The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Mothers Who Raised Churchill and Roosevelt

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt may be the greatest leaders in the history of democracies. Their achievements in winning the Second World War are well known, but perhaps less well known is the role their mothers played in their success. Historian Charlotte Gray's latest book is called "Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt," and she joins Steve Paikin to discuss who these mothers were.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In fact, we apparently admired Churchill so much that in 1977, they erected a statue to Churchill here on the west end of Nathan Phillips Square. Their exploits in winning World War II are well known. What's less well known is the influence their two mothers had on their success. Well, that is not a problem any longer thanks to Charlotte Gray, who has just written this book, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons, The Lives of Jenny Jerome Churchill and Sarah Delano Roosevelt. Charlotte and I had a conversation about these two historic women just a stone's throw from

here at the Royal Canadian Military Institute. I decided to write about these two figures because I'm fascinated by the way that whatever the restrictions on their lives, women have made choices and shaped the space available to their own purposes. Neither Jenny Jerome Churchill nor Sarah Delano Roosevelt would have considered herself a powerful actor in the patriarchal society in which she lived,

where financial and political power belonged to men and women were assessed almost entirely through the male gaze. Sarah and Jenny are such delicious opposites, one so relentlessly old fashioned, the other so daringly non-traditional. Their ambitious sons were lucky to have such formidable mothers. Charlotte, it's so great to see you again. It's great to be back here with you, Steve. Absolutely. A ton has been written about the sons of these two women. How much has been written about the two mothers themselves?

Not a lot. Quite a lot about Jenny Churchill, who Churchill's mother, because she was a quite colorful character and she was slightly scandalous in her own years. So she attracted more attention than Sarah Roosevelt, Franklin's mother, because Sarah was one of those women of her period who felt that her role was at home. It didn't mean to say she wasn't a very strong personality, but researching her was more difficult. As you did the research, did you discover that you had a particularly different take

on the narrative surrounding these two women that would have been different from what's been the conventional wisdom to date? Male biographers of these two women that would have been different from what's been the conventional wisdom to date. Male biographers of these two sons, Winston and Franklin, have always seen the mothers through their motherhood role and nothing else. Because I've discovered that the biographers of male heroes, of the great men of history, want to just race through the early years. They want to portray their through the early years they want to portray

their heroes as um springing fully formed and ready to take charge of the world so often the male biographers and they are all male biographers of those two guys by the way um you know they dismiss the mothers in fact they don't just dismiss them and their influence they can be positively critical and say despite the unhahappiness and the problems of their upbringing, these two men turned out to be extraordinary national leaders. In fact, if you read what the two men themselves said about their mothers, they both admitted to huge debts to them. You have just done what you've done numerous times during the text, because I read the book, and you frequently refer to the fact that the biographers, all men incidentally, so I infer from that that you think that if history had been written by women, as you

are writing history, we'd have had a different take on a lot of this stuff. Is that right? Yes, I do think that. And it isn't just, you know, whether or not I'm a feminist. It's also the balance of history. Generally, history has always been described and written. The most important aspects of it are all military and political. And don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely in agreement that those are two very important streams in history. in history. But we have really ignored social history, especially in this country, which has always been a sort of macho country built on primary resources and where for most of the post-settler history, it's been a poverty-stricken country just struggling to survive. Well, let's not make that mistake here. Let us focus on what you have. And let's start with this. These women had a lot in common. Why don't you give us a bit of a list of the things they shared?

The things they shared included the year they were born, 1854, the class into which they were born, which was the one percenters of New York society, very wealthy families, a sense of entitlement and a wonderful taste in gowns. Their life arcs also showed remarkable similarities. They both did everything that was expected of them in terms of finding appropriate husbands, having wonderful courtships, finding appropriate husbands, having wonderful courtships, honeymoons, immediately looking to have a child so that they could carry on family traditions. And then, in fact, there were huge differences between what happened in those marriages. But then they're both widowed very early. In their 40s. In their 40s. And in both cases, their sons then became absolutely key to their lives. Their devotions to their sons were probably one of the sort of guiding principles of their lives.

Both born in New York State. Was it unusual for a regal person in Britain, as Lord Churchill was, to be marrying outside of the country? By the time that he married Jenny, Lord Randolph Churchill, who, as you say, was, you know, the second son of the Duke of Marlborough. So he lived in that sort of tiny, cozy little world of British toffs with big houses. By the time he married Jenny, those toffs in big houses were in trouble. Their fortunes were crumbling. They needed money. They had no idea how to actually earn a living themselves.

