by Marc Peyser
If, in retrospect, Eleanor seemed blasé about her husband’s condition, maybe it was because she was too angry to care how he had been feeling. After she and Mama put Franklin to bed, Eleanor set about unpacking his suitcases. As she went through his documents and tried to put them in order for him, she came across a stack of letters. They were from Lucy. She read them. The feeling was as stunning as being smacked across the face. “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” she said, “and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world honestly for the first time.”92
* * *
* He was also an avowed teetotaler. Josephus Daniels had recently banned alcohol from all navy ships, yards, and stations, suggesting instead that the men drink coffee. Thus the mocking phrase “a cup of Joe” was born.
Chapter 5
THE BREAK BEGINS
In December 1918, Theodore Roosevelt started talking about running for president again, which was surprising given that he was confined to a New York City hospital bed at the time. The Roosevelt men, for all their lust for life, were often betrayed by their bodies. Theodore had driven his especially hard, ever since he took up boxing as a way to beat back childhood asthma. His rough-riding adventures were the stuff of legend—and only the beginning. Right after leaving the White House, he and Kermit had gone on an African safari deep into the heart of darkness. The following year, father and son took on Brazil, where they explored an uncharted tributary of the Amazon (now called the Rio Roosevelt). They contracted malaria, and at one point Kermit almost had to leave his father behind in the jungle with a leg that had become so infected the expresident couldn’t walk. Now, at sixty, he was suffering with some combination of inflammatory rheumatism, vertigo, gout, lumbago, sciatica, anemia, and blindness in one eye. His doctors feared he would eventually be consigned to a wheelchair. “All right,” the Colonel said after receiving that dour diagnosis, “I can work and live that way too.”1 A Roosevelt wouldn’t let a mere wheelchair keep him from pursuing the White House.
Though he’d been ailing off and on for months, Theodore’s hospitalization was preceded by a typical tornado of activity, including a series of speeches in early October that took him to Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska, and Montana. Quentin’s death in July had been hanging heavily on him, and the Roosevelt cure for what ailed them was always action. On October 28, the day after his sixtieth birthday, Theodore delivered a two-hour speech (vetted once again by Alice) in Carnegie Hall that the New York Times called “savage.” He was responding to a plea by President Wilson, made a few days earlier, to reelect a Democratic Congress that would assure passage of his fourteen-point peace plan. “He does not ask for loyalty to the nation,” Roosevelt said. “He only asks for support of himself.”2 Roosevelt told the Carnegie audience that the fourteen points should be “emphatically repudiated” because they would fail to achieve “the peace of complete victory, a peace obtained by machine guns and not typewriters.” The standing-room crowd frequently broke into the kinds of cheers you might hear at a boxing match: “Rub it in, Teddy!” Outside, several thousand more followers overran the sidewalks and the police.
The speech might have been a triumph, but the stress of delivering it slammed the man like a steer going down at a rodeo. Theodore’s rheumatism (or gout, or whatever it was—the doctors were never sure) made one of his feet swell so badly that he couldn’t get a shoe over it. He was ordered to stay in bed, as if that meant anything. Election Day was November 5, so he naturally ignored his doctors and dragged himself to a blacksmith’s shop in Oyster Bay that served as the local polling place. Roosevelt got his wish; the Senate and the House both flipped to Republican. Even better, on November 9, Alice’s old friend Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and fled to the Netherlands. Two days later, at precisely 11:00 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the armistice began.
—
Alas, November 11 was also the day Theodore landed in the hospital. He languished there for forty-four days, pondering a future somewhere between a wheelchair and the Oval Office. To prove his mettle to himself and the rest of the world, he maintained his usual, manic writing pace, from newspaper columns to the outline of his presidential platform. At one point, he wrote a five-page letter to his friend Rudyard Kipling, but before he could mail it, a letter from Kipling himself arrived. So Theodore wrote him four more pages and mailed them all.
The Colonel had begun to walk a little better by Christmas Day, and his doctors let him return home. Ted junior and Kermit were still in Europe recovering from their war wounds, but Alice, Ethel, and Archie met him at Sagamore, along with a dusting of snow that covered his beloved homestead like a welcoming blanket. There was no holiday from the joint pain, however. His wrist was so inflamed that he had to confine it to a sling and take arsenic injections to reduce the agony. He needed help shaving and had to dictate his letters and columns to Edith or Archie. By January 4, Edith became concerned enough to call in a full-time nurse and his retired White House valet, James Amos, the only person whom the president would allow to help him bathe and dress. He kept dictating—letters, editorials, corrections to a manuscript he’d written—but the pain had worsened on January 5 to the point where the nurse gave him a shot of morphine around midnight to help him sleep. He was staying in Ethel’s old room that night, with Amos sitting near him by the coal fire. “James, will you please put out the light,” Theodore asked just after the nurse left. Edith came to check on him at about 12:30 a.m. and again at 2:00 and found him sleeping peacefully; she didn’t dare kiss him for fear of disturbing him. At 3:00 a.m., Theodore’s breathing began to rev and fade like a sputtering car engine, and so loudly that it woke up Amos. He fetched the nurse. At 4:00 a.m., they summoned Edith, who rushed to her husband’s bedside. “Theodore, darling!” she said. He didn’t respond. He seemed to her to be “just asleep, only he could not hear.” The doctors ruled that he died of a pulmonary embolism. On his nightstand were notes he had dictated to Archie, coordinating a lobbying effort in Washington. Among the condolences that began arriving in sacks the next day was one from Vice President Thomas Marshall. “Death had to take him sleeping,” he wrote, “for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
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Theodore Roosevelt had died so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that most of the family received the grim news long-distance. Archie sent his brothers in France a cable as sharp and piercing as an arrow: “The old lion is dead.” Kermit didn’t get the message right away. He was away from his base, visiting a group of war correspondents in Koblenz at the time. The men there received word via the wireless and were about to break the news to Kermit when he stood up and asked to excuse himself because he wanted to read a letter he’d recently received from his father. No one had the stomach to tell him that “the old lion” was already gone.
Aunt Corinne, who had been scheduled to visit her brother at Sagamore that day, got a call at 6:00 a.m. from Edith. She arrived later that morning, and the two childhood friends “walked far and fast along the shore and through the woodlands he had loved.” By the time they finished, near dusk, Sagamore was being patrolled by a fleet of guardian angels. “They must be planes from the camp where Quentin trained,” said Edith. “They must have been sent as a guard of honor for his father.”3
Though Alice had been home for Christmas, her father had seemed to be improving enough for her to return to Washington for New Year’s. He had been the most significant presence in her life, the man whose approval or absence, feats or failures dictated most every decision she made. His passing before she could say good-bye left her speechless. She was reportedly “overcome by grief” at his funeral, but she never talked about her father’s death.4 Her most voluble response was a mere echo, a biblical allusion that came to mind after hearing of Archie’s telegram to his brother: “The old lion perisheth for lack of prey, and the stout lion’s whelps are scattered abroad.”5 In Crowded Hours, her autobiography, she skips from his Carnegie Hall speech to her postwar campaign ag
ainst Wilson’s peace plan. Just as Theodore Roosevelt’s memoirs omitted any mention of his first wife’s death, if Alice’s memoir were your only source about President Roosevelt, you would never know he died.
Typically, Theodore’s favorite niece worried about everybody’s feelings but her own when she got the news. “I think much of Aunt Edith for it will leave her very much alone,” Eleanor wrote to Sara, adding, “Another big figure gone from our nation and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”6 Unfortunately, Eleanor couldn’t offer her sympathies in person to Edith and her Oyster Bay family. She and Franklin were crossing the Atlantic and playing shuffleboard on the USS George Washington when the ship broadcast the radio report of Uncle Ted’s death. It was Franklin’s second voyage to Europe in the last six months. The first time, he had gone to assess the readiness of American naval forces and forge contacts with the Allies. Now he was going to close up shop two months after the armistice. The fact that he brought Eleanor along on this second sailing spoke less about the peaceful changes in Europe than about a shift in FDR’s priorities. Last time he thought he was helping to save the world. Now he was hoping to save his marriage.
Despite Alice’s hints, a town full of gossip, and enough of her own suspicion to have fired Lucy Mercer, Eleanor was by all accounts stunned when she harvested that bitter crop of love letters from Franklin’s luggage after his previous European voyage. She did nothing at first, either out of shock or because Franklin was still so sick. But when she finally got up the nerve to confront him, letters in hand, the results were devastating. If he wanted a divorce, Eleanor told him, he could have one, though most of the family didn’t know about her offer until many years later. “I remember one day I was having fun with Auntie Corinne. I was doing imitations of Eleanor, and Auntie Corinne looked at me and said, ‘Never forget, Alice, Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom,’ ” Alice recalled. “And I said, ‘But darling, that’s what I’ve wanted to know about all these years. Tell!’ ”7 After all, misery loves company. Alice had once offered her philandering husband a divorce, too.
Franklin did want out; he intended to marry Lucy. But while Eleanor initially seemed resigned, she was becoming more assertive and shrewd by the minute. After appearing to surrender to Franklin’s wishes, she went behind his back and called in the heavy artillery: his mother. Sara was appalled at the notion of divorce. It had no place in her Victorian worldview. What’s more, Eleanor had spent the last few years courting her mother-in-law. Despite their occasional tensions, they had grown closer. There’s a genuine warmth pervading their letters, especially during these years of personal trials for Eleanor. “How lucky we are to have you and I wish we could always be together,” she wrote to Sara. “Very few mothers I know mean as much to their daughters as you do to me.”8
With Franklin’s illness holding him captive in his mother’s house that fall of 1918, Sara convened a meeting with her son and daughter-in-law to hash out the future. Like any smart parent, Mama knew that the surest way to push Franklin toward a divorce was to forbid him to get one. Instead, she simply informed her son that she would stop supporting him if he chose Lucy over Eleanor. He could never afford two houses, the various club memberships, a boat, and the children’s upbringing on his salary and modest inheritance (Eleanor’s $8,000 annual trust income was actually $3,000 more than what Franklin got from his father’s bequest).9 Life with Lucy would mean the end of his lavish lifestyle. To ensure that Franklin understood what was at risk, Louis Howe, his faithful consigliere, joined the tug-of-war. Facing the loss of his franchise player, Howe let Franklin know that divorce would vaporize his political career as well. He made sure Eleanor understood that too, in those moments when she seemed fed up with playing the good wife. “Louis did a selling job,” Elliott said. “Father wanted to give it up and mother felt betrayed and had a primitive outlook on it, but she came around because Louis convinced her.”10 With Mama and Howe lining up one hurdle after another—there was also Lucy’s inconvenient Catholicism, which meant that her marrying a divorced man was highly unlikely—Franklin did what any clever and ambitious man would do. He broke off with Lucy and told her it was all Eleanor’s fault. “She and Franklin were very much in love with each other,” said Mrs. Lyman Cotten, Lucy’s cousin and confidante. “I know that a marriage would have taken place but as Lucy said to us, ‘Eleanor was not willing to step aside.’ ”11
Nonetheless, Eleanor got even with Franklin for the Lucy Mercer mess. As part of her agreeing to stay married, she forced Franklin to make a considerable sacrifice: their sex life. She was thirty-four. He was thirty-six. They never slept in the same bed again. While it’s impossible to know if they remained celibate for the remaining twenty-seven years of their marriage, it’s telling that Eleanor, who became pregnant on her honeymoon and gave birth to six children in rapid succession, had no more pregnancies. To the wronged wife, this frigid arrangement—something of a symbolic neutering—represented the ultimate punishment. At the same time, the end of their “marital relations” was no great loss to Eleanor. She later told her daughter, Anna, that she “had never been sexually fulfilled” and considered sex a “cross to bear.”12 When Eleanor caught a young Anna masturbating in bed, she tied her daughter’s hands above her head to the bedposts.13 Sex required a certain loss of control, of inhibition. Eleanor wasn’t comfortable with those emotions anywhere, least of all in the bedroom.
Which isn’t to say that she wanted no relationship with Franklin. On the contrary, she still cared for him, and he for her. “There was always an affection between them,” wrote their son James. “After all, they had shared a lot and continued to share to the end.”14 Eleanor craved something like what Alice seemed to have with Nick in their similarly flawed but productive marriage. She wanted a partnership. “She demanded respect from then on,” James said.15 That trip to Europe in January 1919—in two adjoining cabins, not one—marked the beginning of their lives as equals. The seas crossing the Atlantic were horribly rough. Bernard Baruch, the object of Franklin and Alice’s tawdry little reconnaissance mission, was on board and spent most of the time sick in his cabin. Livingston Davis, one of FDR’s Harvard buddies who was also traveling with the Roosevelts, noted “whole dining room wrecked by heavy roll, also my breakfast landing on top of waiter’s head.”16 It should have been torture for the sea-phobic Eleanor. Instead, she found herself sailing along comfortably. “I could sit at table, eat or dress or do whatever life required with a certain amount of assurance that I would get through the ordeal without being really ill!” she said.17 Was it a coincidence that she found her sea legs just as she found herself on more equal footing with her husband?
Franklin did his utmost to embrace Eleanor’s growing presence. During their thirty-five days abroad, they toured several stops along the French front lines, including battlefields in the Somme and Boulogne not often visited by women. She joined him to meet the president of France and numerous high-ranking soldiers while squeezing in visits with her injured cousins Ted and Kermit and a mini-reunion with her Allenswood classmates. The overall effect was like a vitamin B12 shot of confidence. Unlike the infamous night when she slept petulantly on the doorstep awaiting Franklin’s return from a late party, Eleanor dragged him away from a dinner one night at 11:00 when she noticed he was becoming “fascinated by Lady Scott”—then bragged about it to Mama in a letter.18 To top it all off, the Roosevelts shared the ship home with President and Mrs. Wilson, lunching with him on the rare occasion when he deigned to mix with his shipmates, then riding the train together from Boston to Washington. “At every station cheering crowds greeted the President, even long after dark. My first experience of the kind and very moving, because the people seemed to have grasped his ideals and to want to back them,” she said.19 (A curious observation, given that she’d spent Inauguration Day 1905 with a president at least as popular as Wilson—Uncle Ted.) It’s telling that in her autobiography This Is My Story, ER devoted more space to this Europea
n trip than to any other single incident. She titled the chapter “Abroad Together.”
If Eleanor held a grudge against Alice for aiding and abetting the enemy of her marriage, she didn’t show it. She invited the Longworths over for dinner regularly, as she always had. In many ways, the dynamic of their relationship was unchanged: it was still Alice the Imp and Eleanor the Audience. Alice was the main event at a dinner in October 1919 for Sir Edward Grey, an old friend of Theodore’s and a former British foreign secretary, who was on a last-ditch mission to persuade President Wilson to compromise with the Republicans in order to ratify the League of Nations. “Lord G. said to Alice, ‘I would like to have a list of the books which you have read and I’ve never heard of’! She really is extraordinary and kept us all entertained,” Eleanor wrote to Sara.20 The cousins clearly cared deeply about each other. Just before midnight on June 2, 1919, Alice and Nick arrived home from a party and were greeted at their door by a friendly local policeman she called Loftus. He wanted to tell the Longworths about an enormous explosion that had been reported just a few minutes earlier at the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the controversial attorney general who had begun arresting perceived Russian sympathizers. (In fact, it was Palmer who deported Emma Goldman later that year, with the help of his eager new assistant, J. Edgar Hoover.) The Palmers lived at 2132 R Street NW. Franklin and Eleanor now lived at 2131 R Street, directly across the road. Nick, Alice, and Loftus jumped in the Longworths’ car and drove the few blocks to the crime scene. They arrived to find shattered windows everywhere, chunks of the Palmer house missing, and anarchist literature strewn around the block. No one was hurt but the hapless perpetrator, who police believed might have tripped and fallen on the bomb while approaching the Palmers’ front porch. “We went in to see Franklin and Eleanor,” Alice said. “A leg lay in the path to the house next to theirs, another leg farther up the street. A head was on the roof of another house. As we walked across it was difficult to avoid stepping on bloody chunks of human being. The man had been torn apart, fairly blown to butcher’s meat.”21 Like Alice and Nick, Franklin and Eleanor had gone out that evening and arrived home just minutes after the blast. “Finding me standing by the window, father embraced me so hard that, in my mind, I can still feel the ardor of it,” James said. “Mother merely asked, ‘Whatever are you doing out of bed at this hour, James?’ as if a bomb exploded every hour.”22
