The Story Behind The Suits: A Brief History Of Brooks Brothers Before Bankruptcy

Brooks Brothers customer Franklin Delano Roosevelt was from an Old Knickerbocker family (New York’s original Dutch settlers) who grew up in Hudson Valley horsey country on an estate overlooking the Hudson and in 1905 he married a distant cousin who happened to be a favorite niece of the sitting President of the United States, another Old Knickerbocker whose last name also happened to be Roosevelt. 

Despite his New York Establishment Bona Fides, they all turned on him and called him a “class traitor” when he started attacking wealth inequality as he ran for the 1932 Democratic Presidential nomination, including his predecessor New York Governor, Alfred E. Smith, the first Irish-Catholic Presidential nominee whom FDR introduced at the Democratic Convention in 1924 as “The Happy Warrior.” 

FDR had the last laugh as he was elected in a historic landslide and was the only President to serve four terms. As the Red Army was approaching the suburbs of Berlin and the American, British, Canadian, and Free French armies were fighting the Battle of the Bulge, FDR boarded a Douglas VC-54C Skymaster nicknamed the “Sacred Cow” to attend the Yalta Conference with British PM Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin on the shore of the Black Sea in Crimean Peninsula to discuss the impending defeat of fascism in Europe. FDR chose to wear a Brooks Brothers fur-collared cape made for the US Navy and a Brooks Brothers Fedora while the Big Three deliberated. Two months later, FDR died in office.