ON 17 MARCH 1913, THE EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR wedding, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Eleanor was not with him. After the brief ceremony, he wrote his first letter on his new and impressive letterhead, embossed with four stars circling an anchor, to his wife:
My own dear Babbie, I didn’t know till I sat down at this desk that this is the 17th of happy memory. In fact with all the subdued excitement of getting confirmed and taking the oath of office, the delightful significance of it all is only beginning to dawn on me. My only regret is that you could not have been here with me, but I am thinking of you a great deal….
This was the first time they had been separated on their anniversary, and ER wired her congratulations: “I ordered your 17th of March present as we couldn’t do anything else together!”
His second letter was to his mother: “I am baptized, confirmed, sworn in vaccinated—and somewhat at sea! For over an hour I have been signing papers which had to be accepted on faith….”
His mother was delighted that his “was a very big job,” and advised him: “Try not to write your signature too small.” Big people should cultivate big, distinct signatures: Avoid “a cramped look.”
ER spent the summer of 1913 with the children, and assorted guests, at Campobello, busy and content, and very involved with the needs of her extended family. Her grandmother was increasingly depressed over her children’s dire problems. Uncle Eddie Hall (whose wife, Josie Zabriskie, had died after a long illness) was on an alcoholic binge, and ER feared for his daughters: “I feel after this he should not dream of taking the children to his own house.” Although she had never acknowledged the reasonableness of her own separation from her father, she now hoped these virtually orphaned young girls would be able to stay with their maternal grandparents.
At Campobello, her mother-in-law was stunned when Harry Hooker arrived to visit Eleanor in Franklin’s absence, and never left them alone: “Mama has chaperoned us pretty carefully.” She was even more annoyed when Aunt Maude, recently divorced from Larry Waterbury, arrived with her new companion: a dapper, entertaining, and creative writer, David Gray. SDR “fairly snorted” when ER tried to discuss David with her; and ER knew that “all her outraged feelings in regards to Maude, David and me” would result in a “grand scene with Mama and tears one of these days.” But ER liked David. His love for poetry and literature, and his serious interests and idealism, seemed to her to outweigh his reputation as a society reveler. She enjoyed his company, considered him talented, and altogether hoped Maude would marry him.
WHEN THE ROOSEVELTS MOVED TO WASHINGTON IN THE AUtumn of 1913, they were as close as they had ever been. The years in Albany had been good for their marriage, and good for them individually. ER recognized that she had administrative and executive talents, took pride in all that she managed to get done, and appreciated particularly her new independence from her mother-in-law. Most of the time, she did as she pleased; she came and went according to her own schedule; she no longer asked for advice, and never suspended her judgment in fear or compromise. There were arguments, and occasional confrontations, but few moments of serious difficulty. Between ER and FDR there seemed to be real understanding, a sense of union and common purpose. They were allied, tender, generous, and loving with each other, expectant and happy.
Two more children were born during the Washington years, and they were raised very differently from their older siblings. On 17 August 1914 the second Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., was born at Campobello, the first child she successfully breast-fed (“I have a little more milk”). ER was finally in charge, no longer fearful, or uninformed, or intimidated by nurses and governesses—or anybody at all. On 13 March 1916, John Aspinwall Roosevelt was born. His arrival, in Washington, had been awaited almost casually. Long past were the days when ER could not be seen in public while pregnant. She gave a party for 225 naval and diplomatic dignitaries the month before his birth, and dined with Caroline Phillips until 10:00 P.M. the night of his birth.
The Roosevelts were prepared to take Washington by storm; and they did. At twenty-nine, ER felt healthy and robust; she was eager to greet each day, ready for every challenge. The new costumes of the second decade of the twentieth century seemed created with her in mind. At dinner parties she seemed the perfect “Gibson girl.” Tall and reed-thin, with her magnificent hair put up, she looked so attractive during this time that even her mother-in-law noticed. Politics offered her a new and exciting setting within which to flourish. Old Washington embraced and welcomed her as one of their own; new Washington was enchanted.
President Wilson’s entourage was a dramatic mixture of the old and the new. The Democrats had returned from a sixteen-year political exile in a forward-looking and experimental mood—except on the issue of race. Woodrow Wilson was the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson, and he segregated government facilities and the civil service. In government offices, including the Navy Department, physical barriers were erected to separate federal workers by race for the first time.
Wilson’s most radical allies, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and Josephus Daniels, were Christian fundamentalists, and Daniels (FDR’s boss) was a bone-deep Southern racist. They represented the essence of America’s contradictory themes. Hated by the trusts and vested interests, the Northeastern establishment, and the planting-mining Southern aristocracy, they opposed robber barons, corruption, and vice. They represented the “little people”—workers, tenants, and farmers—so long as they were white.
Only a month before Wilson’s election, Josephus Daniels editorialized in his Raleigh newspaper, News and Observer (called by conservatives “The Nuisance and Disturber”): “The subjection of the negro, politically, and the separation of the negro, socially, are paramount to all other considerations in the South short of the preservation of the Republic itself. And we shall recognize no emancipation, nor shall we proclaim any deliverer, that falls short of these essentials to the peace and the welfare of our part of the country.”
Wilson was the darling of what would later be called the Dixiecrats. But Northern progressives like FDR rallied to him with equal fervor. For them, race was simply not an issue. Indeed, among whites race had become an issue only for the very few progressives who had founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Jane Addams, Oswald Garrison Villard, and others—most of whom were associated with TR’s third party. But even Theodore Roosevelt had refused to seat at his convention black delegates from Florida and Mississippi, and refused to include a plank on Negro rights, despite Jane Addams’s vigorous protests.
Among Washingtonians, the subject of race was rarely discussed. There was one tense moment when Josephus Daniels expressed horror that Eleanor Roosevelt brought four white servants, and a nurse and governess, to Washington. He practically ordered her to fire them: Only Negroes, he felt, should do servile work. She was stunned by what she considered the “brutality” of his prejudice, and subsequently referred to it as a “shocking” moment.
At the time, however, ER was largely undisturbed by the racism of prewar Washington. She failed even to support First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson’s crusade against the vile housing conditions endured by Washington’s black population, conditions that demeaned both the city and the entire idea of progress. Mrs. Wilson’s activities were mocked and reviled in the local newspapers, but she worked on tirelessly, with Mrs. Josephus Daniels and others, including one of Washington’s most active aristocrats, Mrs. Archibald (Charlotte Everett) Hopkins. As First Lady, Ellen Wilson made it clear that “Good works” were not comic subjects “to all nice people, even in those days.” When she lay dying of Bright’s disease in 1914, her final request was that Congress pass the legislation she had worked so hard for: to prohibit back-alley slum housing by 1918. The Senate passed the bill, and she was told on the day she died, 6 August 1914, that the House votes were assured. But wartime crowding ended all efforts to enforce the law, and a district court ruled it unconstitutional.
Twenty years later, Eleanor Roosevelt’s first public act as First Lady was to accompany Charlotte Everett Hopkins on a tour of the back-alley slums; she continued Ellen Wilson’s crusade for twelve years. But at this time, ER remained aloof from many of the social issues that later absorbed her. Still, she was now convinced, she wrote her Aunt Maude, “If we are not going to find remedies in Progressivism then I feel sure the next step will be Socialism.”
For most progressives, Wilson’s Washington seemed full of hope and promise. If these were not quite the days of Andrew Jackson, at least some country folk—pacifists, and radical populists like William Jennings Bryan (Secretary of State), and his great friend Josephus Daniels (Secretary of the Navy)—had returned in positions of power. In 1896, Bryan and Daniels had joined forces to declare war on robber barons and big-city bandits; they were now willing to work with any allies they might have along the Groton-Harvard-Princeton axis. The young Roosevelts were at the very heart of the new alliance.
