both your children, for I feel for Anna’s sake you will consider me one now too, are deeplyand truly with you in the spirit of what you say. We both knelt before the Giver of every good and perfect gift and thanked him the source of perfect happiness for His tender loving kindness to us. Dear Lady do not fear about trusting your daughter to me. It shall be my great object all my life to comfort and care for her.
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    * A family story which Eleanor told with amusement had it that when her Grandfather Hall needed more money to complete his Tivoli house he went to his mother who “would go to the wardrobe and rummage around” and emerge “with a few thousand dollars.” Eleanor thought that this harked back to her great-grandmother’s immigrant origins “because in Ireland it would be perfectly normal to keep your belongings in whatever was the most secret place in your little house. You would not deposit them in a bank, and this was what . . . my great-grandmother evidently had carried into the new world and proceeded to do.” Eleanor added that “as neither of her sons ever added to the fortune but both of them seemed well provided for, I think it is safe to say that the original immigrant great grandfather must have made a considerable fortune.”

3.THE WORLD INTO WHICH ELEANOR WAS BORN
    A FTER HIS MARRIAGE E LLIOTT WENT TO WORK FOR THE L UDLOW firm, the city’s leading real-estate establishment. His earnings there supplemented the better than $15,000 annual income that he and Anna had between them. Their income did not permit a gold service or servants in livery drawn up in line in the English fashion as were to be seen at the more formal entertainments of such friends as Mrs. Astor and the Cornelius Vanderbilts. But, in an era when there were no taxes and wages were low, the young couple were able to maintain a well-staffed brownstone house in New York’s fashionable Thirties. Anna had her coupe in town and ordered her dresses from Palmers in London and Worth in Paris while Elliott stabled four hunters at Meadow Brook.
    The Elliott Roosevelts were among the gayest and most lively members of the younger set—the newspapers called them “the swells”—who pursued their pleasure in the great Fifth Avenue houses, at Meadow Brook, Tuxedo, Newport, Lenox, and the fashionable watering places of Europe. They were prominent members of New York society at a time when the merger between the old Knickerbocker families and the post-bellum barons of oil, steel, and railroads had already been accomplished, and, in emulation of Europe’s aristocracies, especially England’s, New York society had become a well-defined, self-conscious, codified hierarchy. It was, said Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, “a closed circle to which one either did or did not belong.”
    Anna and Elliott belonged. They and their friends set the fashion in dress and manners, and the anxious ones knocked at their doors. Anna’s graceful beauty and charming manners were everywhere acclaimed. “Fair, frail and fragile, and therefore a good illustration of beauty in American women,” a society columnist rhapsodized. Her father’s discipline had not been in vain. He had insisted that she and her sisters walk regularly in the country with a stick across their backs held in the crook of their elbows, which had produced an unmistakable bearing.“The proud set of the head on the shoulders was the distinctive look of the Halls,” recalled Mrs. Lucius Wilmerding, whose mother was a close friend of Anna. When Town Topics took the young ladies of society to task for their stoop and slouch compared to the “superb” carriage of English girls, it excluded Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt from its strictures and recommended her as a model.
    Mr. Peter Marié, writer of vers de société and a great beau, was noted for the beautiful women at