One day, the Red Cross asked Eleanor to inspect St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mental facility filled with sailors and Marines suffering in the aftermath of battle. The prospect terrified her. Her experiences with her alcoholic father and uncles made her frightened of anyone without what she called “the power of self-control.” She never forgot the sound of the door locking behind her or the sight of the dark ward filled with shattered men, some chained to their beds, muttering, staring.
They continued to frighten her, but she came back to see them, week after week, and lobbied the government and raised private funds to improve the conditions under which they lived.
“You must do what you think you cannot do,” she wrote. She would keep doing that all her life.
One of the sailors suffering from shell shock at St. Elizabeths Hospital whose “incalculable” behavior initially frightened Eleanor. Thanks to her lobbying, the congressional appropriation for their care was greatly increased.
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Eleanor would still be so little known two years after the war that when this photograph of her, Henry Hooker, Franklin’s onetime law partner, and an unidentified woman attending a Washington Senators game was published, the woman in the front row was identified as “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
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Eleanor Roosevelt, photographed in the garden of her Washington home. “My time was now completely filled with a variety of war activities,” she remembered, “and I was learning to have a certain confidence in myself and in my ability to meet emergencies and deal with them.”
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Uncuriously Enough, His Name Is Roosevelt
On July 4, 1917, Franklin addressed the annual Tammany Hall celebration in New York. He assured his mother afterward that it had been a “purely patriotic” event, part of the larger war effort. In fact, it was a signal to Boss Murphy and the big-city Democrats that once the fighting ended, he would no longer be their enemy. To succeed in postwar politics, he would need the bosses he had once fought so hard.
Meanwhile, he did all he could to strengthen and speed up the navy. Daniels overruled his plan to build hundreds of small craft to patrol American harbors that were not under any real threat—“I fear buying a lot of junk,” he wrote—but when the secretary also opposed a far grander scheme to eliminate the submarine menace by laying half a million nets and mines between Scotland and Norway, Franklin went over his head to the president himself to win approval. Seventy-one thousand mines would be put in place before the war ended. “Mr. Daniels has one, only one, virile-minded, hard-fisted, civilian assistant,” wrote the Chicago Post. “Uncuriously enough, his name is Roosevelt.”
Privately, Franklin continued to be scornful of his slow-moving boss and never abandoned hope of supplanting him as secretary, but he also learned lessons from Daniels that would prove essential to him later—how to work his will with Congress, and how to keep control out of the hands of ambitious military men who assumed they knew better than civilians.
This photograph of FDR consorting with his old enemy, Boss Murphy of Tammany Hall, appalled his mother’s resolutely Republican older brother, Warren Delano III. “Uncle Warren says one of the papers has pictures of you and Murphy side by side,” Sara told him. “All this rather upsets me, I confess.” FDR reassured her, but he was uncomfortable, too; Murphy proudly wears his Tammany sash; Roosevelt has taken his off and holds it, rolled up as small as possible, in his fist.
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES A few days after the United States entered the war, Franklin marches the Washington Senators onto the field and raises the flag at Griffith Stadium. He was grateful that his post kept him in the public eye but worried that failure to serve in uniform might hurt his peacetime political prospects.
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W. A. Rogers’s poster was meant to rally American support for the war and yield volunteers for the navy.
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The Lion’s Brood
If Theodore Roosevelt could not fight overseas, his four sons could, and one by one he had secured places for them that would nudge them as close as possible to danger. “I should be ashamed of my sons if they shirked war,” he wrote, “just as I should be ashamed of my daughters if they shirked motherhood.” The memory of his father’s failure to fight in the Civil War still haunted him: “I have always explained to my four sons that if there is a war during their lifetime, I wish them to be in a position to explain to their children, why they did go to it, and not why they did not go to it.”
Besides, he wanted his boys to experience what he had famously called the “supreme triumphs of war” as he had in Cuba. “You and your brothers,” he told Ted Jr., “are playing your parts in the greatest of the world’s great days, and what man of gallant spirit does not envy you? You are having your crowded hours of glorious life; you have seized the great chance, as it was seized by those who fought at Gettysburg and Waterloo, and Agincourt and Arbela and Marathon.”
He was sitting in his study at Sagamore Hill on July 16, 1918, attending to his correspondence, when Phil Thompson of the Associated Press knocked at the door. He said that the New York Sun had just received a curious telegram: all it said was, “WATCH SAGAMORE HILL IN EVENT OF [DELETED BY CENSOR].” Roosevelt understood immediately. “One of my boys is in trouble.”
Two had already been in trouble.
First, Archie’s knee and elbow had been shattered by German shells, and he had been awarded the French Croix de Guerre. Then, Ted had been gassed leading his men on the front lines in one battle and been awarded the Silver Star for his gallantry in another. Kermit was unhurt, but he had survived several close calls fighting with the British army in Mesopotamia, and he, too, had been decorated for his bravery.
