-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Before The Trumpet
Geoffrey C. Ward©1985
Harper & Row
ISBN 0-06-015451-9
390pps -- First Edition -
---[1b]--
In the late summer of 1857, Algonac was nearly destroyed by an intrusion from
the outside world which even Warren Delano could not keep out. Panic hit Wall
Street, sparked by the abrupt failure of the giant Ohio Life Insurance and
Trust Company, but further fueled by the legacy of years of wild
over-speculation in railroads and real estate. Market prices were halved
overnight; specie payment was suspended for a time; thousands of businesses
closed over the next three years; hundreds of thousands of men were thrown
out of work.
One by one, Warren Delano's investments soured. Unlike James Roosevelt, who
would ride out a similar crash sixteen years later, he had spread his fortune
far too thin. For two anxious, sobering years he slid steadily toward
financial ruin. He cut back spending, sold off his town house on Colonnade
Row, even tried to sell Algonac but could find no one able to meet his price.
All of this was kept in the privacy of the Delano bedroom or discussed with
relations in the parlor after Sara and the other children were safely in bed.
They knew only that their parents sometimes seemed tense.
In January 1860, Warren Delano was fifty and faced with bankruptcy after
thirty years in business. He resolved at last to return to China, to Hong
Kong this time, and re-enter the trade which had made him so rich so fast
when he was young—tea and opium.[7]
Warren's sudden decision appalled Ned, who would have to fend for himself
while Warren was away. "It seems the height of folly," he wrote to his
brother John, "to abandon so much that is beautiful and attractive for the
monotonous life on the 'ocean wave' to be followed by an enervating existence
on a barren island on the coast of China—and that, too, under British rule!"
It must have deeply troubled Catherine, too, now pregnant for the ninth time.
Somehow she who had always deferred to her husband would have to run Algonac
without him. She would manage. When there was no man upon whom to lean she
always found within herself the will to go on. Years later one of her sons
would write that her example had taught him that "firmness of character is
often disguised by gentleness, yielding upon [nonessentials] and only
asserting itself when conditions demand a firm attitude."
Sara would learn that lesson as well. So, eventually, would her son, Franklin.
For her, however, then just five, her father's sudden departure was
terrifying and inexplicable. Without warning, the center of her family's
life, the big capable man whose love and attention mattered most to her, had
simply vanished.
All she could know was that he had gone to a place unimaginably far away, and
that no one could tell her when he would come back. For the rest of her long
life she would suffer from an exaggerated fear of being apart from those she
loved.
The family was separated for three years. Her mother did her best to keep the
children cheerful. Uncle Ned and Aunt Sarah and Cousin Nannie all helped. But
Catherine must often have been distracted by her loneliness (however
skillfully disguised), by the noisy demands of little Philippe, and by those
of the still-newer baby, Catherine or "Cassie," born that first spring.
School occupied some of Sara's time. She was now old enough to join the older
children in the made-over breakfast room where Cousin Nannie taught them
their lessons while they sat on straight-backed chairs to improve their
posture. So did dancing lessons at a nearby estate. And when the Civil War
began she joined the women of the house in sewing clothes for the soldiers at
the front, and was very proud when she sent off her first muslin shirt with
its sewn-in label,
"This shirt was made by a seven-year-old girl."
But Sara grew solemn nonetheless, introspective, quiet. She was not to worry
others. But there was at least one vivid clue to how she felt. When her
father's letters arrived from China and after her mother had read them aloud
to the family, Sara carefully soaked off the stamps and saved them. Each one
offered fragile, brightly colored proof that he still existed somewhere, that
he still cared.
When she was an elderly woman, Sara Delano Roosevelt spent much of her time
at Springwood sitting in a tiny densely furnished room just off the big
entrance hall. She called it her "snuggery," and from it, surrounded by
numberless mementos of her crowded life, she could keep an eye on everyone
who came and went from her house. Always near at hand was a small oval
tintype of her father, made not long before he returned to China. In it
Warren and five-year-old Sara are sitting on his lap. Sara's head rests on
her father's shoulder; his long arm and big hand hold her close.
"There was no one like my father," Sara told a friend when she was in her
late seventies. Neither her husband nor her son ever quite measured up to her
memory of him. That conviction was perhaps inevitable, cemented before she
reached the age of six by her father's enforced absence and her dreamy secret
child's longing to be reunited with him.
By 1862, Warren Delano's fortunes had improved, not enough to permit him to
come home, but enough for him to arrange passage on a clipper, the Surprise,
and send for his family to join him at Hong Kong.
Again, Catherine did what he wished without complaint. "I suppose it was
altogether terrifying to my ... mother to give up her beautiful home and its
peaceful security for perhaps the rest of her life," Sara said later, but if
she felt anxiety or resentment she masked it from the children. Algonac was
leased to Warren's old Canton friend, Abbot Low, the owner of the Surprise,
and she resolutely marched her children aboard at New York on June 25.
The voyage would be a family adventure, the greatest of Sara's childhood.
Seventy-five years later she liked to entertain her great-grandchildren at
Hyde Park by singing the chanteys the sailors sang as they raised the sails:
Down the river hauled a Yankee clipper,
And it's blow, my bully boys, blow!
She's a Yankee mate and a Yankee skipper,
And it's blow, my bully boys, blow!
The seven Delano children ranged in age from Louise, now sixteen and
chronically ill, down to Cassie, just two and known to the rest of the family
as "the posthumous child" because she had been born while her father was
away. Sara was seven. With them went Cousin Nannie and two nurses.
Catherine Delano kept a detailed journal of the trip. There is not a word of
complaint in it; perilous sea voyages of 128 days were just another part of
her job. Even the prospect of attack from a Confederate privateer did not
faze her. The captain was alarmed when a steamer appeared on the horizon not
long after they got under way, she noted, but she herself "was perfectly cool
and not at all frightened." (It turned out to be a friendly British
vessel.)[8]
The children and their nurses were constantly seasick. It snowed one day off
Madagascar, and registered 126 degrees on deck in the China Sea. Sara
developed chilblains; Cassie suffered from heat rash. It rained for days and
Catherine had to keep the children entertained below deck while the ship
pitched and plunged through heavy seas. There were other long stretches when
the clipper rested motionless in the water, becalmed. The captain was often
"very discouraged," Catherine noted; she herself never admitted that she was.
Some of the younger children were obstreperous. Warren clambered all over the
ship; Cassie was "perpetual motion" whenever she could get free of her
nurse's arms. Sara remained cautious and sober, did as she was told. Her name
appears less often in her mother's diary than those of the other younger
children.
