How Franklin Roosevelt’s cryptic character
led him to be dubbed the Sphinx.
IF YOU TRAVEL NORTH from New York City along the east bank of the Hudson River, you will before long come to Hyde Park House, Franklin Roosevelt’s country home, preserved more or less as he left it on his death in 1945. Among the exhibits displayed in a glass case in his presidential library is an eight-foot-tall papier-mâché sculpture of a sphinx. The mythical Egyptian creature with a lion’s body, the wings of a bird, and a human head whose cryptic smile defied translation bears Roosevelt’s face, complete with pince-nez spectacles—a nod to his fifth cousin Theodore, the Republican president—his trademark cigarette holder and smoldering cigarette, and his narrowed, smiling eyes above a broad grin.
The statue was commissioned as a joke by the Gridiron Club’s White House correspondents as a satirical centerpiece for their annual dinner in December 1939, attended by the president as principal honored guest.1 The purpose of portraying Roosevelt as a sphinx was to let it be known to the president that the press were flummoxed by his persistent reluctance to make clear whether he would run for reelection in the contest of November 1940. Roosevelt’s ambiguity on the subject had become almost as much a story as whether he would run. Roosevelt so enjoyed the sphinx joke that he immediately acquired the sculpture and had it shipped to Hyde Park to adorn the nascent library that would mark his presidency.
For years, the president had dodged and weaved on the question of whether he would run. He had told some friends he was ready to retire to become a gentleman farmer at Hyde Park. To muddy the waters, he had encouraged many unsuitable and unelectable Democrats to throw their hats in the ring to succeed him. He had told others that he had simply not made up his mind. No one, not even his wife, Eleanor, nor his mother, Sara, knew which way he would jump. The sphinx in the White House was unfathomable. And the longer he wavered, the less chance there was that any rival could raise the funds to challenge him.
Roosevelt’s sphinx-like inscrutability was typical of him. Throughout his life, he had adopted a studied ambiguity about almost every aspect of his life, both political and personal. Born into wealth and living in a grand house surrounded by a large country estate, he was in most respects a conventional New York aristocrat. He was educated at Groton School, the Episcopalian boarding school for the sons of the well-to-do considered the most exclusive school in the whole of the United States, then Harvard University, making him a standard product of America’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant governing elite. He was an athletic man of action. His boundless energy and personal confidence, underpinned by an annual trust fund income of $120,000 ($1.6 million in 2014 terms), lifted him above the less driven bluebloods with whom he shared his privileged background.2
Yet his political views were far from usual for a young man of his elevated social status. While his dashing distant older relation Theodore had been a Republican president, albeit of a progressive sort, and had encouraged his young protégé to enter politics, Franklin followed his father into the Democratic Party. His early steps on the political ladder in New York meant having to overcome the natural conservatism and innate Republicanism of the country people in Dutchess County and persuade them that, despite his Democratic leanings, he would look after them as any good patrician would.
He smothered the traditional upstate voters’ suspicion of his upper-class manners and upper-class demeanor by exercising the quality that would eventually lead him to inhabit the White House: an effortless and irresistible personal charm. In addition, he was physically attractive and approached those less fortunate than himself with an easy, agreeable manner. His biographer Conrad Black described Roosevelt at this time as “slender, clean-shaven, mellifluous, and prone to make his points with a debonair wave of his cigarette-holder.”
Upon this secure social foundation Roosevelt established an unlikely political career, which, by the time of World War One, saw him as assistant secretary of the navy in Woodrow Wilson’s administration. Alongside him was Theodore Roosevelt’s niece Eleanor. When Theodore had given her away at their wedding ceremony, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1905, he had cracked, “There’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.”3 But, as with everything else about him, Franklin Roosevelt’s marriage and his romantic and sexual life was a study in equivocation. There was little doubt he loved Eleanor as a wife. They had six children together, and to all outward views it was a perfect marriage.
Yet Franklin’s eye wandered, often little further than toward distant members of the Roosevelt family who were recruited ostensibly to help him run his private office, and it wandered repeatedly. His sexual drive was so insistent that not even the polio he contracted at age thirty-nine, while summering at the family’s vacation home on the Canadian island of Campobello in 1921, brought his womanizing to a halt. Paralyzed from the waist down, in permanent discomfort, unable to walk unless his legs were reinforced with iron calipers, and largely confined to a wheelchair, he still found a way to both woo women and commit adultery with them.
Roosevelt’s philandering took place with the tacit consent, if not approval, of Eleanor. In September 1917, while unpacking her husband’s suitcase, she stumbled upon love letters from Lucy Page Mercer, her social secretary, and the marriage was thrown into disarray. Betrayed and bruised, the strong-willed Eleanor made her husband an uncompromising and nonnegotiable offer: he must abandon his mistress forthwith and appear a devoted husband or face divorce. The loving marriage was irrevocably broken, but Eleanor was prepared to allow it to seem intact for the sake of her five children. Rather than abandon his soaring political career, Franklin accepted Eleanor’s conditions. To please his long-suffering wife, he agreed to allow her to follow an independent course and establish a public career of her own.
