by Marc Peyser
The war had become Franklin’s life too, but that wasn’t good enough for Uncle Ted. TR repeatedly insisted that FDR quit his post at the navy and enlist, as he had done at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. (Franklin tried; the brass in the military, aware of his central role in overseeing the naval bureaucracy, refused to let him go.) What’s more, Theodore—approaching sixty, blind in one eye, and increasingly frail after grueling expeditions to Africa and South America—was itching to fight too. Just four days after Congress declared war, Theodore rushed to Washington in hopes of presenting his plan to President Wilson. He wanted to raise his own army division, something like the old Rough Riders and including some of the same men, and head to the battlefields of France. Franklin and Eleanor met him at the Longworths’ on that afternoon in April 1917, then Alice drove with her father to the White House. The guard at the northwest gate let them right in—they were, after all, previous tenants—but without an appointment they couldn’t get to Wilson. A week later, he tried again. This time, Theodore had asked Franklin to grease the skids, a tall order given that Wilson was Franklin’s boss and Theodore had been Wilson’s rival and harshest critic. But Wilson agreed to see him, and the former president arrived at the Red Room with his tail between his legs and Longfellow on his lips. “Mr. President, what I have said and thought,” he conceded, “is all dust in a windy street if we can make your message good.”57 The two presidents spent forty-five minutes chatting amiably, perhaps more amiably than either had expected. “There is a sweetness about him that is very compelling,” Wilson told an aide afterward. “You can’t resist the man.”58 When Theodore left, he spent the rest of the day back at Alice’s house, holding court with the press, a collection of ambassadors, and various congressmen eager to hear his battle plans. Wilson was actually in favor of sending TR to war, but his aides argued against it. One month and one personal plea on Roosevelt’s behalf by the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, later, Wilson officially rejected Roosevelt’s request. “I think the decision was a bitter blow from which he never quite recovered,” Eleanor said.59
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For all of Theodore’s war hungering, he managed to overlook his own daughter’s wan efforts. Even Alice admitted that her contributions paled next to those of women such as her brother Ted’s wife, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, who left their three young children at home in New York and went to France with the YMCA so she could be closer to her husband on the battlefields near Paris. “At that time, I was criticized for not serving my country,” Alice said. “I mean, I dished out ice cream to soldiers coming through and things like that, but nothing very serious.”60 She preferred to make the most of her natural talents—giving dinner parties, for example. Just because they didn’t require much sweat and sacrifice didn’t mean they weren’t worthy, right? “I think it pleased the Washington that went to and gave dinners to feel that entertaining the representatives of the Allies had a recognized part in ‘winning the war,’ ” she wrote. “Anyway, it was a far pleasanter form of ‘war work’ than canteens, Red Cross classes, and Liberty Loan drives.”61 Alice’s biggest contribution to the war effort might have been a fashion statement. When the press went after her for going out to a dinner one night wearing silk, ankle-length pants under her tunic-like top, she turned it into a civic-minded campaign: “I urge all the ladies to wear pantalettes,” she said. “They’re comfortable, economical and save considerable cloth.”62 Just as she did with smoking or driving, Alice turned her nonconformity into a lifestyle upgrade for all women.
Alice’s artful rationalizations didn’t entirely stunt her more patriotic instincts. She sold Treasury bonds63 and joined a committee to help government employees find housing in Washington.64 She even invited Eleanor to serve with her. Then, when Eleanor started volunteering at the Red Cross canteen, a tin-roofed shed near Union Station where arriving soldiers could stop for a bite to eat, Alice asked to tag along. “Alice has been here twice in two days & to ask if I want her to work anywhere & I’m going to try to get her interested,” Eleanor wrote to Isabella. “It is a pity so much energy should go to waste!”65 Yet Eleanor knew Alice well enough to suspect that her enthusiasm would melt about as quickly as a Washington snowstorm, especially because Alice informed her that “she did not like scrubbing and ironing,” as Eleanor said. “I’m taking Alice down to the canteen but I doubt if she does much and they told me they were almost afraid to take her on!”66 In fact, Alice lasted all of two trips before quitting due to an ailment she jokingly called “canteen elbow.”67
It’s hard to say whether the heretofore unknown canteen elbow was related to Eleanor’s finger condition, but it seems possible. One busy morning, Eleanor was using the bread-cutting machine to make sandwiches for the servicemen when she got distracted and gashed her finger. “There was no time to stop, so I wrapped something tightly around it and proceeded during the day to wrap more and more handkerchiefs around it, until it finally stopped bleeding,” she said.68 What was the point of Alice’s even showing up? She knew she could never compete with a woman who spilled so much blood for her country.