She and Philippe were closest, and she often led him by the hand. Together
they climbed into the sailmaker's loft almost every day, "decidedly a
resource," their mother wrote, not knowing that the old sailor's chief
attraction was his ability to jab needles deep into his callused thumb
without apparent pain.
One morning Sara and Philippe were gazing drowsily into the water when the
ship glided past a huge green sunfish, basking on the surface, twelve feet
across from fin to fin. Sara shouted, and a sailor snatched up a harpoon and
drove it into the great fish's back. It was hauled on deck and hacked open:
scores of little silver fish spilled onto the bloody deck.
The voyage was not all arduous or exotic. Captain Ranlett did his best to
make his passengers feel at home. The adults read aloud the novels of James
Fenimore Cooper and leafed through back numbers of the Atlantic Monthly. The
children studied French, sang "Bonnie Doon," and danced the Virginia Reel
around the new piano they were taking out to Macao.
On the Fourth of July, the captain fired thirteen guns in honor of the
original states and let the older children touch off a fourteenth for luck. A
special frosted cake appeared at tea, and, after dark, skyrockets were set
off on deck. Then, while Captain Ranlett played the organ, passengers and
crew joined in singing "national airs," the thin homey sound of "Yankee
Doodle" drifting out across the black surface of the alien sea.
The Delano children got their first glimpse of Hong Kong on the morning of
October 31, a blue-gray smudge on the horizon, where their mother had told
them their father lived. Shortly after ten, standing at the rail, Sara saw a
small vessel moving purposefully toward them. It was the family houseboat, a
dozen Chinese sailors straining at the oars.
At the helm, urging his men on, sat her father.
Sara never forgot how he looked at that moment, "all dressed in white . . .
very tall and good-looking, with his side-whiskers and moustache, coming very
quickly up the side of the ship on a ladder the sailors had let down."
He sprang to the deck of the Surprise and lifted her into the air in his
great arms.
Sara and the rest of the family were carried up to Rose Hill, the new home
her father had readied for them, in what her mother called "a cavalcade of
[sedan] chairs."
"I feel very oddly," Catherine wrote that evening, "to be again a fanqui. "
Rose Hill was a vast house of whitewashed stone with a big walled garden that
crowned the summit of a hill. The large rooms with their lofty ceilings and
tall shuttered windows were filled with dark English furniture and Chinese
curios. Below the house, down a broad flight of stone steps cut into the
rocky slope, was a grassy natural shelf on which the family gathered in the
late afternoon to watch the older children and their friends play lawn
tennis. Below them spread the blue harbor and beyond, the high green hills of
the Chinese mainland.
If there had been no junks among the boats that darted back and forth across
the water, Sara might have thought herself gazing down onto Newburgh Bay from
Algonac.
Again, Warren Delano had managed to create for his family an exclusive world.
As much as possible, China was simply ignored. Nannie taught the children
their lessons just as she had at Algonac; their father even had a set of
little straight-backed chairs built for them just like the ones back home.
Sara studied French and practiced the piano, and she and Warren made crayon
drawings of tall-masted ships and American flags, pasting them along with the
words to hymns, including "Thank God for the Bible," onto the pages of an old
account book on which the number of chests of opium entering and leaving
Chinese ports had been carefully recorded.
There were Chinese servants everywhere, of course: cooks, gardeners, waiters,
stable boys, watchmen, chair bearers. And on warm evenings a man sat behind a
delicately painted screen in the dining room, gently pulling the rope that
moved the big muslin punkah back and forth above the table to create the
sticky semblance of a breeze.
But the servants were expressly forbidden to teach Sara or the other children
a word of Chinese for fear they would learn unsuitable words. Every morning
two tailors sat on the veranda talking together as they did the family
mending. One day Sara asked a friend, the daughter of a missionary who had
spoken Chinese from infancy, what they were saying.
"Oh, perfectly dreadful things!" the little girl said. "Let's play in the
other room."
There were diversions—boat rides to Macao or up the Yangtze River, with
fireworks on the Fourth of July, banquets for the Russell employees to mark
the American holidays. But for Sara her father remained the greatest
diversion of all. "Papa is going to shave in a little while," she reported at
age nine to an aunt back home. "He is just beginning ... Papa is at his bath!
"
Hong Kong was a crown colony, and most of the foreign community was English,
commercial rivals of Warren's firm and sympathetic to the Confederate cause.
This last did not endear them to Warren, who once told Ned how he thought
Robert E. Lee should be treated once the war ended; Lee should be hanged, he
said, and his bones hung with those of Jefferson Davis " 150 feet above
Richmond and let them rattle to every North wind that sweeps down from New
England during the next 100 years, or until New England forgets her duty to
God and American liberty."
He was delighted when Sara and Warren decorated their pony cart with American
flags and bunting and drove it proudly to the weekly horse races at the Happy
Valley course. Russell and Company had its own section in the stands, and
Warren took the races very seriously. So did eleven-year-old Warren III, and
one bright afternoon at Happy Valley he astonished his parents by secretly
volunteering to ride a notoriously skittish horse, "Reindeer," and winning
his race against a field of veteran jockeys.
Comic relief was provided each week by the "Chinese Scramble," in which
untrained grooms were coaxed into riding against one another for a handful of
coins. Years later, Sara returned to Hong Kong and reported back to her
father that the scramble had been a disappointment. "The Chinese rode very
well," she said, "and everyone says it is not as amusing as it was in the old
times when the boys did not how to ride and would often fall off. Now none
are willing to ride unless they ride well."
Sara spent three years at Rose Hill, during which the last two Delano
children were born, Frederic in 1863, and Laura the next year. In 1864, seven-
year-old Philippe fell dangerously ill with a malady his frightened parents
called "brain fever" and which left him subject to seizures for the rest of
his life.
As soon as he had recovered enough to travel, the Delanos decided to send
him, Sara, and Warren home. China was too dangerous for young children.
Annie, now fifteen, was appointed to care for them on the journey; she put
her hair up, Sara remembered, as a sign of her new status as a surrogate
parent. William Forbes, a junior partner with Russell and company to whom
Dora was now engaged, provided an escort.
The family was separated again. The children's journey home included an
overland passage across Egypt. Aunt Sarah and Uncle Ned, now grown immensely
fat, met them at the New York dock. Sara and Philippe were to remain in their
charge for two years. Warren was sent off to boarding school. Most of Sara's
time was spent in their stern but indulgent grandfather's home at Fairhaven.