They rented Aunt Bye’s house at 1733 N Street (Aunt Bye now lived in Connecticut), and plunged into the rituals and rondelays of Washington life. Wilsonian Washington was alternately formal and staid, rambunctious and carefree. Wilson shocked everybody by canceling the Inaugural Ball. But there was promise of ongoing merriment. Formal dinners, champagne balls, and old school ties represented the other side of Wilsonian Washington, which quickly embraced the Roosevelts. Politically, Josephus Daniels championed FDR, who seemed to him to represent independence, defiance, progressivism. FDR was, as Daniels told Wilson, “our kind of Democrat.” His “love at first sight” for the attractive young “Gibson boy” would survive many disagreements and disappointments.
ER’s personal politics and her respect for Mrs. Daniels served to mitigate the tense relationship between the two men. ER considered Addie Bagley Daniels, a Colonial Dame and a Daughter of the Confederacy, “a dear.” A socially concerned aristocrat, generous and compassionate, Addie Daniels appealed to Eleanor on both political and temperamental grounds. According to her son, Jonathan Daniels: “Not even the cow in the crystal could disturb a lady who, as a combative editor’s wife, sometimes put on her hat and walked up town to see who was still speaking to her.”
Well connected and well received, the Roosevelts embarked on a social life in Washington that featured bipartisan privileges. Evidently unruffled by the 1912 breach in family solidarity, TR wrote FDR on 18 March: “It is interesting to see that you are in another place which I myself once held. I am sure you will enjoy yourself to the full…, and that you will do capital work. When I see Eleanor I shall say to her that I do hope she will be particularly nice to the naval officers’ wives. They have a pretty hard time, with very little money to get along on, and yet a position to keep up, and everything that can properly be done to make things pleasant for them should be done….”
With TR’s blessing, in Aunt Bye’s home, the young Roosevelts inherited neighbors and family friends that kept them busy, informed, and at the center of political intrigue. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Nannie Lodge, who ER considered “one of the loveliest women I have ever known,” England’s Ambassador Sir Cecil and Lady Spring-Rice, members of the French Embassy—Marie and Lefebvre de Laboulaye, and M. Jules Jusserand and his wife, Eliza Richards, all once so close to Uncle Theodore—now opened their doors to the attractive couple. ER and Marie de Laboulaye particularly “became great friends.” Similar in background and interests, they shared an abiding sense of social responsibility. ER described Marie de Laboulaye as “one of the finest characters it has ever been my good fortune to know.”
Even the seventy-five-year-old curmudgeon Henry Adams was warm and cordial to the young Roosevelts. He would drive by Aunt Bye’s house on N Street in his antique victoria, drawn by his ancient horse, and offer the Roosevelt children his company. They all piled in, including their little Scottie dog, and played and laughed for hours. ER never considered Adams so awesome once she had seen him with her children. Also close to Aileen Tone, who was Henry Adams’s friend and secretary, ER frequently stopped at “Uncle Henry’s” for tea during a day’s calling. He found her openhearted warmth appealing, and enjoyed her company. The Roosevelts were often invited for luncheon and dinner at this center of worldly gossip where the old surveyed the new with a highly critical eye. Henry Adams made “a great impression,” but his pessimism appalled ER. Although she did not go so far in her criticism as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who bemoaned Adams’s effort to turn “everything to dust and ashes,” she believed that he “loved to shock his hearers” with his petulant cynicism. She considered it “an old man’s defense against his own urge to be an active factor.” Having rejected activism “in his youth,” he spent the rest of his life in a fit of disdain for all those who made any effort to improve things. ER wrote SDR while reading The Education of Henry Adams: “very interesting but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little.”
During ER’s first years in Washington, she devoted almost every afternoon to the tedious tradition of “calling.” She left her calling cards at the door or in the hands of Cabinet wives, Supreme Court wives, congressional wives. There was not a notable wife she missed. She called on ten to thirty wives a day, never staying longer than six minutes at one place. Aunt Bye said she should, and she did. It was exhausting, and only marginally useful, but she met everybody, looked for potential friends and allies, kept a detailed record in a calling journal, and reported it all to FDR.
Several women in Washington had actually dispensed with this time-consuming chore, among them Alice Roosevelt Longworth. But ER was not impressed by Alice’s flamboyant independence. In 1916 she wrote Isabella: “now that I am older and have my own values fixed a little,” Alice’s life seems one of “dreariness and waste”:
Her house is charming, her entertainments delightful. She’s a born hostess and has an extraordinary mind but as for real friendship and what it means she hasn’t a conception of any depth in any feeling or so at least it seems. Life seems to be one long pursuit of pleasure and excitement and rather little real happiness either given, or taken on the way, the “Blue Bird” is always to be searched for in some new and novel way.
I sometimes think that the lives of many burdens are not really to be pitied for at least they live deeply and from their sorrows spring up flowers but an empty life is really dreadful!
And so ER dutifully, even contentedly, fulfilled her obligations as a Washington wife. Each evening, there was a formal dinner, sometimes a dance. Her diary entries for these years were almost exclusively devoted to menus and seating plans for dinners of ten to forty guests that she agonized over, at least once a week.
Two Sundays a month were reserved for quiet dinner parties of eight to ten intimate friends who remained political allies over the years: William Phillips, a career diplomat later appointed undersecretary of State in 1933 and ambassador to Italy in 1936; his wife, Caroline Astor Drayton Phillips, first cousin to Helen Astor Roosevelt Robinson; Anne and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior; and their friends from California Adolph Miller (Lane’s assistant secretary, and later a member of the Federal Reserve Board) and Mary Sprague Miller. They called themselves “The Club,” and had scintillating and serious conversations over salad and scrambled eggs that ER prepared in a silver chafing dish at the table. Some commented on the indifferent fare and mediocre wines, but all agreed theirs was a very special, intimate group.
FDR’s Harvard roommate, Lathrop Brown, was elected to Congress in 1912, and together they frequented the Metropolitan and Chevy Chase country clubs. ER was especially fond of Mrs. James Leavitt, “a most enchanting, white-haired lady,” who had been a friend of her grandmother Mittie Roosevelt. Visits with Mrs. Leavitt, who taught her “many a lesson,” were ER’s “greatest joy.” Isabella Ferguson envied ER’s situation: “It must be nice to live where, when you want to see an angel, you can call on Mrs. Leavitt.”
ER was also keenly attracted by the integrity of Interior Secretary Franklin K. Lane, one of the members of “The Club.” He looked to some like Humpty-Dumpty but was always generous and courtly, and he had a code of ethics ER admired. She believed that if anything decent needed to be done, and Lane could do it, it would be done immediately. During the war, when she first toured Washington’s miserably underfunded mental hospital, Saint Elizabeths, she was offended by the conditions allowed. She knew that the hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior, and went directly to him to demand an investigation. He quickly organized an investigative team; they wrote a blistering report, which they presented before a congressional hearing, and the hospital’s budget was significantly increased.
ER’s feelings toward Lane were reciprocated. On an official crosscountry tour they made together, she was awakened as they entered his home state of California by a train conductor who presented her with a most beautiful bouquet of local flowers and Lane’s moving note of welcome. In 1920, when he went in for surgery at the Mayo Clinic, Franklin K. Lane sent one of his last letters to ER:
Just because I like you very much, and being a very old man dare to say so, I am sending this line—which has no excuse in its news, philosophy or advice;—has no excuse in fact except what might be called affection, but of course this being way past the Victorian era no one admits to affections. I will not belittle my own feeling by saying that I have a wife who thinks you the best Eastern product—and probably she’d move to strike out the word Eastern. At any rate I think I should tell you that I am to be operated on tomorrow…. I’d love to see you and the gay cavalier—but let us hope it won’t be long till we meet! Au revoir.
For FDR Lane served more as a mentor. When, for example, he overheard FDR mimicking his boss, whom he called a funny-looking “hillbilly,” Lane told FDR that he should be “ashamed.” He had an obligation to show Daniels loyalty, or he should resign. Over time, despite his arrogance and his sense of superior knowledge regarding all things nautical, FDR did grow to respect Daniels, and to depend on his political skills and friendships. On issues that concerned them most directly, they were in considerable agreement. FDR’s particular job was to order naval stores—steel, oil, and every necessity—at the lowest possible prices. They both agreed that profiteers were unpatriotic. Their experiences confirmed Daniels’s long-standing political outrage against the trusts—collusions of businessmen who jacked up prices in their own interests, the national interest be damned. FDR scouted the planet for bargains, and, with the help of Louis Howe’s aggressive work among the lobbyists, began to receive competitive domestic bids.