And that was just a start. Eleanor already put in round-the-clock shifts at the canteen in often sweltering conditions (“I’ve come to the conclusion that you only feel heat when idle,” she told Franklin).69 She also paid weekly visits to the naval hospital bearing flowers and cigarettes for the wounded sailors, supervised forty groups of women who were knitting clothes to send overseas (while also knitting in “every waking moment”), and presided at the occasional Navy Department rally—all while overseeing the Roosevelt household, moving the children back and forth to Hyde Park and Campobello, and entertaining foreign dignitaries as the wife of the assistant secretary of the navy. The Food Administration even singled her out for her outstanding at-home rationing program, which earned her a small write-up in the New York Times. “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable,” she explained modestly—though not modestly enough for Franklin.70 “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!” he wrote to her angrily. “Please have a photo taken showing the family, the ten cooperating servants, the scraps they saved from the table and the hand book. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.”71 With her own husband taking Eleanor down a peg, it’s hard to blame Alice for her “elbow” and her conclusion: “I leave the good deeds to Eleanor.”72 Anyway, Eleanor didn’t leave many undone.
On the other hand, Alice was only too happy to take on any naughty tasks that might arise, and it just so happened that one did. In the summer of 1918, the War Department suspected that a beautiful and wealthy young socialite named May Ladenburg was leaking American military secrets to the enemy. At the time, Ladenburg was the girlfriend of Bernard Baruch, a New York financier who was set to become chairman of the War Industries Board. The government believed that Ladenburg was charming (so to speak) information out of her lover. She and Baruch were mainstays on the Washington social circuit, so Alice naturally knew them both well. She had even attended parties at the N Street house that Ladenburg rented about a block away from the Longworths. When the Secret Service decided to bug Ladenburg’s home in hopes of collecting incriminating pillow talk, they came to Alice for advice on where to plant the listening devices. She suggested, among other places, “not exactly a hammock but a kind of mattress on a swing” in an upper balcony—prime tryst territory. “I discovered that all I was being asked to do was to look over transoms and peep through keyholes. Could anything be more delightful than that?” Alice said.73
Well, actually, yes. In order to trap Ladenburg, the government also needed to create some phony military documents so they could track the source of her information (the Feds believed she was feeding the intelligence to an uncle in Vienna). The official charged with preparing the documents was none other than Assistant Secretary Ro
osevelt. Together, the partners in crime had the pleasure of eavesdropping on Baruch and Ladenburg’s allegedly treasonous love nest. “We did hear her ask Bernie how many locomotives were being sent to Romania, or something like that. In between the sounds of kissing, so to speak,” said Alice. Neither Ladenburg nor Baruch was ever charged with a crime. Nonetheless, Eleanor charged both her husband and her cousin with conduct unbefitting a Roosevelt. “Eleanor apparently knew about what was going on—as a great many people did—and years afterwards when Franklin was at the White House we were both chuckling about the incident one time and Eleanor said, ‘You know, Alice, I have always disapproved of what you and Franklin were doing,’ ” Alice said. “Of course we were doing a most disgraceful thing in the name of looking after the affairs of the country, but it was sheer rapture!”74 Did she mean the spying or the fact that she was joined on the dark side by her virtuous cousin Eleanor’s husband?