And they were beginning to look at American heiresses as a potential source of money. Now, Lord Randolph and Jenny genuinely just fell in love. And it was not a good marriage in the view of the Duke of Marlborough, Randolph's father, because Jenny had no money to speak of. Although she was born into that very wealthy class, her father was known as the King of Wall Street, and he was a speculator. So he was, by Manhattan standards, nouveau riche, and his fortunes went up and down. Nonetheless, it was unusual to marry

an American in 1874. But Jenny, you know, she had enough panache to carry it off. And she was also a social chameleon. She learned so fast, the habits, the language, the social mores, the nicknames of the British aristocracy. And she flirted outrageously, and they all fell in love with her. We will get to that because you've got some good detail on that. How many months after their marriage, Randolph and Jenny Churchill, did Winston show up? Well, if you believe their narrative, he was born prematurely. Two months prematurely. Which suggests... Which suggests that they... I told you

it was a passionate love affair, and it suggests premarital passion. Can we say that Winston Churchill was a bastard child? No, because his parents were married when he was born. I guess that's right. But they weren't when he was conceived. I cannot date the conception. Okay. You've not been able to confirm that, eh? I can't confirm that. With primary sources. If you can't get it in the primary sources, you can't make it up. Understood. OK.

Jenny Churchill seemed like quite a hands-off mother, right? She wouldn't breastfeed Winston. A governess basically raised him. Was that typical for the time? It was. And she has been criticized quite a lot for that but she wasn't doing anything that in fact most sort of aristocratic mothers weren't doing at the time you know they always had um some breastfed their children but most didn't they had wet nurses

some um kept their children at home with them but they all had nannies and, of course, armies of servants. And then these little boys were all sent off to prep schools very early and then to their public schools, as they're called in Britain, their high schools. So there was nothing unusual about the way Jenny treated Winston. She was probably a little bit lax in terms of going and visiting him in school and things. He missed her. He missed her. He missed her, but he was a very needy little boy. And he also quite manipulative. And so she she could have done a lot more.

But she had this other preoccupation, which was a husband, Lord Randolph Churchill, who was a very difficult, demanding, needy man, who was, it now appears, slowly going mad because he had syphilis, and being more and more difficult to handle and getting furious with Winston and his younger brother, Jack, because Lord Randolph had no time for being a father. He showed very little affection for either of his sons. You are very gentle in the language with which you say Jenny led, quote unquote, an active romantic life. What does that mean?

It meant that I think she stopped sleeping with her husband quite soon after, actually, probably quite soon after Winston was born. And it's not clear exactly who Jack, Winston's younger brother, who his father was. And I think this is partly because by now they knew that, or it was suspected that Lord Randolph had syphilis. But Jenny had a libido and Jenny was a flirt. And she always had a bevy of admirers.

And she always said that she never slept with somebody else's husband. But there were plenty of loose young men available. And she did have affairs. She was discreet. It was not unusual in her circles. But any woman who does that then and now is sort of slut shamed, whereas a man who does it is still admired. The double standard is an important point because John F. Kennedy, of course, had legendary affairs and all of the people who covered him kept all that stuff quiet, didn't write about it. But a woman tries it and it's a different story, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it's seen as shameful. And Jenny was great because she just stared down

and faced the, and laughed off the, you know, the nasty remarks. She said, what do I care? Let's now focus on Sarah Roosevelt, a much more hands-on mother with Franklin. Let's now focus on Sarah Roosevelt, a much more hands-on mother with Franklin. Today, she'd be described as a helicopter parent. I mean, you know, Winston said about Jenny, she was like the evening star for me, twinkling, but in the distance. For Franklin, I mean, his mother was never far from him. And she resented any kind of intrusion she sacked the nanny that her husband had found for when franklin was first born she insisted on breastfeeding franklin herself until he was a year old she very rarely ever left her him out of her sight she wept when she cut off his baby curls when he was seven. He didn't have a bath by himself until he was seven or eight.

When he went to his boarding school, Groton, if he didn't write to her twice a week, she'd call the principal of the school because she was convinced he must be sick. And then when he went to Harvard, she rented an apartment in Boston. So she'd be near to him. Do you think that's a bit much? I think it's far too much. And of course, what happened was that Franklin, who did love her and depended on her a lot, but he developed all these strategies for keeping her at arm's length. You do say that she ensured that her son rarely endured a moment of uncertainty about his place in the world.

What does that mean? He knew he was special. He was special to his mother. And his mother had a great sense of the importance of the Delano and the Roosevelt families in the world. And he therefore knew that his place was absolutely solid. And she adored him. She was quite strict in some ways, but he never felt a moment's doubt in his self-image.

