One day late in May, fate intervened in the busy life of Assistant Secretary Roosevelt and moved his concept for a North Sea Barrier one step closer to reality. Shortly after noon, he looked up from his desk and saw a man standing before him who he later described as looking “just like one of the thousand[s] of crank inventors who pestered the Navy Department.… Most of them sported whiskers and carried black bags. And so annoying had they become that a retired Admiral with nice manners had been detailed to shunt them away from the active naval officers. One day one of them got through the guard. My secretary was out to lunch and he just walked in.”
The man introduced himself as Ralph C. Browne, of Salem, Massachusetts. “I wanted to tell him to get out but I ended up with asking him what I could do for him. Well, he pulled out some sticks and proposed the same old idea that hundreds of others had of laying floating poles on the ocean from which submarine nets could be lowered. The only trouble was that any decent sea would knock it to pieces immediately. Then he showed me a peculiar looking affair with antenna-like attachments. ‘When a sub hits the cable, they go off all at once,’ he said.
“‘Fine,’ I thought. ‘This is just what we have been looking for.’”
Roosevelt sent Browne over to see Commander Fullinwider at the Bureau of Ordnance with a note saying that he appeared to have “something interesting.” Fullinwider and his assistant examined the model the inventor had brought with him, which he called the Browne Submerged Gun. The Navy men showed no interest in the gun itself, but the novel firing device at once caught their attention. It was made up of a copper antenna suspended from a buoy, which contained an electrical relay mechanism. If a submarine were to touch the antenna, the contact of metal closed the circuit and automatically fired the gun. Fullinwider thought that if the firing mechanism could be adapted to sea mines, it would solve one of his biggest problems. But Browne objected. He insisted that the key part of his invention was the gun, not the firing mechanism, and that it would not work on a mine. Fullinwider finally persuaded him to let the Navy try, and on June eighteenth a first crude model was tested at the submarine base at New London. On July tenth a new, more sophisticated model was tested with such success that the Bureau of Ordnance reported that it now had the makings of a new mine suitable for use in the North Sea. The Chief of Naval Operations took note. This achievement removed most of the remaining skepticism in the Navy Department, but the problem of manufacturing the enormous quantity of mines necessary, and of transporting and deploying them, remained imposing. Roosevelt began looking for an answer.
America’s entry into the war was not only changing Roosevelt’s job, it was changing the whole city of Washington. The sleepy Southern town was being transformed by a dynamic new energy, a new sense of urgency, and Eleanor and Franklin were both caught up in the change.
The war had brought with it a relaxation of the strict social code that Eleanor had been forced to live by. No longer was it quite so imperative to paper the town each week with calling cards, to remember quite so many birthdays and anniversaries, to make note of so many promotions and transfers. With the arrival of so many foreign missions, made up of officials on their own who needed to be welcomed and entertained, hostesses were hard pressed to find enough extra females for the luncheons and dinners they were called upon to give.
All of which meant that Eleanor had less need of Lucy Mercer as a social secretary, but a greater need of her as a dinner guest. On April 24, 1917, Eleanor arranged a small luncheon at which Lucy was invited as the extra woman, and the following Sunday she hosted a somewhat larger dinner party for Navy officers, and again Lucy was at the table. One of the other guests that evening was Eleanor’s cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth, one of Washington’s most prominent gossips.
Alice, unhappily married herself, and with no particular fondness for her cousin Eleanor, had recently noticed a certain tension that seemed to be growing up between her and Franklin. Intrigued by the possibility of scandal, she began looking for corroborative evidence. One of the stories she began circulating that summer concerned the evening that the Roosevelts took their house guests, Warren Delano Robbins and his wife Irene, to a dance at the Chevy Chase Club. Around midnight, Eleanor excused herself and took a taxi home. The other three did not return to the R Street house until around four in the morning, and when they got there they were astonished to find Eleanor sitting forlornly outside on the doormat. She explained that she had lost her key. Franklin asked why she had not awakened the servants or taken a cab back to the club. Eleanor, in a pathetic voice, said that she did not like to bother people if she could possibly avoid it, and as for returning to the dance, “I knew you were all having such a glorious time and I didn’t want to spoil the fun.” The psychological term “passive-aggressive behavior” had not yet gained currency in that day, but everyone could recognize it when they saw it, and Irene Robbins, recalling that night, remembered thinking she would not “have blamed Franklin if he had slapped Eleanor hard.”
