But there was in fact something very inappropriate going on in Roosevelt’s life that was headed toward calamity. He and Lucy Mercer, the young woman Eleanor had hired as her social secretary, had fallen in love.
Exactly how or when it happened is lost to history; Lucy had worked in the Roosevelt household for a couple of years before people began to notice. But by the spring of 1916 the affair was full-blown. As assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had the authority to use the former presidential steam yacht Sylph, a sleek, luxurious 125-foot cruiser. During the summers, while Eleanor was away with the children at Campobello, Roosevelt organized weekend yachting parties along the Potomac and into the Chesapeake Bay.
Lucy Mercer was frequently a guest on these adventures. Many people (as well as the Washington gossip columnists) assumed she was involved with the handsome Englishman Nigel Law, who served in the British consulate. In fact, Law was a great friend and running mate of Franklin, and on these yachting occasions and elsewhere he assumed the role of what in less polite society was known as a “beard”—a man who posed as Lucy’s boyfriend, which he was not.
On one festive occasion, Roosevelt’s yacht party cruised down to Hampton Roads, where the U.S. Atlantic Fleet was stationed. There, his guests, including Lucy and Law, boarded the battleship Arkansas for a “splendid luncheon” with the commanding admiral. This was followed by a review honoring the assistant secretary of the fleet, which steamed past while a Navy band played such gay tunes as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and other favorites of the day. A girl like Lucy Mercer could hardly fail to be impressed with the power and authority of Franklin Roosevelt.2
Lucy was a kind of “almost” society girl—meaning, in effect, that she didn’t have any money. Her father was a Mercer of Carroll County, one of the oldest families in Maryland; his ancestor was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and so they had some pull in the swing of things. Carroll Mercer married Lucy’s mother, the lovely Washington socialite Minnie Norcup, after her divorce from an Englishman who was principally known about town for squandering half her fortune. Mercer would squander the rest.3
In 1891, Mercer fathered Lucy, and then went off as an Army captain, eventually to the Spanish-American War. There, and afterward, he claimed to have been a member of TR’s Rough Riders—but in truth was consigned to the commissary corps, procuring food and forage. When he returned to Washington, Carroll polished off the remainder of Minnie’s money in spectacular fashion, then drank himself to death, leaving his wife and daughter to fend for themselves.4
Minnie, mortified, employed her skills as a decorator to earn enough to keep them from poverty. But it was said as well that, as with Winston Churchill’s mother, Minnie Mercer bestowed her charms on a number of wealthy Washington gentlemen who reciprocated generously.
There is no doubt that the matter between Franklin and Lucy was a genuine love affair and not merely the kind of romantic fling in which, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, many politicians and administration men took “little summer wives” while their spouses were off with the children to beach or mountain vacation homes.5
Roosevelt’s sexual relationship with Eleanor had always been strained—and according to her son Elliott it had stopped altogether when she bore her last child. Her daughter, Anna, put it more bluntly, quoting a conversation in which her mother disclosed to her that the birth of John Roosevelt “was the end of any marital relationship, period.” Anna added that Eleanor had once confided that sex was “an ordeal devoid of pleasure.”6
Nevertheless, Eleanor was sometimes consumed by jealousy and suspicion over Franklin’s flirtatious attitude toward women. But she never realized what was taking place right under her nose. She’d always considered herself ordinary, and, even before her marriage, revealed to a relative that she didn’t see how she could keep the dashing, gregarious Franklin, with her “plain looks” and awkwardness in conversation.7
Worse, a number of Eleanor’s friends and acquaintances—even her relatives—not only were aware of Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer, but were accomplices and facilitators in it. When Nigel Law was called back to England, Franklin’s longtime friend from Harvard days, the wealthy Bostonian rake Livingston (“Livy”) Davis stepped conveniently into the beard role. Eleanor despised Davis’s drinking and lascivious behavior but never suspected he had also become a facilitator for Franklin and Lucy’s affair.
Nor did she suspect that their friends Edith and William Eustis had abetted the affair by inviting Franklin and Lucy to weekend house parties at Oatlands, their magnificent country estate near Leesburg, Virginia. Least of all, perhaps, did Eleanor suspect her own cousin Alice of encouraging the relationship. Alice had spotted the couple when they were out for a country drive and confided to Franklin that she had seen him motoring with a “lovely girl.”8
“Yes,” he replied, “isn’t she lovely.”9
Roosevelt, at thirty-four years old, was highly sought after, from Washington’s highest society doyennes to office girls at the Navy Department. It may not be surprising, given his stagnant marital situation, that he took a mistress; post-Victorian morals were even lower than Victorian-era morals, and having a woman on the side, as Alice Longworth so pungently pointed out, was not especially uncommon in the Washington of that day. What Roosevelt ultimately intended to do with the mistress was another question, fraught with scandalous and earthshaking possibilities.
Alice invited the couple to quiet dinners at her luxurious five-story town house on Dupont Circle—and she fostered the relationship in other ways. For her day, Alice was a forward sort of woman who smoked cigarettes and drank in public; she was married to the lascivious Nicholas Longworth, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. She was also the daughter of the formidable Theodore Roosevelt and, as such, she was an influential power in Washington society. Beyond that, Alice was also regarded as the most passionate gossip in Washington. “If you can’t say anything nice about somebody,” she often quipped, “come right here and sit by me.”