While she was there her step-grandmother died. She demanded to see the body.
Her nurse tried to dissuade her but she was adamant. The memory of the
darkened chamber and the sight of the old woman—"so long and thin and drawn
and still"—haunted her all her life.
Few of her letters from this period survive. She must again have sometimes
felt isolated and apart, but no hint of that intrudes in any of them. She was
not to worry people. On April 10, 1865, she wrote to her father that the
Civil War was over. "I am so very happy! All the bells of town are ringing
and they are firing the cannon near the house!"
Wealthy again at the war's end, and unable to return to Algonac until the
Lows' lease ran out in 1867, Warren now toyed with the notion of raising his
family in even greater isolation than that afforded by his Hudson River
aerie. "I have for some years past had in mind a plan of European residence
and education," he told Ned. He would first sell Algonac, then "take the
whole family down to the youngest to Europe [and] seek out a fine old country
residence in a hilly country where woods abound and where saddle horses are
good and cheap." An estate in the Pyrenees would do nicely. "I should want it
to a great degree if not entirely isolated from our countrymen or others who
would speak English habitually, and I should want to organize my household as
to combine the real comforts and proper luxuries of life with a system of
order and regularity of studies, duties, exercise and recreation." It was
American snobs he said he wanted most to avoid, "pretentious, boasting," the
sort of people "that will disgust the world with what they call Yankees." So
great was his dislike of them that he felt "almost inclined to do what might
be considered equally snobbish and in our retreat sink for the time being our
name of Delano and write ourselves 'de la Noye.' "
Instead, he rented an opulent apartment in Paris, overlooking the Bois de
Boulogne.
Sara spent most of the next four years abroad, the first in Paris, where she
celebrated her twelfth birthday in September of 1866 and attended her sister
Dora's wedding to Will Forbes at the American Church the following spring.
There was a wedding breakfast afterwards to say goodbye to the bride and
groom as they set off for China and Rose Hill, which would remain their home
for all their married life.
That evening Sara fell ill. It turned out to be rheumatic fever, and she
spent nearly five weeks in bed, often in great pain but outwardly always
cheerful, and apologetic when she could not help crying out as the bedding
was changed. This was to be the only prolonged illness in her long life, made
more memorable by the reeking sulphur baths which the French doctor
prescribed. The long tin tub was brought to the building each day lashed to
the roof of a horse-drawn cab, then carried upstairs to the Delano apartment.
There Sara was immersed In the hot solution, everything of gold or silver
having first been removed from the room to prevent tarnish from the fumes.
The Paris Universal Exposition was held in the French capital that year and
Sara was allowed to sit out on the balcony on warm days wrapped in blankets
and watch as one by one Europe's leaders clattered past on their way to and
from the grounds. The Empress Eugenie was an almost daily passerby. Czar
Alexander II of Russia came, too, and so did Emperor Wilhelm I of Prussia,
accompanied by his prime minister, Count Otto von Bismarck, in a splendid
uniform.
The Delanos moved on to Dresden and rented a house for the winter, just as
James and Rebecca Roosevelt had done the previous year. Mr. Delano had not
entirely abandoned his scheme of "European residence and education," at least
for his children. Sara attended a local school for young ladies where she
studied German and music. Many of her classmates were Americans, daughters of
other wealthy families spending the season on the Continent. Maggie Carey,
Sara's best friend, was one of them. Her mother was an Astor, the sister of
Aunt Laura Delano, with a summer house at Beacon, just across the Hudson from
Algonac. Now they had a house in the same neighborhood, and after school the
two girls could walk together to the Zwinger Teich to skate, whirling for
hours to Strauss waltzes played by a band in overcoats on an island in the
center of the frozen pond.
Most of the family went home at last to Algonac in the early summer of 1868, b
ut Warren and Annie stayed at Hanover with Uncle Ned and Aunt Sarah, who
would spend the next two years in Europe watching over their brother's
offspring. Sara attended finishing school in the nearby village of Celle,
living in the home of the burgomaster's daughter. Summers were spent with her
aunt and uncle, the remainder of the first summer on an island in the North
Sea, all of the second in the Harz Mountains. A continuing flood of fond and
cheerful family letters helped fend off homesickness.
In May of 1869 a letter arrived from Algonac whose sadness could not be
disguised: Louise, Sara's eldest sister, had died at twenty-three. It had not
been entirely unexpected. She had been ill off and on all her life, and her
father wrote that death had come as a blessed release from suffering. But it
was shocking nonetheless, the first death among the Delanos of Algonac. There
would be five more in the next few years. On Louise's birthday in 1870, Sara
was given her watch as a precious souvenir. By then Sara, her brother and
sister, and their aunt and uncle had all returned to Algonac. They sailed for
home in June of that year aboard the Westphalia, the last steamship to leave
a German port before the Franco-Prussian War began.
At first Sara simply enjoyed being part of the family routine again. "Life
was very regular at Algonac," she remembered. "Friends visited us; no large
parties, just relatives and friends who came one or two or three at a time."
The family still attended Unitarian services in Newburgh nearly every Sunday,
and when weather or illness prevented it, Mr. Delano presided over household
prayers in the library. The Delanos had adopted the old Lyman custom of
reading aloud, and Sara recalled that "most of the standard literature ...
came to me in that delightful easy way and we took turns reading while others
worked." Sara rode in the summer, sleighed in the winter, played whist in the
evenings. There were visits to Fairhaven and to Steen Valetje at Barrytown,
the splendid turreted home of the Franklin Delanos.
Life at Algonac remained the same, but Sara had changed. She was a young
woman now: tall, stately, still reserved, at home in French and German. The
younger children were a little intimidated by her. Fred remembered that when
they all gathered in the schoolroom each morning she blocked out their
chatter with her "determined hands" over her ears, while making her grown-up
way through a six-volume history of the world.
In January of 1873, her father wrote Warren, "Sallie attended her first great
city party ... and Mrs. Carey reports ... that she looked very handsome (No
doubt of it) and received much attention, which I hope will not turn the dear
little pussy's head." Another "grand affair" was coming up, for which Sara
"will be dressed by Aunt Laura and very handsomely, and we shall feel a good
deal of interest in hearing how she gets through the ordeal, for such it is
to a novice fresh from country life."
Sara bore up well, and each winter thereafter spent several weeks attending
balls and cotillions and dinners with one or another of her New York
friends—Maggie Carey, Bamie Roosevelt, or Nelly Blodgett, daughter of the
varnish king with whom the James Roosevelts had sailed for England in 1865.
