by FDR
The Rutherfurds lived together in happy contentment, dividing their time among their estates, the various social seasons, fox hunts, kennel shows, and travel abroad. Lucy helped raise the Rutherfurd children and soon had a daughter of her own. “Seldom have I seen a mother more beloved and respected than was Lucy by her stepchildren,” wrote the Russian portrait painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff.116 Lucy and Franklin maintained a formal correspondence, writing to extend greetings or condolences on special occasions. Other letters, if there were any, have been lost, destroyed, or safely sequestered. But there is no doubt the affection lingered. FDR quietly arranged for Lucy to watch each of his inaugurations from a White House limousine, and about 1940 he began calling her once or twice a week, sometimes speaking in his almost forgotten French to avoid being overheard. Lucy evidently called him as well, and the White House switchboard had standing orders to put Mrs. Rutherfurd directly through to the president.117
In the spring of 1941 Lucy and Franklin began to see each another again. She was given the code name “Mrs. Johnson” by the Secret Service, and her name appears frequently on the White House register.118 FDR enjoyed taking Lucy for afternoon drives through Rock Creek Park, and when Eleanor was away she would be invited by Franklin’s daughter, Anna, to dine with the president. FDR, Jr., home on leave from the Navy, reports bounding into the Oval Office unannounced to find his father having his shriveled legs massaged by an unfamiliar woman whom the president introduced simply as “my old friend, Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd.”119
There was “never anything clandestine about these occasions,” Anna recalled. “On the contrary, they were occasions which I welcomed for my father because they were light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation for a beloved father and world leader in a time of crisis.… Lucy was a wonderful person. I was grateful to her.”120
Winthrop Rutherfurd died in 1944 after a long illness, and thereafter FDR would sometimes stop the presidential train en route from Washington to Hyde Park to visit Lucy at her Allamuchy estate. Once she accompanied him for a weekend at Shangri La, the president’s Catoctin Mountain retreat (now Camp David); they spent a week together at Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Hobcaw Manor; and FDR enjoyed nothing so much as driving Lucy along the meandering country roads near Warm Springs. She was with him there on April 12, 1945, and her face was the last FDR saw before he died. What attracted Franklin to Lucy? The writer Ellen Feldman sums it up nicely:
Lucy Mercer had a talent [to] make other people happy. I am not talking about giving up a career to stay at home and raise children, or nursing an aged parent, or other instances of worthy self-sacrifice. I mean a contagious genius for living joyously. Her descendants speak of the insouciance with which she met early hardship.… They mention her soft heart.… They speak of her need to make surroundings beautiful, and days bright, and loved ones glad to be alive.121
In the months following the president’s death, Eleanor came to accept Lucy’s return to Franklin’s life and Anna’s role in making her visits possible. Sorting through FDR’s effects at Hyde Park, she came upon a small watercolor of her husband painted by Lucy’s friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff. She instructed that it be sent to Lucy.122 Anna also called. “Your telephoning the other night meant so much to me,” wrote Lucy. “This blow must be crushing to you—to all of you—but I know that you meant more to your father than any one and that makes it closer and harder to bear.… I have been reading over some very old letters of his—and in one he says ‘Anna is a dear fine person—I wish so much that you knew her’—Well, now we do know one another—and it is a great joy to me and I think he was happy this past year that it was so.”123 Anna kept Lucy’s letter in her bedside table for the rest of her life.124
* The day Congress declared war, TR went to Washington to ask that he be allowed to raise a division of volunteers and lead it to France. Georges Clemenceau, not yet premier, supported the proposal. The battle-weary soldiers of France needed a miracle to restore their spirits, he wrote Wilson. “Send them Roosevelt.” But the president and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who received TR cordially, wanted no part of the idea. Wilson had decided to fight the war with a conscript army, in which there was no place for volunteers. “To make an exception of Colonel Roosevelt would have been to strike at the heart of the whole design,” wrote Wilson’s secretary, Joe Tumulty.
Wilson found TR more engaging than he had anticipated: “He’s a great big boy. There is a sweetness about him that is compelling.” But aside from the political and military risks of having TR on board, the Colonel was in poor health and half blind, and had been out of touch with military developments for twenty years. Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President 371–373 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973); Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him 288–289 (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921).
* FDR pressed the mine barrage, oblivious to the infraction of the law of nations as well as earlier protests lodged by the United States against British and German efforts to mine the high seas. On August 13, 1914, Secretary of State Bryan had warned the British that the laying of submarine mines was in violation of Article 1 of the Hague Convention of 1907. “The Secretary of State is loath to believe that a signatory to that convention would willfully disregard its treaty obligation, which was manifestly made in the interest of neutral shipping.” Diplomatic correspondence on the issue continued through the remainder of 1914 and early 1915, and on February 15, 1915, the United States sent identical notes to Germany and Great Britain expressing hope that the two belligerents “may through reciprocal concessions, find a basis for agreement … that neither will sow any floating mines, whether upon the high seas or in territorial waters.” U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914, Supplement 454–473; 1915, Supplement 119–120; 1916, Supplement 3–7.
