These are notes for a talk, not a finished essay, nor do they satisfyingly capture the dynamic character suggested by the word legacy, the manifold ways over the course of my own lifetime that the memories, the impact of these grandparents, the weaving of memory and conversation, reading and reflection, letters, photographs and films continue to evolve and influence me. Reckonings, like this journal whose name came to me many years ago, are in constant motion.
Legacies of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt:
my maternal grandparents
John Roosevelt Boettiger
Tuesday, 14 October 2014 – St. Stephen’s Church, Belevedere, CA [much like St. James in Hyde Park] – 3 days ago, the 130th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s birth.
Dedication to another John Boettiger, my father, a good and gifted man, a great newspaper reporter, who lost his way, too soon. When he and Anna Roosevelt, my mother, were married quietly in the Roosevelt family’s New York town house on January 21st, 1935, he married also the most prominent, powerful, scrupulously watched, and enormously admired family in America. They were deeply in love. He was also not a little anxious. The Boettigers and the Roosevelts. Commoners and royalty, working class and patricians. (Flash back to their 1932 meeting and falling in love (he 32, she 26) on FDR’s campaign train, might just have changed the course of American history, but thankfully didn’t.)
These legacies are personal and political. Legacy: impact of their lives; what they bequeath to us, gave us and continue to give us. We know those legacies anew – they change and grow - as we pass through each of our own stages of life. I knew FDR in my 1st decade as a child when my mother and I lived in the White House during WWII. I knew ER in my adolescence and early 20s, a little further toward being a grown-up, my undergraduate years at Amherst College and my early graduate study at Columbia University. “Johnny, come live with me.” That immediate offer bespoke her loving generosity, and her understanding of a promising but insecure young grandson who badly needed love and guidance.
Legacies also mean attending to the impact of freshening events, like Ken Burns’s and Geoff Ward’s great series of films on PBS last month: “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.”
(My Day column, April 1, 1939) “When you love people very much, isn't it grand to be able to join in their happiness? Like everything else in the world, however, there is a price to pay for love, for the more happiness we derive from the existence and companionship of other human beings, the more vulnerable we are when there is any cause for apprehension. It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire, which those who live generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.” [William James: the once-born and the twice-born, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: ER as twice-born, FDR as once-born? A natural healthy-mindedness, secure, self-confident, fearless, contrasted with an exquisite sensitivity to doubt, pain and suffering in the world, the human need for struggle among contradictions, for redemption, not once or twice but always; so, amazingly, a deep openness to wonder and mystery.]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt – Pa to my mother, PaPa to me
Energy, buoyancy, strength, self-possession. (A good phrase, because he was not as easily known as many believed. He was a triumphant fox. Like most of the rest of the world, I hardly knew polio had denied him the use of his legs. And like so many others, if asked, did you know him, I can respond confidently, no, but he knew me.
Playfulness [Whiffenpoof - imaginary animal – ringtailed whiffenpoof, great horned whiffenpoof - early morning play on his bed (funny papers)] and story: the Thanksgiving turkey drumstick; cocktails: his awful martinis: 2:1, and absinthe, and Oval Office desk toys; his children worshipped him, and lost him when he contracted polio; play—hare and hounds on Campobello cliffs—; reading of Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” to children and grandchildren. Play with the self-service elevator (with Winston Churchill). We swam and dunked in the WH pool.
Tom Pendergast, a Kansas City political boss, said in 1924 what the country and the world would later experience: “He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met.” He savored stories, probably his own more than others’. He had a wonderful grin, and he’d often throw back his head and laugh. “I love it!” was a favorite expression. [Like TR’s “Bully!”] He loved to talk, and had a natural eloquence. His fireside chats were gatherings of family. In the Oval Office, one couldn’t get a word in edgewise. (Fortunately, I was more interested in playing with the toys on his desk.) He had a more relaxed attitude towards the truth than ER; he loved to embellish stories, and sometimes bent history a bit to suit his and others’ pleasure. He was a political master, a virtuoso at his craft. His self-confidence was legendary, but more important was his capacity to restore and inspire the confidence of the American people, again and again. He led this nation through the two greatest crises its people had known since the Civil War.
