by FDR
FDR responded with biting sarcasm:
All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband to the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires! Please have a photo of the family, and ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table. 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 began to get telegrams of congratulations and requests for further details from Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Francisco and other neighboring cities.77
Eleanor was mortified. “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way,” she replied. “I feel dreadfully 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.”78 The flap ended quickly. It was ER’s first experience at the hands of the press, and she had no idea how her candor could be exploited. She was never “caught again,” and never again referred publicly to her household staff.*
In early August FDR came down with a serious throat infection that hospitalized him for four days. Eleanor rushed to his side and remained in Washington for almost two weeks. They evidently quarreled again, and Eleanor insisted he come to Campobello by the end of the month.79 “I hated to leave you yesterday,” she wrote on August 15. “Please go to the doctor twice a week, eat well and sleep well, and remember I count on seeing you on the 26th. My threat was no idle one.”80
The precise nature of ER’s threat is unknown, but the context is clear. Some authors suggest she meant to bring the children back to Washington immediately if FDR did not appear.81 Elliott, who edited his father’s papers, is more explicit: “There was no mystery; she threatened to leave him.”82
Whatever the case, FDR made it to Campobello in time to forestall a crisis, and that autumn the Roosevelts moved into more spacious quarters at 2131 R Street. “Whether ER was consciously aware at this time that FDR spent as many hours as possible with Lucy Mercer, we shall never know,” wrote Blanche Wiesen Cook. But members of the family knew, so did many of ER’s Red Cross co-workers, and, in Cook’s words, so did “almost everybody else of importance in Washington. Certainly on some level she knew it all, the way lovers always know, unconsciously and through every cell of their being, when somebody else has preempted some big or little piece of their beloved’s heart.”83
One important figure in Washington who had become aware was Josephus Daniels, FDR’s family-minded chief at the Navy Department. On October 5, 1917, Yeoman Lucy Mercer was summarily discharged from the service “by Special Order of the Secretary of the Navy.” No explanation was provided. No reason was given, and Lucy’s conduct was rated outstanding. Daniels was a man who, in his son’s words, “never let it be known that he knew what he did not want to know.”84 He never indicated in his diary or by word of mouth that he had ever heard of Lucy Mercer. But he could not have failed to notice the chemistry between his assistant secretary and his comely yeoman aide, nor could he disregard the warnings flashed by his wife, who was well aware of the Washington gossip.85
Daniels was old-fashioned about the sanctity of marriage and the sin of divorce. When his brother-in-law, who ran the Raleigh News & Observer in his absence, announced his intention to divorce and remarry, Daniels peremptorily fired him and ran him out of state. The “Chief” loved Franklin as a son. He held Eleanor in deep respect. And he could recognize trouble when he saw it. A divorce would have been political suicide for FDR. Even a scandal would be hard to live down. To prevent that, Daniels evidently decided it was best for Miss Mercer to move on.
During the next six months Eleanor and Franklin saw little of each other. He continued to put in long hours at the Navy Department and saw Lucy when he could, while ER devoted every day to the Red Cross. “I loved it. I simply ate it up,” she wrote later.86 For Eleanor, her war work was an essential distraction that kept her mind occupied. Feeling alone and increasingly isolated, she instinctively turned to Sara for reassurance. The relationship between Eleanor and her mother-in-law had never been easy. But with her marriage threatened, ER found Sara a dependable ally. Sara’s unyielding insistence on family tradition, her unstinting advocacy of virtue and noblesse oblige, even her deep-seated conservatism appealed to Eleanor as she faced the crisis she did not yet fully comprehend.
