Product Description

At the turn of the twentieth century, in the brownstones of New York City and the country houses of Long Island and the Hudson River Valley, a generation of young Roosevelt cousins shared carriage rides to school and dancing class. Together they rode their horses and fished and swam in landscapes they would know until the end of their lives.

When they grew older, the cousins saw one another often in Fifth Avenue ballrooms and at family weddings, and frequently at the Long Island home of their patriarch and hero, President Theodore Roosevelt. There, grounded in a warm and steady love, they followed him on hikes, climbing over pasture stiles and running down steep sandy slopes, and they listened to his speeches at Fourth of July celebrations.

The cousins were numerous. Five girls--Eleanor, Alice, Christine, Elfrida, and Dorothy--all born in one ten-month period, were known during their debutante year as the "Magic Five". Although the public later came to see Alice and Eleanor as polar opposites, in Donn’s compelling account we learn that they were more similar than people supposed. Alice, perceived as beautiful, witty, sophisticated, and dedicated to enjoying herself, was often unhappy and tortured by self-doubt. Eleanor, described later (usually by herself) as serious, mousy, and driven by duty to reform the world, was tough as nails and knew exactly how to gain and hold power. As a debutante she was lively, almost beautiful, and very popular, pursued by many eligible swains. And as children and young women they were best friends--Alice wrote in her diary that the person with whom she would most want to be marooned on a desert island was Eleanor.

But the Roosevelt clan was not always supportive. Sometimes they ostracized members who they felt didn’t uphold the family’s values. Theodore had urged his nieces as well as his nephews to lead lives of public service, a goal that united them and gave direction and purpose to the family, but when the young Roosevelts began to compete for public office, family members began to take sides. Protective and increasingly bitter, Alice saw in her cousin Franklin’s success a threat to her brother Ted’s future. Franklin’s mother and Eleanor perceived his cousins to be dangerous political rivals.

Theodore couldn’t have known, when he encouraged the young cousins to battle for the welfare of others, that their personal struggles for independence would rupture the Roosevelt clan. But as the young people jockeyed for position, they found themselves on a collision course, for only one man could be president.

There have been many Roosevelt biographies, and much about their lives is widely known. Linda Donn, a historian whose earlier book, Freud and Jung, also dealt with duality, here demonstrates that there is still much more to know about this fascinating family. We can easily find ourselves in the Roosevelt cousins’ struggles, discovering that independence can sometimes come at the price of family unity and acceptance, and that an unwillingness to pay that price can incur an even greater one: never coming to know oneself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1686744 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-23
• Released on: 2001-10-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
As she did in Freud and Jung, Linda Donn gives a new spin to a famous story in her portrait of the generation that grew up in the mighty shadow of Theodore Roosevelt. She focuses on TR's daughter Alice, his brother's daughter Eleanor, and their distant cousin Franklin, who married Eleanor in 1905. Contrary to Alice's recollections elsewhere, she and Eleanor were fond of each other as girls. Each had lost a mother, adored a father, and felt out of place among the gregarious Roosevelts. Alice hid her fears behind a stylish, mischievous façade, but her diaries reveal great insecurities. And though Eleanor later depicted herself as a painfully shy wallflower, contemporaries thought her spirited, smart, and popular. Franklin, often portrayed as mother-dominated, began very early to reject her attempts to manage his life; at 14 he wrote sharply, "Please don't make any arrangements for my future happiness." Alice socialized frequently with the Franklin Roosevelts during World War I, but in the 1920s divisions opened between TR's Republican Oyster Bay clan and the Democratic Hyde Park Roosevelts, particularly after Eleanor campaigned vigorously against Alice's half-brother, Ted Jr., when he ran for governor of New York. FDR's New Deal widened the rupture, but in later years "tribal feeling" was restored. Donn's readable narrative modifies conventional wisdom to take greater account of human complexity, particularly the chasm between how people view themselves and how others perceive them. She solidly achieves her goal: "a rich and ultimately truer picture of the Roosevelt family." --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
From the politics of the dinner table to the politics of Washington, D.C., Linda Donn (Freud and Jung: Years of Friendship and Loss) probes the people and the relationships in one of America's most important families in The Roosevelt Cousins: Growing Up Together, 1882-1942. With chapters like "Shifting Alliances" and "Schisms," the volume seems to suggest that the cousins sometimes behaved more like warring nations than relatives. In this careful and serious study, Donn calls into question popular myths about Eleanor's mousiness and FDR's relationship to his mother, and provides plenty of insight into a clan that played out its family dramas on a national stage.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Keen competitive spirits between the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park Roosevelts colored personal relationships among famous cousins that were played out publicly in the national political arena between the two most prominent females, Alice and Eleanor. Theodore Roosevelt's oldest daughter, Alice, and niece Eleanor both married political men, who then catapulted them into the limelight. For Alice, it was Nicholas Longworth, who became Speaker of the House, and for Eleanor, it was her distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In her narrative of the Roosevelt clan, Donn (Freud and Jung: Years of Friendship and Loss) draws on her training in clinical psychology to create an insightful, nuanced view of the main characters and their relationships. She shows convincingly how the cousins remained close until Woodrow Wilson defeated Theodore in 1912 and then recruited Franklin as assistant secretary of the navy, the position Theodore once held. The gap widened after TR's son Ted ran the New York governorship, with Alice as his informal campaign manager. The basic story is not new, but the elegant writing, psychological insight, and useful photographs make for absorbing reading. Highly recommended for public libraries. William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.