A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.--Sigmund Freud
A Restless young Franklin Roosevelt, under strict quarantine for scarlet fever in the Groton school infirmary, was startled by the scraping sound against the red brick wall, followed by a gloved tap on the window'and then the apparition of his mother, the regal Sara Delano Roosevelt, peering into the room. She was perched on a workman's ladder, risking her safety and shattering her dignity to circumvent the no-visitors edict.
From that precarious roost, she talked with him each day and even read to him. When she learned of his illness she had rushed home from Europe to comfort him; from the day he was born her son had been her total concern.
When he was a student at Harvard, she rented an apartment in Boston to oversee his social life. When he and his young wife needed a larger house, she provided it. When he was stricken with polio, she pampered and cosseted him, against his wishes. When he was president, she schemed to bring the White House up to her standards. And when he was contemplating divorce, she threatened (so it was whispered) to cut off his funds from the family fortune. Whether Franklin wished it or not, Sara Roosevelt was determined to do what she deemed best for him. Not that she always won. After all, she had shaped this son in her own mold'confident, determined, and pleasantly stubborn when it came to getting his own way.
From the beginning she and her husband, James Roosevelt, created a world of privilege and principle, a secure little universe in which Franklin could grow up on the family estate at Hyde Park, covering hundreds of acres in New York's beautiful Hudson Valley. Shielded by his family's position, he was exposed to only a small circle of family, servants, the local gentry, and a few deferential shopkeepers in the village that bordered on Roosevelt land. The values and lifestyle of his parents were emblems of the world of a disappearing landed aristocracy.
At first their relatives in the other branch of the family'the Republican Roosevelts'regarded Sara and James as an odd couple. It is unlikely that Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, whose son Teddy was away at Harvard, had harbored any intention of matchmaking when she invited her daughter's good friend 'Sallie' Delano to a dinner party that included, among other guests, cousin James, a widower of fifty-one, a rather formal man with muttonchop whiskers'and a son Sara's age. Sara was twenty-five, tall and graceful at five-foot-ten, and world-traveled. By the end of the evening, Sara had accepted an invitation to visit him at Springwood, his country home, properly chaperoned, of course.
In May 1880 Sara arrived at Springwood; Hyde Park was abloom, and before the visit ended, so was love. Years later Sara wrote a nostalgic letter to her son, then the governor of New York:
Darling Son:
Just 51 years yesterday, the 7th, I came to visit. If I had not come then, I should now be 'old Miss Delano' after a rather sad life!
That Sara was still unmarried when she met James was astonishing. She was one of the five 'beautiful Delano sisters,' as New York society called them, daughters of another family in the Hudson Valley aristocracy. Numerous young men paid court to her, only to be rejected as not suitable by her father, Warren Delano II. (One such was Stanford White, a budding architect whom she found charming, but her father did not, ordering her to return his flowers with a cold letter that would end the friendship. Warren Delano was a good judge of character, at least...