Sara was a bridesmaid at Maggie Carey's wedding to an elegant diplomat,
Alphonse de Steurs, the Dutch charge d'affaires; The groom, Sara told her
parents, was "the nicest foreigner I have ever met," and the most handsome.
She and her sisters attracted many suitors, "an avalanche of young men,"
their father once wrote. One especially enthusiastic visitor fell in love
with four of them in turn—Annie, Sallie, Kassie (who now insisted on spelling
her nickname with a "K"), and Laura. He would have kept at it indefinitely,
Sara thought, had the supply of sisters held up.
There was brisk competition among the girls. A Newburgh neighbor had three
sons, the most courtly and handsome of whom Mr. Delano nicknamed "the Marquis
of Salisbury." All four sisters vied for his attention. "The Marquis is very
attentive," Annie wrote to her brother in triumph one spring day. "He took me
for my first rowing lesson on Tuesday, and yesterday he came for Marianne
(her maid) and me. We were out two hours. The shade under the bank was
charming ... Poor Sallie is off for Irvington."
"Pretty ears are all Dora needs to be perfect," Sara once wrote to Warren
with sweet malice, and when Sara's glowing complexion was remarked upon (as
it often was), Kassie liked to say loudly, "We do believe Sallie paints" just
to annoy her.
Sara never got overtly angry, just more dignified, a fact which greatly
amused her father: "Sallie had a presentiment that she would do something
wicked," he wrote on a spring evening in 1876, "and accomplished the feat in
the afternoon." One April Fool's Day, Kassie was sitting quietly in the music
room when Sara glided past, after a walk in the garden, resplendent in a red
silk dress and a hat with a long green feather. "I am going to take a bath
and change my clothes," she announced. "Then I shall come down to practice
and I hope I may have this room to myself."
Kassle waited until she was confident her sister's bath had begun, then rang
the doorbell and sent a servant upstairs with the calling card of a handsome
and much-admired West Point cadet, known in the family as "the Pilgrim
father" because of his frequent references to his Massachusetts lineage. Sara
dressed again as fast as she could and appeared in the doorway a few minutes
later, a bit flushed but smiling welcome.
Her sister sat grinning on the sofa. "It is I who have the honor of calling
on you, Miss Sallie April Fool," Kassie said, rising and bowing deeply.
Sara strode from the room without a word.
In matters of the heart as in everything else, Sara's father's word was law.
He had begun to fail physically. In 1870 he lost the sight in his left eye
when the retina became detached. Two years later, striding along the aisles
of a New York dry goods store in search of winter supplies, he stepped
blindly to the left and fell to the bottom of an elevator shaft. His hip was
shattered. He was brought home in agony, remained in bed for thirteen weeks,
managed to get around the place on crutches, seemed fully recovered, then
fell again and, further weakened by lumbago, had to settle for a cane.
All three of the most important men in Sara's life became invalids. She would
consider it her duty to care for each of them in turn.
On his sixty-eighth birthday in 1877, her father pronounced himself "Age 50 ab
ove the shoulders, 86 below." Still, his grip on Algonac and the lives of all
who lived there never loosened. He sent some suitors away, prowled the parlor
when his daughters entertained, decided whose invitations could be accepted
and whose must be turned down.
Dora had to wait to marry until Will Forbes had earned his $100,000
competence as a Russell partner. Annie, too, fell in love with a Russell man,
a heavyset earnest young clerk named Frederick Hitch. He came from a fine
family but had entered the firm with no funds of his own. Warren insisted
that there be no wedding until Hitch, too, had become a wealthy man. Fred and
Annie may have discussed marriage as early as 1865, when she was only
sixteen. If so, she loyally waited for him for nine years; they were not
permitted to marry until the autumn of 1877.
Mr. Delano was no gentler with the private lives of his sons. When young
Warren was sent away to school he was bombarded with his father's admonitions
and advice. The boy was never to put on airs or dress better than his
schoolmates; he must not borrow money or stay awake past ten, and when he
slept had to keep the window open four to twelve inches. He should not be
tempted to drink "or taste even, wine or beer.... Touch not tobacco." In fact
he was to "Do nothing, touch nothing, say nothing, that you will not do, or
touch, or say in the presence of your father, your dear mama, or your loving
sisters. Do nothing in secret that you would not do in the light of the sun."
Later, when his son was studying engineering at the Lawrence Scientific
School at Harvard, there were social directives as well: "I want you to call
on Mr. [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow [the venerable poet and an old friend of
the Lymans]. First dress yourself properly for the occasion and ... have as
much conversation with him as Mr. Longfellow appears to have the time and
inclination to bestow upon you and to help you to talk you may refer to your
voyages to China and back."
Warren was a genial, handsome young man, bearded and athletic—"nothing short
of a demi-god" to his younger brothers—as determined as his father but at
least initially more playful. At Harvard he had applied his engineering
skills to hoisting a big wooden top hat onto the head of the figure that
surmounts the Soldiers Monument, sixty feet above the Cambridge Common; it
took the combined forces of the police and fire departments two hours to
knock it off again.[9]
He was graduated In 1874, hoping to travel west as a mining engineer. His
father had other plans for him, however, and he went to work instead as
superintendent of one of Warren Delano's enterprises, the Union Mining
Company, digging coal and shale from deposits near Mount Savage, Maryland,
and making firebrick from the local clay.
While still at Harvard he had met and fallen in love with Miss Jennie Walters
of Baltimore. Her brother was a classmate of Warren's and had introduced
them. She was both beautiful and unusually well educated, attending classes
at Harvard and living with other young women in the home of Professor James
Bradstreet Greenough, a champion of women's education who later helped found
Radcliffe.
Her father forbade her to marry. William Thompson Walters was a curious man.
He had organized the Atlantic Coast Railroad Line, made himself many times a
millionaire, and compiled one of the finest collections of French art in
America. Major works by Delacroix and Corot, Millet and Gerome covered the
walls of his big house on Mount Vernon Street; and he traveled to Europe to
pick up more so often that two large galleries had eventually to be added to
hold the overflow. A diminutive man-under five feet tall-and unshaven rather
than bearded, he introduced the giant French percheron horse to America, and
he had grown increasingly eccentric since his wife's death in 1862.
Jennie was his only daughter, and whenever she was at home she managed his
cluttered household as best she could and acted as hostess to his infrequent
guests. So far as he was concerned she was not to marry Warren Delano or
anyone else; life without her would be intolerable. When she protested that
she was truly in love, he ordered her not to see her admirer or even to write
to him for two years. If she defied him he would cut her out of his will, bar
her from his home.
