Never Enuff Wacky Roosevelts!
Oct. 16th, 2016 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSome mornings I wake up, and my body feels like some kind of remote-controlled robot device. I cannot think. I move by algorithm.
It’s one of those mornings when I expect everyone I care about to text or call throughout the day. You know, I’ve been thinking, they’ll say. And I have finally realized: You’re a horrible human being. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Ever again.
I’m thinking of holing up in my hideaway and rewatching all 38 episodes of The Tudors. Nothing like 450-year old political controversies to perk up that lagging sense of inner security and proportion, right?
But first…
In 1867, on a cold day in December, a boy left his brownstone mansion on Broadway and 13th Street to go out for a walk.
He returned home a few hours later. Minus an overcoat.
“What happened?” his father demanded.
“I saw a little street urchin,” said the boy. “He looked so cold that I gave him my coat.”
“You’re a kind-hearted lad!” laughed his father. “Like Little Nell in the Dickens novel.”
And the next day, he bought his son a new overcoat.
This story is likely to be apocryphal.
For one thing, it’s highly unlikely that a seven-year old boy would be allowed to go traipsing about New York City’s streets on his own. In the 1860s or in any other decade.
Nonetheless, this was Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite anecdote about the father she adored. One imagines that it served the same purpose as the baptism by proxy practiced by members of the Latter Day Saints. She was also nicknamed “Nell” as a child.
Like his brother Theodore, Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt by all reports had an intensely magnetic personality. But where TR’s magnetism expressed itself as a kind of irresistible force applied to immoveable objects, Elliott’s was a type of charm.
That’s him on the right and TR on the left in the picture above. They look alike, yes? But Elliott is slightly handsomer.
TR, the eldest by two years, was a sickly kid when he was growing up. He was small for his age, subject to acute asthma, attacks and suffered from nervous diarrhea.
Elliott was also sick but not in a way that attracted as much notice from his family. In 1874, at the age of 14, he began to suffer from severe headaches and blackouts during which he babbled incoherently. He had no memory of anything he said during these episodes, and became so afraid of them that he developed a fear of the dark and an inability to concentrate on anything. His family responded by withdrawing him from prep school and sending him away to Texas. Turned out this was a smart move: All he needed to recover was 1,800 miles of distance from them.
Unfortunately, that distance proved impossible to maintain though he made efforts throughout his brief life to do so. At 20, he traveled alone to India.
After two years, though, he had to return home.
These days, it’s thought that Elliott suffered from a type of epilepsy.
At the time, though, medical science had no explanation for his attacks, and it’s likely that Elliott himself thought they were symptomatic of some deep lack of manliness. He’d begun drinking heavily because alcohol seemed to depress the frequency of the attacks. Self-medicating as we enlightened modernists would say.
At the age of 22, Elliott Roosevelt met Anna Livingston Hall. He married her a year later. The year was 1883.
Anna was so beautiful that some famous painter – I forget whom – begged for the privilege of painting her. He was denied.
Anna had had a rather Gothic upbringing in a hideous old house called Oak Terrace in the strange little town of Tivoli-on-Hudson (which these days is a kind of a suburb of Bard College.)
Her father, Valentine Gill Hall, was an Old School Protestant religious zealot; his wife and four daughters were never allowed opinions or a voice in any decision. Indeed, they were not even allowed to go out shopping: Merchants were required to bring merchandise to Oak Terrace.
Her brothers, Valentine and Edward Hall grew up to become tennis champions and raging alcoholics.
When the senior Valentine died abruptly, it fell to Anna to take over the management of the Oak Terrace estate.
Fascinating literary footnote: Anna’s sister Edith is thought to be the prototype for Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. (Edith Wharton, you will recall, summered at Wyncliffe, a mere 10 miles away from Oak Terrace.)
The Roosevelts disliked Anna. I can’t find the actual letter to Auntie Bye in which TR dismisses her as frivolous, vain, and superficial. It would have been written after Elliott’s marriage, though. Of course, the two Roosevelt brothers were immensely competitive with one another: If Theodore married a famous beauty, then Elliott must marry an even more famous one.
One can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for Anna Hall Roosevelt even if she was incredibly mean to her oldest child, Eleanor. Denied the opportunity for an education, forced to assume responsibility for an addled mother and a coven of petulant siblings at the age of 17, forced to cover up the family darkness when she made her debut into society a year later, of course all she could dream about was having a good time.
One imagines she married Elliott because (A) a woman must marry or be relegated to a kind of Austen-esque spinsterhood, and his prospects seemed like the best of the bunch. But (B) because Elliott seemed to be capable of showing her a good time.
