PREGNANT YET AGAIN, SHE REALIZED the time had come to hire a secretary.1
After tagging along on one more wearisome inspection trip to a Gulf Coast navy base, Eleanor took a name from Auntie Bye—a young lady whose parents Bye had known from N Street,2 Minna and Carroll Mercer’s daughter Lucy, age twenty-three. She came to the Roosevelt household in December 1913, well turned out in a stylish wardrobe from her previous Washington employer,3 an influential interior decorator who had gone into mourning and given Lucy her civilian clothes.4
Eleanor was happy to employ the girl three mornings a week. She paid her $30 and treated her as a social equal, though Lucy was yet more: another Cinderella with a fatally flawed father and magical mother; Queen Victoria had pronounced Minna Leigh Tunis “the most beautiful of American women.”5 Her father, Carroll Mercer, scion of an old Maryland family, had served with Uncle Ted in the Rough Riders,6 thereafter pursuing an Elliott Roosevelt–style sportsman’s life, until financial reverses, alcoholism, and divorce spiraled him downward. By the time Lucy’s parents parted in 1903, when Lucy was twelve, they had squandered a fortune.
Lucy stood almost as tall as Eleanor, with a rounder, full-breasted figure,7 and, to go by one family memoir, “a hint of fire in her warm, dark eyes.”8 She served the household as a member of the family, moving smoothly through her tasks, upholding rules, perfecting systems, remaining cheery and flexible. When handling bills and letters, she would fan her paperwork around her on the floor and, in a twinkling, have everything in order.9
Franklin heralded her entrances and exits with his big round butterscotch voice: “Ah, the Lovely Lucy.”10 Anna remembered feeling happy when she was greeted by the amiable Miss Mercer.11 The boys listened for the secretary’s soothing, Southern-inflected voice. In a household that could be tense for days on end, Elliott welcomed an ally who was “gay, smiling, relaxed.”12 Not surprisingly, Lucy made a hit with snobbish Mama during one of Eleanor’s many official trips with Franklin: “Miss Mercer is here, she is so sweet and attractive and adores you, Eleanor.”13
BY THE FIRST OF AUGUST 1914, everyone knew the world was changing far faster than anyone could handle. By the fourth, an immense German army was crashing through neutral Belgium, aimed at Paris.
“A complete smash up is inevitable,” reported Franklin. “These are history-making days. It will be the greatest war in the world’s history.”14 He had the trick, already, of turning crisis and alarm into confidence and dash.
Eleanor was not part of the unstoppable conflagration; she passed the time on cool Campobello, expecting her baby on August 26. But Franklin was suddenly in the middle of surging events, as England, bound by “a scrap of paper,” honored its old agreement to defend Belgium and declared war on Germany. Two days later, Austria came in against Russia, which by then had joined France and England. The Ottoman Turks lined up with Germany and the Central Powers, and the “war that will end war,” per H. G. Wells’s October 1914 study, began putting out lights all over Europe.
Eleanor could not follow Franklin at anything like the same speed. She did, however, put her own hopes for peace on hold to support her husband when he found himself blocked on the warpath by a noncombative boss at a slumbering Navy Department—to say nothing of a fleet with fewer than two hundred ships on active service.15
“To my astonishment on reaching the Dept. nobody seemed the least bit excited about the European crisis,” Franklin reported to Eleanor on August 2. “Mr. Daniels feeling chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization and similar idealistic nonsense was receiving such a rude shock. So I started in alone to get things ready and prepare plans for what ought to be done by the Navy end of things.”16
“I am not surprised at what you say about J. D. for one could expect little else,” she tutted in return. “To understand the present gigantic conflict one must have at least a glimmering of understanding foreign nations… Life must be exciting for you and I can see you managing everything while J. D. wrings his hands in horror.”17
He did have one powerful ally in war preparedness—Rear Admiral Bradley Allen Fiske, a walrus-mustached Spanish War veteran, who had been arguing since March for a bigger navy. Fiske viewed the pacifism of women like Eleanor as the enemy to American readiness, and, even more confusedly, blamed women’s suffrage for “effeminizing” the country and blinding men like Secretary Daniels to the navy’s dangerously slow mobilization.18
“We’ve got to get into this war,” boomed Franklin to whomever would listen.
“I hope not,” Daniels replied each time.19
As Franklin trumpeted preparedness up and down the corridors of the War, State, and Navy Building, Eleanor prepared to give birth. Good, reliable Blanche Spring arrived on Campobello on August 12. Franklin, by then, had made the peculiar decision to jump into a Democratic primary for U.S. senator from New York. In June, a boomlet had also been started with little real hope of making Franklin the Democratic candidate for governor.20
Sensing their moment for a bold upward move, Franklin and Louis Howe had fixed sights on the Senate primary, despite Roosevelt’s oft-repeated aversion to this institution pledged to slow and stately deliberation. They had confidence that with the navy behind Franklin, Tammany would be a cinch to beat. They miscalculated. Expecting to face a stooge, they got James W. Gerard, the forty-seven-year-old New York Supreme Court justice who was Woodrow Wilson’s now-unwelcome ambassador to the German Empire. Gerard’s post kept him too busy to come home to campaign, but he won widespread admiration for his tireless efforts to get Americans out of Germany.21
In August, Franklin managed to squeeze in a flying visit to Campobello. When their big-city birthing veteran Dr. Albert Ely failed to appear on the 16th, Franklin sailed across the swift Narrows to Lubec, the easternmost point of the continental United States, bringing back Dr. Eben Bennet. After hours of labor with little progress—Eleanor all the while urging the doctor to go to his other patients—she delivered late on the 17th another better-than-ten-pound baby, the second Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr.22
Wasting no time, Franklin dashed back to New York for a six-week primary fight. Eleanor looked upon his sudden determination to become a senator with a cool eye. “It never occurred to me to be much excited,” she admitted. “I carried on the children’s lives and my own as calmly as could be.”23 It was a strange time for a senior official in Woodrow Wilson’s Navy Department to run for an office in which he himself didn’t think he belonged, and especially to be asking for Wilson’s backing: Ellen Axson Wilson had died suddenly of Bright’s disease mere days prior.