She stuck to her resolve. Her father stopped speaking to her, and they lived
together for months in what Mr. Delano called "that ill regulated mansion,"
picking their way among "the groups and piles of works of art" in total
silence. Warren's father was sympathetic to his plight. The ban on
correspondence was "an unreasonable course," he said, but he warned against
doing anything hasty. "Be patient, prudent," he warned, or there would be "a
more or less violent severance of relations with Mr. Walters, for which
neither Jennie nor you are prepared."
Tempers cooled, although Mr. Walters was never fully reconciled to the
marriage, and in May of 1875 the young couple announced their engagement to
their closest friends. They were married in July at a country church not far
from the Walters' country residence. Warren's family almost did not attend,
Mr. Walters having stubbornly refused to invite them until the last minute,
and the wedding itself was understandably subdued. Only a handful of friends
and neighbors came. The Delanos sat alone in their pew. After the ceremony,
Mr. Delano noted, the bride and groom "left the church together, followed by
W. T. Walters, my family, and the audience, [who] without congratulations or
demonstrations of any kind, dispersed."
The marriage was solid and affectionate in spite of its strained beginning,
and in 1877 the young Delanos had a son. He was christened Warren Delano IV
in the presence of his proud grandfather at Algonac, just moments after Annie
married Fred Hitch.
Sara Delano was known all her adult life for the strength of her will.
But in its first real test her resolution proved weaker than Jennie Walters'
had been.
Sara had her share of suitors but so far as we know seems to have taken only
one seriously, Stanford White—whom she and everyone else then called
"Stanny." His aunt, Mrs. Laura Fellows, lived nearby, and he and his older
brother, Richard, had been frequent summer visitors at Algonac over the
years. They took the Delano sisters sailing, accompanied them on picnics,
played croquet with them across the smooth lawns. But in the summer of 1876
the old friendship between Stanford White and Sara may have flared into
something more.
White was twenty-three that year and a whirlwind, tall and thin with
bristling red hair, freckles, a flaring mustache, and bright intense eyes. He
slammed doors, never walked when he could run, boomed out things like
"Thunder and guns!" and "Gin and seltzer!" when he got excited (which was
often), and liked to whistle airs from Don Giovanni when there was even a
moment's lapse in the conversation. Music was just one of his enthusiasms; he
also loved sporty clothes, fine horses, fishing, architecture, and art; he
carried a sketchbook under his arm and had a way of pronouncing a Hudson
Valley sunset "bully" and rushing outside to capture it on paper in rapid
sure strokes of watercolor.
He evidently fascinated Sara. He appalled her father, who called him "the
red-headed trial." To him Stanford White must have seemed everything unwanted
in a son-in-law. He was noisy, intrusive, overconfident, unreliable, and
without prospects. There was nothing wrong with his Massachusetts family. His
grandfather had been a wealthy clipper merchant, but steamships had put him
out of business, and young Stanny's father, Richard White, was a foppish
aesthete reduced to piecing together a living writing reviews of music and
literature. Worse, Stanny himself had hoped to be an artist, giving it up at
seventeen only when the painter John La Farge told him that in art there was
precious little prestige and still less money. For some five years now he had
been one of several badly paid draftsmen in the office of the eminent Boston
architect H. H. Richardson and—though Warren Delano may not have known of
it—he had also begun a lifelong series of affairs with women who were, as a
member of his family later said, "not of his class." He spoke loud and often
of striking out soon on his own, but Sara's father had little reason to
believe him. As a husband and provider, Stanford White seemed a terrible risk.
One afternoon at Algonac, Mr. Delano came upon Sara unwrapping a huge basket
filled with flowers White had sent her. "I suppose those are from the
red-headed trial," he said. "Remember that I don't care for that at all."
But Sara evidently did care for White; she may even have loved him. It is
impossible to measure the depth of their feelings for one another in that
reticent age now so long ago. No letters between them survive. But if she was
in love, she must have been deeply torn. In her desire to please and placate
her father, she was her mother's daughter; but she was her father's child in
her determination to have what she wanted, and she did not want to give up
Stanford White.
The decision was put off. Dora and her husband had been home on leave and
were now about to make their way back to Hong Kong. Sara was evidently told
to go with them and see what time and distance might do to her infatuation.
She was away for nine months. She visited England, where she first savored
English country life at the home of Will and Dora's friends, watched the
races at Ascot, and heard Prime Minister Gladstone and Lord
Beaconsfield—Benjamin Disraeli—speak at Westminster. Half a century later, in
1929, she took several of her grandchildren to see George Arliss in the film D
israeli. When the gaunt, hawk-nosed actor appeared on the screen, she
startled the children by hissing loudly, "But he is Beaconsfield!"
At Hong Kong a smitten British officer sent her a beautifully carved ivory
fan. Dora intervened in her father's absence, reminding Sara that, like
Stanford White, the young man was without sufficient means to be a proper
suitor. Sara sent back the gift with a note gently suggesting that it might
better be sent to the officer's sister.
At Paris on her way home the following spring, Sara took a long walk in the
Bois de Boulogne and stopped to pick a bouquet of the daisies and buttercups
that grew there beneath the ancient trees. It all reminded her overwhelmingly
of Algonac. "Dear Papa," she wrote that night, "sometimes I feel I would do
anything for a little talk with you. "
Time had done its work. She had come around. Her father's approval still
meant more to her than her own independence or the bright promises of
Stanford White or any other man.
She returned home that summer. White paid a visit to Algonac on the evening
of September 16. Whether he saw her then or only spoke to her father we do
not know. But he never called again.
Seven years later, on February 7, 1884, White married Bessie Springs Smith of
Smithtown, Long Island. He had by then become one of the most celebrated and
prosperous architects in America. Writing in the Algonac diary that evening,
Warren Delano tersely noted: "Mr. Stanford White is married today."[10]
Sara met James Roosevelt three years after she gave up Stanford White. She
was twenty-six. Her devotion to her father had not diminished, and she now
shared the running of the household with her mother, hiring servants—and
firing them if they displeased her. But Dora and Annie were already married.
So was Maggie Carey. If she did not marry now she might never get another
chance. None of the objections her father made to White could fairly be made
against Mr. James. He was in many ways very like her father–far closer to his
age than hers, sober, wealthy, self-assured. We cannot know precisely what
she felt for him then, but for someone so devoted to her father, so
accustomed to doing what he wished without question, those similarities must
have mattered. In a sense, Mr. James may have been the next best thing.
