by FDR
50. ER uttered these words to her daughter, Anna, at the time of Anna’s marriage in June 1926. They were repeated by Anna to her daughter, Eleanor Seagraves, who confirmed them to Blanche Wiesen Cook. 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 536 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
51. James Roosevelt with Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View 97 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).
52. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 81 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973). Sleeping arrangements at Hyde Park would confirm the children’s assessment. When the house was redone in 1916, there were three new bedrooms above the mammoth first-floor library. Sara occupied the large one facing the Albany Post Road, Franklin had another large one facing the river, and Eleanor had a small one in between. On June 14, 1918, Sara wrote Franklin about buying a new desk for “her” [ER’s] room; a year later Sara wrote her son about the two big rooms, “yours” and “mine.” Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL. Compare Eleanor Roosevelt, “I Remember Hyde Park,” McCall’s (February 1963).
53. “Standards were different in those days,” recalled Robert Donovan of the Associated Press. “I’m sure there were some reporters, friends of the White House, who knew about Lucy. But none of them ever thought about exposing the situation. The newspaper business in those days was not so damn serious as it is today. It was a hell of a lot more fun.” Quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 518 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
54. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Ellen Feldman, Lucy: A Novel 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
55. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 73. “Though she was a paid employee … she was a lady to her fingertips.”
56. Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 157–158 (New York: Doubleday, 1981). “I think their relationship [FDR’s and Lucy’s] was very much a lonely-boy-meets-girl thing. The rose behind the ear, the snipped-off lock of hair. That kind of thing.”
57. Quoted in Bernard Asbell, The F.D.R. Memoirs 229 (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
58. Letter, Captain Lyman B. Cotton, Jr., USN, to Jonathan Daniels, January 29, 1967, quoted in Daniels, Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents 157 (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
59. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 488. Olive Clapper, Washington Tapestry (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946).
60. Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 35–36 (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2003).
61. FDR was the youngest of the fifteen assistant secretaries who served between 1860 (when the position was established) and 1936. He was thirty-one when he assumed office; the average age was forty-eight. He also served longest: seven years and five months. Arthur W. Macmahon and John D. Millett, Federal Administrators 247 (New York: Ames Press, 1967). Reprint.
62. Arthur C. Murray, At Close Quarters 85 (London: John Murray, 1946).
63. Admiral W. Sheffield Cowles to FDR, August 17, 1917, FDRL.
64. Quoted in John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
65. The dowager was the famed Washington socialite Margot Oxford. Ibid.
66. Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 36.
67. Michael Teague, Mrs. L 157–158. Joseph P. Lash quotes Mrs. Longworth in a similar manner, based on his own interview with her. Eleanor and Franklin 226.
68. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 82.
69. Henry Brandon, “A Talk with an 83-year-old Enfant-Terrible [ARL],” The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967.
70. Levi Morton, the son of a Vermont preacher, made a fortune in New York banking, ranking with the Drexels and Morgans in post–Civil War American finance. His firm, Morton Trust Company, later became the foundation of the Guaranty Trust Company. Morton served in Congress and was vice president under Benjamin Harrison and later governor of New York. Ellerslie, his great country house on the Hudson, was near Hyde Park. The Roosevelts and Mortons made several Atlantic crossings together and often went to the Adirondacks for winter sports with Franklin and the Morton daughters in tow. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 163–164.
71. In his edited collection of his father’s letters, Elliott noted that “during the war years F.D.R. frequently spent the evenings with the Eustis family,” 2 The Roosevelt Letters 227n.
72. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 86 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). The quote originally appeared in ER’s This Is My Story, published in 1937. Also see Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 222–223.
73. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 83.
74. Ibid. 86.
75. FDR to ER, July 16, 1917, 2 Roosevelt Letters 280 (FDR’s emphasis).
76. The New York Times, July 17, 1917. The text of the Times article is reprinted in 2 Roosevelt Letters 282–283n.
77. FDR to ER, July 18, 1917, ibid. 282.
78. ER to FDR, July 20, 1917, ibid. 283n.
79. According to Elliott, “Mother arrived with a long list of complaints to make. She was lonely for his presence in Campobello.… She was tired of the string of excuses he had been making for not leaving Washington. He did not even bother to read the letters she sent ‘for you never answer a question and nothing I ask appears.’ She even chided him for neglecting Granny by not taking the trouble to go to Hyde Park.” An Untold Story 89.
80. ER to FDR, August 15, 1917, FDRL (ER’s emphasis).
81. Morgan, FDR: A Biography 205. Ward, First-Class Temperament 369.
82. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 89.
83. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 224.
84. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 148.
85. Mrs. Daniels was close friends with Mary Patten, ER’s Red Cross co-worker, and Mrs. Thomas R. Marshall, both of whom spread stories about Franklin and Lucy that autumn. Letter, Mrs. Charles Sumner Hamlin to Jonathan Daniels, February 19, 1955, ibid. 132.
