Sara Delano was quite a catch for James Roosevelt when he wound up his whirlwind courtship and married her in 1880. She was a handsome, hazel-eyed girl of 26, just half James Roosevelt's age. Her father was a tea merchant in the China trade. He was the son of a long line of sea captains descended from Philippe de La Noye, who came to Plymouth in 1621.
When Warren Delano lost his fortune in the panic of 1857, he left his home near Newburgh, N.Y., went back to China to recoup his wealth. Five years later he sent for his family. Sara was then a little girl. She went out to China on the clipper Surprise. They lived a year in crowded Hong Kong, traveled home by leisurely stages through Europe. In Berlin she spent one winter, studying at a private school. In Paris she spent another. Back in Newburgh, Sara Delano became a belle of the Hudson River Valley.
She met James Roosevelt at a dinner party given by his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt.* A retired lawyer and sportsman, James Roosevelt was a widower with a son her age. A few months later they were married, and Sara Delano Roosevelt went to live with James at Hyde Park, across the river.
When their only son was born on a winter day in 1882, an overdose of chloroform almost cost Sara Roosevelt her life. The nurse could not believe that the boy would live. They called him Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after his great-uncle who had married a Miss Astor. His mother remembered that he was plump and pink.
The slow days of those calm and sunny years went by, one after another. On a winter day again, in the first year of the 20th Century, James Roosevelt died. His son was not quite 20, and a student at Harvard. Sara Roosevelt was a vigorous, handsome lady of 46. She was rich in her right: her father had left her almost $1,000,000. James Roosevelt left her the place at Hyde Park, to be passed on to their son when she died.
Mrs. Roosevelt did not expect that Franklin would become a politician. "I hoped, she said, "that he would grow up to be a fine, upright man, respected in his home and in his own community — I hoped that he would grow up to be like his father." She once wanted him to become a diplomat, but she followed his rise in politics with devoted interest. When Franklin was elected President of the United States, she said simply: "I know he'll do his best."
At Hyde Park, Sara Delano Roosevelt was still the head of her household. Even when the President was there, his flag curling idly in the wind above the grey mansion on the bluffs over the Hudson, Mrs. Roosevelt sat at the head of the table, placed her son beside her. She did not care forsome of the customs the young people introduced— cocktails, for instance. But she was always happy when she could have Franklin and his family of tall children and growing grandchildren around her.
The President's mother was interested in charity: the babies' wards of the New York Post-Graduate Hospital, the Henry Street visiting nurses, the Berry Schools (for needy boys & girls) in the hills of Georgia. She liked to travel. The year after her son went to live at the White House, when she was 79, Mrs. Roosevelt made another trip abroad. In London she took tea with Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. They talked about their sons. Later the King and Queen of England came to visit her at Hyde Park.