As usual, summer arrived early and stifling in Washington, and Franklin Roosevelt was quick to use the perquisites of his office to escape the oppressive heat. On the weekend of June 16, he requisitioned the 124-foot government-owned yacht Sylph, which had been TR’s favorite when he was president, and put together a small party made up of friends and family, including Lucy Mercer, who was invited presumably as company for Nigel Law, a young man from the British embassy who had recently become a close friend of Franklin’s.
According to at least one account of that weekend, something transpired on board the Sylph—some troubling suggestion to Eleanor that there was a relationship between her husband and Lucy that she had not been aware of previously—that caused her to abruptly terminate Lucy’s employment later that week.
Perhaps that account is correct, but subsequent events suggest it was just as likely that the decision to terminate Lucy’s employment was made jointly by both Eleanor and Franklin—most likely with the involvement of Lucy herself—and simply reflected the changes that were taking place in Washington and in the Roosevelts’ circumstances. Eleanor felt less need for a social secretary, and perhaps at the same time was feeling the pinch of wartime inflation. But both Roosevelts would have known that Lucy relied heavily on the money she got from Eleanor, and it was probably Franklin who came up with a solution—which was to keep Lucy on, but to cut her duties and salary significantly, and arrange for her to make up the lost income by joining the Navy Women’s Corps. Whatever the circumstances, on June 29, 1917, Lucy Mercer was sworn in as a Yeoman’s Third Class (F) at the Washington Navy Yard, and was promptly assigned to the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
The love affair between Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer is probably one of the most important, if shadowy, events in the life of this very important man. It marks one of the rare occasions when this otherwise circumspect individual, with a seasoned poker player’s instinct for risk assessment, allowed himself to take a huge gamble and surrender to a passionate adventure. Whether the adventure began in 1916, as some speculate, there is no question that Lucy’s move to the Navy Department in 1917 would have been critical to the development of their relationship. It must have been a remarkable experience for Lucy to find herself in Franklin’s office, privy to the daily business at the heart of a great nation at war. She would have already been quite familiar with his private opinions of many of the people she was now meeting for the first time—Josephus Daniels, Louis Howe, Admiral Benson, and the others—from Franklin’s casual and unguarded comments at his R Street home: and his often candid, and occasionally contemptuous, comments on his co-workers now became a new kind of secret the two lovers could share.
Eleanor was reluctant to leave for Campobello that summer, possibly because she feared for her marriage, but by the middle of July she could put it off no longer and departed with the children, leaving Franklin in Washington. It was there, on the morning of July 17, that he was startled to read in the New York Times a story about how rich families were dealing with wartime difficulties. Under the headline HOW TO SAVE IN BIG HOMES, he read: “The food saving program adopted at the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, has been … a model for other large households. Mrs. Roosevelt … 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 the use of soap, each servant has a watchful eye for evidence of shortcomings on the part of the others; and all are encouraged to make helpful suggestions in the use of ‘left overs.’ No bacon is used in the Roosevelt home; corn bread is served once a day. The consumption of laundry soap has been cut in half. Meat is served but once daily, and all ‘left overs’ are utilized. Menu rules allow two courses for luncheon and three for dinner. Everybody eats fish at least once a week. ‘Making the ten servants help me do my savings has not only been possible but highly profitable,’ said Mrs. Roosevelt … ‘prices have risen, but my bills are no larger.’”
As a politician with a keen awareness of his public image, Roosevelt would have cringed at the picture of the entire staff in his office discussing the assistant secretary’s family and its ten servants bravely making do with fish at least once a week as they struggled along with “left overs” while doggedly saving soap. Somewhat shaken, but maintaining a jocular mood, he dashed off a good-natured but pointed note to Campobello:
All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I’m 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 and the handbook. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.
Honestly, you have leaped into public fame, all Washington is talking of the Roosevelt plan and I begin to get telegrams of congratulation and requests for further details from Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Francisco and other neighboring cities.
Eleanor’s embarrassed response exhibited appropriate contrition: “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way and I feel dreadful about it because 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.”
Alice Longworth remained in Washington through the summer, and kept a cousinly eye on the comings and goings of Franklin and Lucy, as well as the young man from the British Embassy, Nigel Law, who so often seemed to accompany them. The three were seen to spend considerable time together on board the Sylph and elsewhere, where Nigel played the part of Lucy’s escort as a cover for Franklin. Alice would undoubtedly have understood the subterfuge.
One day Franklin received a telephone call from Alice. “I saw you twenty miles out in the country,” she said. “You didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel, but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.” Franklin answered blithely, “Isn’t she perfectly lovely.” Apparently he felt he could trust Alice.