Gerard won the primary three-to-one (but lost to James Wadsworth in November), sending Roosevelt back to huddle with Louis Howe about turning a senatorial defeat into an executive’s victory. FDR’s heroic potential rested on his being the Chief, not a lawmaker. He had fallen short, but not of the office he felt he had been born to assume. His eye was still on the prize. “It would be wonderful,” he told a friend, “to be a war President of the United States.”24
WITH A HEALTHY NAMESAKE SETTLING in, all should have been well. But Eleanor and Franklin could not find their way forward as a couple. The war would expose their secret, first stumbled upon during their honeymoon: they could not make each other happy.
“Something locked me up & I can’t unlock,” as she came to characterize her upbringing’s emotional legacy.25 She yearned for closeness, and yet her own responses prevented it. She would never be kittenishly playful with him; he would never confront hard truth with her. They could scarcely ever relax with each other.
Things that once drew her to Franklin now pushed them apart. On Sundays, she disliked his skipping out to play golf at the high and mighty Chevy Chase Club while she worshipped with the children at stately old St. Thomas Parish on Dupont Circle. She welcomed the steady part of churchgoing for her young family, hoping to awaken her children to the Gospel message that one cannot live for oneself alone.26 But St. Thomas’s had its own snobbery and conceits; the Reverend C. Ernest Smith, its dogmatic rector, defined a Protestant as “a person who is opposed to the Roman Catholic Church.”27
Franklin avoided worship outside his Hyde Park parish, partly because he loathed sermonizing, and partly due to his clannish attachment to St. James’s, where he followed in his father’s footsteps as vestryman and, later, senior warden. For the Hyde Park Roosevelts, being Episcopalian was outwardly a kind of horsemanship, clubby and pedigreed. Franklin had no need of membership in another congregation, nor would he have considered “transferring his letter” to a parish as preening or high society as St. Thomas’s.28 Rather, he made sardonic sport of seeing how casual the assistant secretary of the navy could be about attendance; and the more he got away with his games—one Sunday playing as many as forty-five holes of golf without anyone the wiser—the more his pleasure intensified.
Eleanor often felt alone during their travels as public official and wife. On their first morning in San Francisco, in 1915, set to open the Panama-Pacific International Exposition with Franklin K. Lane, Eleanor awakened early to the delivery of a huge bouquet at the door of their hotel room. She thought the flowers were from her husband and felt all the old tenderness—until she opened the tiny card and saw to her surprise the name of the other Franklin. This was the state of orange blossoms and sunshine, read Franklin Lane’s note, and he wished her first impression to be of the strength and brilliance of California’s beauty.29
Admiration helped; she was getting so little. Her Franklin could still make her feel that she was the most important person in the world: focusing suddenly on her with his hawklike eyes. Enticing her into a spin around the dance floor. Hurling her into a sudden playful romp at a picnic. Yet these gestures found no circuit to complete, leaving her conscious of something she could never fulfill, let alone enjoy. Instead, submission to her husband and his mother was her one method for keeping an uneasy peace. By caving to Sara’s interference—by holding herself back from declaring, This is my territory, clear out—Eleanor perfectly fitted Franklin’s desire for the distribution of power in the family.
Behind closed doors, Franklin now maintained his own liberty by keeping secrets with his mother. When Mama thought of renting her half of their double mansion on Sixty-Fifth Street,30 Franklin withheld the information from Eleanor. In a sense, Mama and Franklin weren’t holding back from Eleanor so much as they were playing up to each other. Franklin understood that sharing a secret heightened the part of his mother that drew identity and power from exclusivity. With that gleaming smile of complicity, Franklin could always take people prisoner through their little weaknesses.
Displaced to Campobello, Eleanor worried that she could lose him to one of Washington’s “summer wives,” the young stenographers who doted on bachelor husbands while “the Missus” (as Franklin referred to Eleanor) shuttled the children north until September. Franklin’s letters were full of awkward omissions, and since by custom Eleanor and Mama had always shared his latest news aloud, Eleanor sweated the politics of their triangle, nervous when Franklin so obviously withheld information: “I have to invent,” she grumbled, “and that is painful.”31
Franklin never thanked Eleanor for managing his mother, much less the logistics of re-establishing a trio of children, their latest governess, assorted pets, a pair of maids, and up to fifty pieces of luggage in a two-stage annual getaway, from June in Hyde Park, to July and August on Campobello. Isabella Ferguson was perhaps the first to spot Eleanor’s potential as a mobile administrator: “I never heard anything to equal your life—of calls & trains,” she told Eleanor. “My dear you seem the embodiment of 20th Century activity.”32
That was the trouble. Franklin was creating “the 20th Century.” For the time being Eleanor was just… activity. Eleanor was preparing to be drawn into nursery conflicts. “I hate not being with you and seeing it all,” she wrote during one of his more important naval assignments to Europe. Embarrassed, she added, “Isn’t that horrid of me?”33
Eleanor’s way involved a certain martyrdom. Her duty, as she committed herself to it daily, was to please Franklin—to be sure that her own faults did not disgrace him on inspection trips to navy installations in Florida and along the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Treated in Eleanor’s lexicon as “feats of endurance,” these heat-prostrating twenty-hour-a-day slogs gave her the chance to show Franklin that she was so strong she couldn’t be hurt. Whether he noticed was another matter.
One night at a dance at the Chevy Chase Club, he hardly seemed concerned when she excused herself and went to find a cab. He had been conspicuously quick to his feet every time Lucy Mercer or her sister Violetta rose to go anywhere. Franklin seemed pleased to stay behind and did not get home until morning, returning to N Street with the Warren Robbinses. It was they who witnessed what happened next, passing it along to Cousin Alice, who could almost be heard licking her chops as she listened:
The three approached and Franklin opened the vestibule door:
“Whereupon Eleanor arose from the doormat, pale like a string bean raised in the cellar…”
Franklin said, “But, darling, what’s happened? What are you doing here?”
“Oh,” said Eleanor, “I forgot my key.”
And Franklin said, “But couldn’t you have gone to Mitchell Palmer’s house, where there’s a guard?”
“Oh, no, I’ve always been told never to bother people if you can possibly avoid it.”
“You must have been hideously uncomfortable.”
“Well, I wasn’t very uncomfortable.”34
Eleanor’s self-effacement, stretched on the rack of usefulness, did not lead to a strengthening of character, much less a stronger marriage. It did, however, prepare her, better than was immediately obvious, for work in the war.