Quentin, the youngest and perhaps the best loved of the Roosevelt boys, had joined the army’s fledgling Air Service. He was engaged to Miss Flora Payne Whitney, but forbidden by her parents to marry until the war was over. When a visitor told Quentin how proud the country was to see all the Roosevelt sons in uniform, he just grinned. “Well,” he said, “you know it’s rather up to us to practice what father preaches.”
Quentin’s fellow flyers in the 95th “Kicking Mule” Aero Squadron called him the “Go and Get ’Em Man” because of his eagerness for combat. On July 5, 1918, he’d survived his first dogfight. “You get so excited that you forget everything except getting the other fellow,” he wrote to his mother.
On the 10th, he’d shot down a German plane. “The last of the lion’s brood has been blooded!” his father said when he heard the news.
On the 14th, Quentin had gone up again with his comrades. A stiff wind blew them dangerously deep into Germany. An enemy formation rose to meet them. Fourteen planes mixed in a “general melee,” one American pilot remembered, “rolling and circling and diving … [with] the continuous tat, tat, tat, tat of the machine guns.” The Americans flew separately back to their base. Quentin never got there: bullets had riddled his cockpit; his plane plunged into a rutted field.
At dawn the next morning, Thompson again climbed the piazza steps at Sagamore Hill. He said further dispatches confirmed that Quentin had been killed. Roosevelt hesitated, pacing up and down. “But—Mrs. Roosevelt? How am I going to break it to her?”
He went inside and half an hour later returned with a formal statement: “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the Front and had a chance to render some service to his country, and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him.”
Roosevelt remained stoical in public, but he was privately anguished. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death, has a pretty serious side for a father—and at the same time I would not have cared for my boys and they would not have cared for me if our relations had not been just along that line.”
His coachman came upon him in the stable, his face buried in the mane of his son’s pony, murm
uring, “Poor Quentyquee, poor Quentyquee.”
Archie Roosevelt recovering from his wounds in an American hospital in Paris. At the news that he’d been wounded, his mother drank a toast to him at Sagamore Hill and then, tears in her eyes, smashed her glass, saying, “That glass shall never be drunk from again!”
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Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his wife, Eleanor, who was in France, organizing YMCA canteens for the doughboys. He’d been gassed near Cantigny, then shot in the back of the left kneecap; he was forced to walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
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Kermit in a British uniform in Mesopotamia. Married now, and with an infant son, he confessed that he didn’t “like the war at all, but as long as it’s going on I want to be the first in it.” He’d joined the British army because he thought it would take too long for U.S. forces to get into action.
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Quentin, the last of the Roosevelt boys to face combat, in the cockpit of his plane
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Alice Roosevelt Longworth buys war bonds from Girl Scouts in Washington, D.C.
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Quentin Roosevelt sprawls dead next to his broken aircraft in a battered photograph taken by a German soldier. Copies of the picture eventually made their way to all the Roosevelts. “Two bullet holes in the head,” Eleanor told a friend, “so he did not suffer and it is a glorious way to die.”
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Theodore Roosevelt, grieving for his lost son and wracked with pain from the inflammatory rheumatism that made it agony to walk and would drive him to the hospital for a time, clings to his seventh grandchild, Edie Derby. When a friend expressed her sympathy, he replied, “Do not sympathize with me. Have you ever known any man who has gotten so much out of life as I have? … I have made the very most out of my life.”
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A Man Must Be What He Is
That same summer, Franklin Roosevelt had finally persuaded his chief to let him sail for Europe on an inspection tour. He had the time of his life. In London, he bought himself three pairs of silk pajamas, praised the heroism of the men he called “my” Marines at the Battle of Belleau Wood, chatted with King George V, who told him he’d “never seen a German gentleman”—and, at a dinner at Grey’s Inn, had a brief encounter with Winston Churchill, the man with whom he would one day direct a far bigger war. Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, took no notice of him, a fact which did not please FDR when he learned it many years later.
In France, Franklin visited his wounded cousins, Ted and Archie, accompanied a drunken congressional delegation to the Folies Bergère, and toured the battlefields in a special costume he’d designed for himself. At one battered village, he was allowed to fire an artillery shell into the German lines, seven miles away, and at a crossroads called “the Angle of Death” he stood in the open snapping photographs long enough for the Germans to call in artillery. He and his party had to drive off so fast he left his suitcase behind.
“The more I think of it,” he wrote Eleanor, “the more I feel that being only thirty-six my place is not at a Washington desk, even a Navy desk. I know you will understand.” He now hoped to get himself a navy commission and join a naval battery on the Western Front. But first he traveled to Scotland to inspect the North Sea mines and spent a couple of days salmon fishing in a cold rain before sailing home. Once aboard the USS Leviathan, he collapsed in his cabin with double pneumonia. When the ship docked in New York, orderlies had to carry him ashore. An ambulance brought him to his mother’s house. He was carried to a guest room upstairs.