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The war naturally brought plenty of hardship, too. For the Roosevelts, the darkest cloud came on July 16, 1918, when the local Associated Press reporter showed up on Theodore’s doorstep clutching a strange cable from France that read, “WATCH SAGAMORE HILL FOR—” For what? The censors had blotted out the rest. But Theodore felt sure it meant something had happened to one of his four boys. He asked the reporter to keep the mystery between the two of them for the moment, until they knew more. Theodore spent the evening with Edith as if nothing had happened. The next day before breakfast, the AP man returned with an unconfirmed report—it was young Quentin. He had been shot down over Chamery, France, deep behind enemy lines, and killed. Theodore went in to tell Edith and returned a half hour later with a public statement: “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had a chance to render some service to his country and show the stuff that was in him before his fate befell him.” Then the grieving parents climbed into a rowboat and paddled into the stillness of Oyster Bay.75 If either Theodore or Edith felt morose, they sealed the lid on their grief like a tomb. Two days later, they were in Saratoga for the Republican State Convention, where Theodore went on as the scheduled keynote speaker. Still no official word about Quentin. Back at Sagamore three days later, some family friends who worked with the Red Cross dropped by with a delegation of visiting Japanese colleagues and asked the ex-president for a tour.76 He took them to the trophy room and talked a bit about Japanese-American relations. On their way out, the neighbor, Trubee Davison, asked Roosevelt if he’d heard any more information about Quentin. “He said, ‘Trubee, just 20 minutes before you arrived I received this telegram from President Wilson,’ ” Davison said. “Then he showed me the telegram from Wilson that spoke of Quentin’s death. It was one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of control and courage I have ever seen.”77 Only those closest to the family could see through their steely curtain. “I dined with Alice last night & she says the family have been wonderful about Quentin,” Eleanor wrote two weeks after her cousin’s death. “He was killed instantly by 2 bullet holes in the head they have heard through Spain so he did not suffer & it is a glorious way to die but I know A. Edith & Ethel are suffering.”78
Though her brother Hall ultimately returned safely, Eleanor suffered a different kind of loss at the hands of the war. She reveled in juggling her full plate of volunteering and managing the household, but that left her little time for Franklin. When she wasn’t rushing from the canteen to the navy hospital, she was with the children in Hyde Park or Campobello. At the same time, Franklin was either sailing off to inspect naval bases or hopelessly trapped in Washington. “I do miss you so very much, but I am getting busier and busier and fear my hoped-for dash to Campo next week for two days will not materialize. Nor can I get to H. P. for Sunday, as I found my absence last Sunday has put me too far back,” he wrote to her.79 She had been petulant and suspicious about these sudden no-shows all summer, especially given how often Lucy turned up in Franklin’s letters. Eleanor realized that her former secretary was still turning up in the Roosevelts’ home, too, when she received a packet of paperwork in the mail from Lucy—even though Lucy had been fired weeks earlier. In August 1917, when Franklin entered a Washington hospital with a serious throat infection, Eleanor seized the chance to be alone with him. She left the children at Campobello and rushed home. The tone of Franklin and Eleanor’s conversations there was alternately warm and strained, based on the letter she wrote to him on the return train trip back north: “I hated to leave 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.”80
The content of the un-idle threat remains a mystery. Some biographers believe she ordered him to stop making excuses and get up to Campobello by the appointed date or she would drag the brood back to Washington. (He did in fact show up as commanded.)81 Others believe she actually confronted him about Lucy. “There was no mystery; she threatened to leave him,” said their son Elliott.82 But that seems unlikely. The truth is, despite her festering suspicions about Franklin and Lucy, Eleanor had adopted an astonishing see-no-evil attitude toward their relationship, even by her usual doormat standards. One day in the winter-spring of 1918, Eleanor was alone at home in Washington. Franklin had gone on a short trip to award some navy medals, and this time he took Mama and the two youngest boys, Franklin junior and John, with him. Eleanor spent the late afternoon listening to the wartime debates in the Capitol. She apparently also spent the day with Alice, who decided to have a fraught conversation with her cousin after the last hearing of the day. “On the way out I parted with Alice at the door not having allowed her to tell me any secrets,” she said. “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!”83
