Ward - A first-class temperament : the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, 1905-1928

Praise for Geoffrey C. Wards

A First-Class Temperament

It is not often that history is so profoundly affected by the force of a single personality as in the case of Franklin Roosevelt, and in this large, generous-spirited chronicle, by focusing on the metamorphosis years, Geoffrey Ward has achieved a brilliant portrait of the great man in the making. The book teems with life. It is full of wonderful, often surprising detail. The footnotes alone are a gold mine of Roosevelt family color and background. And the extraordinary mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, emerges as a force of her own kind and one the reader will not forget.

David McCullough

A truly first-class study. Lively and revealing, especially in gauging the psychological background and personality of both the Roosevelts. Ward has found much new evidence, and evaluates it with a sure touch. This, one feels, is the way they were as persons, on their way to fame and greatness.

Frank Friedel, Charles Warren Professor of American History Emeritus, Harvard University

First-class. This splendid book tells the story of his win-someness, his enthusiasms, his courage, and his many faults. And it tells why so many Americans cared so much for him.

The Washington Post Book World

Rich and solid. Everything is covered, often in great and sometimes newly discovered detail.

USA Today

It is simply splendid! Wards virtues: inexhaustible research, painstaking accuracy and absolute fairness to the faults as well as the greatnesses of his subjects, always tempered with compassion, should put this book at the very top of the growing literature about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Louis Auchincloss, author of The Last of the Old Guard

ALSO BY GEOFFREY C. WARD

Treasures of the Maharajahs

Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 18821905

The Civil War: An Illustrated History (with Ric Burns and Ken Burns)

American Originals: The Private Worlds of Some Singular Men and Women

Tiger-Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats (with Diane Raines Ward)

Baseball: An Illustrated History (with Ken Burns)

Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley

The West: An Illustrated History

The Year of the Tiger (with Michael Nichols)

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (with Ken Burns)

Jazz: A History of Americas Music (with Ken Burns)

Mark Twain (with Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns)

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

The War: An Intimate Portrait of America, 19411945 (with Ken Burns)

GEOFFREY C. WARD

A First-Class Temperament

Geoffrey C. Ward is the coauthor of The Civil War (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns) and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and the Francis Parkman Prize. He lives in New York City.

Franklin Roosevelt at the helm off Campobello, 1920.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2014

Copyright 1989 by Geoffrey C. Ward

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harper & Row, New York, in 1989.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Quotations from the letters of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Corinne Robinson, and Corinne Alsop in the Theodore Roosevelt collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, are used by permission of the Houghton Library. Quotations from the letters of Anna Roosevelt Cowles on deposit at the Houghton Library by the Theodore Roosevelt Association are used by permission of the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7335-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7336-0

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For Nathan, for Garrett, and for Kelly

All photographs courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, except where noted.

Franklin Roosevelt at the helm off Campobello, 1920.

Illustrations follow on

Franklin and Eleanor, honeymooning in Switzerland, 1905.

This previously unpublished honeymoon snapshot of a haggard Franklin, suffering from hives, was taken in Venice by his bride, who later posed for him in the gondola, right, holding her husbands hat.

Franklin comes in a winner behind his fathers old horse, Bobby, at the Dutchess County Fair in Poughkeepsie, 1905, and takes Anna for a walk at Campobello two years later, while Eleanor (left) and Annas nurse, Blanche Spring (center), look on.

Franklin (above, hands in pockets) has a close-up look at manual labor at one of the coal mines owned by his Uncle Warren Delano in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the summer of 1908. Two years later, restless as a novice lawyer, he began to spend weekends at Springwood (right) in hopes of persuading local Democrats to nominate him for some office.

Franklin campaigning for the state Senate in 1910 (Eleanor is just behind him in the large hat). Roosevelt was already a top-notch salesman, a witness remembered, because he wouldnt immediately enter in the topic of politics he would approach them as a friend with that smile of his.

Group portrait made by Eleanor during the Roosevelts visit to the Fergusons near Silver City, New Mexico, in May 1912. Left to right: Mrs. Tilden Selmes, Isabellas mother; Isabella Selmes Ferguson; Robert Ferguson; and Franklin.

Livingston Davis and Franklin at Hyde Park during the winter of 1913.

Roosevelts qualifications for his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, as seen by H. R. Mianz of the Washington Herald, March 22, 1913.

The Roosevelts of Washington, 1916. Left to right: Elliott, Eleanor, Franklin, Franklin Jr., James, Sara, John, Anna.

The Assistant Secretary of the Navy on the Western Front, 1918. To his left is Admiral Charles P. Plunkett, commander of the naval battery in which Franklin hoped to serve as a lieutenant commander.

Franklin samples some of the sublime Scotch that kept him and his party warm while fishing in the rain in Scotland on August 30, 1918.

Franklin and Josephus Daniels gazing at the White House from the balcony of the old War and Navy Building, in May 1918.

Three snapshots of the vice-presidential campaign from Anna Roosevelts album: At the left, Franklin does his best to stir an upstate New York crowd; above, he stretches his legs between train rides with (left to right) Louis Howe, Tom Lynch, and Eleanor; below, he gratifies a group of the women whom Eleanor called worshippers at his shrine at Jamestown, New York, delighting himself and annoying his wife.