America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  Still, despite her obvious outrage, Mrs. Ellet was able to see a ray of hope in the situation. Cream, she believed, would always rise to the top. Of the vulgar parvenues, she wrote:

  The really excellent will never mingle with them. Their day to shine must be short, even among the golden-calf idolaters of New York. That city, as well as others, can boast her pure-blooded, pure-mannered aristocracy, deserving respect as well as admiration, and exercising a healthy influence over all grades.

  Mrs. Ellet also defended the title of her book, and in a preface to the volume she noted that certain of her friends had commented that elevating her book’s subjects to the status of royalty “seems out of place in the society of a republic.” But, said Mrs. Ellet,

  We are all accustomed to hear of any leading lady that she is “a perfect queen,” the “queen of society,” a “reigning belle,” the “queen of the occasion,” &c. The phrase is in every one’s mouth, and no one is misled by it. The sway of Beauty and Fashion, too, is essentially royal: there is nothing republican about it. Every belle, every leader of the ton, is despotic in proportion to her power; and the quality of imperial authority is absolutely inseparable from her state. I maintain, therefore, that no title is so just and appropriate to the women illustrated in this work as that of “queens.”

  Meanwhile, twenty years before those words were penned, another celebrated Manhattan diarist, Philip Hone, had interred New York’s regal families in two short sentences. From an 1847 entry in Hone’s Diary:

  Died yesterday, Mr. James Roosevelt, in the eighty-eighth year of his age; a highly respectable gentleman of the old school, son of Isaac Roosevelt, the first president of the first bank of New York,* at a time when the president and directors of a bank were other sort of people from those of the present. Proud and aristocratic, they were the only nobility we had—now we have none.

  The American aristocracy would continue writing its obituary for the next 150 years. Perhaps this was because the concept itself seemed a collective oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, and that therefore, having been illicit from the start, it had always been an endangered species, doomed to extinction. And yet, as it would turn out, both Mr. Hone and Mrs. Ellet were wrong in their predictions. The aristocracy had not died out with the above-mentioned Mr. Roosevelt, nor would the “pure-blooded, pure-mannered aristocracy” be able to resist the social inroads of the parvenus for very long. After all, the aristocracy could not go on marrying its cousins or other close relatives forever. As this intramural marital pattern had already done in England, it began to produce some very odd people indeed in the United States.

  A case in point is the Roosevelt family, who showed a fondness for marrying Alsops, Livingstons, Robinsons, an occasional Astor (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s half brother, James Roosevelt, married Helen Astor), and Delanos, but mostly other Roosevelts. The paternal great-great-great-great-grandfathers of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, for example, were brothers, and when Franklin D. was running for the presidency in 1931, Fortune magazine, attempting to unravel the Roosevelts, worked it out that his son James was “his own sixth cousin once removed.” Meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt’s father was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s godfather.

  All American Roosevelts descend from a common ancestor, a Dutch immigrant to Nieuw Amsterdam named Klaes Martensen Van Rosenvelt who arrived on these shores in 1644, some thirty years before the first Robert Livingston. The Roosevelts’ rise, however, was not as rapid and spectacular as the Livingstons’, and both Roosevelts who became U.S. presidents emphasized the populist point that their common ancestor was “very common” and could not even spell his name. For four generations, American Roosevelts busied themselves in trade, farming, and real estate management, and prospered modestly. It was not until the fifth generation that the family produced a really rich Roosevelt. He was James Roosevelt I, a wealthy hardware merchant. He was followed by his son Isaac, who in addition to becoming a bank president also built New York’s first sugar refinery and became the first family politician as a member of the New York State Senate. After Isaac, it became something of a Roosevelt family tradition to enter public service. In all, there have been five Roosevelts who have held the post of assistant secretary of the navy. These have been Henry Livingston Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Theodore Douglas Robinson.

  In the nineteenth century, the Roosevelt name acquired additional luster—and money—through James Henry Roosevelt, who, like his collateral descendant Franklin, was stricken with polio in the prime of his life and who, like Franklin, refused to let his illness defeat him. A brilliant lawyer, he continued to practice law from his sickbed and, when he died, was the first Roosevelt multimillionaire. Since he had never married, most of his fortune was left to found New York’s Roosevelt Hospital, to the distress of his many nieces and nephews.

  But, at the same time, some peculiarities were beginning to show up in the Roosevelt family tree. There was the case of the battling Roosevelt brothers, for instance. These were the two sons of Robert Barnwell Roosevelt: Robert Barnwell, Jr., and John Ellis Roosevelt, whose rivalry erupted into a nineteenth-century tabloid scandal. Both brothers had built large places adjacent to each other on Long Island, but in order to protect their respective domains from each other both erected tall and ugly spite fences—topped with jagged pieces of broken glass and barbed wire—around their houses. Both brothers married twice, and both of their two marriages ended in divorce. By his first wife John Ellis had two daughters, one of whom married her second cousin, Philip Roosevelt, and the other of whom married a man named Fairman Dick, who was killed in a hunting accident. For his second wife, John Ellis chose the daughter of a Navy paymaster who was twenty-five years his junior and also the sister of his brother’s second wife. This marriage was soon in the divorce courts, and the case reached the newspaper headlines when Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Jr., took the witness stand to testify against his older brother, describing the “unprintable” language of a stevedore that he had heard John Ellis use to verbally abuse his young wife in drunken rages.