ON FEBRUARY 9, 1917, ELEANOR attended the annual meeting of Woman’s Volunteer Aid in the upstairs ballroom at Maison Rauscher, social Washington’s salon for catered receptions. The post-Lusitania death toll and sunken Allied vessels had reached breaking point. A thousand women had thronged to hear Mabel Boardman recruit volunteers for auxiliary work in the Red Cross should America enter the fighting.
President Wilson would shortly become the first commander in chief to declare women partners in one of the nation’s wars, but the jobs women would fill were still indeterminate. Eleanor was typical of the Social Register turnout at Rauscher’s. She could not drive, cook, or type, which ruled her out of the motor corps, kitchen corps, and clerical corps. When uniformed workers from each of these divisions reported on their activities, she and her friends were astonished to find, as Caroline Phillips observed afterward, how little they could do.35 There would also be a uniformed refreshment corps—the ladies of Washington’s calling system certainly knew how to pour hot liquid into cups—but no canteen service had yet been organized.
With Washington itself preparing to go on wartime footing, Eleanor would have broader duties as a subcabinet wife. The prospect of becoming one of the more prominent capital hostesses—not just another face at the dinner party, but a social leader expected to show the same resolve and élan as her saber-rattling husband—worried her. She liked noticing others; she dreaded being noticed. Even a train conductor calling her name for a telegram was enough to make her shrink from the hand delivering the message.
Her fear of social exposure had flared in private the previous autumn, when, just as their guests were about to arrive for a dinner party mainly made up of Franklin’s faster Washington set, she burst into spontaneous tears while putting Elliott to bed. She and the children had only recently returned from Campobello, as a terrifying infantile paralysis epidemic had swept up the coast from New York, and Franklin had anxiously urged her to stay with the children on the island well into October. In Washington, Lucy Mercer had kept house for him.
Upon returning to N Street, Eleanor became conscious “that there was a sense of impending disaster hanging over all of us.”36 She referred to the looming conquests of Imperial Germany, but her children sensed otherwise. For years, Elliott would attribute her tearful party jitters to her usual shyness and social stress. But, as he came to realize, “Those were the early days of Father’s involvement with Lucy. Mother was facing the breakup of the marriage, and she felt at the moment that she was powerless to do anything to prevent it from happening.”37 Elliott watched as his father appeared and asked what was wrong; his mother answering in a choked voice: “I’m afraid I cannot face all those people, Franklin.”38 Nonsense, he told her, and demanded that she pull herself together for their guests.
ON APRIL 2, 1917, AT 8:30 p.m., in the great stilled chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives, Franklin made sure she had a seat among the hundreds of visitors packed into the gallery to hear a pale but calmly forceful President Wilson make his case for war.
Hardly daring to breathe, Eleanor listened to Wilson argue that the United States must cast its lot with the Allies and enter Europe’s most terrible and disastrous war ever—not for revenge or conquest or as an assertion of power, but to champion the rights of mankind in the fight between autocracy and democracy. She joined the applause mounting from the floor as Wilson established that peace was impossible for the world’s free societies while the autocratic power remained on earth. A stronger navy would be needed, and a new army of five hundred thousand conscripts; but the months ahead called for more than men and materials. The task required “everything that we are and everything that we have”—giving blood and guts and lives and fortunes to Germany’s foes.
“The world,” said Wilson, “must be made safe for democracy.”39
Eleanor returned home “half-dazed by the sense of impending change.” Anxious about what the war would mean for Hall and for Franklin, she grasped the subtext of what Wilson himself, resolved but heartsick, knew he had asked Congress to approve that momentous day—a “message of death for our young men.”40
Franklin wasted no time trying to get into uniform, immediately lobbying his boss to go to sea as an officer. But when Josephus Daniels raised the question of commissioning Franklin for active duty, President Wilson stated: “Neither you nor I nor Franklin Roosevelt has the right to select the place of service to which our country has assigned us.”41 He would stay at his desk.
War was declared on April 6, 1917, and from then on, everyone in the government worked “twenty-five hours a day.”42 The calling system was put in mothballs,43 replaced by nationwide knitting campaigns. Franklin had predicted correctly: from coast to coast, the women of America took up double-pointed needles as “Our First Line of Defense.”44
Knitting brought women together, starting conversations. Suffragists took up “purling,” “ribbing,” and “casting off” as new forms of activism. Churches relaxed rules so that congregants could ply their needles during the sermon. Women took knitting bags to movie theaters. Old-guard masculine bastions like Scribner’s Magazine tried to cast the trend as “a nation of women turning their backs on feminist movements, and setting themselves to that least exciting, most old-fashioned, most feminine of occupations, knitting—the knitting of millions of sweaters, of socks, of wristlets, of scarfs for the men who had so consistently frowned upon or pitied or derided them.”45
Once started on a project for a soldier at the Front, many volunteers discovered they “couldn’t put it down.”46 Eleanor loved the work: “I simply ate it up.”47 She spent one afternoon a week taking wool, needles, and knitting patterns to navy wives and picking up the completed socks, vests, and wool helmets. Two days a week she visited the wounded in the naval hospital. Whatever time she had left went to the Navy Red Cross, whose knitting service, under Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, officially sent 8,976 articles of clothing to shore stations and men at sea.48
When she realized that many women of her acquaintance were waiting to be told what to do, Eleanor lent a hand to Isabel Anderson, the public-spirited Boston heiress married to diplomat Larz Anderson, who was then forming the District of Columbia chapter of the Red Cross Refreshment Corps. The fifty Washington ladies whom Anderson and Roosevelt recruited to provide food and drink for soldiers passing through Union Station joined seventy thousand women in canteen service nationwide.49 By war’s end, survivors of the Western Front would call the American Red Cross “the Greatest Mother in the World.”50
Three early mornings a week, Eleanor left her children to nannies as she crept out of the house in her crisp blue Refreshment Corps uniform and reported for duty in the small tin-roofed canteen in the railroad yards.51 A mile and a half north of Union Station, under the wide District sky, the yard spread over a sooty acreage of hazardous crisscrossing steel rails and shrieking car-wheels. In winter, Eleanor worked cold and drafty day shifts; but in summer, arriving to serve from six until midnight and often beyond, she would make her way down a steep embankment52 into a shadowy world where low switch lights dotted the tracks, red and green signal lamps flared, and the headlights of panting engines gleamed through the dusk.