Louis Howe, hired to be FDR’s assistant, played a dual role during these years: He worked vigorously to keep the profiteers at bay and save the navy money, but he also promoted FDR’s political reputation whenever and wherever possible. Unfortunately, that led to a campaign to diminish Daniels’s reputation, by suggesting falsely that anything of interest and importance done by the Department of the Navy was done by FDR. In the face of the Roosevelt-Howe braggadocio, which on occasion involved mendacity and insubordination, Daniels’s ongoing support for his assistant was remarkable.
Through all the tensions and changes of prewar Washington, Eleanor and Franklin appeared to be a uniquely devoted and hardworking couple. Their intimate Sunday evenings at home, their conscientious and occasionally fabulous dinners, their open-house luncheons (FDR liked to lunch at home, and ER never knew whom or how many he would bring), and her arduous calling rendered them a very visible and agreeable pair. At diplomatic dinners, ER was frequently the only person present who could converse with everybody, and translate for everybody. ER herself considered her achievements in Washington society extraordinary, although she later wondered at the “compulsion” with which she had done it all.
Hardly anybody knew that she did much of it beneath the cloud of painful migraines; people only noticed that she did it all so efficiently and so well. For years husbands in Washington held her up to their wives as an example. Any time a political wife demurred from making the all-out effort her husband expected of her, she was likely to be told to think about Eleanor Roosevelt. She moved an army of five children, assorted servants, and various pet dogs and birds six times a year, alone and without complaint. Society reporters also celebrated her skills. During the war, she single-handedly rescued the “little season” by planning a Halloween dance at Rauscher’s to benefit the American Hospital at Neuilly. Mrs. Franklin Lane helped, “but all the arrangement is in the capable hands of the wife of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.” In addition, she continued her efforts to inform herself politically, and voraciously read books on the history, economics, and intrigues of nations. FDR was grateful and wrote to her Aunt Maude, now married to David Gray, of “her really brilliant mind and spirit.”
When Europe exploded into war, the first week of August 1914, the United States was torn apart by confusion. Many progressives had become convinced that the wild savagery of international war had, like slavery, become outmoded by civilization. There were navies and empires, of course, and competition. But there had been the illusion that gentlemen would now solve their differences in board rooms and, if necessary, the back rooms of banks. During the first month of the war, a hundred thousand French boys died on the fields of Flanders. Wilson, Bryan, and Daniels called for neutrality, and prayed for peace. TR roared for troops, action, battle.
From the beginning of the war, ER wrote, the United States became “the battleground of opposing ideas, and our family was being torn by the differences between Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy and that of President Wilson and his Administration in general. I had a tremendous respect for this uncle of mine, and for all his opinions. I knew that he felt we should take sides in the European war. He was such a definite person that he could not understand how one could sit by….” She recognized that her husband shared her uncle’s Big-Navy and Big-Empire views, rooted in the teachings of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. FDR shared TR’s impatience and marched in the direction of his bellicosity. ER, however, had an “instinctive belief” in William Jennings Bryan’s “stand on peace.” When he forged miniature plowshares out of old sabers and gave them to his friends and colleagues, many people ridiculed his gesture: “But to me they were not in the least ridiculous. I thought them an excellent reminder that our swords should be made into plowshares.”
Nonetheless, ER did not become involved in the peace crusade that engaged so many Americans. She did not join the many women and men who later became her closest allies as they organized the Woman’s Peace Party and the American Union Against Militarism. While Lillian Wald, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, Oswald Garrison Villard, Roger Baldwin, Amos Pinchot, John Haynes Holmes, and so many others opposed preparedness, ER’s husband immediately took charge of the Big-Navy crusade, which parroted TR’s wail—however untrue—that the United States had “a puny little egg-shell of a navy.” And whatever her private hesitations about the future direction of America’s foreign policy, Eleanor supported her husband publicly.
On 7 August 1914, ER wrote FDR: “All one’s thoughts these days are on war…. Isn’t it extraordinary how quickly it happened? …Life must be exciting for you and I can see you managing everything while Josephus Daniels wrings his hands in horror!”
FDR was astonished that nobody in the navy, except himself, cared to plan for the future. Nobody even “seemed the least bit excited.” Josephus Daniels went about sighing and moaning, “feeling chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization and other idealistic nonsense was receiving a rude shock.” Only Franklin—single-handedly, he wrote ER—worked all day to get things moving; and he did actually succeed one day “in getting one ship north from Mexico.”
And then there was Mexico, and Haiti. In 1914, the United States almost went to war with Mexico to protect its oil interests against Mexican revolutionaries, then called “bandits.” Although military action against Mexico was ultimately averted, military rule was imposed on Haiti. Also in 1914, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine to settle European business claims in Haiti. Allegedly to prevent Haiti from becoming a German naval base, the United States offered to take over the country’s finances and resources. When Haiti, the only independent black republic in the world besides Abyssinia, refused to sign a treaty of domination, Marines were sent to establish “law and order.” At the same time, Marines were also sent to impose a military government on Santo Domingo, to quiet the “unrest.” In 1916, FDR accompanied the Marines to Haiti to pacify the island, and subsequently claimed he wrote the new Haitian constitution himself. Josephus Daniels pursued these colonial actions with vigor, while he continued to hope for neutrality regarding Europe.*
However ambivalent ER felt about war, her letters to her husband were full of sympathy for the ordeal he faced trying to convince his superiors to act boldly regarding Europe. She, too, came to consider Bryan and Daniels unschooled regarding the nature of the real world; and she was an Anglophile who hoped especially for Britain’s quick “and decisive victory at sea.”
During the early months of the war, she wrote with dismay: “I am not surprised at what you say about JD [Josephus Daniels] or WJB [William Jennings Bryan] for one could expect little else. To understand the present gigantic conflict one must at least have a glimmering of understanding of foreign nations and their histories. I hope you will succeed in getting the Navy together and up to the mark….” “The situation in Washington must be intense and I should think we’d have to wake up when a German liner gets out of the port of New York with coal and supplies, otherwise we’ll soon be in trouble!”
William Jennings Bryan resigned as Secretary of State to lead a peace crusade on 8 June 1915, after the passenger liner Lusitania, which he knew was carrying munitions to Britain, was torpedoed and more than a thousand passengers were killed, including 118 Americans. ER wrote: “I’m glad Bryan is out but I can’t help admiring his sticking to his principles.” ER continued: “How about JD? I wonder how would his resignation affect you!” Josephus Daniels did not resign, to FDR’s temporary “disgust.” He did, however, change his views, and by 1916 was in full agreement with FDR’s commitment to preparedness. While Wilson campaigned as the president who “kept us out of war,” his administration prepared for combat.
World War I destroyed the progressive alliance. The progressive-suffragist coalition was the first damaged, as the suffragists themselves split into different camps. In the presidential election campaign of 1916, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Crystal Eastman opted for a peace-first strategy and supported Wilson, even though he opposed suffrage. Others supported Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, who stepped down from the Supreme Court to campaign, on a platform of suffrage and war. One of the suffragists who joined his campaign was Inez Milholland, who had so intrigued FDR when she visited his office in 1911. In 1917, at the age of only thirty, she died suddenly while lecturing in behalf of votes for women. TR now attacked all his former progressive allies who wavered on the war. He called them “silly and base,” and particularly scorned “poor bleeding Jane,” a veritable “Bull Mouse.” Addams, however, became the spirited leader of the Woman’s Peace Party, which influenced Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” peace proposal.