In the winter of 1918 Eleanor wrote Sara almost every day. She mentioned nothing directly but spoke often of the need to confide, to talk intimately: “I miss you and so do the children. As the years go on, I realize how lucky we are to have you, and I wish we could always be together. Very few mothers I know mean as much to their daughters as you do to me.”87 Sara responded with equally fulsome praise. The two women were never closer. On March 17, 1918—Franklin and Eleanor’s thirteenth wedding anniversary—Sara sent a congratulatory telegram. Eleanor wrote movingly in reply:
I often think what an interesting happy life Franklin has given me and how much you have done to make our life what it is. As I have grown older I have realized better all you do for us and all you mean to me and the children especially and you will never know how grateful I am nor how much I love you dear.88
In the summer of 1918 FDR finally managed to get to the front in France. The Senate Naval Affairs Committee was heading to Europe, and Daniels wanted Roosevelt to get there first and correct anything that might attract its criticism.89 Franklin chose to make the Atlantic crossing aboard the USS Dyer, a newly commissioned destroyer rushed into service without a shakedown cruise to escort a convoy of troopships through the war zone. He reveled in every moment, from the storm that smashed the crockery in the wardroom to an engine breakdown and the alarm bells signaling a U-boat attack that never materialized. As Roosevelt retold the story through the years, the German submarine came closer and closer until he had almost seen it himself.
In England, FDR met Lloyd George (“not very tall, rather large head, rather long hair, but tremendous vitality”) and the King (“He seemed delighted that I had come over on a destroyer”); consulted with the Admiralty; spent a weekend at Cliveden with Lady Astor (“enthusiastic, amusing and talkative as always”), and spoke at a banquet at Gray’s Inn.90 In Paris he dined with President and Mme. Poincaré (“much like similar dinners at the White House except that here the wines were perfect of their kind and perfectly served”); spoke again with Marshal Joffre (“older and grayer than when he was in the United States”); and, the high point of his visit, met with the premier, Georges Clemenceau.
I knew at once I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France. He did not wait for me to advance to meet him at his desk, and there was no formality such as one generally meets.… He is only 77 years old and people say he is getting younger everyday. He seemed delighted at the present rate of progress. [T]he wonderful old man leaves his office almost every Saturday in a high-powered car, dashes to the front, visits a Corps Commander, travels perhaps all night, goes up a good deal closer to the actual battle line than the officers like, keeps it up all day Sunday and motors back in time to be at his desk on Monday morning.91
Roosevelt was especially impressed by French sangfroid. Despite four years of war, with the Germans literally outside the gates of Paris, they continued “the planting of the flower beds in the Tuileries and the repairing and cleaning of streets. They seem to lose their heads even less than the Anglo-Saxons—very different from what we thought four years ago.”92
From Paris, FDR went to the front. After relieving an American naval attaché who sought to keep him out of the trenches, he pushed his party from one battlefield to the next. He saw Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Verdun, was briefly under enemy fire (“the long whining whistle of a shell was followed by the dull boom of the explosion”), and came within a mile of the German lines. “Such tireless energy as Roosevelt’s I have never known,” said Captain Edward McCauley, Franklin’s naval aide, “except perhaps for his kinsman
, Theodore Roosevelt. I thought I was fairly husky, but I couldn’t keep up with him.”93
If Franklin did not see combat, he surely experienced its immediate aftermath: the shell holes filled with water, the roofless houses and splintered trees, the stench of dead horses, “rusty bayonets, broken guns, discarded overcoats and ration tins, rain-stained love letters, men buried in shallow graves, some unmarked, some with rifles stuck in the earth bayonet down, and some, too, with a whittled little cross and a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung on it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.” That is the way Franklin described Belleau Wood, a memory he would cite again and again.94
From France, FDR went briefly to Italy, hoping to resolve the complicated command structure in the Mediterranean. In Rome he met with his naval counterparts and urged that the Italian fleet take action against the Austrians as soon as possible. At one point he questioned the wisdom of keeping the main Italian battle fleet riding at anchor in Taranto harbor for more than a year, with no drill or target practice.
“Ah,” said the Italian chief of staff, “but my dear Mr. Minister, you must not forget that the Austrian Fleet have not had any either.”