Train after rattling train toiled in, loaded with soldiers, lumbering over the switches, backing into the lighted shed, alongside which Eleanor and her three shift-mates worked the canteen. She fed wood by the cord into a menacing contraption known as an army field kitchen, then dropped sacks of coffee into the boilers over the fires, brewing 160 gallons at a go.
With as many as nine trains in the yards at once, and every man aboard to be offered coffee and jam sandwiches, crullers or buns, averaging two pieces of food per soldier, some two thousand sandwiches needed to be ready to go at any hour of any day. In the hot, dim hut, the women took turns slicing bread on a primitive cutting machine, then spread the open faces with jam, wrapped the finished sandwiches in paper, loaded them onto trays, and hurriedly fanned out over the rails, often just as the bell tolled, to hand up the ration with a murmured word of encouragement.
At first, railroad officials had objected to the women being on the tracks at all. What was the idea of their being there to “help” the men? It took the canteeners a full summer of earnest hard work to overcome the railroaders’ prejudices53 and for the commanding officer of the Refreshment Corps to get authorization from the War Department for a direct-line telephone connecting the troop train clerk and the hut. With this, they finally had correct, confidential information about the movements of troops, enabling the canteen to render twenty-four-hour service, furnishing food and mail for ten to fifteen thousand men each cycle, the daily numbers frequently reaching twenty thousand.
Squads of four volunteers worked each shift under paramilitary discipline imposed by officers ranked from lieutenant up to colonel.54 Privates like Eleanor, working three or four shifts a week in Company A, learned to identify a captain such as Mary Sheridan, eldest daughter of the Civil War general, by the three discs on her epaulet, to obey orders instantly, and to jump to any task.55 The three volunteers working the last shift remained on duty all night in emergency cases. The first morning shift went on duty at 6 a.m. The following winter, these icy risings occasioned James Roosevelt’s complaint to his grandmother: “Do not you think that Mother should not go so early?”56 But by then Private Roosevelt had a reputation to live up to: Col. Mrs. Mason Gulick and her staff knew they could rely at any hour on their “willing horse.”57
Eleanor canvassed every train, large basket of sandwiches hooked over one arm, meanwhile holding open a huge canvas mail bag for the soldiers in the train windows to drop in their letters and postcards, or reaching up with a Gulliver-sized coffeepot to tip its spout into the tin cups in the outstretched hands.58 When the trains pulled out of the station, her heart ached. The boys seemed so playful in their broad-brimmed campaign hats. Some scarcely knew where they were; many had little or no idea where they were going.59 Certainly, no one had ever seen young American men shipping out in such multitudes, barracks bags slung at their shoulders. To Isabella Ferguson, Eleanor said it was “a liberal education in the American soldier.”60
Full mobilization meant that for the first twelve months of Eleanor’s service,61 no fewer than 1,700,000 newly drilled doughboys passed through the Washington canteen, bound for Hoboken or Newport News. The draft of June 1917 (the nation’s first since the Civil War) registered more than 10,000,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty—25,000,000 over the next year and a half. There seemed no limit to it, almost as if the immigration that had shaped the city of her childhood had suddenly reversed action. By war’s end, fully 2,500,000 members of the American Expeditionary Force would have flowed past Eleanor’s chronically shorthanded hut to scatter across the sea.62
“The war,” reflected Eleanor, “was my emancipation and my education.”63 It freed her to develop her natural capacity for organization. As wife of the assistant secretary of the navy she was pleasant, energetic, quick-learning: an amateur with potential. But the paramilitary, semiprofessional Red Cross brought out the systematic professional in her. Her accounting system for the canteen’s shop, where soldiers lined up to buy tobacco products and candy bars, was a model of efficiency for the other volunteers; she was one of two officers who always left her accounting for the next shift in perfect condition. She was also singled out to oversee the working visits of renowned volunteers: “We had 6 trains this p.m. & Mrs. Woodrow Wilson & that is a burden I can better describe in words than on paper,” she told Mama.64
In later years, those who had known “Private” Roosevelt in the railyards were amused at the illusion that the Mrs. Roosevelt of history seemed to “spring suddenly into usefulness.” In reality, wrote one of her fellow canteeners, “she started her career of usefulness and efficiency years before, and added to it as time went on.”65
THAT SPRING, AS WAR FEVER swept young male America, Grandmother Hall was upset that Eleanor’s brother Hall intended to leave his young family to fight in Europe’s clash of arms.
To Eleanor’s dismay, Grandmother demanded of her why Hall did not “buy a substitute” to take his place in the draft. Eleanor had never heard of such a loophole, and during yet another of her thankless duty visits to Tivoli said sharply that no one would do such a thing. But in the New York City Civil War lottery, both her grandfathers had been able to afford the $300 fee to enter a substitute, and Grandmother Hall insisted that it was what a gentleman would do.
Grandmother dug in. So did Eleanor. The Selective Service regulations now clearly spelled out that “no person liable to military service shall hereafter be permitted to furnish a substitute for such service.”66 When workingmen were summoned to lay down their lives for their country, it was only right for men of privilege and property to answer the same call. Substitution overvalued the worth of the rich man and undervalued the contribution made by soldier or sailor.
This was, she later recalled, the outspoken beginning of her lifetime’s fight to transcend tribalism. She had long stuck by Oak Lawn laws because Oak Lawn had given her all that she had had of childhood. Something, she was not yet sure what—perhaps the transparent absurdity of social exclusivity in wartime—was beginning to awaken her to the need for a middle way.67
Uncle Ted, meanwhile, had limped to Washington, bellicose and uninvited. When the partially blind, Amazon fever–ridden, fifty-eight-year-old former president made the rounds at State, War, and Navy, Josephus Daniels could not have been more relieved to hear him declare a preference “to lead the army rather than to command the fleet.”68
Privately, Wilson viewed TR and his proposed division of Rough Doughboys “as just a spectacular feat to put himself before the public.”69 After receiving and hearing out Roosevelt at the White House, Wilson decided in favor of forming and training the army by new methods that shared the burdens of service more equally; and asked Secretary of War Newton Baker to let Colonel Roosevelt down easy, while wiring TR his own reasoning.