It was a bargain Roosevelt was in no position to refuse if he was to pursue his ambition: to follow Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. A sex scandal and a conspicuous divorce would have stopped Franklin in his tracks. His affair with Mercer turned out to be a turning point in a marital arrangement that was always as much dynastic as a love match.4 What became one of the most powerful marriages in American history was forged in the heat of adultery into a formidable personal and political alliance.
The ambiguity at the core of his marriage was echoed through his politics. While his views were liberal, to maximize his appeal he liked to appear a political chameleon, blending in with whomever he needed to please in order to move on to the next stage in his ambitions. His country neighbor and eventual close government colleague Henry Morgenthau had learned that when Roosevelt said he was “100 percent” behind an idea, it meant nothing. The differences between what Roosevelt thought, what he said, and what he did were quite distinct.
So long as Theodore Roosevelt was alive, Franklin was under his sway. After Wilson took the United States into World War One on the Allied side—after a German U-boat torpedoed an American passenger ship, the Housatonic, off the Isles of Scilly—Theodore, much to Eleanor’s fury, tried to persuade Franklin to resign his post and “get into uniform at once.”5 A similar stunt leading the all-volunteer Rough Riders in the Spanish–American War of 1898 had transformed Theodore into a nationally known, swashbuckling war hero, and he felt Franklin should follow suit.
In January 1919, with the war won, Franklin and Eleanor embarked on a hastily arranged tour of Europe, ostensibly to “wind up naval affairs in Europe, dispose of what could be sold and ship home what could be used.”6 The real purpose, however, was a voyage of reconciliation to save their sputtering marriage. The couple had only been at sea for a few days when, on January 6, 1919, news came by ship’s telegraph of Theodore Roosevelt’s death by heart attack in his sleep.7 The sudden demise of his maverick mentor marked a profound change in the young assistant secretary of the navy’s thinking. Over the course of the trip, the influence of the opportunistic Theodore Roosevelt slowly gave ground in Franklin’s mind to the loftier sentiments of Woodrow Wilson.
An epiphany took place when the Roosevelts traveled home from Paris with the president’s party the following month. They were shown the first copy of the League of Nations charter by a New York Times reporter when they boarded the George Washington at Brest and Eleanor recalled “how eagerly we read it through!”8 Over luncheon, Wilson took Franklin and Eleanor into his confidence and explained why he thought it essential that the isolationist Republicans who were determined not to ratify the Treaty of Versailles should be defeated and that America should be allowed to join and lead the League. “The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust,” Wilson told them.9
The Treaty of Versailles became the first treaty in America’s history that the Senate did not ratify. Without American participation, the League soon showed its impotence in the face of territorial aggression by Japan and Italy and fell into abeyance. Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding,10 declared that “the issue of the League of Nations is as dead as slavery.”11 America returned to its happy isolation, protected on the east and west by vast oceans and on the north and south by the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the western hemisphere to be under the undisputed influence of the United States. Wilson’s failure to take into account the strong isolationist feeling in the Senate and his inability to forge a compromise had led inexorably to America’s failure to join the League. But it was not just hostility in the Senate that Wilson underestimated. As Franklin Roosevelt’s son Elliott observed, “[Wilson] made costly mistakes, the greatest of which was a failure to recognize the intrinsic isolationism of the American people.”12
The reasons for the president’s defeat were not lost on Roosevelt, whose political good fortune continued. In the 1920 election, he was the Democratic vice presidential candidate on the ticket of James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio, whose principal plank was ratification of the Versailles Treaty and America’s membership of the League of Nations.13 Roosevelt remained fully in favor of the League but was aware it would be a hard sell. “The League will not die,” he declared in his speech at the 1920 San Francisco convention accepting the number two position on the ballot. “Today we are offered a seat at the table of the family of nations to the end that smaller peoples may be truly safe to work out their own destiny. . . . We shall take that place. I say so because I have faith—faith that this nation has no selfish destiny.”14
It was wishful thinking. As Roosevelt biographer Ted Morgan observed, “After the wartime years of sacrifice and rationing, and the thousands of families who had lost a son or a brother, the American people did not want high-minded thoughts about international cooperation but a chance to improve their lives.”15
The League proved an idea before its time. In November 1920, it was, as a correspondent wrote to Roosevelt, “about the most effective millstone that any party, bent on suicide, has tied about its neck.”16 Nonetheless, spurred by the thought that at just thirty-eight he had beaten TR to the vice presidential nomination by four years, in late September Franklin set off on his first national campaign. Ferried around in his own private railroad carriage, the Westboro, he visited twenty states in eighteen days, giving seven speeches a day. By election day he had visited thirty-two states and spent sixty sleepless nights in a sleeping car.