“This is a naval classic which is hard to beat,” FDR wrote afterward, “but which perhaps should not be publicly repeated for a generation or two.”95
From Italy back to France, then briefly to England before boarding the troopship USS Leviathan in Brest on September 8 for the return home. “Somehow I don’t believe I shall be long in Washington,” he wrote Eleanor before sailing. “The more I think of it the more I feel that being only 36 my place is not at a Washington desk, even a Navy desk. I know you will understand.”96
Whatever Franklin’s wish for active service, the Atlantic crossing of the Leviathan in September 1918 was certainly one he preferred to forget. Another Spanish influenza epidemic swept Europe and the United States that year, taking more than 20 million lives. Leviathan was hit hard. Virtually the entire ship’s complement was struck down, Franklin included. Many of the officers and men were buried at sea, while Franklin hovered semiconscious in his bunk, his condition exacerbated by the onset of double pneumonia. The Navy Department kept a wary eye on Leviathan as it made its way to New York. Secretary Daniels telegraphed Sara of Franklin’s condition, suggesting that she and Eleanor (who was in Hyde Park) meet the ship when it docked on September 19.
“When the boat docked and we went on board,” Eleanor recalled years later, “I remember visiting several of the men who were still in bed. My husband did not seem to me so seriously ill as the doctors implied.”97 The fact is that Franklin’s condition was still grave: he was so weak he had to be carried off the ship to an ambulance and borne up the stairs of Sara’s house on East Sixty-fifth Street by four muscular orderlies. While it is possible that Eleanor’s recollection may reflect her feelings at the time, it is more likely to have been colored by the bitterness that set in shortly afterward.98
In the course of unpacking Franklin’s luggage, Eleanor discovered a neatly bound packet of love letters from Lucy Mercer. “The bottom dropped out of my world,” Eleanor remembered. “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”99
Family recollections differ as to what happened next. The two versions are not mutually exclusive. The Roosevelts believe that Eleanor offered to step aside so that Franklin might be with the woman he loved but that Lucy, being Catholic, could not bring herself to marry a divorced man with five children.100 Lucy’s relatives contend that she was perfectly prepared to marry Franklin but that “Eleanor was not willing to step aside.”101
What is generally accepted is that Eleanor did indeed offer “to give Franklin his freedom.” Her Aunt Maude had recently divorced, and divorce was certainly preferable to remaining where she was not wanted.102 It is also likely that Franklin was prepared to leave. But what neither he nor Eleanor reckoned with were Sara’s reaction and the counsel of Louis Howe. Both intervened decisively to hold the marriage together.
For Sara, divorce was unthinkable. If FDR really wished to leave his wife and five children for another woman and bring scandal upon the family, she said, she could not stop him. But if he did so she “would not give him another dollar,” nor could he expect to inherit his beloved Hyde Park. And for Eleanor, well, it was perfectly all right for her to talk about giving Franklin his freedom, but what about the children? Who would take care of them?103
For Howe, it was a question of Franklin’s career. Daniels would certainly have fired him, and the electorate would be unforgiving. Any hope of future elective office was out of the question. If FDR had presidential ambitions (and certainly Howe did on Franklin’s behalf), he would have to choose between his career and Lucy Mercer.
Howe evidently played mediator. Sara had pulled Franklin and Eleanor back from the brink, but it was Howe, speaking separately with each, who brokered the settlement. He persuaded Eleanor that FDR could not go on successfully without her; and he convinced Franklin that to continue in politics he needed his wife.104 FDR agreed never to see Lucy again—that was Eleanor’s price for reconciliation—and with Louis Howe’s help the two stitched together one of the most remarkable partnerships the world has ever known.
Franklin broke the news to Lucy but could not bear to tell her the truth. Instead, he put the blame on Eleanor: she would not agree to a divorce. Lucy said it did not matter. As a Catholic she could not have married a divorced man. Both were white lies, told by lovers to spare each other’s feelings. Lucy’s mother, an equally devout Catholic, had divorced and remarried, and there is little reason to believe that Lucy would not have married the man who had risked everything for her.