Eleanor was relieved but sorry to see Uncle Ted sidelined; she knew how important it was to him to bear the same risks as his boys. In the end, however, it was always the same. Despite his impassioned love of country, it was all about TR. Eleanor yearned for a cause that was greater than herself.70
ON JUNE 24, 1917, SHE fired Lucy Mercer. The official reason was that the war gave her fewer social obligations. In fact, the opposite was true. To maintain morale, diplomatic Washington kept its machinery whirring with the normal round of receptions, teas, and dinners.71 “I wonder that you find any time for letters at all,” wrote her brother, “with the distractions of family and the arduous linguistic labors of entertaining Japanese, Mexicans, and Hottentots.”72
Jealousy brought her to let Lucy go. The more watchful Eleanor became, the more invisible was Lucy, and the more airtight the seal on Franklin’s narratives. To Eleanor he adamantly accounted for every detail of his days, recording to the minute the timetable of his arrivals and departures, even including to and from the dentist’s chair.
Occasionally, the times he gave Eleanor did not match those he more casually supplied his mother (off by as few as fifteen and as many as thirty-five minutes), but the women were not passing his letters back and forth, and if they had, what did it matter that Franklin claimed to Eleanor he had reached the dentist by 8:45 and to his mother insisted it was 10:10? Franklin’s vehemence about the facts made it easier for everyone to pretend that the facts were true.
He cared that Eleanor believe him. Franklin chronicled places, people, and weather, pretending to share the pleasure of occasions, but in reality his gaslighting was a bid for Eleanor’s trust. Good character had been the coin of his courtship and young manhood, on the flip side of which gleamed his ambition to be Number One. When he was not right with “Babs,” he was not right with the world. But now he had fallen in love outside his marriage, and he was willing that first wartime summer to risk being wrong with Eleanor to test that love.
Five days after being fired from 1733 N Street, Lucy joined the Navy Department. Under a brand-new Daniels wartime program to create “the best clerical assistance the country can provide,”73 eleven thousand women had been enrolled as yeomen. Fulfilling Wilson’s progressive vision of equal partners in the nation’s service, Josephus Daniels’s “Yeomanettes” were the only women during the war who served in the United States Navy on the same footing as men of the same rank, receiving equal pay and allowances.74 Lucy accepted one additional privilege. After being sworn in at the Navy Yard, Yeoman Third Class Mercer was assigned straightaway to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
ELEANOR HAD ALWAYS DONE MORE than her share of knitting, but now her needles bit like fangs, gobbling up whole skeins of wool. Babs. Franklin sounded as if he were calling a lost little lamb: “Ba-a-a-bs!” What a contrast to the relief with which he had greeted Miss Mercer’s morning arrivals at N Street: “Ah, the lovely Lucy!”75
At the canteen, she accustomed herself to the heat in the little corrugated-tin shack with its cooking fires burning under the metal roof: “I’ve come to the conclusion that you only feel heat when idle.”76 Likewise, she was learning to use fatigue to concentrate her energy. The more worn down she got, the more basic her judgment about what really mattered.
Throughout this first full summer of her husband’s offstage pairing, she knew only to protect herself from what she instinctively did not want to know. Whisperings had been heard, recalled one Washington insider, “on all sides.”77 Franklin’s passion for Lucy, agreed another, was “known to everyone in Washington except Eleanor.”78
That summer, she redoubled her patriotic efforts.79 Joining the rest of the nation in wheatless and meatless meals so that scarce foodstuffs could supply the army’s needs, she signed a pledge card from the Patriotic Economy League and made good on it by cutting back her daily menus. She allowed two courses for lunch, three for dinner, while excluding bacon, serving cornbread and meat but once a day, and halving the quantities of laundry soap used by her family of seven. She also made each of the servants sign a pledge card to do all within his or her power to economize, even if that meant that her upstairs maids Millie and Frances would now be on watch for “evidence of shortcoming in the others,” ready to rat out offenders.
When the conservation section of the Food Administration picked Eleanor’s “program” as a model for other large households, even including the servants spying on one another, the New York Times scheduled a reporter’s visit to the exemplary Mrs. Roosevelt.
Meanwhile, her annual banishment to Campobello loomed, even though the children had whooping cough. Franklin’s eagerness to pack her off was more galling than usual. His constant bugling about “Campo” as the paradise he himself would revel in, if only he could get away, grated. Each time he lamented how lonely summertime Washington would be without “Babs,” she held herself in check, merely assuring him he would have quite enough to occupy himself.80 Then she sent the barely recovered children ahead to Canada with their governesses and the cook, so that she could maintain her belt-tightening post, at least until the reporter’s visit.
On that day, Franklin went to work as usual but punished Eleanor’s Campo-resistance campaign by failing to come home for lunch, leaving her to face the Times on her own.
Eleanor had just surrendered herself to island exile when the food-conservation story appeared as “How to Save in Big Homes.” The Times presented a laughable Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt as the most practical and effective of three outstanding women who were playing their conscientious part in making the world safe for democracy. Eleanor’s strategy of having daily conferences with her servants contrasted with the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s opening of her home in Newport to a series of patriotic classes on food conservation and the social activist Dorothy Whitney Straight’s offer to do same for the summer colony at Southampton, Long Island.81
FRANKLIN SENT A BLAST OF sarcasm from the office: “All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer, and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!… Honestly you have leaped into public fame, all Washington is talking of the Roosevelt plan.”82
In the hush of Campobello, Eleanor’s quotations seemed to shout. Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable.83 Anyone could tell that that wasn’t her saying such a foolish thing, but she felt no less disgraced, because, as she took pains to explain to Franklin, “so much is not true and yet some of it I did say.” Mortified, she denounced the reporter—“I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way”—and vowed never to let herself be caught out again. But that was cold comfort on a rocky Canadian island. “I’d like to crawl away,” she admitted, “for shame.”84
When homemakers around the country wrote in to the Navy Department with questions about Mrs. Roosevelt’s economizing program, Franklin had Lucy forward the letters to Eleanor with answers that Franklin asked Lucy to dummy up and deliver to his wife for use in her replies.
