THE WARS OF THE ROOSEVELTS:
The Ruthless Rise of America’s Greatest Political Family
By William J. Mann
Harper, 609 pp., illustrated, $35
Usually stories about the Roosevelts come steeped in rectitude — a little noblesse oblige, of course, but mostly nobility and a high sense of obligation. Theodore battled crime and the trusts; Franklin fought economic depression and the Axis powers; Eleanor took on prejudice along with the social and sexual conventions of her time, place, and class.
“The War of the Roosevelts’’ isn’t so much about entrenched economic interests, the Nazis, and the plight of the poor and striving. It’s not about cleaning up mean streets as much as it is about mean streaks. Teddy nudges his rival brother — a libertine, to be sure, but mostly a threat to the future president’s unbridled ambition — into a sanatorium. Thus begins a sordid tale of a family both driven and riven. It is neither the plot of a PBS documentary nor a scholarly tome about cleansing the economy and preserving democracy.
“The rise of the Roosevelts is the story of a family at war, of survival of the fittest, where the strong devoured the weak and where the nonconformist[s] . . . were brutally relegated to nonexistence,’’ William J. Mann writes in the second paragraph of the book. And away we go! Illegitimate children. Range wars. Renegade family members.
Mann’s take on the Roosevelts reads more like a Penny Vincenzi dynastic novel (“Old Sins,’’ published in 1989, or perhaps “No Angel,’’ released in 2000) than a James MacGregor Burns biography (“Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom,’’ which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971). But he does succeed in adding anecdote and antidote to the work of Edmund Morris, the biographer of Teddy, and H.W. Brands, the recent biographer of Franklin.
For here is scandal, ambition, mendacity, and the de riguer bastard child and in-law of heretofore unknown Jewish blood. Finally, the Roosevelts are taken down to the level of the Kennedys. Ordinarily such leveling — how the Bushes have escaped this is a mystery, though there still is time — is more gratuitous than gratifying. But Mann does make a convincing case for generations-long tensions that give new perspective to Franklin’s life as legatee to Teddy and to the troubled union he entered with Teddy’s niece, Eleanor, who would forever be scarred by the virtual loss of her banished father to her uncle’s plots. As always, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy’s daughter, adds spice and spectacle to the tale.
At the heart of this volume is an examination of the inner lives of people known mostly for their public lives. Mann, for example, says of Teddy: “For all his desire to be a force for good and for change in the world, the ironic dichotomy of Theodore Roosevelt would be his often brutal control of his family and his inability to countenance different worldviews.’’ Alice harbored “depression, anger, and despair’’ and felt “unwanted and unloved.’’ Of Eleanor: “All her life, she’d been made to feel less than.’’ Mann finishes the thought by not finishing the sentence, only to revive her later as a saintly crusader for lost causes.
And while a book like this — a little gossipy, with excursions into pop psychology, written by a biographer of Barbra Streisand, Elizabeth Taylor, and Katherine Hepburn — might ordinarily be pasted together hastily from secondary sources, the bibliography shows diligence and determination, for Mann consulted an impressive array of primary sources, especially letters written by and to the principals.
The result is a chronicle of tensions in every direction and in multiple dimensions: Alice’s contempt for Eleanor; Franklin’s mother’s suspicion of Eleanor; Eleanor’s resentment of her daughter’s enabling of Franklin’s meetings with his mistress in his final months; pretty much everybody’s disapproval of Eleanor’s attire. Then there was Franklin’s polio, which Eleanor unforgettably said allowed her to stand on her own two feet.
That last paragraph reflects how Eleanor, more than Teddy or Franklin, emerges at the center of all this — and that is without delving into how Alice resented the notion that Eleanor, not she, became a political heir to her father. But — for once! — Alice remains at the periphery, far more devilish than dutiful. By 1932 she was asking her brother, long a rival of Franklin, to leave his post as governor of the Philippines to campaign against their cousin.
But in the end, it is Eleanor who shines. In his final chapters Mann treats her kindly, admiringly.
“[T]he shy, awkward, friendless little girl had been transformed into a messenger of hope for the downtrodden all over the world,’’ he writes. “It was as if she had become Gaia, Hera, Athena — a mortal woman no more.’’ There is truth to that, for today Teddy is a distant figure of history, Franklin a receding memory held by dwindling numbers, many of them infirm — and Eleanor was the inspiration for another onetime first lady, who just months ago won the Democratic presidential nomination.
THE WARS OF THE ROOSEVELTS:
The Ruthless Rise of America’s Greatest Political Family
By William J. Mann
Harper, 609 pp., illustrated, $35
David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He can be reached at dshribman@post-gazette.com.