FDR recreated the presidency, probably to a greater degree than any before or after him. The New Deal echoes still in our memories. We remember the famous and telling words from his first Inaugural, won from his own life: “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” And the New Deal may echo in our wishes as well. To use the image of Bob Herbert’s splendid and moving new book, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America, in our own age of massive inequality of income, endless war, political dysfunction, great economic insecurity and poverty, and issues like climate catastrophe that demand a response hitherto unimaginable, we are indeed, and again, losing our way.
Our need for a “New New Deal, if it is even possible, might have some things in common with FDR’s, but much more in common with the great transformative grassroots movements of the last century and more, like abolition and civil rights, the labor and women’s movements, but on a scale well beyond them. There will still be a need for extraordinary political, economic and moral leadership. There won’t be another FDR, but there are remembrances of what he offered people everywhere. Winston Churchill once said that to encounter Franklin Roosevelt with all his buoyancy, his iridescent personality, and his élan was like opening your first bottle of champagne. He genuinely liked people, he enjoyed responsibility and challenge, he was a supremely confident pragmatist in governance, a humane, bottomless, bold and persistent source of experimentation, and like his cousin Theodore, he adored being president.
But there comes an end. 12 years as president. Yalta was a 14,000-mile journey. Deeply tired, and ill. To Warm Springs. Left on my 6th birthday, 3/30/45. “Give my love to Johnny”: his last words to my mother. Died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, 63 years old, a casualty of war, no less than those who died on Omaha Beach or Guadalcanal. Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Eleanor Roosevelt – Grandmère – Story of a late night in her NY study in the summer of 1958 – I was 19 – quiet, Gregorian chants – my writing and my father – (1) gifted reporter, editor and publisher and (2) his struggle w/ depression, and my hunger to remember and understand him after he took his own life 8 years before.
She wrote that same year, so characteristically: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” [Among this boy’s human rights is that he know his father as she had known and loved him.]
Courage, compassion, integrity, grace and dignity, generosity, satisfaction in
giving; to be usefulwere her watchwords. She was, in so many different ways, personal, political, worldwide. “She would rather light a candle,” said Adlai Stevenson at her memorial service, “than curse the darkness.” But she knew the darkness more intimately than her husband.
Hers was a deep sense of spiritual devotion, to give love as, too often, she did not receive love. (By her bedside after her funeral: prayer long associated with the spirit of St. Francis).
I can see her heartfelt saying of this prayer each night. Its psychic rhythm is hers. How can I be of more use to others? I know the world is so full of suffering.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, harmony;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light.
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console,
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved, as to love…
She lived her faith.
For one so deprived of early love, so emotionally abused in childhood — a beautiful, chilly, self-absorbed mother, a father she adored but who was deeply flawed and mostly absent; both her parents died, as well as one of her two younger brothers, all before she was 10 — for all of that, she had an astonishing gift for love and friendship; and a vulnerability to depression. (Grisilda moods; St. Gaudens statue in Rock Creek Cemetery; activity as antidote. She had her uncle Ted’s energy. Travel with her was inspiring and exhausting. Berlin, Brussels and Harry Belafonte.
Consider the issues of her life, from teaching young women at the Rivington Street Settlement House to corralling the entire United Nations for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (her greatest single achievement) — poverty, children’s and women’s welfare, social and economic justice and equal opportunity.
The early New Deal, depending as it did on fragile political alliances, ignored many of the issues ER cared about most: decent and affordable housing for all Americans, universal health care, equal opportunity for education, prison reform, civil rights and racial justice, discrimination against women (especially women’s employment and equal pay for equal work). She persevered.
My grandmother spent her whole adult life working for justice and for real, functional democracy, not oligarchy or plutocracy masquerading, and never losing track of the fact that the wellbeing of individual human lives was at the heart of that work, and was always at risk, always endangered. I treasure the example and the legacy of both of these amazing grandparents. But more than any other person, my grandmother has been my mentor, my best teacher, and continues to be that 52 years after she left us.
So. For all of their differences of character and method, and the complexity of their marriage, my Roosevelt grandparents had a deep affection and high regard for each other; they enlarged each other’s gifts and served each other’s purposes; they gave each other strength, shared not the same but a complementary, resilient courage and wisdom in the face of adversity, and worked to make government a humane instrument of the growth and well being of all the people, everywhere. I draw from their outsize legacies every day. They are inescapable. I love them both.