FDR’s memo to Daniels outlining the project (October 29, 1917), as well as his letter to President Wilson (October 29, 1917), made no mention of the earlier American protests or the law of nations. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 293–294, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
* In 1938 FDR related the episode to the Wilson biographer Ray Stannard Baker:
About the middle of June [1918] the political situation in New York flared to the front.… Charles F. Murphy, who had the final say in the City, and sufficient support in several large upstate cities to give him control of the convention, had come to realize that a New York City candidate would stand little chance of election if forced through by the City Organization. The secretary of Tammany Hall, Mr. Thomas Smith, came to Washington to see me with the message from Mr. Murphy that he would be very glad to support me for the governorship as there seemed no other upstate candidate who was well-known in every part of the state and who, at the same time, had a definite connection with war service. I told Mr. Smith I was extremely sorry but that I could not even consider accepting the nomination. Mr. Smith went to New York and returned a few days later to ask me to give Mr. Murphy some recommendations of upstate candidates. A careful check of the field convinced me that the best-known Democrat in the State was Alfred E. Smith.… It was pointed out by Mr. [Thomas] Smith and Mr. Murphy that Alfred E. Smith was not only a Tammany man but a Catholic. My reply was the demand for his nomination for Governor could well originate with upstate delegates and that in war-time, the church to which he belonged would not be raised as an issue in any community.
I communicated with many of my friends among Democratic leaders upstate suggesting to them that they should start an organized movement for the nomination of Alfred E. Smith.
FDR to Baker, October 24, 1938, Baker Papers, Library of Congress.
* By 1916 Franklin had shed whatever anti-Catholic bias he might have inherited. Not only had he formed strong bonds with the Irish politicians of New York City, but many of the clergy would become his close friends, including Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, George Cardinal Mundelein
of Chicago, and especially James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. Somewhat to Sara’s chagrin, the Roosevelts were in fact distantly related to James Roosevelt Bayley, an Episcopal convert to Catholicism who had been Gibbons’s predecessor as archbishop of Baltimore, and to Bayley’s aunt, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, America’s first Catholic saint. In later years FDR enjoyed recounting Cardinal Gibbons’s reply when asked whether he subscribed to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Gibbons acknowledged that he did, adding with a twinkle that he had met the Holy Father many times “and each time he called me ‘Jibbons.’ ”
One might note that except for his mother and Eleanor, the three women closest to FDR during most of his adult life were his secretaries Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, and Lucy Mercer, all of whom were Roman Catholics. For the Gibbons quote, see Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles 137 (New York: Doubleday, 1979).
* As Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled, “Most of my contemporaries were far too shy even to ask their doctors about such matters. I think most American doctors at the time would have been horrified, fearing lawsuits.… I still have a letter written to me shortly after I was married by my sister-in-law, Nan Wallingford, who was the mother of three. In it she begged me to send her ‘one of those cunning, labor-saving devices’ so that she might save her ‘tottering reason.’ ” Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 57 (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
* FDR accompanied Vice President Thomas R. Marshall to officially open the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition at San Francisco. While on the West Coast he inspected Navy installations and took his first dive in a submarine. Shortly before, the American submarine F-4 had failed to surface after a dive off Pearl Harbor with the loss of all on board. The public was stunned, and FDR, who was worried about Navy morale, went aboard submarine K-7 in Los Angeles. Despite heavy seas he ordered it to dive and go through its paces. Roosevelt greeted the press afterward, elated: “It was fine and for the first time since we left Washington we feel perfectly at home.” Los Angeles Tribune, March 29, 1915; Josephus Daniels, Years of War and After 256; Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR 204 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).
* Corcoran House, along with the Hay-Adams houses and Decatur House, was one of Washington’s most noted residences. Daniel Webster had lived there when he was secretary of state but found himself unable to support it afterward and sold it to W. W. Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Eustis, a Corcoran grandson, was a fabled huntsman who preferred his estates in Leesburg, Virginia, and Aiken, South Carolina, to living in Washington. In 1920 he sold the house to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whereupon it was demolished and a new headquarters building for the Chamber was erected on the site. Washington: City and Capital 655–656, Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937).
