adjoining houses on 65 th Street, one for herself and one for her son and daughter-in-law. Their first child, Anna, was born in May 1906. Five more children would be born during the next ten years, including one who died in infancy from the flu. These were hard years for Eleanor. She was not ready for many domestic responsibilities. She reproached herself bitterly over the baby who died,although she was not at fault. Her mother-in-law tried to plan her life for her, and often succeeded.
Wanting desperately to share in her husband’s activities, Eleanor tried to learn to drive Franklin’s little Ford car and to ride Franklin’s horse Bobby. But she ran the car into a gatepost, and she could not control Bobby. She practiced golf by herself for days and then ventured on the green with her husband, who, after watching her cut at the ball for a few minutes, said that she might just as well give it up. She did.
Franklin seemed insensitive to his young wife’s feelings of inadequacy, her restlessness under Sara’s maternal domination, her wish to share more of his life. When he found Eleanor once weeping at her dressing table at their—or Sara’s—house on 65 th Street, he reacted more with bewildered dismay than with anxious compassion. “What on earth is the matter with you?” he demanded. Though he gave his wife and family warm affection and plunged into family picnics and yacht trips with zest and vigor, he could spend many a Saturday afternoon playing poker at the University Club in New York City. Like his father, he seemed able to compartmentalize his life with ease.
Roosevelt had begun Columbia Law School in the fall of 1904 and he entered his second year soon after returning from his honeymoon. Here he repeated the pattern of Harvard, minus the extracurricular activities. Although the Columbia faculty included a distinguished group of law professors, the courses failed to interest Franklin. His grades once again averaged C. He failed two courses—one of them Pleading and Practice I—and had to take make-up examinations. After passing the New York bar examinations before the end of his third year he promptly dropped his courses, thus failing to win his LL.B. degree. Clearly the study of the law did not challenge young Roosevelt.
Law practice was something else. Through his connections he got a clerkship at the old Wall Street law firm of Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn. It was an unpaid job the first year and his work was rather routine. But cases came his way—many of them from his rather litigious family—and he enjoyed the practical higgle and haggle of legal negotiation. He was surprised and depressed at the gap between legal education and legal practice. He saw little connection between legal “grand principles” and the problems of a relative’s trunk destroyed on a Le Havre dock, the interpretation of a will, or a deed of transfer of land.
Roosevelt was not excited by the broader points of law. If he had been, his future at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn—and his whole career—might have been much different. The firm defended such clients as Standard Oil of New Jersey and the American TobaccoCompany against the government’s attacks on the trusts; it was saturated with the spirit of sober, responsible defense of corporate interests in the face of progressivism. As it turned out, Roosevelt was influenced far more by his everyday contacts with clients, lawyers, claimants, and the politicians and would-be politicians around the courts than he was by office ideology.
After a time, however, he was bored by the law. Something inside him was pushing him to wider fields of action.
The six years after Harvard were outwardly uneventful ones for Roosevelt, aside from family affairs. They were years of intellectual latency. But beneath the surface was a flux and flow, stirred by the nature of the times, by his wife and associates, and by the demands of his work. The year 1910 brought this period to a close and
Wanting desperately to share in her husband’s activities, Eleanor tried to learn to drive Franklin’s little Ford car and to ride Franklin’s horse Bobby. But she ran the car into a gatepost, and she could not control Bobby. She practiced golf by herself for days and then ventured on the green with her husband, who, after watching her cut at the ball for a few minutes, said that she might just as well give it up. She did.
Franklin seemed insensitive to his young wife’s feelings of inadequacy, her restlessness under Sara’s maternal domination, her wish to share more of his life. When he found Eleanor once weeping at her dressing table at their—or Sara’s—house on 65 th Street, he reacted more with bewildered dismay than with anxious compassion. “What on earth is the matter with you?” he demanded. Though he gave his wife and family warm affection and plunged into family picnics and yacht trips with zest and vigor, he could spend many a Saturday afternoon playing poker at the University Club in New York City. Like his father, he seemed able to compartmentalize his life with ease.
Roosevelt had begun Columbia Law School in the fall of 1904 and he entered his second year soon after returning from his honeymoon. Here he repeated the pattern of Harvard, minus the extracurricular activities. Although the Columbia faculty included a distinguished group of law professors, the courses failed to interest Franklin. His grades once again averaged C. He failed two courses—one of them Pleading and Practice I—and had to take make-up examinations. After passing the New York bar examinations before the end of his third year he promptly dropped his courses, thus failing to win his LL.B. degree. Clearly the study of the law did not challenge young Roosevelt.
Law practice was something else. Through his connections he got a clerkship at the old Wall Street law firm of Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn. It was an unpaid job the first year and his work was rather routine. But cases came his way—many of them from his rather litigious family—and he enjoyed the practical higgle and haggle of legal negotiation. He was surprised and depressed at the gap between legal education and legal practice. He saw little connection between legal “grand principles” and the problems of a relative’s trunk destroyed on a Le Havre dock, the interpretation of a will, or a deed of transfer of land.
Roosevelt was not excited by the broader points of law. If he had been, his future at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn—and his whole career—might have been much different. The firm defended such clients as Standard Oil of New Jersey and the American TobaccoCompany against the government’s attacks on the trusts; it was saturated with the spirit of sober, responsible defense of corporate interests in the face of progressivism. As it turned out, Roosevelt was influenced far more by his everyday contacts with clients, lawyers, claimants, and the politicians and would-be politicians around the courts than he was by office ideology.
After a time, however, he was bored by the law. Something inside him was pushing him to wider fields of action.
The six years after Harvard were outwardly uneventful ones for Roosevelt, aside from family affairs. They were years of intellectual latency. But beneath the surface was a flux and flow, stirred by the nature of the times, by his wife and associates, and by the demands of his work. The year 1910 brought this period to a close and
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