TR was desperate to get the United States into action, and to lead the bully bloody fray himself. Almost sixty and rotund, he campaigned to resurrect the Rough Riders. FDR tried to get him an audience with Wilson, but they were both cautious: TR wrote his niece early in 1915: “I am very anxious to see you and Franklin, whenever the chance offers; but I do not want to compromise Franklin by being with him just at this time. I wish you would tell him that from all quarters I hear praise of the admirable work he has done for the Navy, under very difficult conditions. With love, Your affectionate Uncle.”
Wilson finally agreed to see TR, but was cold and uninterested. TR could play no role; there was no place for him. He was shattered, and called Wilson a “skunk in the White House.” ER “hated to have him so disappointed and yet I was loyal to President Wilson.” She was much relieved when familial pressure succeeded in forwarding TR’s appeal through channels and on to General Pershing; but the War Department also rejected his offers. ER thought it “was a bitter blow from which he never quite recovered.”
On 2 April 1917, Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress to ask for a declaration of war. ER wanted very much to attend, and FDR had to comb Washington for a ticket for his wife. ER “listened breathlessly and returned home still half dazed by the sense of impending change.” After his thirty-six-minute “message of death” one could actually “feel the world rocking all around us.”
ER’s brother Hall joined the one service that would consider a father of two: On 14 July, Hall and his cousin, TR’s son Quentin, went together to enlist as aviators, after having memorized the eye chart in order to pass their physicals. Grandmother Hall was aghast, and asked ER why her brother, as a substantial gentleman with responsibilities, did not hire a substitute. ER had never heard of such a thing; she did not know that both her grandfathers had done just that during the Civil War, and in her “first really outspoken declaration against the accepted standards” of her grandmother and her society, ER “hotly responded that a gentleman was no different from any other kind of citizen in the United States, and that it would be a disgrace to pay anyone to risk his life for you, particularly when Hall could leave his wife and children with the assurance that at least they would have money enough to live on.” ER wrote proudly of that confrontation, and her “increasing ability to think for myself” and assert “my changing point of view.”
In many ways, the twentieth century began with World War I. Nothing remained the same. Traditions were smashed; empires were sunk; understanding was transformed; everything not destroyed was shifted about. Modernity arrived with uniforms and guns, born of ashes and blood. The war spawned revolution and counterrevolution; contradictory theories and violent heroics; endless and shifting political alliances.
For ER the war meant new work: “The women in Washington paid no more calls.” Mrs. J. Borden (Daisy) Harriman organized a Red Cross motor corps. ER would need to learn to drive, and did so within the year. But first she organized the Red Cross canteen, and with Addie Daniels organized the Navy Red Cross. She knitted and distributed free wool to the Navy League, entertained troops in and out of Washington’s Union Station, and made coffee and sandwiches. ER visited sailors in hospitals and homes for the wounded and shell-shocked; she organized and worked from nine in the morning until long past midnight. ER knew the world had changed, as she felt her own world transformed.
The tensions of Washington, its interminable gaiety, its illusions and temptations, intruded a new factor into the Roosevelt marriage: FDR began to stay later and later at parties, and ER began to leave earlier and earlier. This pattern had begun in 1909, when ER made it clear that, although she did not want to interfere with her husband’s seemingly insatiable need for frolic, certain frolics bored, annoyed, and even pained her. In Albany, they had come to an agreement: He might do precisely as he liked, as long as she did not have to endure frivolous, and frequently alcoholic, evenings with him.
But in Washington, as in Albany, there was more to a long night on the town than idle conversation: Work was done, deals were made, liaisons were forged. And ER enjoyed many aspects of Washington’s night life. She liked to dance, and found diplomatic receptions and balls particularly congenial. She missed the “gay side” of French and British entertainments when they ended during the war, she confided to Bob Ferguson, and always found Washington the most “interesting place to be.”
By 1917, however, ER’s and FDR’s social interests began to diverge. FDR seemed increasingly more comfortable in company that ER did not care for. That year, he invited his Harvard classmate Livy (Livingston) Davis to join him as special assistant to the assistant secretary. An especially flamboyant bon vivant who imbibed all day and partied all night, he was a new influence on her husband. ER judged Livy Davis “lazy, selfish, and self-seeking to an extraordinary degree.” From her point of view, he was duplicitous and dangerous.
Wartime Washington was for Livy Davis “gay and glamorous.” FDR spent more and more time with him in the palatial homes of their old Harvard Gold Coast pals. In addition, there were the Army, Navy, and Racquet clubs; there was the Chevy Chase Club, golf, poker, stag dinners, and occasional flirtations. ER knew it all, or all she could bear to know. Her thirty-five-year-old husband was high-spirited, handsome, energetic, dashing. Women flocked to him. She was determined not to become like her mother, distanced and cold, closing off the very source of comfort that might make one want to return home. She knew it was possible to freeze the heart away. She tried to say little, generally looked the other way, occasionally plunged into a Griselda mood, and tried to be gallant.
From 1913 to 1917, Franklin spent less and less time at Campobello with ER and their children, family, and friends. Eleanor understood the demands and constraints of his job, but she wondered at FDR’s failure to spend any significant time with her. She became suspicious. Flirtations were one thing; a serious romantic affair was another.
In 1914, ER had hired as her social secretary a young, attractive society belle, whose father had died poor and whose hardworking mother had trained her to be self-sufficient. Lucy Page Mercer was warm, charming, and efficient. She served easily as the “extra” woman whenever needed at dinner parties. She was wonderful with the children, who adored her. She did everything before she was asked, never looked at the clock, and was always cheerful. ER considered her a reliable friend.
ER’s first querulous mention of Lucy Mercer was written at Campobello on 23 July 1916: “Dearest Honey, Your letter of Thursday is here and one from Miss Mercer. Why did you make her waste all that time [answering my] fool notes. I tore them and [Lucy Mercer’s answers] up and please tear any other results of my idiocy up at once. She tells me you are going off for Tuesday and I hope you all had a pleasant trip but I’m so glad I’ve been here and not on the Potomac!” Campobello was tranquil; “the fog is never far out,” the breeze cool, and it was “lovely all day and really I don’t think I ever want to take the trip down!” On the other hand, “if we stay here long you will be ruined, labor is terribly high,” and food prices soared: “lamb is 33 cts a lb., when bought by the side!”
That summer and autumn, because of a polio epidemic that raged through the Northeast and as far south as Washington, ER stayed with the children at Campobello until October. But during the winter and spring of 1917, she saw enough and sensed enough to make her extremely reluctant to leave her husband alone with his new friends. They had words; she hesitated; but in July she packed up her army and went off to Campobello. FDR wrote her en route that he had a cold, and “a perfectly vile day” as soon as she left:
I really can’t stand that house all alone without you, and you were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo, just as I ought to, only you can and I can’t! I know what a whole summer here does to people’s nerves and at the end of this summer I will be like a bear with a sore head…. as you know I am unreasonable and touchy now—but I shall try to improve.
They had both become unreasonable and touchy. There were arguments and upsets, but it was all vague: No words were spoken directly. ER returned to familiar habits: silence and solitude. It was impossible not to feel resentful when left alone by the “gay cavalier,” whose every word was filled with mirth and seemed mired by falsehood. FDR told his wife of each jolly day, about the lunches, dinners, cards at the country club, wonderful sails with “The Charlie Munns, the Cary Graysons, Lucy Mercer and Nigel Law.” Nigel Law, a dapper fellow closer to Lucy’s age of twenty-five, frequently squired ER’s social secretary about. FDR was generally with them, but Town Topics rarely reported that. Law was one cover, Livy Davis another. They were often together, and there was always an official purpose. On one occasion, they sailed down the Potomac to visit the fleet. FDR rhapsodized to ER: “Such a funny party, but it worked out wonderfully!“
In the course of going about her own business on the home front, ER gave an interview to The New York Times, which appeared on 17 July and caused her immense embarrassment.
The food-saving program adopted at the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt …has been selected by the conservation section of the Food Administration as a model for other large households. Mrs. Roosevelt on her pledge card said that there were seven in the family, and that ten servants were employed. Each servant has signed a pledge card, and there are daily conferences.
