Eleanor Roosevelt

Sara was determined to ensure her son's success in all areas of life including his marriage. Sara had doted on her son to the point of spoiling him, and now intended to help him make a success of his marriage with a woman that she evidently viewed as being totally unprepared for her new role as chatelaine of a great family. Sara would continue to give huge presents to her new grandchildren, but sometimes Eleanor had problems with the influence that came with "mother's largesse."

Although Roosevelt was always in the good graces of her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, the pater familias of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, as the Republican branch of the family was known, she often found herself at odds with his eldest daughter, Alice Roosevelt. Theodore felt Eleanor's conduct to be far more responsible, socially acceptable and cooperative; in short, more "Rooseveltian" than that of the beautiful, highly photogenic, but rebellious and self-absorbed Alice, to whom he would ask, "Why can't you be more like 'cousin Eleanor'?" These early experiences laid the foundation for lifelong strain between the two high-profile cousins. Though the youthful Alice's comradely relationship with Franklin during the World War I years in Washington is still the object of curiosity among Rooseveltian scholars, both Eleanor's and his relationship with Alice and other Oyster Bay Roosevelts would be aggravated by the widening political gulf between the Hyde Park and Oyster Bay families, as Franklin D. Roosevelt's political career began to take off. Read Less

Eleanor Roosevelt later learned that Lucy Rutherfurd had been with FDR when he died. Her biographer, Joseph P. Lash, called it a "bitter discovery" and wrote that Roosevelt alluded to this in her memoir of the White House years, This I Remember: Read Less