The wedding day was set for October 7, but preparations for it did not absorb
the family's attention as fully as they might have that summer. Cousin Nannie
Church, who had taught all the children their lessons, had died suddenly the
previous January. Sara, her mother, and her sisters all still wore mourning
dress when Mr. James first called at Algonac. Then, on August 11, just a few
days after Sara's secret had been revealed to family and friends, and several
days before news of the engagement appeared in the newspapers, Aunt Sarah
died at Algonac of cancer. Mr. James accompanied the family to the burial
services at Fairhaven and there was introduced to a host of Delano cousins.
Mr. Delano was pleased, of course, that Roosevelt "devotes himself to Sallie
who in her turn is absorbed in thought of him," but was privately gleeful
when his worldly future son-in-law seemed "a little surprised at the luxury
and comfort surrounding the old home."
Sara had greatly loved the aunt for whom she had been named, and out of
respect for her memory the scale of her wedding was considerably reduced.
Only 125 close friends and members of the family were invited.
It was a splendid afternoon, the wooded shores above the river brilliant with
autumn. Guests arriving from New York were met at the Newburgh ferry landing
and driven to Algonac in a fleet of Delano carriages, the New York World repor
ted, and "many of the villagers and residents in the pretty country cottages
on the roadside turned out to do honor" to them as they passed.
The Algonac gardeners had draped the parlor walls with ropes of ivy, and an
alcove had been "metamorphosed into a floral chancel" with ferns and palms
and wild flowers. Family and guests watched as Sara swept to her place
beneath a canopy of blossoms, tall and regal in a gown of white brocade, her
bridegroom's wedding gift of five strands of pearls around her neck.
Mr. James took his place beside her in a morning coat, his gray side-whiskers
freshly combed. And there, shortly after three o'clock, they exchanged their
vows.
Many years later, a guest remembered that several elderly women in the back
of the room "were crying that such a lovely girl should marry an old man."
Sara dutifully became a Roosevelt when she married Mr. James. Even the manner
of her journeying from her father's house to her husband's seemed designed to
make that clear. She emerged from Algonac after the wedding beautiful in a
black hat and going-away gown of mourning black and gray. Mr. James helped
her into the Delano victoria waiting beneath the porte cochere, then took his
seat beside her. Michael French, the Algonac coachman, snapped his whip and
the couple spun off down the gravel path. It was precisely fourtwenty by
Warren Delano's pocket watch. Beyond the gate they turned north toward Hyde
Park. At Milton, roughly halfway home, they drew up alongside Mr. James's
liveried coachman and his T-cart, waiting under the trees. Mr. Delano's
victoria returned empty to Algonac; his daughter rode on to Springwood in the
Roosevelt carriage, Mr. James himself holding the reins.
The Roosevelts spent what Sara recalled as "a happy month" together at Hyde
Park before embarking on an extended honeymoon in Europe. They rode together
each morning, their horses' hooves scattering drifts of leaves, and on sunny
afternoons Mr. James rowed them up and down the river. In the evenings they
often dined with neighbors or with Mr. James's mother and his brother's
family at Rosedale. Years later, John Roosevelt's daughter Ellen recalled
that whenever she knew Aunt Sallie was coming to dinner she asked to be
allowed to stay up long enough to catch a glimpse of her—"so tall and slim
and lovely in a dress of dark velvet."
Sara had little to do that month except to be lovely and affectionate. The
Algonac housekeeper had come up before the wedding to arrange the bride's
things in the bureau drawers of her new bedroom. Springwood was still managed
by Elespie, just as it had been in Rebecca Roosevelt's day; a cook and
housemaid carried out her orders.
Reminders of Rebecca were everywhere, and Mr. James did not encouraae
change. He seems to have hoped to recreate as precisely as possible the life
he had led with his first wife. If Sara ever resented this, she did not
openly object. Like her father, her husband had the right to have his home
precisely as he wished. He did not, for example, much enjoy the traditional
Lyman and Delano custom of reading aloud; Sara gave it up and played bezique
with him every evening they were alone together, just as Rebecca had.
Still, Sara remained a Delano. She and her father saw to that. During the
first month of her marriage she went home twice to Algonac while James was in
New York on business, and twice her parents visited Springwood. Throughout
their married life the Roosevelts journeyed to Algonac or Fairhaven whenever
the Delanos gathered: Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and anniversaries.
If Mr. James disliked being so subsumed by his wife's family he left no
record of it.
Both Roosevelts traveled to Algonac for several days toward the end of their
first month together and there witnessed a giant Republican torchlight parade
in honor of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, Mr. James's old
acquaintance from Union College. The presidential contest was especially
bitter that year, and it must have been a somewhat strained occasion. Mr.
Delano had contributed heavily to Garfield's campaign. Mr. James liked Arthur
well enough, but he had loyally backed the Democrats while again declining
their nomination for Congress. We know that he watched with his in-laws as
the Republicans paraded through Newburgh with their placards and flares, and
can only assume he was embarrassed for his party when, from the darkness,
local Democrats began pelting the marchers with eggs and bottles.
Mr. James voted his convictions at Hyde Park on Election Day, November 2.
Garfield and the Republicans won, and Mr. Delano's pleasure in their triumph
was tainted only by the stubborn Democracy of his own servants. "All my Irish
employees from French down," he told his son, "not only voted the Irish
ticket but show signs of such anger at the result that another week will
probably see 3 or 4 of them discharged from service."
The Roosevelts sailed for Europe aboard the Germanic five days later. Uncle
Ned, Laura, and Sara's parents all came to New York to say goodbye. "Sallie
sad going off," her father noted, "but bears it bravely enough." They spent
ten months abroad, together but rarely alone, visiting a multitude of friends
and relatives then living on the Continent and in England. Will and Dora
Forbes spent three weeks with them in Rome, and the Roosevelts stayed for a
time with the Franklin Delanos at Geneva. The whole Algonac family met them
in Paris, where Mr. Delano had hired an entire floor of the Hotel du Rhim for
a month-long reunion; James patiently took Sara's mother and sisters to the
Opera in the evenings and for long drives in the Bois de Boulogne in the
afternoons.
In Spain, James nursed Sara through a brief illness and bought her an old
lace mantilla to cheer her up. "James too devoted to me," she wrote in her
new diary. They gazed together into the glowing pit of Mount Vesuvius while
"burning stones fell all around us," and visited Ghent, where Sara showed
James the coat of arms of her remote ancestor, Jehan de Lannoye, carved in
the cathedral wall. At Scheveningen in Holland they bought an old Dutch clock
and ordered a massive sideboard built for the Springwood dining room, made up
of carved medieval panels.