Mrs. Roosevelt does the buying, the cooks see that there is no food wasted, the laundress is sparing in her use of soap, each servant has a watchful eye for evidence of shortcomings on the part of the others….
No bacon is used…; corn bread is served once a day…. Meat is served but once daily, and all “left overs” are utilized…. Everybody eats fish at least once a week.
“Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable,” said Mrs. Roosevelt today.
FDR wrote his wife the next day that her “newspaper campaign” was a “corker”:
I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires! Please have a photo taken showing the family, the ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table…. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.
Honestly you have leaped into public fame, all Washington is talking …and I begin to get telegrams of congratulations and requests for further details from Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Francisco….
FDR did not write of his mother’s response, but he did note that Uncle Fred Delano thought it would all pass quickly; “but Gee how mad Eleanor will be!”
ER was in fact mortified: “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way…. So much is not true and yet some of it I did say. I never will be caught again that’s sure and I’d like to crawl away for shame.” It was her first learning experience at the hands of the press: ER had had no idea how her candor and innocence could be used against her. She never did get “caught again” in that way, and she never again referred publicly even to the existence of her household staff.
This public relations disaster only momentarily distracted her from a much more serious source of pain. ER’s lifelong fear of abandonment was not relieved by FDR’s breezy letters, and the summer of 1917 seemed the longest summer of her life: “I don’t think you read my letters for you never answer a question and nothing I ask for appears!”
Then, at the beginning of August, FDR was hospitalized for a serious throat infection, and requested her company. ER left Campobello instantly to nurse him. They were together for almost two weeks, and they had a serious talk. On 15 August, ER wrote: “I hated to leave you yesterday. Please go to the doctor twice a week, eat well and sleep well and remember I count on seeing you the 26th. My threat was no idle one.”
As soon as he recovered, FDR was out and about. On 20 August, FDR wrote of another jolly outing to Harpers Ferry, with the Graysons and Lucy Mercer. One day, Alice Roosevelt Longworth telephoned FDR: “I saw you 20 miles out in the country. You didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel, but your eyes were on the perfectly lovely lady.” Franklin replied, “Isn’t she perfectly lovely.” Alice invited FDR and Lucy Mercer to her famous and fabulous dinners, and they went.
Alice reveled in the gossip about FDR and Lucy Mercer, and promoted the romance. The woman who became famous for her barbed tongue and a needlepoint cushion that directed guests to the honored place upon her sofa—“If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone come and sit by me”—now struck out cruelly at her cousin. She loved to tell the story of an evening witnessed by Irene and Warren Delano Robbins that dramatized ER’s Griselda mode. ER had left a particularly merry party at ten, reportedly because Lucy Mercer was there and FDR could hardly bear to be away from her side. FDR and the others returned home at 4:00 A.M., in very high spirits, to be greeted by the grim reality of ER rising from the doormat, “looking like a string bean that had been raised in a cellar.” She explained to the merry trio that she had forgotten her key and preferred not to disturb the servants, or disturb the group by returning to the Club since “I knew you were all having such a glorious time, and I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”
Alice’s incipient cruelty toward ER, a wee festering sore since childhood, turned gangrenous as her own marriage disintegrated.
Nicholas Longworth was an ardent politician, a dandy, a superb violinist, and a notorious drunk. He made no effort to hide his affairs, his gambling, or his drunkenness from his wife, who sought to outdo him by behaving as outrageously, if in different ways. But even Alice had limits. They were reached when Nick focused his attentions upon Cissy Patterson, Aunt Bye’s young friend during TR’s presidency and then much in the company of both Bye’s nieces.
No stranger to bitter familial rivalry, Eleanor Medill Patterson was one of the four grandchildren of Joseph Medill, who had founded the Chicago Tribune. As the only girl-child in the Medill-Patterson-McCormick clan, she had money and privilege but nothing specifically to do with her energy or her brilliance. The boys (Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, Senator J. Medill McCormick, and her beloved brother, Joseph Medill Patterson, who subsequently founded the New York Daily News) ran the family businesses. After a disastrous marriage to a scoundrel Polish Count, Josef Gizycka, who beat and abused her, she returned to Washington. Discontented and adventurous, she spent several months each year hunting and living in Wyoming, but with the snows always returned to Washington in search of diversion. Eventually she allied herself with William Randolph Hearst and became one of the most powerful women in American public life, as editor and publisher of Washington’s Times-Herald.
But during the war years, the Countess Gizycka was most notable as one of the wildest women in wicked Washington. At one party in her own home, Alice Longworth discovered her husband and her great friend Cissy in the bathroom: with the door unlocked and the light on, having sex on the floor. Alice countered by having a torrid and long-lived affair with Idaho Senator William E. Borah. Much like her father, Borah was rotund, opinionated, powerful, insufferable. Politics consumed him. And Alice adored him. His wife left town, and Borah enhanced his reputation as the “stallion of Idaho.” Alice Long-worth became widely known throughout Washington as “Aurora Borah Alice.” Best of all, she beat Cissy Patterson in the race for Borah’s affections.
There seemed to be a specific pattern to their rivalry: Cissy Patterson would pursue Alice’s husband and lovers at parties in Alice’s home. One evening, Cissy disappeared with Borah. The next morning, a maid found her hairpins in the library. Alice sent them with a note: “I believe they are yours.” Cissy replied: “And if you look up in the chandelier, you might find my panties.” But Borah disliked Cissy’s gloating, and her writing of him indiscriminately in one of her columns. He chose Alice. (Cissy Patterson got even: She killed him off in her novel, Glass Houses, which she wrote during the 1920s, when she lived in Paris.)
By 1920, Alice and Borah had become inseparable, and in 1925, at the age of forty-five, Alice had a daughter. She looked just like Borah, and Alice intended to name her Deborah. Nick could not abide that— De-Borah, indeed—and Alice reluctantly agreed to name her daughter Paulina.
For all her own flamboyance, Cissy Patterson never demeaned or criticized Eleanor Roosevelt. Even later, when their political differences became profound, she would never allow anybody to ridicule ER in her company. Although Cissy Patterson frequently referred to herself proudly as “just a plain old vindictive shanty Irish bitch,” her biographer believed that “she wanted to be Eleanor Roosevelt.” Cissy Patterson admired ER and called her “the noblest woman I have ever known. I adore her above all women.”
Nicholas Longworth was one of the most popular men in Washington, and the most beloved Speaker of the House. He was also a playful and contented father. However, there was nothing but venom between him and his wife. By the time he died in 1931, Alice hated him so thoroughly that she burned virtually all his papers and treasures, including his Stradivarius violin—an act of wanton destruction for a financially troubled widow, since that 1690 violin (one of only twelve hundred that Antonio Stradivari made) might have saved her considerable hardship. Clearly, Alice’s bilious attitude toward ER had more to do with her own life than with her frequently repeated gibe that Franklin “deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor.”
Alice Longworth and FDR became closer during the summer of 1917 than ever before. Their new attachment was forged as they created a dirty little scheme to spy on another Washington romance, in the name of patriotism. Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board and the personal financier of America’s early efforts at large-scale economic warfare, was having an affair with a Roosevelt family friend, May Ladenburg. Subsequently the wife of Preston Davie (a ferocious Republican enemy of Roosevelt’s New Deal), she was the beautiful daughter of the senior partner in a German-American banking house, Ladenburg, Thalmann and Co. Her home was one of Washington’s most congenial social centers, and Alice knew her house, gardens, and stables well. She and FDR went about with military agents, bugging the place; and together they listened above a horse stall as Baruch and May Ladenburg made love and talked in her adjoining studio: “We did hear her ask Bernie how many locomotives were being sent to Rumania…. In between the sounds of kissing…” It was a “most disgraceful” thing to do, “of course,” Alice Roosevelt Longworth acknowledged; “but it was sheer rapture!” ER considered it a vile caper, and “most unjust to poor May Ladenburg.”