In that latter assumption, she was entirely mistaken.
TBC.
It’s one of those mornings when I expect everyone I care about to text or call throughout the day. You know, I’ve been thinking, they’ll say. And I have finally realized: You’re a horrible human being. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Ever again.
I’m thinking of holing up in my hideaway and rewatching all 38 episodes of The Tudors. Nothing like 450-year old political controversies to perk up that lagging sense of inner security and proportion, right?
But first…
In 1867, on a cold day in December, a boy left his brownstone mansion on Broadway and 13th Street to go out for a walk.
He returned home a few hours later. Minus an overcoat.
“What happened?” his father demanded.
“I saw a little street urchin,” said the boy. “He looked so cold that I gave him my coat.”
“You’re a kind-hearted lad!” laughed his father. “Like Little Nell in the Dickens novel.”
And the next day, he bought his son a new overcoat.
This story is likely to be apocryphal.
For one thing, it’s highly unlikely that a seven-year old boy would be allowed to go traipsing about New York City’s streets on his own. In the 1860s or in any other decade.
Nonetheless, this was Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite anecdote about the father she adored. One imagines that it served the same purpose as the baptism by proxy practiced by members of the Latter Day Saints. She was also nicknamed “Nell” as a child.
Like his brother Theodore, Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt by all reports had an intensely magnetic personality. But where TR’s magnetism expressed itself as a kind of irresistible force applied to immoveable objects, Elliott’s was a type of charm.
That’s him on the right and TR on the left in the picture above. They look alike, yes? But Elliott is slightly handsomer.
TR, the eldest by two years, was a sickly kid when he was growing up. He was small for his age, subject to acute asthma, attacks and suffered from nervous diarrhea.
Elliott was also sick but not in a way that attracted as much notice from his family. In 1874, at the age of 14, he began to suffer from severe headaches and blackouts during which he babbled incoherently. He had no memory of anything he said during these episodes, and became so afraid of them that he developed a fear of the dark and an inability to concentrate on anything. His family responded by withdrawing him from prep school and sending him away to Texas. Turned out this was a smart move: All he needed to recover was 1,800 miles of distance from them.
Unfortunately, that distance proved impossible to maintain though he made efforts throughout his brief life to do so. At 20, he traveled alone to India.
After two years, though, he had to return home.
These days, it’s thought that Elliott suffered from a type of epilepsy.
At the time, though, medical science had no explanation for his attacks, and it’s likely that Elliott himself thought they were symptomatic of some deep lack of manliness. He’d begun drinking heavily because alcohol seemed to depress the frequency of the attacks. Self-medicating as we enlightened modernists would say.
At the age of 22, Elliott Roosevelt met Anna Livingston Hall. He married her a year later. The year was 1883.Anna was so beautiful that some famous painter – I forget whom – begged for the privilege of painting her. He was denied.
Anna had had a rather Gothic upbringing in a hideous old house called Oak Terrace in the strange little town of Tivoli-on-Hudson (which these days is a kind of a suburb of Bard College.)
Her father, Valentine Gill Hall, was an Old School Protestant religious zealot; his wife and four daughters were never allowed opinions or a voice in any decision. Indeed, they were not even allowed to go out shopping: Merchants were required to bring merchandise to Oak Terrace.
Her brothers, Valentine and Edward Hall grew up to become tennis champions and raging alcoholics.
When the senior Valentine died abruptly, it fell to Anna to take over the management of the Oak Terrace estate.
Fascinating literary footnote: Anna’s sister Edith is thought to be the prototype for Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. (Edith Wharton, you will recall, summered at Wyncliffe, a mere 10 miles away from Oak Terrace.)
The Roosevelts disliked Anna. I can’t find the actual letter to Auntie Bye in which TR dismisses her as frivolous, vain, and superficial. It would have been written after Elliott’s marriage, though. Of course, the two Roosevelt brothers were immensely competitive with one another: If Theodore married a famous beauty, then Elliott must marry an even more famous one.
One can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for Anna Hall Roosevelt even if she was incredibly mean to her oldest child, Eleanor. Denied the opportunity for an education, forced to assume responsibility for an addled mother and a coven of petulant siblings at the age of 17, forced to cover up the family darkness when she made her debut into society a year later, of course all she could dream about was having a good time.
One imagines she married Elliott because (A) a woman must marry or be relegated to a kind of Austen-esque spinsterhood, and his prospects seemed like the best of the bunch. But (B) because Elliott seemed to be capable of showing her a good time.
In that latter assumption, she was entirely mistaken.
TBC.
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Date: 2016-10-16 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 11:45 pm (UTC)