He was completely self-confident. There's a story you tell in the book, and when you told it, the first thing I thought of was that amazing scene at the White House where John F. Kennedy is welcoming all of the kids and Bill Clinton is one of those kids and they shake hand and it's been captured for posterity. Current president meets future president. This happened with FDR. James Roosevelt, his dad, takes him to the White House to say farewell to Grover Cleveland, the president. And Grover Cleveland actually says to Franklin Roosevelt, my little man,

I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States. That is a great story. But is that really true? Did this really happen? Well, it's certainly in Sarah's memoirs, which is where I got the story from and many other biographers have as well. And I can imagine Grover Cleveland saying that because this was not a great stage of his presidency. I could also imagine that Franklin paid absolutely no attention. Well, clearly not. He had four terms or three and a half anyway, three and a bit. Okay, both women, as you pointed out, were widowed in their 40s. That's a lot to deal with. How did they handle it? They handled it quite differently.

But what they had in common with the way they handled it was that they did not retire into the sort of obscurity of grief. They did not sort of disappear from the world. In Jenny's case, she did disappear from London. She went straight to Paris because she really couldn't stand the idea of hanging around London, dressed head to toe in black,

which was not her style. And frankly, Lord Randolph's death, although she was grief-struck, but it was a huge relief. He had been so difficult at the end. I mean, he was raving mad by the end. And he, at one point, pulled a gun on her. So she went to Paris,

where she recovered her spirits and realized that she could now more legitimately take lovers and she could go to the House of Worth and order more gowns and follow the kind of things she loved. She just enjoyed life. I mean, that's one of the things about Jenny. She had real joie de vivre.

Sarah, equally devastated when James Roosevelt dies, but she too refused to sort of retreat into grief. She continued all the things she'd always enjoyed, including annual trips to Paris where she had a sister living. But her main focus is now Franklin, whose career and whose education she pursues with a vengeance. For her, the shock is that Franklin, age 22, suddenly springs it upon her that he's engaged to his cousin. And Sarah doesn't know what to do about this.

She had no idea. I don't know how she missed it, because most mothers would have fingertips to know that their son was having a love affair. But Eleanor Roosevelt had come into Franklin's life. They were determined to get married very early. I think in some ways it was a decision on Franklin's part to separate himself a little from his mother. But Sarah adapted by realizing that Eleanor at this stage was a pretty sort of shy, rather withdrawn young woman who had been damaged by a miserable, miserable childhood. And Sarah took a

deep breath and took charge and made sure that the wedding was perfect. In fact, President Teddy Roosevelt gave the bride away. She organized the house that they would move into in Manhattan. And I don't think Eleanor could have survived the early years of her marriage without her mother-in-law's help. And they ended up having a good relationship, yes? No. No, they ended up having a relationship which went from the dependence of the early years to Eleanor finally, as the children got older and left home, realizing her own strengths, her own potential, and taking on more and more roles outside the home. She could do that because there was always Sarah there, sort of making sure that the

children went to boarding school, that the children were looked after. Eleanor started doing her thing, teaching, developing close relationships with women, and just got angry at her mother-in-law's sort of pretentiousness and possessiveness. And one of the ways that Sarah's reputation has actually been distorted is that one of the best sources on Sarah Roosevelt are the memoirs that Eleanor

subsequently wrote after Sarah's death. And in each of these memoirs, Sarah is more and more critical of her mother-in-law, who she said even sort of when she was looking at Sarah on her death bed, she wrote to a friend, you know, I never really liked her. Sarah made it to a good old age, right? She got in her 80s? Oh, yes. She was in her late 80s, and she was absolutely determined while Franklin was president that she'd be there for him. Now, Jenny, conversely, had a second marriage, also not great, and had a very sad demise. Her death was terrible.

She did. I mean, first of all, she married a man who was the same age as her son, Winston, and they had a gay old time for a period, but then that went off the rails and they got a divorce. She married again, this time a man younger than her son, Winston. I mean, Jenny grabbed life with both hands and her death was very sudden. What had happened was that she finally had some money. She by now realized that because she had great taste, she could flip houses and decorate them

and actually make some money doing this. She was very successful. She had a pile of money. She went to Italy to stay with a friend, bought a wicked pair of Italian sandals, wore them, tripped, fell, broke her ankle. She got gangrene in the leg. It had to be amputated. She continued to be this wonderful, fiery Jenny. What she said was, I'll just have to put my best foot forward. But then suddenly she, there was a sort of a massive bleed. She went into a coma and she died in 1921.

And it was a real tragedy. It was on all the newspaper hoardings in, throughout London. And Winston ran in his pajamas through the streets, desperate to get there before she passed. Which leads me to the next question. How did both men react to the deaths of their mothers, admittedly at different times in their lives? Winston, as I said, was devastated. He had the plaster cast of Jenny's arm and hand on his desk throughout his career.