FDR managed to tear himself away from his summer activities to come to Campobello the last week of August, as promised, and he left with the family on 2 September for Hyde Park, although he left New York almost immediately for Washington. ER remained at Hyde Park until November, for the first time finding respite and comfort in her mother-in-law’s home. ER expected FDR to return the first week of November, to visit and to help the family move back for the winter season in Washington. But on 5 November, ER wrote: “We are terribly disappointed and I am very cross for I would have left here with the babies today if I had known even yesterday….” His wire arrived too late, but all the chicks “sent love and were so sorry you could not come.” Unable to acknowledge the depth of her anger, ER effused gratitude instead: FDR had “been a marvelous correspondent and it has been such a pleasure to see your handwriting daily!”
When ER returned to Washington, she resumed her canteen work and spent many hours listening to the intensifying debates in Congress. There she had an unpleasant encounter with her busybody cousin Alice while FDR, his mother, and several of their children went on a brief excursion to pin medals on heroes:
Dearest Honey,
All is quiet here and I hope you and Mama have had good weather and a fine “Welcome Home.” I wish I could have been there to have seen you give the medals and I hope F Jr and John saw and heard everything for they should remember some of it….
This afternoon I went to the Capitol about 4…. On the way out I parted with Alice at the door not having allowed her to tell me any secrets. She inquired if you had told me and I said no and that I did not believe in knowing things which your husband did not wish you to know so I think I will be spared any further mysterious secrets!…
I am very lonely without you and shall be very glad to see you on Monday. Much love from the chicks, Devotedly Always,
E.R.
Whether ER was consciously aware at this time that FDR spent as many hours as possible with Lucy Mercer, or that members of her own family, many of her canteen and Red Cross co-workers, and almost everybody else of importance in Washington knew that Franklin and Lucy were sweethearts, we will never learn. Certainly on some level she knew it all, the way lovers always know, unconsciously and through every cell of their being, when somebody else has pre-empted some big or little piece of their beloved’s heart. But denial (“I did not believe in knowing things…”) is inevitable, until it becomes unbearable.
It is clear that FDR did very little to protect his wife from gossip, did nothing significant to hide his affair, and went so far as to enlist many of their mutual friends in his relationship. His willingness to dine with Lucy Mercer in public and at the home of Cousin Alice, already established as one of Eleanor’s cruelest detractors, was certainly among his boldest acts of betrayal. Although ER might choose to ignore her rapacious cousin, she could not ignore material evidence when she held it in her hands.
During the winter and spring of 1917–18, ER and FDR saw little of each other. She devoted every day to war work, and he was elsewhere. That summer, she decided to stay in Washington, and sent the children and most of the servants off to her mother-in-law at Hyde Park. In July, alone with one maid in Washington, ER made her daily rounds in her Red Cross uniform, comfortable despite the heat. “I loved it. I simply ate it up”—in part because it left her no idle moments during which to think. On 9 July, FDR sailed for Europe to inspect the fleet. On 20 July 1918, she wrote her husband: “They have asked me to go …with a unit of five to start a canteen in England. It is quite a temptation.” Eager to go to the front, be at the center of activity, and remove herself from the tensions around her, ER seriously considered this offer, but reluctantly declined because of her children.
Eleanor Roosevelt was the mother of five children between the ages of two and twelve. She had money, and she knew she could do good work. She liked to work, and she worked well under the most arduous circumstances. She worked through the steamiest heat wave in a tin-roofed canteen; she worked after she had cut her finger to the bone on the new bread-cutting machine. She wrapped handkerchiefs around that finger all day, and bore the scar forever; but she was so busy trying to prepare for the several troop trains scheduled to arrive that day she had not even felt the pain.
During the war, ER’s personal interest in the wounded sailors and their families she visited was profound. She brought fresh flowers, candy, newspapers, and always genuine compassion; she took time and noticed details. She received several letters of gratitude like the following: “I want to thank you as the mother of one of the boys who was in the Naval Hospital …for the kind words—the little favors—the interest you took in my son…. He always loved to see you come in. You always brought a ray of sunshine with you, always had something to say to him….”
And then there was her amazing capacity to raise money from various and unlikely sources. When she wanted to see a recreational center built for wounded men who needed physical therapy, she went to the Colonial Dames, and “in a short time” the center was not only built but self-supporting. She raised money for crippled Southern boys through the Daughters of the Confederacy, by going directly to the personal friends and endless associates who rarely said no to her. Her effectiveness was widely recognized, but not, ironically, by Theodore Roosevelt. In July 1918, TR divided the Nobel Peace Prize money he had not spent among various agencies and relatives aiding the war effort. Yet he failed to contribute to his niece’s significant work.
ER had also learned to drive that July. Huckins, the family chauffeur, taught her in the Stutz, and then in the Buick. He praised her efforts, and she did “finely.” ER loved to drive, and after that summer she drove all the time—occasionally so fast that her best friends thought her reckless. And she finally learned to swim that summer. She took lessons; she practiced; she persevered; she swam. She felt safe and comfortable now in any water, and no longer nervous about the children. Trifles, minor mishaps, inconsequentials no longer unnerved her.
Over the years ER had grown accustomed to spending weeks alone with her children, and gradually her relations with them had become easier, and for Eleanor more contented. As early as 1912, ER’s brother Hall wrote to her: “Is F paying any attention to his family this summer or is the bee buzzing as hard as ever?” Hall suggested that his sister “build a little cell for him at Campo and tie him down.” Five years later, ER wrote her friend Isabella: “I’ve had many quiet evenings this summer and since infantile paralysis kept us a month later than we expected at Campo I really did much reading and worked hard over the chicks all day. Anna is going to be capable and dependable I think and James already devours books and I think will have a quick and interesting mind. Elliott is just very lovable and sensitive and stormy and the two babies very soft and adorable.” By the autumn of 1918, ER believed she could in fact do anything she had to do.
During August and September of 1918 ER made frequent trips to be with her children and mother-in-law at Hyde Park. It was an odd choice for a port in the storm, but usable. Indeed, during this year ER’s relations with her mother-in-law were the warmest they had ever been, or were to be. Sara was solid, direct, without artifice, dependable. She was aggressive and demanding, and her bluntness lacked charm, but there were no tricks, no devious games. Her insistence on the primacy and sanctity of family and tradition was particularly congenial to ER that year, though at other times it had caused friction, even acrimony.
For years ER had struggled to work herself free of some of her mother-in-law’s less appealing convictions, and by 1917 both ER and FDR had started moving away from Sara Delano Roosevelt’s dearly held ideas about the role America’s aristocracy must continue to play. One Sunday evening, after a long and discordant weekend, SDR wrote to “Dearest Franklin and Dearest Eleanor” about her views regarding “noblesse oblige” and “honneur oblige.” She was sorry they disagreed, “sorry to feel that my views are not [yours].” But she wanted to explain herself:
One can be democratic as one likes, but if we love our own, and if we love our neighbor, we owe a great example….
After I got home, I sat in the library for nearly an hour reading, and as I put down my book and left the delightful room and the two fine portraits, I thought: after all, would it not be better just to spend all one has at once in this time of suffering and need, and not think of the future; for with the trend to “shirt sleeves,” [and the abandonment of] the old fashioned traditions of family life, simple home pleasures and refinements, and the traditions some of us love best, of what use is it to keep up things, to hold on to dignity and all I stood up for this evening. Do not say I misunderstood. I understood perfectly. But I cannot believe that my precious Franklin really feels as he expressed himself.
Well, I hope that while I live I may keep my “old fashioned” theories and that at least in my own family I may continue to feel that home is the best and happiest place and that my son and daughter and their children will live in peace and keep from the tarnish which seems to affect so many….
During that time, when ER felt most adrift, she turned to her mother-in-law for a sense of security. Sara Delano Roosevelt’s verities were familiar, comforting; and she welcomed and embraced her daughter-in-law. On 22 January 1918, ER had written SDR that over the years she had come to “realize how lucky we are to have you and I wish we could always be together. Very few mothers I know mean as much to their daughters as you do to me.” Her letters frequently told of her need to confide, to talk intimately; she considered “running away” from Washington several times “to see you.” On her thirteenth wedding anniversary, ER had written a letter of gratitude to Sara: “I often think of what an interesting, happy life Franklin has given me and how much you have done to make our life what it is. As I have grown older I have realized better all you do for us and all you mean to me and the children especially and you will never know how grateful I am nor how much I love you dear.”
