“I went to FDRs home in Hyde Park, NY. The volunteer tour guide mentioned FDRs mom’s family made their fortune from the opium trade. They were the El Chapos of the Victorian era”.
The tour guide was speaking the truth. It’s amazing that he or she would mention that.
Then they made more money supplying opium to the US Army Medical Corp during the civil War.
The tour guide was very open about the what a modern person would see as the seedy ways these families made their money. She mentioned the Roosevelts started their fortune by processing sugar in colonial NYC. Which I knew was part of the Triangle Trade pattern of Colonial America. The sugar was made by slave labor working under horrific conditions in the Caribbean.