He was very quiet for a while, but then res throughout his career. He was very quiet for a while, but then resumed his career. But he always spoke of her with great love. Franklin disappeared for two or three days after Sarah's death. And at one point, a few days later, he was unpacking some of her boxes and found her keepsakes,

which included his first know, his first baby shoes and a lock of his baby hair. And he asked the archivist who was helping him, could she leave him for a few minutes? And the archivist said, this was the first time that any of us employed by the president had ever seen a tear in his eye. You know, and this is sort of the president who went to war. Both men got into politics for one, Roosevelt. It might not have been something that his mother wanted. For Jenny Churchill, her son going into politics was in some respects the family business, so maybe not a shock there. But talk more about that, if you would, about how both mothers reacted to their son's entry into public life. I think Jenny always wanted Winston Churchill

to go in because it was going to be revenge, vengeance for the way her husband had been treated because Lord Randolph had resigned from cabinet, assuming because then he was sort of the golden hope for the Conservative Party. And he assumed that he would be invited back and given a big job. He was deputy prime minister with a different title at that stage. And then, in fact, the prime minister said, well, thank you very much. Sorry, you're going. And Lord Randolph's political career just fizzled out. And Jenny had been longing to be the wife of the prime minister. So she decided if she couldn't be the wife of the prime minister been longing to be the wife of the prime minister.

So she decided if she couldn't be the wife of the prime minister, she'd be the mother of the prime minister and encouraged Winston all along with all her connections and everything to go into politics. And when at 26. Yes, very young. Yeah. In contrast, Sarah and her husband, James, thought that politics was a grubby business. You know, it was sort of not really suitable for Roosevelt's who were gentlemen and landowners. And she was horrified at the idea that Franklin would go into politics. Once he said, well, I'm going to anyway, she said she did a complete pivot and backed him all the way. If Franklin's going to run, I want to make sure he can win. And her money was crucial to all his various election campaigns. When they

were in politics at the beginning, I don't think women could vote. Correct. And yet both mothers were not suffragettes. They were not champions of women getting the vote. Why not? At this stage, both in Britain and in North America, women's suffrage was a class issue to some degree. And upper class women in both countries felt far greater allegiance and solidarity with their class than with women from other social classes. It would be very hard to persuade Sarah that she and her cook had anything in common and any sort of common problems. In fact, it took their sons to persuade both these women that they should adopt the idea

of votes for women, because both Franklin and Winston realized that that's the way that the political tides were running, that if they wanted to win votes, they had to endorse suffrage campaigns. And when they did, finally, their mothers did. For every author who does a book like this about somebody important in history, there's usually a moment where you get into the archives and you discover a treasure trove of whatever, personal letters, something.

And you had a moment like that. What was that like? I did have a moment like that, two moments like that. And you have to remember that I started this pre-COVID. And then just as I was about to go to the archives in Britain for the Churchill archives at Churchill College, Cambridge, and to Hyde Park to the FDR Presidential Library for the Roosevelt papers, the lockdown started. And I mean, I couldn't leave my study, let alone Ottawa

or the country or the continent. I finally, finally got to those archives, having written the bulk of the book. And what was glorious was seeing the women's actual handwriting. Because of course, at Hyde Park, there's Sarah's handwriting, which is precise, even, she sticks to the lines, she's pathetical. And she's the woman I know, you know,

who takes charge and organizes properly and probably has organizational charts. Jenny's letters, scrolling across the page, sort of funny little, whenever she says, wants to say, your father will be really cross. She just puts an X for cross. She's always in a hurry, never sticks to the lines. And it was glorious. I suddenly felt I really know these two women.

Graphologically speaking. Graphologically speaking. You know, you said something a second ago about how there's not necessarily a template for determining greatness in world leaders. However, comma, what state of the union was Jenny Churchill born in? New York.

What state of the union was Sarah Delano born in? New York. What state of the union was William Lyon Mackenzie King's mother born in? New York. Have I found the common element here? Yes. The first book I wrote was about Mrs. King, and the most recent book is about the other two. The common element is mothers of great men.

From New York State. From New York State. There's something about the Empire State, you've got to admit. Is that where you were born? No. Such greatness I cannot aspire to, I'm afraid. Well, I tell you, now that you've got it all said and done, you know these two women probably better than anybody alive today, right?

You probably do, having spent so many years looking into their lives. Can you say that you like one of them better than the other? No. And that's because, you know, as a biographer, it's not a question of whether you like them or not. It's because you've been trying so hard to understand them and to trace their path through life that you sympathize with both of them. And, you know, there are occasions I feel when Sarah was beyond stuffy or where Jenny was simply too outrageous. But I'd love to be in a room with either of them.

That being said, I don't think I'd love to be in a room with both of them. Well, you couldn't have been because they never met, did they? They never met. They probably did in Paris, but I have no evidence. So although they almost certainly were in the same room, I don't think that they never recorded it. What a shame. That would have been fun. Then I would have liked to have been on a fly on the wall. Right on. Charlotte,

thanks for this. This was great, Steve. Thanks so much to you. Pleasure. Thank you.