On Sunday morning, August 21, 1881, the Roosevelts attended services at York
Cathedral in England. "I nearly fainted, giving James a little fright," Sara
confided to her diary that night, "but the feeling passed over." She was
nearly four months pregnant, and it was time to sail for home.
The Roosevelts settled back into life at Hyde Park to await the baby. The
Delano seamstress came to alter Sara's dresses. Mr. James surprised her with
a Chickering grand piano on their first anniversary. Friends came and went.
Sara's Uncle Ned had died suddenly of a heart attack aboard his yacht, while
they were still abroad. She was again in mourning. Then her brother Philippe
fell ill. He had grown into a tall, slender young man, gifted and outgoing
but always delicate, and a special favorite of Sara's. His father had sent
him to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study the year before-he wrote with zest
and wit and could recite long passages of prose or poetry after a single
reading-but repeated seizures drove him home, and a male companion was hired
to remain with him day and night. Then, on December 10, he suffered a massive
seizure. Twenty-four more followed over the next forty-eight hours. He died
on the morning of December 12.
The Roosevelts hurried to Algonac. Philippe was to be buried in the family
plot at Fairhaven, but Sara was far enough along in her pregnancy, her father
wrote, so that it was thought "not quite safe" for her to accompany the
family. Mr. James stayed behind with her at Algonac and helped care for
Warren Delano IV, her older brother's four-year-old-son. "It is a comfort to
have Baby Warren," she wrote, "and though my thoughts are in Fairhaven, I
have to be happy with the baby. We take him to drive and to the farm to see
the animals and James tells him splendid stories."
pps. 61-108
--[notes]--
1. Many years later the Roosevelt coachman was still grumbling to his family
about the inconvenience of these visits: "I'd take him ... there [to Algonac]
and I never got back till five in the morning."
Source: Nancy Fogel interview with Albert and Mary Paul, FDRL.
2. An eager-to-please nineteenth-century genealogist once delighted his
Delano patrons by tracing their forebears in Europe all the way back to a
Roman patrician family, the Actii, who were said to have staked a claim to a
corner of French Flanders in the final days of the Empire.
Whatever the truth of that story, the history of the American clan is rich
enough in color and incident. Among its livelier members: Thomas Delano,
Philippe's son, who was fined by the Massachusetts Bay Colony for having
sexual relations with his wife before marriage, wed Mary Alden, the daughter
of the girl his father had pursued to the New World; Captain Amasa Delano who
circled the globe three times and took down the first account of the Bounty mu
tineers~ colony on Pitcairn island; Captain Paul Delano, who commanded the
Chilean fleet that helped end Spanish rule in Peru; and Dutch-born Adelaide
Delannoy, seduced by the American actor Junius Brutus Booth, who became the
mother of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.
Sources: Daniel W. Delano, Jr., Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence, a
nd Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles, pages 179-180.
3.The Chinese were never a match for Britain, and when the war ended in the
summer of 1842, the emperor was forced to open five new trading ports and
cede Hong Kong to the foreigners. Opium was not mentioned in the Treaty of
Nanking, but Hong Kong provided a convenient new storage and distribution
center for the trade.
4. Robert Forbes did append a terse chronicle of the firm, including a list
of its early partners and their terms of service, to the later editions of
his Personal Reminiscenes. But it is skeletal and bloodless, not at all what
he originally had in mind. The Russell men's responses to his questionnaire
are filed among his papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston,
Massachusetts.
It is interesting that when writing his brief memoir of life at Canton,
Warren Delano left out his own involvement with opium entirely, but went out
of his way in a footnote to absolve Houqua of ever having owned a chest of
the drug.
Source: Delano Family Papers (hereafter DFP), FDRL.
5. Downing's English-born collaborator, Calvert Vaux, did a lovely watercolor
rendering of Algonac as it would look when redesigned; it is now on display
in the Dutchess County Room of the FDR Library.
6. Algonac was one of Downing's last projects. On July 28 of the following
year he boarded the steamboat Henry Clay on his way to New York. He did not
know that over the protests of her passengers her captain was racing a rival
steamer, the Armenia. Off the New Jersey Palisades a boiler overheated and
her canvas cover caught fire. Within moments the boat was in flames. Downing
was last seen alive at the rail, urging calm and tossing deck chairs down to
passengers floundering in the water. His body was not found until the next
morning. Some sixty persons died, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister
Louisa and Mrs. Bartlett, the wife of James Roosevelt's old Poughkeepsie
schoolmaster.
7. The Roosevelt and Delano families were silent about the sources of Warren
Delano's fortune. The word "opium" does not once appear in Gracious Lady, Rita
Halle Kleeman's semi-official biography of Sara Delano Roosevelt.
During World War II Westbrook Pegler wrote at least three columns excoriating
FDR as a hypocrite for accusing others of living off ill-gotten gains when
the activities of his own grandfather Delano—"an old buccaneer"—had allowed
him and his wife to enjoy "to the utmost ... luxury and riches derived from
the degradation and wretchedness of the Chinese people. ... Certainly with
their special interest in the family history [the President and Mrs.
Roosevelt] must have come upon the evidence long ago that they were living
richly on the profits of a slave traffic as horrible and degrading as
prostitution."
The White House did not respond, but Daniel W. Delano, the distant but
admiring relative who wrote Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence, was
indignant. "This charge has no foundation in fact," he wrote. "[Warren]
Delano's opium dealings were legitimate and no records exist of any
transaction that, by the widest stretch of the imagination, could be
construed as lacking in honesty." Mr. Delano's motives in dealing in opium
during the Civil War through "legitimate trade channels" were patriotic: he
was working to obtain "huge cargoes of the much-needed drug" for the care of
the Union wounded at the front. To believe that Warren Delano's drug dealing
was illegitimate, Daniel continued, "would be to dishonor the memory of
President Abraham Lincoln and his integrity.... President Lincoln, knowing
Mr. Delano personally and having a high regard and the utmost respect for
him, appointed him his special agent in China.... While serving hi this
capacity, Mr. Delano brought back to America the first treaties we had with
that country."
This defense has itself little foundation in fact:
1. It entirely ignores Warren Delano's participation in the opium business
during his first sojourn in China (1833-1846), when his devotion to the Union
was clearly irrelevant.
2. The importation of opium was never legal in Chinese eyes; its "trade
channels" were never "legitimate."