  Drink was becoming something of a family curse, particularly in the Roosevelt line that was also graced by Livingstons. Philip (“The Signer”) Livingston’s grandson, Edward Livingston, had a daughter, Elizabeth, who married Edward Ludlow. Their daughter, Mary Livingston Ludlow, married Valentine Hall, Jr., whose considerable inheritance came from a British land grant. Valentine Hall had been an alcoholic and had led a life of wild carousal and dissipation as a youth. But then he had reformed and, in the process, had found God. He hired a full-time preacher to live with his wife and family in his gloomy mansion on the Hudson, and to whomever would listen, he and his live-in clergyman would deliver sermons together on the evils of drink and the joys of joining hands with Jesus. His relatives dreaded the periodic visits that were required to this dour household and the hellfire-and-brimstone homilies that inevitably went with them.

  Valentine Hall was an autocratic man who dominated his wife and demanded only that she be beautiful and bear him children. The latter she did six times, producing four daughters and two sons. The oldest of the girls, Anna, would become Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother. All the Hall children were in one way or another peculiar.

  The two boys, probably in rebellion against their sermonizing, teetotaling father, both became alcoholics and were members of the high-living nineteenth-century crowd that moved in the wake of Diamond Jim Brady. Both were guests at the notorious “Jack Horner Pie” dinner that was tossed in Brady’s honor by James L. Breeze in the 1890s. A stag affair for twelve guests only, its highlight came when a huge pie was rolled in, out of which stepped a naked dancing girl who was presented to Brady. Lest the other guests be disappointed, she was soon joined by eleven other ladies, similarly unclad.

  When Valentine Hall, Jr., perhaps mercifully, died in 1880 at the age of forty-six, his children really began to kick up their heels. Daughters Edith, Elizabeth, and Maude
became hard drinkers and heavy gamblers, falling in and out of love with great rapidity and always with inappropriate men. Son Valentine Hall III was the heaviest drinker of all and lived reclusively in his bedroom in the family mansion, where all day long he sat at a window, drinking, with a shotgun across his knees. At any stranger or family member who appeared within his range he would fire a shot that was usually, thanks to his condition, well off-target. Still, it was a disconcerting habit that “Uncle Vallie” had and one that made visits to the house something of an ordeal. Fortunately, he was carried off by drink at an early age.

  Anna seemed to be the only straight one of the Hall children, and for this she was considered the most peculiar of all. But she, too, would demonstrate certain eccentricities, and her life would also be cursed by alcohol. While still in her teens, she announced her engagement to a handsome neighbor, Elliott Roosevelt, who was then just twenty-one. It was thought to be a splendid match—because of who the Roosevelts were and because it united two prominent Hudson Valley families—and an engagement party for Anna was thrown by Miss Laura Delano, whose older sister Sara had married Elliott Roosevelt’s cousin James and would become Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mother. The Delanos, whose American ancestry went back to 1621, considered themselves even grander than the Roosevelts, and with an ancestral fortune made in the China trade, they were even richer.

  The future seemed bright for young Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt. In a few years’ time, his brother Teddy would be governor of New York and, a few years after that, president of the United States. But for all his good looks and charm, Elliott Roosevelt did not have his older brother’s famous stamina and gumption. He suffered from something that at the time was diagnosed as epilepsy but may in fact have been a brain tumor. He was subject to sudden fits, dizzy spells, and violent headaches. To relieve his pain from these, he also resorted to the bottle. In addition, he felt no need, nor desire, to work, and despite a number of efforts on his family’s part to find him jobs, he was never good at anything and preferred parties, polo, and riding to the hounds from the huge mansion he built for himself in Hempstead, Long Island. It wasn’t long before Anna Hall Roosevelt realized that she had married a drunkard and a wastrel.

  She herself, meanwhile, was turning out to be far from the perfect wife. She fancied herself, and was, beautiful, and she was extremely vain. When her daughter Eleanor was born, she complained that the child had inherited the overlong Livingston nose, and from the time Eleanor Roosevelt was a little girl, she was constantly reminded by her mother that she was plain. When, no doubt as a result, Eleanor grew to be a painfully shy, introverted, and solemn adolescent, her mother gave her the cruel nickname “Granny.” At the same time, Anna Hall Roosevelt enjoyed rhapsodizing about her own good looks and liked to boast that Robert Burns had been so smitten by her that he had recited his poetry to her while she was having her portrait painted in Switzerland.* Anna was also fond of foreign travel and, perhaps to escape her alcoholic husband, was often on extended tours about the world, disporting herself while becoming a stranger to her children, who were left in the care of governesses and nurses. If Anna Hall Roosevelt was proving an imperfect wife, she was also an even more imperfect mother.