Eleanor was at Hyde Park with her mother-in-law when, on 12 September, they received a telegram: They were to meet FDR’s ship in New York with an ambulance and a physician. He had double pneumonia and influenza, as did most of the men on that ship—and many crew and officers had been buried at sea. It was a worrisome time: The deadly flu epidemic of 1918 raged throughout the country, and within weeks ER’s entire household would be in bed. But FDR’s health turned out not to be the main issue. The night she unpacked FDR’s baggage, the “bottom dropped out” of ER’s world.
As she sorted his mail and ordered his papers, she found a neat and hefty packet of Lucy Mercer’s letters. Did she read every letter? Did she merely note the salutations and the signature? With what words did she arouse FDR from his deep-fevered sleep? We know only that she offered him “his freedom.” For Eleanor, the prospect of a life alone must have been easier to imagine than that of facing one moment longer in a home where she was not wanted. There had been so many homes in which she was an outsider, a guest—where she felt tolerated and only marginally loved. Her Aunt Maude had recently divorced and remarried. Divorce was certainly preferable to the cruel alternatives she had witnessed throughout her childhood.
Sara Delano Roosevelt, however, was aghast at the prospect. She would not abide it. If her son abandoned his wife and her grandchildren for that woman, she would cut him off without another cent. She would not hear of it. There was nothing to discuss. FDR had to choose. That woman; or his wife and family and the money he needed for his career.
Divorce would have ended FDR’s political career. His boss, Josephus Daniels, would certainly have fired him. Daniels, a fundamentalist Christian, was the man who brought morality to the navy. He banned the condom packet sailors once received, since he believed in virginity before marriage and in abstinence outside of marriage; he ended the sailors’ wine-and-beer mess before Prohibition; he condemned divorce and fired his own brother-in-law from his newspaper when his marriage ended. And then there were the voters. Divorce was an unacceptable public scandal. Moreover, without his mother’s financial support, FDR could not afford politics. Nor could he pay for his customary life-style, which then included his share of three houses, servants, membership in every major club in New York and Washington, not to mention his book, stamp, print, model ship, button, and various other collections. It was impossible.
There was also the question of Lucy Mercer’s Catholicism. Would she have married a divorced man? What were all that passion and all that pain about? Undoubtedly too much has been made of the chilling effect of Lucy Mercer’s Catholicism, since FDR was in fact the love of her life, and FDR had risked everything for that love. One may assume that, had FDR taken his freedom, she would have married him. But he evidently told Lucy Mercer that he could not get free, that ER would not give him a divorce. This was not his final lie.
On 14 February 1920, ER wrote SDR a postscript to a long and otherwise detailed letter: “Did you know Lucy Mercer married Mr. Wintie Rutherford two days ago?” Winthrop Rutherford, a widower with five children, was fifty-six, more than twice Lucy Mercer’s age, and one of the richest and most attractive men in society circles.* His wife, Alice Morton (Levi Morton’s eldest daughter), always close to the Roosevelts, had died in 1917. FDR was stunned by the news of Lucy’s marriage, which he overheard at a party. Although he had agreed never to see Lucy Mercer again, Lucy and FDR did see each other, even before Winthrop Rutherford’s death in 1941. FDR arranged to have her present at his first inaugural and saw her whenever she visited her mother in Washington. Subsequently, he visited her near her estate in Aiken, South Carolina, with the help of Bernard Baruch, who arranged several meetings. There is the famous story of FDR’s railroad car being taken off to a siding near the Rutherford place at Allamuchy in New Jersey; and the fact that, when ER was away and her daughter, Anna, presided over White House social evenings, she occasionally invited Lucy Mercer. Finally, Lucy Mercer was with FDR when he died at Warm Springs, while he was having his portrait painted by her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff, as a gift for Lucy Mercer Rutherford’s daughter Barbara.
ER suffered the Lucy Mercer affair on several levels. Franklin had not only betrayed her; he had betrayed her in the company of many others. He had humiliated her, and connived with Alice. Did FDR want ER to know? Did he resent her removal to Campobello, her refusal to be baited, her failure to ask questions? He was used to his mother’s firm and tight rein. His wife, in contrast, had set no limits. FDR did not destroy or hide Lucy Mercer’s letters. Had he forgotten them? Was he too sick to remove them from his luggage? Curiously, the only point ER made in her memoirs concerning that dreadful moment of discovery was that, when they boarded FDR’s homecoming ship, with so many truly sick and dying men, “My husband did not seem to me so seriously ill as the doctors implied.”
ER wrote of that time only obliquely, and in code. She never referred to Lucy Mercer or her pain. But she did write of the “liberal education” she received in wartime:
I think I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions. I had spent most of my life in an atmosphere where everyone was sure of what was right and what was wrong, and as life progressed I have gradually come to believe that human beings who try to judge other human beings are undertaking a somewhat difficult job….
…during the war I became a more tolerant person, far less sure of my own beliefs and methods of action, but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives…. I knew more about the human heart, which had been somewhat veiled in mystery….
In September 1918, ER began a long process of introspection and change. Her life seemed suspended, awash in bitterness, and it would take years for her to regain the self-confidence that she felt she had lost overnight. Still, her quest for understanding began immediately, and it occupied her entire soul. Eleanor Roosevelt had married a man who was not unlike her father. But ER had never lost her romantic feelings for her dashing, womanizing, undependable, mercurial father. She had always blamed her cold and judgmental mother for the tragedy of their lives. It was inconceivable that she would react to her husband’s behavior as her Uncle Theodore had successfully persuaded her mother to do: to leave him, abandon him—whatever his protest or explanation, whatever his preference or primary commitment. As an adult, ER became convinced that greater tenderness and empathy on her mother’s part might have averted the great failure of her parents’ lives, and their early deaths.
Now, at thirty-four, the age at which her father died, ER sought to avoid what she considered her mother’s mistakes. As ER scanned her memory, her heart, literature, all she then understood about life and love, she paused at the world of passion and intensity mandated by individual needs in the teachings of Marie Souvestre. ER considered the realities, the romantic myths, the unexpected foibles, the surprising lusts, the mysteries. She feared rigidities; despised cold, judgmental abstractions. She trusted the heart to be tender.
First Eleanor offered Franklin “his freedom.” If he loved Lucy Mercer enough to marry her, she wanted him to be free. But FDR turned down her offer of divorce. He made promises, provided explanations. This “golden boy,” this vibrant “apollo” who charmed everyone he met, now directed all his influence and charm toward his wife. He would never see Lucy Mercer again. Did he apologize? Did he explain? Had he been engaged in a long-overdue emotional rebellion—against being a mama’s boy who always did the right and proper thing; who condemned all departures from the proprieties of his class and culture; who had mocked his half-brother’s son’s love for a socially unacceptable woman and blamed Taddie for his father’s death; who at the young age of twenty-three had taken on the responsibilities of a wife and home? Well, he had erred. Washington was so full of temptations; he had been trying out his new power, his new independence, for the first time in his life. It was a flamboyant, fatuous time. And it was over. He cared about his wife; he loved her. He was sorry he had hurt her. There was so much at stake—so much to do, and to do together.
Louis Howe played a significant role in their discussions. He persuaded FDR that his career and all his political dreams would end with divorce, and that he needed his wife, whose skills were special; and he persuaded ER that FDR could not go on successfully without her. If he wanted her, ER had no intention of destroying his career or discouraging his future. And then there were five young children, and Mama, and their lives together.
Was there anything left between them? Was there love? Could there be trust? Could they start over? Was all passion spent, or forever rerouted? Might they even try?