“Why did you make her waste all that time answering those fool notes?” demanded Eleanor. “I tore them and the answers up and please tear any other results of my idiocy up at once.” She scarcely drew breath before adding: “She tells me you are going off for Sunday and I hope you all had a pleasant trip but I’m so glad I’m here and not on the Potomac!”85
Franklin’s letters circled around Lucy Mercer and Nigel Law, the twenty-four-year-old British third secretary, who was known to be fond of Lucy, and Cary T. Grayson, President Wilson’s doctor, and his wife. Franklin did not seem to be reading her letters, Eleanor said, “for you never answer a question, and nothing I ask for appears!” He in person appeared least of all, excuses and alibis now his standard closing: “I do miss you so very much, but I am getting busier and busier and fear my hoped-for dash to Campobello next week for two days will not materialize.”86
Each time he insisted that it was all on account of work that he was bearing up “all alone without you,” or that it was she who was “a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer,” she decided it was best to say nothing.87
When a throat infection put Franklin in the hospital, Eleanor trekked back to Washington, a “burning fiery furnace” that month,88 and nursed him for a week, returning to Campobello with his promise that he would come to the island on August 26. If he reneged, Eleanor planned to return at once to make good on the vow she left him with: “My threat,” she warned, “was no idle one.”89
If family lore can be counted upon in so private a struggle, she had threatened to leave him.90 And yet further outings with Lucy followed, only now without Nigel Law, and, worst of all, Eleanor had to hear of these plans not from her husband but as a cheery fait accompli by letter from Lucy.
Eleanor found a pretext to put Miss Mercer in her place. She reimbursed Lucy for petty cash that she had spent for Eleanor’s navy knitting program, and when Lucy returned Eleanor’s check, as a friend might, Eleanor refused as her former employer to relent, sending back the check with a still stronger letter. This had the desired effect, flushing out Lucy as the willful troublemaker: “She is evidently quite cross with me!” relayed Eleanor to Franklin.91
Franklin was forced to action by this battle of wills between wife and mistress, and he settled the whole matter of Navy League knitting by going to Secretary Daniels and disbanding the program.
That same week, a curious thing happened in the department. After receiving a perfect performance grade and promotion to Yeomanette Second Class, Lucy was abruptly discharged by “Special Order of Secretary of the Navy,” no explanation offered.
WHEN ELEANOR RETURNED FROM CAMPOBELLO that fall of 1917, Cousin Alice buttonholed her one afternoon at the Capitol Rotunda to ask point-blank if Franklin had “told” her—leaving the question deliberately unfinished.
Eleanor knew better than to trust Alice, who had wanted to divorce as early as 1912,92 when her genial and popular husband, Nicholas Longworth, the Ohio Republican congressman, broke with her father over TR’s Bull Moose abandonment of their party. More painfully, Longworth was a well-known adulterer, but when Oyster Bay ruled against divorce, and Longworth—House majority leader in 1923 and Speaker from 1925 to 1931—continued on a long career of dishonoring Alice, she retaliated in full measure, becoming the capital city’s master of such modern arts as How to Implement a Whispering Campaign and When to Resort to the Highly Publicized Washington Scandal.
Eleanor remained guarded. Her voice rose as she replied that she did not believe in knowing “things which your husband did not wish you to know.”93 Then she excused herself and hurried away.
THE DAY BEFORE THEIR THIRTEENTH wedding anniversary, while making sandwiches for the soldiers, Eleanor sliced her finger to the bone. She bound up the wound and went right on working.94 Anna reported to Granny: “Mother cut her finger badly yesterday in a bread machine down at the canteen, and Doctor Hardin came and sewed it up.”95 To Eleanor’s surprise, the crisis passed without further complication. She could now depend upon “a certain confidence in myself and in my ability to meet emergencies and deal with them.”96
In May, the Red Cross promoted her to captain97 and asked her to go to London—sailing in ten days, if possible—to set up a canteen, a “little piece of America,” which would serve some three thousand men daily.98
“It is a fearful temptation,” confessed Eleanor to Mama, “because I feel I have the strength & probably the capacity for some kind of work & one can’t help wanting to do the real thing instead of playing at it over here.”99
She was finding herself envious of Cousin Ted’s wife, the other Eleanor Roosevelt100—“Eleanor Theodore,” as the tribe called the tall, golden-haired, charming, and capable Eleanor Alexander Roosevelt, to distinguish her from “Eleanor Franklin.”101 While Eleanor “T” broke the army rule against officers’ wives by wrangling her way onto French soil as the first female manager of a Y.M.C.A. hotel (“doing more good than twenty men” by serving as “a mother and a sister to lonely soldiers”102), Eleanor remained in official Washington under “F’s” wing, earning token recognition as co-head of the women’s nursing auxiliary at the Navy Department.103
She yearned to break out. Coming home from a day shift, she was obliged to go from nurse and social worker to subcabinet wife and hostess with a brief pause as mother of three children getting ready for bed. Sometimes she reached her front door in uniform just as her guests were arriving in evening dress, and so learned the art of the quick change. From here on, a lifelong habit.
But these were not career moves. Her achievements were not professional. For the time being, she got things done by being Mrs. F. D. Roosevelt, and the more constrained she felt as a woman of rank and position upon whom responsibilities fell, the more jealous she became of Franklin’s opportunities, especially because in Washington she sometimes made an impression as the wiser, better informed of the two. Ray Lyman Wilbur, the Stanford University president turned wartime food administrator (coiner of the slogan “Food Will Win the War”), met Franklin and Eleanor at a picnic dinner given in Rock Creek Park by the Franklin K. Lanes for the Herbert Hoovers. Wilbur would remember that he and his wife “were more impressed by Mrs. Roosevelt than by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. She seemed to have an unusual grasp of what was going on in Europe, and I was struck with her comments and how they were similar to what I had already heard from Hoover.”104
And yet when both received the call overseas, she could not give herself permission and Franklin could. On May 12, she closed the Red Cross question, saying, “I really won’t go abroad,”105 and in July, Franklin secretly boarded a destroyer escort to a troopship convoy, the first risky passage of an eight-week inspection mission beginning at U.S. naval bases in the Azores.