Would Alice really have tattled on Franklin right in the Capitol rotunda? The larger question is why Alice, once again, acted so cruelly toward her oldest and once-dearest cousin—so cruel that she seemed determined to bulldoze her marriage. It wasn’t just that Alice liked to make trouble for her own amusement, though that was certainly part of it. It was around this time that she became infamous on the dinner-party circuit for her braying Eleanor imitations. With her teeth thrust out, her jaw tucked in, and her voice ratcheted to a quivering upper register, Alice’s take on Eleanor came across as something like a talking horse just out of a proper British finishing school. “Alice was venomous toward Eleanor,” said Margaret Cutting, Hall Roosevelt’s first wife. “I never saw anybody so vicious.”84
But Alice didn’t see it that way. She just thought Eleanor needed to lighten up. “She had so little enjoyment, so little amusement. She was so insecure about so many things,” Alice said. “I’ve always laughed about the family, including myself. I’m a comic character too.”85 In fact, there was something almost protective about the way Alice confronted her cousin that day in the Capitol. She could easily have ratted Franklin out. Instead, she tried to lead Eleanor to uncover the truth for herself. If Franklin’s relationship with Lucy really was an open secret around town, being the last one to know would make the situation that much more humiliating. Alice knew how it felt to be the subject of gossip. She had once been the most gossiped-about woman in the country. And she knew what it felt like to endure an unfaithful husband. If Franklin wasn’t going to let his wife confront the situation on her own terms—rather than have the situation thrust on her when she least expected it—Alice was at least going to force his hand.
Instead of following Alice’s lead, Eleanor once again buried her head and carried on her life as if nothing were amiss in her marriage. Franklin certainly couldn’t get in much trouble in the summer of 1918. After months of badgering Secretary Daniels, he was finally being sent overseas to tour the troops in Europe. He sailed from Brooklyn on July 9 and spent two months in England, France, Italy, and Belgium. FDR might have been only an assistant secretary, but he was treated lik
e royalty. He had a private forty-five-minute meeting at Buckingham Palace with King George V, who also sent regards to the family. (“He had just had a nice letter from Uncle Ted, thanking him for one he had sent at the time of TR’s illness last spring,” FDR wrote to Eleanor.)86 He also met the prime ministers of England (Lloyd George), France (Clemenceau), and Italy (Orlando), along with a fleet’s worth of admirals, colonels, and generals from throughout the Allied countries and a smattering of American politicians (Herbert Hoover, Fiorello La Guardia) who happened to be passing through. He even found time to squeeze in visits with a few relatives, including Roosevelt cousins Archie, Ted junior, and Ted’s wife, Eleanor.
Naturally, Eleanor kept herself just as busy at home. She spent the first month alone in Washington, mostly slaving away in the canteen while the children were up in Hyde Park. “It was not an unusual thing for me to work from nine in the morning until one or two the next morning, and be back again by 10 a.m.,” she said. “The nights were hot and it was possible to sleep only if you were exhausted.”87 At least she had some company. “Mrs. Wilson now has a uniform and comes to work fairly regularly,” she wrote to Sara.88 Eleanor did finally escape the heat for a few weeks in Hyde Park, taking a break only to attend the funeral of Aunt Corinne’s husband, Douglas Robinson. She got word a few days later that Franklin would be heading home. Then, the day before his arrival, an urgent telegram arrived from the Navy Department saying that Franklin had contracted double pneumonia and that she should meet him at the dock in Hoboken with an ambulance. (Many others on board Franklin’s ship were also gravely ill; a few had died and been buried at sea in the Atlantic.)89 Naturally, Mama insisted on joining Eleanor to collect her boy. On September 19, the women and a doctor waited for Franklin, had him loaded onto a stretcher, then quickly delivered him to Sara’s side of the house on Sixty-Fifth Street (Franklin and Eleanor had rented theirs out while they were living in Washington). “My husband did not seem to me so seriously ill as the doctors implied,” Eleanor wrote later in her memoir, but plenty of other folks were worried.90 “Dear Franklin, We are deeply concerned about your sickness, and trust you will soon be well. We are very proud of you. With love, Aff. Yours Theodore Roosevelt.”91