86. ER to Lorena Hickok, October 1932, Hickok Papers, FDRL.
87. ER to SDR, January 22, 1918, FDRL.
88. ER to SDR, March 18, 1918, FDRL.
89. Daniels gave FDR a carte blanche. His instructions were to (1) inspect U.S. naval forces with particular attention to administrative and business organization; (2) to coordinate with other branches in order to coordinate naval activities with their enterprises; (3) gather information pertaining to general conditions abroad and their applicability to naval affairs; and (4) investigate any other matters he deemed advisable. 2 Roosevelt Letters 301.
90. FDR’s extensive diary entries for his crossing on the Dyer and his stay in Europe are reproduced in ibid. 301–316.
91. Ibid. 327–328.
92. Ibid 326. FDR’s Aunt Dora, Sara’s older sister, had refused to leave her Paris apartment even when the city’s fall appeared imminent. A quarter of a century later she would do the same. While most Americans in Paris fled home after war began in 1939, Dora would not budge. When asked by newsmen what the president’s aunt intended to do, a spokesman for her responded:
Madame is determined to remain in her Avenue George V home so long as it is tenable. She has lived in Paris forty years. All the friends of her whole life are here.… Madame is in excellent health and in excellent spirits. She is not uncomfortable … and is not making any emergency plans.
Sara made a special trip to Paris to try to extract Dora but was unable to change her mind. Eventually Dora left on one of the last ships to depart France, her fiftieth crossing of the Atlantic. She died at Algonac on July 20, 1940, at the age of ninety-three.
93. Unpublished memoir of Captain Edward McCauley, quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 399.
94. 2 Roosevelt Letters 333–336.
95. The remark is that of Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, quoted by FDR, ibid. 346.
96. FDR to ER, August 20, 1918, ibid. 350–351.
97. ER, Autobiography 96.
98. I am indebted to Geoffrey Ward for this insight. First-Class Temperament 410n.
99. ER to Joseph P. Lash, October 25, 1943, quoted in Lash, Eleanor an
d Franklin 220. “Mother spent the first seven years of her marriage constantly pregnant, and my father went through World War I being busier and busier and busier,” Elliott remembered. “And my mother was such an insecure person during those first few years that I think it became a tremendous blow to her to realize what was going on. I don’t think she had any inkling that such a thing was possible between two people who had said their vows, and so it was horribly upsetting to her.” Elliott Roosevelt, oral interview, June 20, 1975, FDRL.
100. The oft-repeated Roosevelt version was set forth by Alice Longworth in her interview with Henry Brandon for The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967. “I remember one day I was having fun with Auntie Corinne [Mrs. Douglas Robinson, TR’s youngest sister] … I was doing imitations of Eleanor, and Auntie Corinne looked at me and said, ‘Never forget, Alice, Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom.’ And I said, ‘But darling, that’s what I’ve wanted to know about all these years. Tell.’ And so she said, ‘Yes, there was a family conclave and they talked it over and finally they decided it affected the children and there was Lucy Mercer, a Catholic, and so it was called off.’ ”
Also see Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 95; David B. Roosevelt, Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt 112 (New York: Warner Books, 2002); Linda Donn, The Roosevelt Cousins 158 (New York: Knopf, 2001); and especially Joseph Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance 68–71. (New York: Viking, 1982).
101. Letters of Mrs. Lyman Cotton and Miss Mary Henderson (Lucy’s North Carolina cousins) to Jonathan Daniels, quoted in Washington Quadrille 145–146.
102. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 228.
103. Alsop, FDR 70.
104. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 231.
105. Quoted in Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 145.
106. ER, Autobiography 93.
107. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 227. Blanche Wiesen Cook reports that it was during the Lucy Mercer years that Eleanor lost her appetite and that “when she did eat she could not keep her food down.… We now know that one of the results of frequent vomiting is a deterioration of the teeth and gums. During this period Eleanor’s teeth loosened, spread, and protruded more than ever.” 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 235.
108. Quoted in Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism 56 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987); Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance 73–74.
109. The first veiled reference to appear in print came in 1946, when Olive Clapper, wife of the famous Washington reporter Raymond Clapper, alluded to “a persistent rumor” in her book Washington Tapestry. Mrs. Clapper wrote, “Mrs. Roosevelt was supposed to have called her husband and the enamored woman to a conference, at which she offered to give her husband a divorce if the woman wished to marry him. A Catholic, the woman could not marry a divorced man. When she expressed these sentiments, Mrs. Roosevelt issued an ultimatum that they must stop seeing each other—to which they promptly acquiesced.” Lucy Mercer was not mentioned by name, and only her Catholicism links her with the story. Ibid. 238.
Also see John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 73 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Gunther cites Mrs. Clapper and also does not name Lucy Mercer.
110. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 320n. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
111. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 67–68 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). Rexford Tugwell in The Democratic Roosevelt, published the next year, makes no mention of the rumor or of Lucy Mercer. (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
In 2001, James MacGregor Burns provided an excellent summary account of the romance in The Three Roosevelts 155–156, with Susan Dunn (New York: Grove Press, 2001).
112. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 354–355 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1966, Professor Schlesinger thought the story of FDR and Lucy had been exaggerated in the Washington rumor mill but conceded that they had been “emotionally involved.” “No doubt Franklin began to show a delight in Lucy; no doubt this worried Eleanor, as it would any wife.” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1966.
113. Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954); Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
114. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (New York: Doubleday, 1982). More recently the story has been treated effectively by Geoffrey Ward in his perceptive A First-Class Temperament 361–374, 411–417. Another fine account is provided by Blanche Wiesen Cook in volume one of her biography of Mrs. Roosevelt, pages 216–232.
115. Consuelo’s front-page marriage to the duke, which cost the Vanderbilts an estimated $10 million to arrange, ended in separation in 1908 and annulment in 1926. At the hearings before the Rota in the Vatican, Ava Vanderbilt Belmont (Consuelo’s mother) testified, “I have always had absolute power over my daughter.… I ordered her to marry the Duke.”
At the time of Consuelo’s marriage, a New York society writer chirped, “Winty was outclassed. Six feet two in his golf stockings, he was no match for five feet six in a coronet.” Elizabeth Eliot, Heiresses and Coronets 188 (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959); Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society? 233–234 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
116. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, FDR’s Unfinished Portrait 76–77 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
117. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 250–251.
118. The president’s official schedule for April 5, 1941, indicates that FDR returned from the Oval Office to his White House study “accompanied by Mrs. Johnson.” The time given is 1555–1740. Cited in Ellen Feldman, “FDR and His Women,” American Heritage 53, 55 (February–March 2003).
119. Interview, Geoffrey Ward with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., cited in Ward, First-Class Temperament 777n.
120. Quoted Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 591–592.
121. Feldman, “FDR and His Women” 59.
122. “Thank you so much,” wrote Lucy. “You must know it will be treasured always. I have wanted to write you for a long time to tell you that I had seen Franklin and of his great kindness to my husband when he was desperately ill in Washington.… I think of your sorrow—you—whom I have always felt to be the most blessed and privileged of women must now feel immeasurable grief and pain and they must be almost unbearable.” Lucy Rutherfurd to Eleanor Roosevelt, May 2, 1945, FDRL.
123. Lucy Rutherfurd to Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, May 9, 1945, FDRL. Franklin’s early letters to Lucy have not been located. Lucy claimed to have burned them, but writers such as Ellen Feldman doubt that is the case.
124. John R. Boettiger, Jr., A Love in Shadow 261 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Additional insight into Franklin’s deep affection for Lucy can be found in Resa Willis’s FDR and Lucy: Lovers and Friends (New York: Routledge, 2004).
NINE | The Campaign of 1920
The epigraph is from a letter by FDR, November 9, 1920. Quoted in Alfred Steinberg, Mrs. R.: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt 121 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958).
1. The George Washington was built as a passenger liner for North German Lloyd by A. G. Vulcan at Stettin in 1908. Displacing 33,000 tons, with a cruising speed of 18 knots, it was one of the largest liners afloat, accommodating 568 passengers in first class; 433 in second class; 452 in third class; and 1,226 in steerage. When war began in 1914, George Washington sought refuge in New York, a neutral port, where it remained berthed until the United States entered the war in 1917. It was thereupon seized by the United States government, converted to a troopship, and made eighteen round-trips to France during the war, transporting 48,000 troops.
Under the peace settlement, George Washington became the property of the United States and was reconverted to passenger service, where it sailed on the transatlantic run under the flag of the United States Lines until 1931. Laid up by the Depression, it was reacquired by
the Navy in 1941 and served again as a troopship until taken out of service in 1947. Damaged by fire at her mooring in Baltimore, George Washington was scrapped in 1951. Arnold Kludas, 1 Die grossen Passagierschiffe der Welt, 2 ed. 122–123, (Oldenburg/Hamburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1972).
2. ER to Isabella Ferguson, July 11, 1919. Greenway Collection, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
3. Among the papers at Eleanor’s bedside when she died was a sonnet by Ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice extolling the statue:
O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes
Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!
O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down
Upon a world of passion and of lies …
Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 237 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
4. Elizabeth Cameron was the daughter of Senator John Sherman of Ohio and the favorite niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 235, 245–247, 539 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992); Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams 183, 245 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). Also see Otto Friedrich, Clover 330–331 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), and Arline Boucher Tehan, Henry Adams in Love 86–90 (New York: Universe Books, 1983).
5. ER to SDR, January 3, 1919, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 355, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
6. Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President 394 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
7. Ibid. 400.
8. FDR to Daniels, January 9, 1919, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
9. ER to SDR, January 9, 1919, 2 Roosevelt Letters 355.
10. ER to SDR, January 11, 20, February 11, 1919, ibid. 359, 361, 373.
11. Orlando bitterly withdrew from the conference on April 24, 1919, protesting the refusal of Wilson to grant Italy the former Austrian city of Fiume and the province of Dalmatia on the Adriatic. “Now President Wilson, after ignoring and violating his own Fourteen Points, wants to restore their virginity by applying them vigorously where they refer to Italy.” Following his withdrawal, Orlando’s government won a whopping 382–40 vote of confidence in the Italian Parliament. Aldrovandi Marescotti, Guerra Diplomatica 262 (Milan: Mondadori, 1946).