Two days after Franklin had sailed, Eleanor received the shocking news that her cousin Quentin Roosevelt, age twenty, a first lieutenant in the 95th American Aero Squadron, had been killed in aerial combat over German lines. He had died instantly, Eleanor wrote Isabella Ferguson, “by two bullet holes in the head so he did not suffer and it is a glorious way to die.” Yet she knew what this loss would mean at Sagamore Hill.106
“I am so sorry for Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted,” she told Mama.
“Think,” she reminded Franklin, “if it were our John.”107
Quentin, the grinning, best-loved youngest of Uncle Ted’s brood, recalled people to the bright-eyed little rascal whom the country had loved to see climbing trees or shooting spitballs as leader of the so-called White House Gang. Grown stocky and determined (“We boys thought it was up to us to practice what Father preached”108), Quentin had gone to war as a golden youth attractively engaged to Miss Flora Payne Whitney, to whom TR now broke the news before making a public announcement.109 Eleanor caught the noble spirit comingling national grief and personal sorrow when she reminded Mama: “I suppose we must all expect to bear what France & England have borne so long.”110
For Uncle Ted, the loss would be overpowering. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death, has a pretty serious side for a father,” TR lamented; “and at the same time I would not have cared for my boys and they would not have cared for me if our relations had not been just along that line.”111
Exactly two months later, Eleanor attended Uncle Douglas Robinson’s funeral at Henderson, the old family seat nine miles up the mountain overlooking north-central New York’s Mohawk Valley. The loyal brother-in-law who had given her father his last chance had become, by age sixty-three, a chronically enraged husband and an overworked downtown real estate executive and trust officer. He and Aunt Corinne had not made each other happy: Uncle Douglas had worshipped her, and she had kept a cool distance, always defended against his rage.112 At work, the drain of men going to war had left Uncle Douglas fighting on alone for the survival of multiple firms and fortunes,113 until one afternoon that September he had suffered a heart attack on the train home to Henderson. After the services, Eleanor comforted her own great comforter, Aunt Corinne, and was harshly lectured by Uncle Ted about Franklin facing the test of real war.
TR warned, as he had before, that Franklin was in danger of doing damage to his future. He must get to the Western Front in an AEF uniform, and it was Eleanor’s duty to see that he go all-in before the fighting was stopped.
This incensed her. If anyone knew his duty, it was Franklin. He had stayed the course as a big-navy assistant secretary—longer, in point of fact, than Uncle Ted had done in the same job—and Franklin had carried out his duty on the express orders of the commander in chief.114 Moreover, Franklin had taken 1913’s “crab fleet” of superannuated pre-dreadnaughts115 and overseen a greater naval expansion than that of Uncle Ted’s White Fleet, launching more than 157 new vessels—“incomparably the greatest navy in the world,” Wilson had proclaimed.116
Enlisting for overseas duty in the army would be absurd—but entirely Franklin’s decision. Indeed, during his inspection of the Naval Railway Battery at the Front, without any prompting, Franklin seemed to have wakened to Uncle Ted’s position. He realized that because he was thirty-six and automatically exempted from the latest draft call, he felt all the surer that his rightful place was not as a “chair-warmer” behind a Washington desk,117 but as a commissioned officer attached to the Naval Bombing Squadron ready for action near Sainte-Nazaire.
Eleanor had become ever more committed to Wilson’s stand on peace, and instinctively felt she owed greater allegiance to the President and to the fight for the peacetime organization he had sketched in the last of his Fourteen Points: “A general association of nations,” in which “great and small states alike” would come together as sovereign members of a common council to stop future local clashes from becoming global catastrophes.118
“UNDER NEW DRAFT LAW PLEASE register me at Hyde Park,” wired Franklin from France, the first Eleanor knew of his aim to get into the fighting.119 On his voyage home aboard the USS Leviathan, virtually a hospital ship of Spanish flu cases, Franklin made sure through Secretary Daniels’s office that Louis Howe got word to Mama to meet Franklin on arrival with a doctor and an ambulance. He had been brought low by double pneumonia.
No wire reached Eleanor; she had to be alerted by telephone by Lathrop Brown, Franklin’s college roommate, now assistant to Interior Secretary Lane.120 But she made it to the pier to board the ship with Mama and Dr. George Draper as soon as it docked.
Franklin did not seem to Eleanor as emaciated as the men with whom he was traveling, nor “so seriously ill as the doctors implied.”121 But she held her tongue as four navy orderlies under Dr. Draper’s instructions ran the patient home in an ambulance, bearing him into Mama’s half of the house, since their own side was still rented to the Thomas Lamonts. Three years before, after Franklin had undergone emergency surgery for appendicitis, Eleanor had been upset that Mama had beat her to the bedside, arriving with a new silk kimono for her boy. But now, no matter how sick Franklin was or which side of the house they were on, Eleanor was fully conditioned to surrendering her husband to his mother.
Grateful for this chance to reestablish simple usefulness as he lay sick and abed, Eleanor put away Franklin’s things. Thinking to help him catch up on the mail, she looked among his letters. She knew her husband. He would have correspondence from English shoemakers on top of offers from stamp and coin companies, along with unpaid bills for his favorite silk pajamas, three new pairs of which she was not at all surprised to find in his luggage.122
THE LETTERS SHE ALSO FOUND that day have come down to history123 as a packet,124 or a bundle,125 sometimes beribboned,126 occasionally perfumed.127 By one reckoning, there were enough communications to describe the whole as hefty.128 Another account claimed just one single missive. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor’s most comprehensive biographer, has pictured “a stack” of letters tied up in “the proverbial red ribbon.”129 In other contemporary versions, the ribbon is given the texture most often ascribed to Lucy Mercer’s voice: velvet.130 Yet another documentarian hangs the fate of the Roosevelt marriage on a knotted string.131
Whatever the fact, Eleanor never expected to open a suitcase and find Lucy Mercer’s handwritten letters. How many lines she read, we do not know, nor what they told her beyond the appalling truth: Franklin had lost his heart to her social secretary.
Lucy, after all, was a perfect match for the man Franklin had become. By Eleanor’s own later judgment, she herself had been a deeply insecure, often unresponsive, and overcritical spouse. Even beyond sex and coziness and lighthearted loving, Lucy gave Franklin the constant validation to which he felt entitled. Naturally, he would have preferred an uncritically loving Lucy, smiling at every request, curling to her tasks on the floor.132
“A lady to her fingertips,” as Eleanor’s own favorite son, Elliott, recalled. “Femininely gentle where Mother had something of a schoolmarm’s air about her.”133 This last was particularly cruel. Eleanor’s intellect was her gift, and with typically strong insight, she knew that Franklin’s real secret was that he needed nobody.
SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT HAD A morbid horror of divorce.134 She would not allow the guilty party to set foot in her house; even the innocent party was questionable. The rupture of a marriage signified the “complete failure of a woman’s life.”135 Divorce was thinkable only to the richest: Vanderbilts might divorce, or even Astors. But not Delanos; a courtroom revelation that Franklin was mixed up in such events—legal grounds in New York State required proof of adultery—was unthinkable.
“Every thought, every wish, every plan, of Sara’s heart,” explained a close friend, “had been thrown with single-minded zeal into the perfection” of the life she had made for and with her only son.136
Before anyone could do anything rash, Mama convened discussion, calmly facing Franklin and Eleanor in one of the narrow rooms of No. 47. She began by asking Eleanor what she intended to do about Franklin and Miss Mercer.137
Ever after, the family storytellers agreed that Eleanor offered to give Franklin “his freedom.”138
“Don’t be a goose,” replied Franklin, reasserting authority: Girls were “goosey,” men remained above the battle.
But, Eleanor later told a friend, “I was a goose.”139 By which she meant that she was adamant about one condition: that Franklin think. Since her discovery, she herself had not raged, nor asked for further detail, nor even sought the counsel of a friend; but she had reflected. Before undoing their bond, Eleanor insisted, he must carefully weigh the effects of his decision on the children.140 If he still wanted to part ways after every consideration—including the annulment he would need, were he to marry the observant Roman Catholic Miss Mercer—Eleanor would bow out.
Mama would hear of no such thing. She knew perfectly well that if Franklin meant to divorce Eleanor, she, Sara, could not stop him, but neither would she blindly side with her son, nor would she use Lucy Mercer to cut Eleanor loose.
The fact was, Sara wanted her daughter-in-law to stay. Eleanor was tradition. She was the chaste, no-nonsense stanchion of Franklin’s future, and if truth had been told, Eleanor’s submissiveness had allowed and would go on allowing Sara to be the über-mother she wanted to be. Without this central virtue, which Sara’s generation still called chastity, “even Joan of Arc,” by one friend’s account, “could not have passed into Sara Delano’s good graces.”141
LOUIS HOWE SHUTTLED BETWEEN ALL parties, convincing Franklin that his political future depended upon a grand alliance with his wife and mother. As conditions were explored for what would be more Roosevelt coalition than traditional devotional marriage, Louis soothed Eleanor by acknowledging that she was not merely “still needed,” but indispensable. No matter what had happened, she remained vital to Franklin’s faith in the future.
Mama was also necessary. Still empress of the family purse, she could dictate steel-bladed terms: here, a vow to cut Franklin off without a penny if he went ahead and left Eleanor. She would see to it that none of her blue-chip stocks or substantial cash reserves came his way, and he would never inherit his beloved home on the Hudson. On this, her position was sweeping and final.
History, having no records of Franklin’s thinking, cannot say which consideration made the difference. According to one of many renditions of Eleanor’s discovery of his betrayal, Franklin was said to have been “unmasked for the first time in his life.”142 Yet, in point of fact, he no more exposed his true self now than in any other response to crisis over a lifetime of impenetrability to his wife, his closest associates, and political adversaries.
FDR never offered a word of insight into what Lucy Mercer meant to him. Franklin’s cousin Daisy Suckley, a confidante of his later years, felt strongly that despite Lucy, Franklin’s feelings for Eleanor were “deep & lasting.” Their tragedy, maintained Daisy, stemmed from their inability to relax into each other.143
At some point, Franklin did manage to let Eleanor know that he was sorry for hurting her.144 That was something new, almost experimental. He also volunteered to give up Lucy for good. Contrary to legend, Eleanor did not ask Franklin for this.145 A wife’s instinct may have told her that he would go on seeing Lucy in public; official Washington intersected often enough with Social Register Washington that such reunions would leave Franklin susceptible to relapse. Be that as it may, Eleanor stipulated that if Franklin wished to remain married, he must demonstrate that, even platonically, he still wanted her as his life partner. She would not stay where she was not wanted. On that point she was as clear as glass.146
For Franklin’s part—to the end of his life—he would keep Lucy Mercer concealed in a category by herself. Part old flame, part soul mate, part tender of his heart, she would always be the woman he loved, the Lovely Lucy, and he would arrange for her to reappear at intervals during his years as president (mostly after her own marriage to Winthrop Rutherfurd ended in widowhood) under the pseudonym “Mrs. Paul Johnson.” By the end, the risk to a well-insulated war president was as nothing compared to the life-altering damage that would have been done in 1918.
“It seemed amazing,” mused Cousin Alice. “It could have been the end of Franklin.”147 To be caught cheating on his much-respected wife—a Red Cross canteen captain—and found romancing Yeomanette Second Class Mercer would have been scandal and ruin for the assistant secretary of the navy. Josephus Daniels would have had to fire Roosevelt at once. Franklin would have gone no further in the Democratic Party. Certainly, no candidate for president had ever reached the White House as a divorced man remarried to a Roman Catholic.
Franklin would never put so much of himself on the line for anyone ever again. Almost a quarter of a century later, Eleanor would confide in a friend how hard it still was to accustom herself to Franklin’s “lack of real attachment to people.” She “could never conceive of him doing a reckless thing because of personal attachment.”148 With those to whom he drew closest after 1918, he would resort to the safer pattern established with Mama and Eleanor, belonging no less to one than to the other. Among his life’s romances, Lucy remained unique in this all-important regard: From September 1916 to September 1918 he had risked everything for her.
Franklin’s attitude toward the Christian covenant of marriage seemed reverent but hardheaded. Fundamentally, he was his own judge, perfectly willing to give himself the benefit of the doubt.
Eleanor had the greater problem in doing herself justice at this crucial turning point. She was thirty-three, the mother of five surviving children. Young Franklin Roosevelt had been her rescuer. He had restored her belief in love and family and home. The sudden loss of that faith was deeply destabilizing, but she did not shirk from seeking to understand her part in their marriage’s undoing. She sat with it. “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”149