3. While Warren Delano may have helped obtain the drug for the War Department
during the Civil War-presumably at a profit-the major market for opium even
then remained what it had always been: the craving of hundreds of thousands
of Chinese addicts.
4. We do not know whether Lincoln knew Warren Delano, or even knew of him.
Daniel Delano offers no evidence that he did. Nor is there any trace of a
link between the two men among the voluminous Delano papers at the FDRL, and
it seems unlikely that a family so history-conscious would have mislaid the
proof if there had ever been any. Nor is there documentary evidence that
Warren Delano was ever Mr. Lincoln's "special agent" in China. He Was U.S.
consul at Hong Kong for a time, a post that went automatically to the most
senior American merchant on the island; he had held it for the same reason at
Canton during the 1840s.
5. Finally, the first U.S. treaty with China was the Treaty of Wang Hsia,
signed at the end of the Opium War in 1844 and carried home by the man who
negotiated it, Caleb Cushing.
Precisely what Warren Delano's children thought privately of their father's
career in the opium trade may never be known. But there may be one suggestive
clue. Perhaps in part as expiation, his youngest son, Fred, volunteered to
serve in 1927 as a member of a three-man League of Nations commission that
investigated the drug traffic in Persia (now Iran); the poet Archibald
MacLeish served as his assistant. The commission urged that a railroad be
built to allow commodities other than opium to be hauled out of the mountains
to the ocean. The Trans-Iranian railroad was the result, 865 miles of
twisting, climbing track that linked the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea.
Even before it was completed, the Shah Riza Pahlavi had ordered himself a
private parlor car with fittings of rosewood, silver, and gold. The opium
flow never even slowed.
There is no record anywhere of what FDR knew or suspected about his
grandfather's career, but Eleanor Roosevelt was evidently privately bothered
by Pegler's charges. When she visited Hong Kong in 195 3 she talked them over
with a knowledgeable British merchant and reluctantly concluded that "the
Delanos and Forbeses, like everybody else, had to include a limited amount of
opium in their cargoes to do any trading at all."
Sources: Frederic A. Delano (hereafter FAD) Papers, FDRL; Time magazine,
January 3, 1938; Eleanor Roosevelt, On My Own, page 131.
8. This incident provided another example of Franklin Roosevelt's imaginative
version of his family history. The President must have known what really
happened. He had seen three separate and nearly identical accounts of it-in
his grandmother's log, found and copied for him by his Uncle Fred Delano; in
the captain's log itself, obtained for the FDR Library, and in Rita Halle
Kleeman's Gracious Lady.
Still, he was unable to resist making more of it than there was. On April 18,
1942, he wrote to Felix Frankfurter that the Surprise had "passed the
Confederate commerce destroyer 'Alabama' in the night but [was] not seen."
Source: Max Freedman, Roosevelt and Frankfurter, page 656.
9. Mr. Delano's parental reactions were not always predictable. He was
evidently amused by young Warren s Harvard prank, but four years later, when
his youngest son, Fred, took part in something similar but on a much smaller
scale, he was outraged. Fred was thirteen in 1878, a boarding student at the
Adams Academy in Quincy, Massachusetts, when he and several other boys rigged
up a miniature cannon so that it would go off loudly but harmlessly on the
second floor of the school after everyone was in bed. Dr. William Everett,
the headmaster, was "a highstrung, nervous man," Fred recalled many years
later , and interrogated all sixty boys as to who had been responsible. "When
it came my turn, he asked if I knew anything about the incident. I could not
say that I did not.... I said that I did, but refused to tell who had a hand
in it." All the other boys denied knowing anything at all. As a result, the
headmaster put Fred on a train for home that afternoon. His father met him at
the Newburgh depot "in great distress," and when they reached Algonac not
even his mother was allowed to speak to him. "There was no suggestion of
sympathy on anyone's part. I was treated as a disgraced boy." He was kept in
his room. A servant brought him his meals. This went on for several weeks
while his father and Dr. Everett carried on a long anguished correspondence
about the boy's future. Finally, he was allowed to go back to school for his
final examinations.
Years later, after Warren Delano died and Fred was cleaning out his father's
desk, he found a packet of more than a dozen letters dealing with this
incident and its aftermath and was astonished to discover that Dr. Everett
had proposed only a short suspension; his father had urged expulsion. The boy
was "forever disgraced," he had written. "He even went so far," Fred
remembered, "as to say that if he were to rear another family, he was
inclined to think he would seek a home among the Chinese, because in China
the sons of the family could be depended on and honor their parents and live
up to their standards."
Source: An unpublished autobiographical sketch by Fred Delano, kindly
provided to me by his grandson, Frederic D. Grant, Jr.
10. Dr. Nona Ferdon, in her pioneering unpublished thesis, Franklin D.
Roosevelt: A Psychological Interpretation of His Cbildhoodand Youth (page
145), reports that "in confidential conversation with a recognized Roosevelt
scholar" living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1970, she was told that
"Stanford White was the only man Sara Roosevelt ever loved." The scholar was
Frank Freidel, who was told the story by a member of the Delano family.
This was clearly an exaggeration, but Sara's friend and biographer, Rita
Kleeman, provides some suggestive evidence that there was a thwarted romance.
On page 83 of Gracious Lady she notes that Stanford White, "a magnificent
looking boy with a shock of flaming red hair" was a frequent caller at
Algonac. On the same page she tells of "one red-haired young man who was
exceedingly attentive" to Sara. Her father disapproved of this suitor,
calling him "the red-headed trial," and eventually had her send him away.
Warren Delano's disapproval "ended it for Sallie," Kleeman continues, "for
she still thought that her father knew more than any one else in the world
and that whatever he said was right."
Since Sara herself must have been the source of both these stories, I suspect
she may have told her friend rather more than she had meant to reveal about
her relationship with White and that either then or later the two women
agreed to separate the two anecdotes out of respect for the memory of Mr.
James. It should also be remembered that Warren Delano was not wrong about
White's reliability as a husband, as Sara and the world learned in 1906, when
he was murdered in the presence of his former mistress by her deranged
husband. Sara may well have told the story originally to Mrs. Kleeman more as
an example of her father's perspicacity than as a romantic tale about herself.
Further evidence is provided by the Algonac diaries which record White's
frequent visits to Algonac in the summer of 1876 and none at all after
September 16, 1877. My account also helps explain Sara's otherwise curiously
sudden decision to accompany Will and Dora Forbes back to China in 1876 and
her very short stay at Rose Hill. After taking nearly six months to get
there, she started home again in less than a month.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