* Although deeply embarrassed, ER remained resolute in her determination to save food. Elliott reports that throughout the war his mother always had a spare place set at the table for “Mr. Hoover” (Food Administrator Herbert Hoover) to symbolize for the family their need to conserve. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 87 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
NINE
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1920
It was a darned fine sail.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
ON JANUARY 2, 1919, Franklin and Eleanor boarded the USS George Washington in New York, heading for Paris.1 The armistice had been signed in November, and FDR was to initiate the dismantling of the Navy’s vast European establishment. This included fifty-four shore installations stretching from the Azores to the Shetlands, twenty-five port authorities, and mountains of supplies, plus a vast array of claims, contracts, and government agreements arising from operations abroad. His party included Thomas J. Spellacy, a genial Irishman who was United States attorney for Connecticut, as legal adviser; and Commander John M. Hancock, chief of Navy purchasing.*
For Franklin and Eleanor it was a reconciliation of sorts—Eleanor’s first visit to Europe since their wedding trip in 1905—and an opportunity to heal the hurt of the past autumn. After Eleanor discovered Franklin’s romance with Lucy Mercer, she grew morose, suffered headaches, and had days when she doubted her will to live. “This past year has rather got the better of me,” she wrote her friend Isabella Ferguson. “I still have a breathless, hunted feeling.”2
Several times each week Eleanor drove herself to Rock Creek Cemetery on the outskirts of Washington to sit alone and contemplate the remarkable statue Henry Adams had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt in his wife’s memory. Eleanor found solace communing with that shrouded figure of grief and in later years would usually visit the cemetery whenever in Washington.3* Henry’s wife, Clover Adams, a pioneer woman photographer, had committed suicide by drinking potassium cyanide, deeply distressed at her husband’s infatuation with their friend and neighbor, Elizabeth Cameron, the beautiful young wife of Senator J. Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania.4 To learn more about the Adamses, Eleanor gave Franklin a copy of The Education of Henry Adams, which had been privately printed in 1906 and had just been reissued for general purchase. They took it aboard the George Washington, and Eleanor read it during the crossing. “Very interesting,” she noted of Henry Adams, “but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little.”5
Four days out of New York, Franklin and Eleanor were informed by radio that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. Both were stunned. TR had just turned sixty-one and, though he had recently been hospitalized, seemed to be regaining strength for another run at the White House in 1920. The Republicans had retaken control of both houses of Congress in November, Wilson was vulnerable, there was no apparent Democratic successor, and once again the GOP appeared united. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, a bitter critic of TR in past years, believed he would be nominated by acclamation on the first ballot.6 The former president died of a pulmonary embolism while asleep at Sagamore Hill. “Death had to take him in his sleep,” commented Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. “If Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”7 TR was not old, said Franklin, “but I cannot help think that he himself would have had it this way and that he has been spared a lingering illness.”8 Eleanor wrote Sara that she was concerned about Aunt Edith, “for it will leave her very much alone. Another big figure gone from our nation and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”9
Paris in January 1919 was a city of contrasts. Reminders of the war were everywhere: captured German artillery pieces lined the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde; limbless men and demobilized soldiers begged for change on fashionable street corners; and almost every other woman was dressed in black, mourning a departed loved one. Along the grand boulevards the glorious chestnut trees were gone, cut for firewood during the last desperate winter. Paris itself had been spared, but there were severe shortages of coal, milk, and bread.
Nevertheless, a festive air gripped the city. Those with money could still find wonderful clothes and jewels. The restaurants, when they could get supplies, were marvelous, and the nightclubs sparkled with gaiety. “I never saw anything like Paris,” wrote Eleanor. “The scandals going on would make many a woman at home unhappy. It is no place for the boys [i.e., American soldiers], especially the younger ones.… All the women in the restaurant look to me exaggerated, some pretty, all chic, but you wonder if any are ladies.”10
The Roosevelts were billeted by the Navy in a suite at the Ritz, where the lobby swarmed with foreign dignitaries sent to attend the peace conference that was about to begin. Woodrow Wilson arrived in the city the first week of January, after a triumphal tour of Great Britain and Western Europe. David Lloyd George arrived on January 11. The following day the Supreme Council of peacemakers—Wilson, Lloyd George, Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clemenceau—convened for the first time.11 They met in the ornate chamb
ers of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, where, as host, Clemenceau presided. For the most part their discussions were conducted in English. Clemenceau, who had lived many years in the United States, spoke English fluently, and Orlando was minimally conversant.12
As the only head of state, Wilson was accorded a chair a few inches higher than the others, but of the four, Wilson was in the most precarious political position.13 Lloyd George was fresh from parliamentary elections in which his coalition had won a huge majority; Clemenceau had just received an unprecedented 398–93 vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies; and Orlando headed a left-center government that was virtually unassailable. Only Wilson was fresh from defeat, having unwisely declared the congressional midterm elections in November a referendum on his leadership.14 The electorate had responded by giving the GOP control of Congress for the first time since 1910.15
To compound his problem, Wilson had excluded the Senate from the negotiations. The American delegation, in addition to Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House, included more than twenty academic specialists but not one member of the U.S. Senate, which ultimately would have to pass judgment on the peace treaty.* Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would soon become chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and was on record as supporting a league of nations.16 The personal animosity between Wilson and Lodge was notorious, but to have included him would have been an act of statesmanship from which the president would have benefited substantially. Equally damaging, Wilson had thumbed his nose at the nation’s Republican leadership, almost all of whom had supported the war vigorously. William Howard Taft, Charles Evans Hughes, and Elihu Root had all endorsed the idea of a league, and their inclusion would have given the delegation a bipartisan cast.17 Instead, Wilson chose to go it alone, convinced, as always, that his mission was divinely ordained.