“She and Franklin were very much in love with each other,” remembered Mrs. Lyman Cotten, Lucy’s North Carolina cousin and confidante. “I know the marriage would have taken place but as Lucy said to us, ‘Eleanor was not willing to step aside.’ I am also sure that she thought that the religious opinions of the two could have been arranged. Nothing is easier in the Roman Catholic Church than an annulment, especially among those occupying high places.”105
Eleanor emerged from the ordeal a different woman. “I knew more about the human heart.… I became a more tolerant person … but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives.”106 Mrs. Roosevelt commenced the metamorphosis from a private to a public person. The marriage survived, but love and trust were gone. She forgave Franklin and they continued to live together, but their relationship had changed. Independent and increasingly self-confident and outspoken, Eleanor was now her own person. For her, the Lucy Mercer affair was a watershed. “I have the memory of an elephant,” she told a friend. “I can forgive, but I cannot forget.”107
Franklin, for his part, changed as well. He took care to protect his wife’s feelings and to preserve outward proprieties. He would never allow anyone to criticize Eleanor in his presence. He spent more time with the children, gave up golf on Sunday mornings, and did his utmost to rebuild the marriage, albeit at arm’s length. Like Eleanor, he matured and became more serious.
Historians and biographers attribute FDR’s political coming of age to the searing effect of polio. Many of Franklin’s friends believed his bitter disappointment in love had an earlier and equally profound effect. Corinne Robinson Alsop, Eleanor’s cousin, thought that before Lucy, Franklin was without depth. “He had a loveless quality, as if he were incapable of emotion. It is difficult to describe, but to me [the affair] seemed to release something in him.” Another who knew Franklin wrote that after losing Lucy he emerged “tougher and more resilient, wiser and more profound, even prior to his paralysis.”108
There was no scandal. Not until the 1960s was FDR linked publicly with Lucy Mercer.109 Harvard Professor Frank Freidel, writing the first multivolume biography of FDR in the early 1950s, dismissed the story in a footnote. Such rumors, wrote Freidel, “seem preposterous. They reflect more on the teller than FDR.”110 James MacGregor Burns, in his captivating Rooseve
lt: The Lion and the Fox, published in 1956, alluded to wartime rumors in Washington but refuted them in a paragraph.111 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Roosevelt, mentions Lucy Mercer and FDR’s affection for her but resists going further.112 The first to attempt a full account of the romance was Jonathan Daniels, FDR’s presidential press aide and the son of Josephus Daniels, first in The End of Innocence, then in Washington Quadrille, published in 1968.113 Eleanor Roosevelt confirmed the story in her long series of interviews with Joseph Lash, summarized by Lash in 1972 in his loving portrait Eleanor and Franklin and embellished in Love, Eleanor ten years later.114
Franklin did not see Lucy again until 1941, although they never really lost contact. In 1920, Lucy married Winthrop Rutherfurd, one of the wealthiest and by all accounts one of the most respected members of East Coast society. A direct descendent of Peter Stuyvesant of New York and John Winthrop of Massachusetts, Winthrop (“Winty,” his friends called him) was an avid sportsman who divided his time between a country estate in Allamuchy, New Jersey, an elegant town house in New York, and Ridgeley Hall, his winter home in Aiken, South Carolina. In his youth, Rutherfurd was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in New York and had successfully courted and won the affection of Consuelo Vanderbilt, only to have Consuelo’s mother break off the engagement and compel her to marry the ninth Duke of Marlborough.115 Winthrop later married another considerable heiress, Alice Morton, a daughter of Vice President Levi Morton (and sister of Lucy’s friend Edith Eustis). Alice died in 1917, leaving Rutherfurd a widower at fifty-five with six children to care for. After Lucy’s romance with Franklin broke off, Edith Eustis evidently brought her and Winty together, and they were married shortly afterward. He was fifty-seven, Lucy was twenty-nine.