Eleanor joined him briefly, to boost her husband’s support among women who were voting for the first time since winning suffrage, but she soon returned home, unable to adjust to the gossip, politicking, card-playing, and cigar-smoking of a campaign train. Roosevelt, however, found he was in his element, getting to know the whole country “as only a candidate for office or a traveling salesman can,”17 and freely trading on his link to TR. Such audacity attracted not only the disdain of the isolationist McCormick family’s Chicago Tribune, which reported that “Franklin is as much like Theodore as a clam is like a bear-cat,”18 but the disavowal of TR’s eldest son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr.,19 fresh from fighting on the Western Front, who told a group of cattle-raising Rough Rider veterans in Wyoming, “He does not have the brand of our family.”20
On November 2, 1920, Cox and Roosevelt were routed by Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, who won 61 percent of the popular vote and carried the electoral college by 404 votes to 127. To Roosevelt’s embarrassment, even New York state went Republican. One of his mother’s gardeners, of German descent, told Franklin that he had voted Republican because a relative had written from the old country complaining of food shortages, which he blamed on Wilson and the Versailles Treaty. When Franklin asked him, “Are you not an American citizen?” he replied, “Yes, but if America joins with England and France against Germany, I am a German.”21 It was a remark that would echo in Roosevelt’s mind in the years ahead.
After serving four years as governor of New York state, Roosevelt became the Democratic presidential candidate and was elected to the White House in 1932 at a time of dire national emergency. The stock market crash of 1929 took place on President Herbert Hoover’s watch, throwing the national economy into disarray and spurring a General Depression that threw millions out of work. The 1932 election turned on which candidate Americans believed would prise them from the mire. Foreign affairs were barely mentioned.
After his victory, Roosevelt spent his first two terms attempting, through the New Deal and other ingenious devices that employed state agencies, to reduce the misery of mass unemployment stemming from a collapse in business activity. But the 1930s were also a time of rising dictatorships in Europe and a growing threat to democracy everywhere. It was in these circumstances, with a second world war on the horizon, that Roosevelt had to decide whether to allow his name to be placed on the 1940 presidential ballot.
As time passed, he had come to fear that the rise of Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, and an increasingly bellicose military in Japan would lead to a war in Europe and the Far East that the United States could not avoid. He concluded privately that only he would be able to check the predominantly isolationist sentiments of the American people and prepare them for the prospect of war. But if he were to pull off the unprecedented feat of winning the presidency for a third term, it would take all his ambiguous wiles and ingenuity at equivocation. Hence his vagueness when answering questions from the press and his own party leaders about his intentions.
Ranged against him were a number of strong characters determined to keep America from intervening to protect the democracies which, as the Thirties progressed, were threatened by Japanese, Italian, and German invasion. Among those who campaigned against American involvement in what Thomas Jefferson had called in his inaugural address “entangling alliances”22 were some of the most influential in the land. There were the Old Contemptibles (Woodrow Wilson’s implacable opponents in the battle over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty by the Senate) and their descendants in Congress, who maintained a close watch on the executive branch nudging the nation toward war. They were joined by a number of very rich men: newspaper owners such as William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick;23 popular public figures such as the motor manufacturer Henry Ford, the transAtlantic flier Charles Lindbergh Jr., and the movie mogul Walt Disney; and financiers such as Joseph P. Kennedy, who harbored political ambitions that included the presidency.
There were well-defined differences between those who fought to keep America out of conflict. Some were isolationists pure and simple, who wished the nation to retreat behind its borders and even limit its trade with the outside world. Some were internationalist isolationists, who felt that America’s ability to sustain itself economically allowed it to strictly limit its contacts with foreign nations except for trade. And some were noninterventionists, who believed that America could continue trading without taking sides in foreign disputes. But such differences in definition were of little importance to Roosevelt.
To him, these groups soon combined into a single phalanx of opponents, ready to hinder at every turn his attempts to persuade the American people that the United States, by now the largest economy in the world, could no longer remain aloof from the existential threat posed by the dictators who were expanding their borders through force of arms and putting democracy to the sword. To win the people round, Roosevelt embarked on a tentative and delicate subterfuge, stressing the danger of America remaining isolated while declaring that he had no desire to allow the United States to take up arms against another nation. It was a tightrope walk between alarmism and complacency, for which his complex and sophisticated character was ideally suited.
And so it was that the president was portrayed in newspaper cartoons and in the Gridiron dinner sculpture as a sphinx. The British statesman Winston S. Churchill once described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”24 He might just as well have been describing Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man he would befriend and collaborate with to purge the world of Nazism.