  Anna and Elliott Roosevelt had three children—Eleanor; Elliott, Jr.; and Gracie Hall, the last a boy despite his name (in later life he would use the name Hall Roosevelt)—but with the birth of each child the parents’ quarrels became more violent. The more Anna berated her husband over his drinking, the more he drank, and by the time she was twenty-five Anna had a new complaint: the ordeal of living with her husband was causing her to lose her looks. Elliott began to threaten to commit suicide, and he would disappear for months at a time while his cast-off family had no idea of his whereabouts. During one of these absences his son Elliott, Jr., died of smallpox at the age of four.

  At the time, various European health spas were widely touted as providing cures for alcoholism, and when she could find him, Anna began escorting her husband to a series of these drying-out resorts. None of them worked. After her son Hall was born during the last one of these trips, Anna decided she had had enough of Elliott. She had discovered among other things that he had squandered all but $200,000 of his inheritance. In a panic, Anna had her husband committed to a hospital for the mentally ill in Paris. She then returned to America and immediately instituted a lawsuit to have him declared legally insane by the U.S. courts so that she could be given control of what was left of his money. Naturally, the case made tabloid headlines.

  From Paris, Elliott Roosevelt countered with a claim that he had been kidnapped by his wife, that all she was after was his fortune, and that he was being victimized by his family. Pending settlement of the matter, he was released from the French mental hospital and promptly moved in with a Parisian lady of easy virtue, upon whom he began spending more money. He claimed that she gave him “love instead of lectures.” To try to clear up the whole untidy business, Teddy Roosevelt was dispatched to Europe to reason with his brother. He found Elliott in terrible shape. But he succeeded in persuading Elliott to return to America, enter an alcoholism treatment center, and set up a trust to care for his wife and two surviving children. In return, Anna would agree to drop her lawsuit against him. But Elliott’s stay at the American clinic lasted only a week or so before he was back at his old routine. When Anna refused to let him back into her house, he disappeared again. Eventually he turned up at a relative’s farm in Virginia, and Anna and her children moved to a house in mid-Manhattan.

  The family’s troubles, however, were far from over. Within a few months of her husband’s return from Europe, Anna Hall Roosevelt became ill with diphtheria and died in her New York house. Her looks gone, withered by illness, she looked much older than her twenty-nine years. Even on her deathbed, she refused to see her husband. Two years later, he too was dead from injuries suffered in a fall, presumably when drunk. Thus Eleanor Roosevelt was an orphan at ten with a baby brother to care for. Over the next years, the two children—sometimes separately, sometimes together—would be taken in by a long series of relatives and family friends, some of whom were more caring than others. During this period, also, Eleanor would watch her uncle Theodore become president of the United States and her cousin Alice, whom the press had dubbed The Princess (and who had been Eleanor’s best, if not only, childhood friend), cavorting delightedly in the public spotlight.

  Against this backdrop of family discord, financial and emotional chaos, neglect, and psychological abuse, it is perhaps astonishing that Eleanor Roosevelt would emerge as a woman who, in periodic polls of most admired women in the world, is still ranked near the very top of the list.

  Or perhaps hers was a case of “class will tell.”

  Class, however, did not tell in the case of Eleanor’s little brother Hall. Like his father, Hall Roosevelt was sent to Groton and Harvard, where he was a superior student and seemed destined for great things. But then something happened, as had happened to his father. He married, had a son, Danny, divorced, and began drinking heavily. One day at the family mansion at Hyde Park, in a drunken rage, he picked up his young son and hurled him to the ground, breaking his collarbone. Though drunk, Hall insisted on driving Danny to the hospital and, on the way, turned his car over in a ditch. The trip to the hospital was completed by a New York state trooper. For a while, the family’s hopes centered on young Danny, but he was killed in an airplane crash while still young. Hall Roosevelt’s drinking increased, and he enjoyed taking his young nieces and nephews—who thought it all marvelous fun—on barhopping and nightclubbing adventures in New York, unbeknownst to their parents. He died at age fifty, a failure and a disgrace, and the despair of his sister, who loved him dearly.

  Perhaps, by the nineteenth century, the American aristocracy had begun to believe that it could behave exactly as it chose and that any aberrant carryings-on could be tolerated and brushed off as mere upper-crust “eccentricity,” just the way titled eccentrics have long been tol
erated and even encouraged in England. In Boston, for example, it has been said that if an Adams chose to stand on her head in the middle of Boston Common, her friends would merely comment, “By the way, I saw Abigail Adams today. She was standing on her head in the Common,” and that would be that. Certainly many aristocratic American families tend to speak almost proudly of their eccentric relatives, and the Roosevelts are no exception.

  In the James Roosevelt branch of the family—the so-called Hyde Park branch, as opposed to the Oyster Bay branch—the first James Roosevelt had a son named Isaac, the bank president, and Isaac had a son named James, whose passing was noted by Philip Hone and who had a son named Isaac, who had a son named James, and so it would go. (The practice of re-using first names in alternating generations was common among a number of old families; because the first John Jay had a son named William, William had a son named John, and Williams and Johns have taken generational turns in the Jay family’s naming process right down to the present day.) The second Isaac Roosevelt was the first family eccentric. He was a doctor who refused to practice medicine because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood.