by FDR
Franklin remained noncommittal. He said he was gratified to have so many supporters and was “greatly surprised to find many of these friends in somewhat unexpected quarters,” but he declined to announce his candidacy. When asked about his intentions, Roosevelt stressed the patriotic importance of his work in Washington and said it would not be right for him to leave while the war lasted. But he left the door ajar. “It would be foolish and idle for any man to say what he would or would not do in the future, particularly when the entire situation, international and political, may change overnight.”36
In June, President Wilson added his voice to those urging FDR to run. “Tell Roosevelt he ought not to decline to run for Governor of New York if it is tendered to him,” he advised Daniels.37 But Roosevelt, with Howe’s advice and Daniels’s support, decided against a run for the governorship. “I have made my position entirely clear,” he wrote Wilson, “that my duty lies in my present work—not only my duty to you and to the country but my duty to myself—If I were at any time to leave the Assistant Secretaryship it could only be for active service.”38 Roosevelt’s motives were mixed. So long as the war continued, he believed his place was to serve the war effort, either as assistant secretary or in uniform. To abandon his post would be tantamount to desertion. He also thought 1918 would be another Republican year. Whether he could unseat a popular incumbent was far from clear. Having lost one statewide race, Roosevelt did not want to lose another. What could not be foreseen was that the war would be over by election time and the political equation would have changed. The Democrats nominated Al Smith in FDR’s place in 1918, and Smith went on to win a stunning upset victory over Governor Whitman.39 In later years, Roosevelt claimed to have engineered Smith’s nomination.* “I see that you have been called the ‘best equipped’ man” for governor, FDR wrote Smith on the night of the Democratic primary. “May I tell you that this is not only true, but that I trust that the people of the State will realize that this is not a mere phrase—it is based upon actual fact.”40
As with Franklin, the war gave Eleanor the opportunity to move beyond her limited social circle. Her first four years in Washington as wife of a member of Wilson’s subcabinet had been almost as circumscribed as her life had been in New York, restricted to paying formal calls and leaving visiting cards, entertaining and being entertained, while supervising a household that grew larger each year. When war came, Eleanor found herself in great demand outside that narrow world, and like Franklin she threw herself into her new role with an enthusiasm she had not experienced since her days as head girl at Allenwood. She became an indefatigable organizer of Red Cross volunteers. Scarcely a troop train could pass through Union Station without Eleanor being there with a bevy of assistants to hand out coffee, sandwiches, and hand-knitted woolen socks.41
Despite her wide exposure, some prejudices died hard. Eleanor never felt completely comfortable with the Roman Catholic clergy and the Irish politicians with whom FDR consorted, and her tolerance for those of the Jewish faith grew slowly.* Eleanor was distressed in January 1918 when she was obliged to attend a gala given by the British Embassy to honor Bernard Baruch, then head of the War Industries Board. It would be “mostly Jews,” she wrote Sara, and “I’d rather be hung than seen there.” Afterward she reported, “The Jew party was appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels, and sables mentioned again.”42
Several months later Eleanor was surprised when FDR brought the young Harvard professor and Washington consultant Felix Frankfurter home for lunch. She found Frankfurter unappealing. “An interesting little man,” she wrote Sara, “but very Jew.”43 Later she would refuse to read Maurice Low’s interpretive biography of Woodrow Wilson because the author was “such a loathsome little Jew.”44 Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor’s elegant biographer, noted, “ER’s caustic comments concerning Jews remained a routine part of her social observation for many years, diminishing as her friendship with Baruch and other Jews flourished.”45
FDR did not have that problem. Although his half brother, Rosy, was a notorious anti-Semite, neither Sara nor Franklin’s father, James, was infected with the virus. James had numerous Jewish friends, including August Belmont and Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and he told Sara on several occasions that although he was not Jewish, “if he were he would be proud of it.”46 FDR enjoyed ethnic jokes and often told them himself, but he drew the line at sectarian slurs, especially if directed at particular individuals. And he recognized early in his career that he needed support across the religious spectrum. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., his neighbor in Dutchess County, was one of Franklin’s closest friends. They shared the interests of gentleman farmers, comparing notes on everything from breeds of dairy cattle to selective timbering. “Two of a kind,” FDR inscribed across a photograph of him and Morgenthau seated together in an open convertible. When he became governor, Roosevelt appointed Morgenthau chairman of New York’s Agricultural Advisory Commission and then called him to Washington in 1933 to head the newly established Farm Credit Administration. The following year Morgenthau succeeded William H. Woodin as secretary of the Treasury, a post he held for the duration of the Roosevelt administration.
Throughout his career FDR drew heavily on members of the Jewish faith for their skill and expertise. Judge Samuel Rosenman joined Roosevelt’s staff in 1928 as his chief aide and speechwriter and remained in that capacity until the president’s death in 1945. Sidney Hillman, Ben Cohen, and David Niles were in and out of the White House, advising the president and carrying water for the New Deal. Jews constituted roughly 3 percent of the population when FDR was president, yet they represented about 15 percent of his top appointments.47 Roosevelt set the tone with his masterly reply to a pointed query about his ancestry: “In the dim past [my ancestors] may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.”48 FDR’s response to the Holocaust was nuanced and complex, and certainly not everything America’s Jewish community desired, but that in no way diminishes his commitment to social justice or the breakthrough that the New Deal represented. Until 1933, Washington had been run by WASP descendants of old-stock Americans. Roosevelt opened government to those of talent regardless of pedigree.
The war years also saw Franklin and Eleanor grow distant. FDR put in longer hours at the Navy Department. Eleanor was drawn increasingly into volunteer work, and their summers were spent apart, Franklin at his post in Washington, ER and the children at Campobello. After the birth of their sixth child, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, on March 13, 1916, the evidence suggests that Eleanor and Franklin adopted abstinence as the only sure means of birth control. That was common at the time. The Episcopal Church (as well as the Roman Catholic) forbade birth control, and it was illegal in many states by statute.49 Sara had adopted the practice after Franklin’s birth, and in the refined circles in which the Roosevelts moved, contraception was almost never discussed.*
An only child, Franklin had wanted six children—the same number that had romped through Cousin Theodore’s home at Sagamore Hill. That desire had been one of the reasons he had been rejected by the young Alice Sohier in 1902, before his courtship of Eleanor. Whether he mentioned this same desire to Eleanor is unclear, but she had now given birth to six children (one of whom had died in infancy), and the Roosevelts would have no more.
The Roosevelt siblings are in agreement on the matter. Anna, who was closest to her parents, said her mother told her that “sex is an ordeal to be borne.” After John’s birth, “that was the end of any marital relationship, period.”50 James, more circumspect, wrote, “It is possible that she [ER] knew no birth-control methods other than abstinence when she determined to have no more children.”51 Elliott said that from John’s birth
until the end of Father’s days, my parents never again lived together as man and wife.
Mother had performed her austere duty in marriage, and five children were testimony to that. She wanted no more, but her blank ig
norance about how to ward off pregnancy left her no choice other than abstinence. Her shyness and stubborn pride would keep her from seeking advice from a doctor or woman friend.… It quickly became the most tightly held secret that we five children ever shared and kept.52
It was in the summer of 1916, shortly after the birth of John Aspinwall, that FDR took up with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s part-time social secretary. ER and the children were at Campobello, and Franklin was spending another summer alone in Washington. Lucy was nearby, unattached, and incredibly attractive. The long, tender love affair between Franklin and Lucy remained shrouded in secrecy until well after the president’s death. Eleanor never mentioned it in her extensive autobiographical writings; Franklin said nothing; and Lucy was among the most private of persons. The families knew, the White House staff was aware, and many in the press had more than an inkling of the relationship. In those days the private lives of public persons were strictly private.53 Journalists respected that, the public was not consumed with people watching, and the three protagonists—Eleanor, Franklin, and Lucy—conducted themselves with honor, dignity, and discretion.
Arthur Schlesinger put the romance into perspective: “If Lucy Mercer in any way helped Franklin Roosevelt sustain the frightful burdens of leadership in the Second World War, the nation has good reason to be grateful to her.”54
Lucy Mercer came into the Roosevelt family in the winter of 1914, when Eleanor, overwhelmed by her social obligations as wife of the assistant secretary of the Navy, hired her three mornings a week to assist with correspondence and help unravel the mysteries of Washington society. Lucy was twenty-three, the impoverished daughter of high-living socialites who had recklessly spent their way through a substantial fortune. She had been raised in Washington, just a few doors from the Roosevelt home on N Street, educated at a convent in Austria, and, despite the hard times on which her family had fallen, was listed in the Social Register in both New York and Washington. She attended the same parties and dinners as the Roosevelts, was accorded the deference bestowed on aboriginal families in the District of Columbia, and found ready employment as a social secretary, a genteel calling that virtually made one a member of the family.
The Roosevelt children adored her. Anna remembered Lucy’s warm smile and friendly greeting. Elliott called her gay, smiling, and relaxed. “She was femininely gentle where Mother had something of a schoolmarm’s air about her, outgoing where Mother was an introvert. We children welcomed the days she came to work.”55
Lucy was nearly as tall as Eleanor, fair, slender, and with the same blue eyes and light brown hair, but was far more graceful and at ease with herself. Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled Lucy as “beautiful, charming, and absolutely delightful,” with a really lovely face and “always beautifully dressed.”56 A friend, Aileen Tone, who held a similar position with Henry Adams, remembered seeing Lucy seated on the Roosevelts’ living room floor, the family’s bills, letters, and invitations spread around her in neat piles, “making order of them in a twinkle.”57 Another friend remembered her smile, “the most beautiful and winning I have ever seen.”58 Still another remembered her warm, mellow voice in contrast to the “shrill arpeggios” into which Eleanor’s sometimes climbed.59 Roy Jenkins (Lord Jenkins of Hillhead), FDR’s most recent biographer, may have said it best when he described Lucy as a young lady of delicate charm, “a quintessential Jane Austen heroine, cast up one hundred years late on the shores of the District of Columbia rather than those of Dorset or Devon.”60
Franklin was thirty-four, nine years older than Lucy, but still so youthful-looking that a cranky Wisconsin congressman ordered him to stub out his cigarette while he waited to testify before a House subcommittee, mistaking him for a junior clerk.61 His appeal for the opposite sex was now considerable. Arthur Murray, Great Britain’s assistant military attaché, spoke of Roosevelt as “breathing health and virility.”62 Bamie called him “my debonair young cousin,” and her elderly husband, Admiral Sheffield Cowles, teased Franklin that “the girls will spoil you soon enough. I leave you to them.”63
In 1915, when Franklin attended the Panama Pacific Exposition with his friend Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips, a San Francisco society matron proclaimed them “the most magnetic young men I ever saw. I had no idea that the Democratic party ever recruited that type of person.”64* A Washington doyenne remembered FDR from his time as assistant secretary as “the most desirable man” she had ever met.65 Alice Roosevelt Longworth, when she learned of Franklin’s interest in Lucy, confessed that she marveled he hadn’t strayed earlier.66
The romance began innocently enough. Franklin was again in Washington alone for the summer and continued his usual round of social engagements. Lucy was often present at those functions, and FDR, as was his wont, flirted brazenly. Lucy, who in many ways was as strong-willed as Eleanor, flirted back. One thing led to another, and soon Franklin was inviting her for cruises aboard the Navy’s yacht Sylph and long drives in the Virginia countryside. The cruises were always well attended by a host of guests, but the drives were strictly private.
“I saw you twenty miles out in the country,” Alice Longworth teased Franklin, “but you didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.”
“Yes, she is lovely, isn’t she?”67
FDR was happy in Lucy’s company and she very much in his. Unlike Eleanor, Lucy was uncritical in her affection and saw no need to direct his activities or admonish his behavior. She knew instinctively how to please him, to bolster rather than challenge him. Elliott recalls that Lucy had “the same brand of charm as Father, and there was a hint of fire in her warm dark eyes. In the new circumstances of Father’s life at home, I see it as inevitable that they were irresistibly attracted to each other.”68
Friends recognized that as well. A number, such as British Embassy counselor Nigel Law and Franklin’s Harvard classmate Livingston Davis, often provided cover, posing as Lucy’s escorts, while others, such as Alice Longworth and Edith Morton Eustis, provided safe houses for the couple to meet. “Franklin deserved a good time,” said Alice. “He was married to Eleanor.”69 Alice, though she had been Eleanor’s maid of honor, had little good to say about her cousin in those years, and her decision to provide succor for Franklin and Lucy was spiked with malice—perhaps because her own marriage to Nicholas Longworth had turned sour.
Edith Eustis, one of five attractive daughters of former vice president Levi Morton, was a Dutchess County neighbor of the Roosevelts and had known Franklin since childhood.70 She admired his work in Washington and adored Lucy, a cousin of her husband, William Corcoran Eustis. Their elegant Washington mansion, Corcoran House, had been built in the earliest days of the city for Lucy’s ancestor Maryland Governor Thomas Swann. It stood at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and H Street, directly across from Lafayette Park, astride the route Franklin walked each day to and from the Navy Department.71*
Eleanor sensed something amiss that summer. Franklin’s letters were intermittent and perfunctory, and he visited Campobello for only ten days, an aberration for someone who enjoyed the island so much as he. A polio epidemic raging along the East Coast kept Eleanor and the children at Campobello for four months instead of the usual two (the island proved to be insulated from the disease), and she did not return to Washington until after the election in November. “From a life centered entirely in my family,” she wrote many years later, “I became conscious that there was a sense of impending disaster hanging over all of us.”72 The comment in her autobiography is interlaced between references to the growing menace posed by imperial Germany in late 1916, and it is easy to believe that ER was referring to the international situation. Elliott and others believe she was referring to something more personal. “By ‘all of us’ she meant not the country at large, but her family. She was talking about trouble much closer to home.”73
The relationship between FDR and Lucy intensified in 1917. On June 24, ten weeks after the Uni
ted States entered the war, Lucy enlisted in the Navy as a yeoman (female) and was assigned secretarial duties in the office of the assistant secretary. To believe FDR did not have a hand in the assignment is to believe in the tooth fairy. Franklin did not flaunt his infatuation with Lucy, but he made no secret of his affection for her. He began to put in longer hours at the Navy Department and often did not arrive home until after midnight.74
That summer Eleanor delayed her departure for Campobello as long as feasible. She and Franklin had words, there were arguments and upsets, but it was all vague. FDR was eager for her to take the children out of the Washington heat; Eleanor was reluctant to leave Franklin alone in the city. Finally, on July 15, she packed up her family and went off to Campobello. FDR wrote her en route, part apology, part smoke screen: “[Y]ou were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo.… I know what a whole summer here does to people’s nerves and at the end of this summer I will be like a bear with a sore head … as you know I am unreasonable and touchy now—but I will try to improve.”75
Scarcely had Franklin written than The New York Times published an earnest interview with Eleanor that made matters worse. Under the headline “How to Save in Big Homes,” the Times snidely described the Roosevelt ten-servant household on N Street as a model of wartime thriftiness: “Mrs. Roosevelt does the buying, the cooks see that there is no food wasted, the laundress is sparing in her use of soap, and each servant keeps 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 ‘leftovers.’ ” Eleanor was quoted as saying that “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable.”76
