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Summary: An admiring look at a formidable woman, and her son's wife
Review: Who among us wouldn't want to have been Sara Delano Roosevelt? Adored daughter and sibling, independently wealthy through her father's success in the Chinese opium trade, married to an older man whose forebears were as securely rooted in America as her own, she became the mother of one perfect child who grew up to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Self-doubt was not in the emotional vocabulary of either of FDR's parents, who raised him in the country splendor of their estate in Hyde Park, New York. Jan Pottker takes an intriguing look into the life of Sara Delano Roosevelt, and entwines it with her relationship with FDR's wife, his fifth cousin Eleanor Roosevelt. The book is a feast of anecdotes. Finding them and displaying them appears to be Pottker's greatest strength as a biographer. Everyone's heard the story of how the King and Queen of England came to Hyde Park in 1939 and enjoyed an informal hot-dog lunch. But who knew that 200,000 people lined the road from Poughkeepsie to Hyde Park to greet the royal couple? Or that when the formal dinner for the visiting royalty was delayed an hour, "the roast beef remained pink in the center"? Keeping life, well, rosy appears to have been the leitmotif of Sara's life, and the polar opposite of her daughter-in-law Eleanor's. Much has been written about Eleanor's deep insecurity, having been orphaned young and passed around among relatives, and Pottker covers no new territory here. However, it makes the reader squirm to see Eleanor's dutiful, doubtful personality wither somewhat in the face of Sara's utter self-confidence. Eleanor appears to have spent her thirty-six years of married life abjectly begging Sara's pardon, bickering with her, or silently, sullenly yielding to her mother-in-law's will, which was as formidable as her control over the extended family's pursestrings. In her effort to provide a rounded portrait of Sara, Pottker often provides contrasting anecdotes about her daughter-in-law that almost always cast Eleanor in a bad light. This is unfortunate, as neither woman needs to play the bad guy at this late date. Both Sara and Eleanor were remarkable women, but where the latter learned to find her greatest fulfillment outside the unnourishing bosom of her family, the former started life strengthened by the best that the Victorian era could provide a girl, and only later yielded graciously to satisfying the interest of the world in her role as the President's mother. The contrast between the two women is sufficient without Pottker's effort to cast Eleanor in a lesser light so as to illuminate Sara further. Yes, she did frequently tell her grandchildren, "You are my true children. Eleanor only bore you." But in light of their parents' increasingly separate lives and chaotic schedules, Sara and Hyde Park were the constant touchstones while her grandchildren were growing up. Had Sara not subsidized the family as she did, her son could not have run for president and guided the country through the Depression and World War II. We, as a nation, are richer for her generosity. However, the dependency that she encouraged in her son, which he never appears to have refused, seemed to have born bitter fruit in the unfulfilled potential in the subsequent generation: There were nineteen divorces among the five Roosevelt children, none of whom appears to have sustained a notably happy or successful adult life despite their financial and social advantages. Elliott and James in particular made something of a cottage industry of writing and being interviewed about their parents. They are quoted extensively--perhaps too extensively--throughout Pottker's book. Pottker interviewed Anna Roosevelt's two eldest children, the great-grandchildren whose memories provide a living link with the matriarch born in 1854. (Interestingly, Curtis Dall--once known to the nation as "Buzzie"--dropped his father's name to use Roosevelt as a surname.) She also provides the insights of Nina Roosevelt Gibson, Ph.D., the psychologist daughter of John, the youngest Roosevelt child, who is almost never quoted by Roosevelt biographers. This book is a welcome addition to our knowledge of the Roosevelts--and, as Sara would point out if she were here, of the Delanos as well, whose family background she privately considered to be superior. The largest, sturdiest oak at Hyde Park inexplicably toppled to the ground only minutes after Sara died there at the age of eighty-six. Though witnesses were startled, no one was surprised.
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