In this episode, I describe family life at Warren Delano II’s family estate in the 1850s, featuring the young Sara Delano, who would one day become the mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Warren Delano II (1809-1898) was a member of a tight circle of Yankee businessmen who made their fortune in the American China trade and who owned large fleets of swift clipper ships that carried goods around the world at unprecedented speed. The family ethos cultivated by Warren Delano II and his business partner John Murray Forbes lasted for several generations, creating many leaders in American politics, the arts, sciences, education, and business in the process.
These retreats on the Hudson River and on the coast of New England were meant to be refuges from the commercial life that had made these families so wealthy in the first place. They were worlds away from the tenements of New York’s “Five Points,” the wet decks of clipper ships fighting their way around Cape Horn, and the shadowy “work hard, play hard” counting houses of the Canton factories. For these men, there was much that was best left unsaid to their children and grandchildren. As Warren Delano liked to say, “never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.”
Yet above the fireplace at Algonac was a portrait of Warren Delano’s Chinese mentor "Houqua,” a reminder that he was always watching over them. And a signal to visitors that Delano was part of a small and very special crowd. Algonac, like so many other grand houses built by the Houqua’s “American sons,” was their reimagination of the Wu family palace on Honam Island in the Pearl River.
This “serene but tough” ethos was passed on from Warren Delano II to his daughter Sara Delano, and from her to her son Franklin Roosevelt.
As one historian said, FDR’s vision of the presidency was “him in it.”
To learn more about the Delano family and American global commerce, read Barons of the Sea: And Their Race to Build the World’s Fastest Clipper Ship.
The Yankee Family Ethos