Eleanor unpacked her husband’s luggage and came upon a bundle of letters addressed to him and written by her own onetime social secretary, Lucy Mercer. At that moment, she remembered later, “the bottom fell out of my own particular world,” and she was forced, she said, to “face myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”
Lucy Mercer was beautiful, cultured, and soft-spoken. She came from an old Maryland Catholic family that had fallen on hard times. Bamie Roosevelt had recommended her not long after the young Roosevelts arrived in Washington five years before, and Eleanor had been pleased with the way she had helped steer her through the shoals of society in the nation’s capital.
Lucy had been part of the Roosevelt household for three years. The children liked her. So did Sara: “She is so sweet and attractive,” she wrote, “and she loves you, Eleanor.” But she also came to love Franklin—“his ringing laugh,” Lucy remembered, “all the ridiculous things he used to say … his extraordinarily beautiful head.”
When Eleanor and the children were away at Campobello, Lucy and Franklin had spent time together, dining at the homes of discreet friends, sailing and picnicking along the Potomac. Alice Longworth had seen them driving around Washington together and teased Franklin about Miss Mercer. “Isn’t she lovely?” was all he would say.
Rumors may have reached Eleanor. She had let her secretary go in June of 1917, but within two weeks Lucy enlisted in the navy—and then was conveniently assigned to Franklin’s office at the Navy Department. At Campobello that summer, Eleanor worried about where her husband was and what he was up to. In October, Franklin’s boss Josephus Daniels dismissed Miss Mercer from the service. The threat to the Roosevelt marriage seemed to have been lifted.
But now, more than a year later, it was clear that Lucy Mercer was still an important part of her husband’s life. Lucy’s relationship with Franklin confirmed every fear Eleanor Roosevelt had ever harbored about herself: no one would ever love her for long.
According to family tradition, she offered her husband his “freedom.” His mother was said to have told her son she would not stand in his way if he wanted to leave his wife and five children—but she also would not provide him with another penny, and would make sure he did not inherit his beloved Springwood. Louis Howe weighed in, too: a divorce, he said, would end Franklin’s political career.
Franklin promised never to see Lucy again. Eleanor agreed to remain with him. But the experience taught her, she would write many years later, “that practically no one is entirely bad or entirely good … that a man must be what he is.” She neither forgot nor forgave her husband’s transgression: it became almost a measure of one’s intimacy with her to have been quietly told what he had done and how she had dealt with it. But the bitter memory of her husband’s betrayal would not prevent her from forming with him one of the most powerful political partnerships in American history.
Franklin enjoys the sea air aboard the USS Dyer, on his way to the war at last. Halfway across the Atlantic, he noted in his journal that “ten miles ahead of this Floating City of Souls a torpedo may be waiting to start on its quick run.” No enemy torpedo ever materialized, but a German submarine was spotted several miles away—and over the years, in his retelling, the American destroyer and the German submarine grew closer and closer until he was claiming that the sub had come up first on one side of his ship and then the other.
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Roosevelt, wearing his distinctive inspection outfit, visits a massive naval gun emplacement on the Western Front. Behind him, in the cloth cap, is his good-time companion, Livingston Davis.
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Franklin samples some of the “sublime Scotch” that kept him and his party warm while fishing in the rain in Scotland.
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Lucy and Winthrop Rutherfurd, the elderly widower she married in 1920. He was twenty-nine years her senior, and when Franklin overheard the news, a member of the Roosevelt family remembered, he “started like a horse in fear of a hornet.”
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Lucy Mercer, shortly before she joined the Roosevelt household in 1913 as Eleanor’s social secretary. A cousin remembered that “every man who ever knew her fell in love with her.”
The Old Lion
When the Great War ended in Allied victory on November 11, 1918, Theodore Roosevelt was fifty-nine yea
rs old but felt and looked far older. On the evening of January 5, 1919, he sat reading in his children’s empty nursery. He’d recently been hospitalized, and was still weak, weary, oddly short of breath. But he’d long since made his peace with the Republican Party and was determined to make one more run at the presidency. “I cannot go without having done something to that old gray skunk in the White House,” he’d told a recent visitor. He dismissed the “Fourteen Points” upon which Wilson hoped to build a lasting peace as just “fourteen scraps of paper,” and opposed American participation in the proposed League of Nations: “Let each nation reserve the right to itself for its own decisions, and … make it perfectly clear that we do not intend to take a position of an international Meddlesome Mattie.”
The year 1920 would bring him back to power. He was sure of it. So were many political leaders on both sides of the aisle.
Meanwhile, he needed rest. As he closed his book and got ready for bed that evening he said to Edith, “I wonder if you will ever know how I love Sagamore Hill.”
During the night he suffered a pulmonary embolism—a fatal blood clot in the lung.
Archie cabled his brothers: “The old lion is dead.” “I have never known another person so vital,” William Allen White wrote, “nor another man so dear.” “Death had to take him sleeping,” Vice President Thomas Marshall told the press, “for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
The Roosevelts Page 17