They did try. History confirms some details: FDR took care to protect his wife’s feelings, and allowed nobody to criticize her in his presence. Indeed, they both protected and defended each other with the vigor and strength of a bond sealed by the deepest pain. If there had been too much pain for their relationship to become an unselfish love, it became a most unselfish partnership.
Our common understanding is that Eleanor and Franklin never again resumed a sexual relationship. The source for that understanding is exclusively the testimony of the Roosevelt children who knew at the time nothing of their parents’ struggle. According to them: Mother never slept with Father again (James and Elliott); Mother considered sex an ordeal to be borne (Anna). But children are unreliable sources concerning their parents’ sexuality, and are particularly vulnerable to the historical stereotype that conjures up the frigid mother and the deprived father.
WHATEVER THE WORDS SPOKEN, WHATEVER THE AGREEMENT forged in that time of highest tension and most bitter feeling, ER and FDR subsequently made every effort to recover the joy between them that they had allowed to evaporate. ER went to and determinedly enjoyed more parties. FDR spent more time with the children and doing other things he knew would please ER. He gave up golf on Sunday mornings to go to church; he bought her thoughtful presents, and persuaded Josephus Daniels to allow ER to accompany him on his European tour of January 1919, during which he presided over the liquidation and distribution of America’s vast military stores. That trip served as a second honeymoon. On the way over, however, ER was shocked to hear of the sudden death of her Uncle Theodore Roosevelt. The old warrior had died unexpectedly and peacefully in his sleep the night before, 6 January. ER’s thoughts turned immediately to “Aunt Edith for it will leave her very much alone.” There was no suggestion of personal sorrow, but ER did grieve for the country: “Another big figure gone from our nation and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”
Postwar Paris was for the Roosevelt circle something of a carnival. All of their friends and relatives were there. ER and FDR had never seemed so gay together. And ER participated in all discussions with a new vigor. She made suggestions and connections. She toured hospitals and battlefields.
It was a transforming experience. She wrote Isabella: “We were able to motor from Paris to Boulogne through the northern part of France over which the British and French had fought for years and I do not think one can quite realize without seeing—Boulogne Wood with its few bare sticks to mark what once had been …gave one an even more ghastly feeling than the shelled and ruined towns…. What the men who fought there lived through is inconceivable….”
Astounded by the devastation of war—the millions of dead after four years of carnage, which left “every other woman in a black veil to her knees”—ER became committed to Wilson’s postwar vision as expressed in his most generous rhetoric; and she dedicated herself to the fight for the League of Nations.
During this trip, ER explored the new boundaries of her own independence, and together she and Franklin explored the contours of their new relationship. Understandings were reached, and renegotiated. There were moments of disappointment, occasional lapses. But these were no longer ignored, denied, dusted away, or hidden behind a sullen front. On 31 January, ER wrote SDR that she was grieved not to be with FDR on his tour of Brussels, Cologne, and Coblertz. Her husband had decreed: “it was easier for everyone concerned not to have women along.” ER was disappointed, as she had been when she wrote FDR on 1 August 1918, while he was in the Azores: “It was wonderful to hear only I hate not being with you and seeing it all! Isn’t that horrid of me!” But now ER no longer thought it horrid or even unreasonable to resent the notion that woman’s place was on the sidelines, while the hunters and heroes went off for adventure and fun. She resented it and said so—loudly and often.
ER now resolved to speak, and act, whenever she was displeased. She wrote Sara: “We had a most interesting dinner …and I dragged F home with difficulty at 11 o’clock he was so fascinated by Lady Scott.” She would no longer stand idly by while FDR fluttered and courted: When a flirtation arose, they would now leave together, early.
Paris was dramatically changed. ER decided it was not for the squeamish or the young. And “the scandals” that involved many of the officers “would make many a woman at home unhappy.” On the other hand, ER understood why everyone drank wine with meals: “The cheer would certainly be too cold without it…. Decidedly we are growing effete at home from too much comfort & I always thought myself something of a Spartan!”
Spartan, Puritan, and Prude were names that ER had routinely assigned to herself. Slowly, deliberately, she began to discard the heavy weight of these affects. Gradually personal freedom, emotional liberty, happiness became once again important to her. This postwar trip to Europe helped point the way.
For many years, nobody referred to the Lucy Mercer affair, including Eleanor, who wrote to her friend Isabella on 11 July 1919: “This past year has rather got the better of me it has been so full of all kinds of things that I still have a breathless, hunted feeling about it though for the moment I am leading an idle if at times a somewhat trying life!” But she referred specifically only to Franklin’s pneumonia and the children’s bout with flu.
The first major storm that confronted the Roosevelts, it challenged more fundamentally than any subsequent upheaval their ability to keep their two ships sailing along a parallel and connected course. For all of ER’s autobiographical candor, she does not refer to her most painful marital moment—the moment that most profoundly changed her life. If she grew to tolerate FDR’s continued reputation as a flirt, a bottom-pincher, and a knee-holder—a reputation that increased with age and was considered part of his congenial, innocent, and charming style—that tolerance was rendered possible by the critical years of reassessment and reconsideration between 1918 and 1920. During those years, ER resolved to design for herself an independent life that freed them both to live according to the rhythms of their individual needs and wants.
Her decisions were not made with ease, and her days were not without heartache. During these years, ER lost her appetite; when she did eat, she frequently could not keep her food down. In May 1919, for example, ER noted that she had had a quiet dinner with Mama, “but I might as well not have eaten it for I promptly parted with it all!” Photographs of this period portray an underweight, dejected woman whose face is averted. Few pictures from these years, pictures of the entire family and Mama, show ER with her face to the camera. She rarely smiled; she was depressed; and today we would call her loss of appetite, which continued for years, “anorexia.” We now know that one of the results of frequent vomiting is a deterioration of the teeth and gums. During this period, ER’s teeth loosened, spread, and protruded more than ever. She felt profoundly tired, suffered headaches, and had days when she wondered about her will to live.
ER spent several days each week, in the months before she left Washington for Europe, at Rock Creek Cemetery. She drove herself many miles out of the center of town to sit alone in the quiet and regard the statue Henry Adams had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt in his wife’s memory. Marian Hooper Adams was a pioneer woman photographer, a learned “bluestocking” and linguist whose translations and research Henry Adams had found indispensable for his early histories. A witty, gracious hostess, much beloved by old Washington’s inner core, she was one of the famed “five of hearts”—that collection of earnest eccentrics consisting of Clover (as she was known) and Henry Adams, Clara and John Hay, and pioneering geologist Clarence King.
Clover Adams committed suicide by drinking photographic acid, evidently when she heard of her husband’s affair with Elizabeth Cameron. Adams had the monument and garden built, and then erased all evidence of Clover’s existence. Erected without a name, or designation of any kind, the statue was more a monument to his loss than to her memory. He called the statue Peace of God; a peace “beyond pain and beyond joy,” Saint-Gaudens noted. Most people, including ER, called the statue Grief.
ER found comfort in that sheltered green holly grove, with its curved stone benches facing a hooded, robed figure of timeless beauty and endurance. There it was easy to contemplate the lives of women, and commune with the spirit of one particular woman who had given in to pain but now seemed impassive, perhaps victorious, and filled with determined strength. ER always kept a copy of the poem Cecil Spring-Rice had written about the bronze statue she would visit so many times over the years. It was among her bedside papers at her death:
O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes
Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!
O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down
Upon a world of passion and of lies!…
For ER, the Lucy Mercer affair involved an agonizing struggle to recover her self-esteem. In the process, she enlarged her ability to love and trust, and found new paths to happiness and fulfillment.
*FDR never referred to the forced-labor policies initiated to “modernize” Haiti and build roads; or the three thousand deaths reported during the first years of occupation, although the island was governed officially by the U.S. Navy. See notes, page 532.
*Indeed, in 1896, Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont (Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont) earned her reputation as America’s meanest mother when she forced her seventeen-year-old daughter Consuelo Vanderbilt to leave the country after she became secretly engaged to Winthrop Rutherford, then thirty. See notes, pages 535–36.