As the affair was carried on, Roosevelt was buffeted between his job at the Navy Department and the never-ending Washington social whirl that included Eleanor whenever she was in town. This meant dinners and other social gatherings at the homes of such dignitaries as Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams, Charles Hamlin, and Theodore Roosevelt himself, where they would mix and mingle with ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, legislators, and other denizens of official Washington. The couple also found themselves welcome in the homes of many of Washington’s “cave dwellers,” who tended to regard them as Roosevelts rather than Democrats.10
The Roosevelts’ social activities compared favorably with those of Winston Churchill, except that while the Roosevelts associated mostly with politicians, high-ranking administrators, and wealthy swells, the Churchills’ world was composed of princes, dukes, counts, and other powerful men who’d made fortunes from the British Empire.
Both lives contrasted markedly with the social scene in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, where there were no royals, elected legislators, or wealthy swells, because the Communists had killed them all. Cocktail parties were unknown in Stalin’s Russia, as were grand balls. There were, of course, country houses to visit, built years earlier by wealthy bourgeoisie who had since been liquidated or sent to forced labor camps by the revolution’s turns of fortune. There were dinner parties in the Soviet Union, of the banquet sort, but they tended to be somber affairs where conversation was usually confined to party business. At these events, vodka or no, people generally minded their tongues if they knew what was good for them.
* * *
OFFICIAL DUTIES CARRIED ROOSEVELT to naval bases in the far-flung reaches of the world. He even donned a sidearm for a horseback tour of U.S. Marine positions in the island country of Haiti, which had been convulsed by murderous bandits.*1 And that was where war found him. A telegram from the War Department called Roosevelt urgently back to
Washington. President Wilson had given the German ambassador his passports and was apparently contemplating asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany.
After the outrageous Lusitania sinking in May 1915, the Germans had rescinded their policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against unarmed ships on the high seas for fear of provoking the United States into war. But in early 1917 the German staff convinced the kaiser to reinstate the policy in hopes of starving Great Britain and France out of the conflict before the Americans could join it. Accordingly, German submarines sank four U.S. transports during the early months of 1917. To Roosevelt’s consternation, however, even that wasn’t enough to propel President Wilson onto the warpath.
Finally, an intercepted telegram from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico became the last straw. This shocking document proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico if the United States should enter the war. Under its terms, Germany promised, if victorious, it would help Mexico recover Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and other territories lost at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848. (For reasons known only to the Germans, California was not included in the bargain.) The revelation was widely publicized in the newspapers and so enraged the American people that Wilson at last felt he had enough political capital to join the war he had consistently promised to keep the United States out of.
America’s entry into World War I was a colossal enterprise involving the induction, training, and transport of nearly 4 million men across the Atlantic Ocean to the battlefields of France and Belgium. Franklin Roosevelt’s Navy, of course, was responsible for the latter, as well as security along the coasts from German submarines. It was also involved in a wide variety of wartime enterprises across the globe—including the laying of a giant minefield against German submarines in the North Sea that was Roosevelt’s brainchild.
As soon as war was declared, TR counseled his cousin Franklin to join the military as a fighting man; he himself had done this when the Spanish-American War broke out, which he credited for boosting him to the presidency. Franklin tried to join up, only to be discouraged by Secretary Daniels as well as by the president himself on the sensible grounds that the Navy needed its highly competent administrators to stay in their positions and not risk their lives on the fighting front. Roosevelt demurred in his quest to become a military hero but determined to raise the matter again in the future.
In the summer of 1918, Roosevelt went to the fighting front in France on a tour of inspection; he managed to get himself close enough to come under enemy artillery fire. He toured the American battlefield, some of it on foot, at Belleau Wood shortly after the fighting ended. In his diary, he wrote of walking amid “rusty bayonets, broken guns, emergency ration tins, hand grenades, discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters, crawling lines of ants, and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth, some with a helmet, and some, too, with a whittled cross with a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.”11
Roosevelt was treated as a high-level American dignitary. In London, he met Lloyd George and Churchill, and in Paris he chatted with Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister. Somewhere along the way he contracted influenza, the current strain of which could be deadly. He was put aboard the liner Leviathan,*2 more dead than alive. When the ship docked at New York, he was carried ashore on a stretcher and sent by ambulance to his mother’s town house in the city. Eleanor came up from Washington to care for him. She changed his bedclothes and bedpans and spoon-fed him for days. Then, while unpacking his suitcases, she made a terrible discovery: a packet of love letters to Franklin from Lucy Mercer.
This produced a crisis in the Roosevelt household of breathtaking dimensions. For Eleanor it all came back: the time she’d burst into tears before a cousin saying she would never be able to hold Franklin, because “he’s too attractive.”12
When Roosevelt had gained enough strength to absorb the shock, Eleanor confronted him with the evidence and, finding it undeniable, Roosevelt confessed all. According to family accounts, Eleanor offered a divorce and Franklin accepted. Their daughter, Anna, remembered her mother saying years later that she’d asked Franklin to take the time to think it over. There were, of course, the children to consider, but also the social disgrace. A divorce would be fatal to any future political career.13
Sara somehow got into the discussion and was appalled, especially at Eleanor’s offer to give Franklin his freedom. There had never been a divorce in either branch of the Roosevelts, she noted, and the shame would bring ignominy to both families. Sara informed a torn and distraught Franklin that if he should divorce his wife and abandon his family, not one penny of the great Roosevelt fortune would come his way—including income from her own trust, which she so liberally had thus far bestowed. In other words, divorce meant not only dishonor to his family, the possible alienation of his children, and the end of his political career, but reduction from the upper reaches of society to the middle class. Roosevelt’s personally inherited trust from his father’s estate was $5,000 a year—somewhere between $55,000 and $75,000 in today’s money, certainly not enough to retain the lifestyle to which he was accustomed.14
Roosevelt may have been in love, perhaps desperately. But he was pragmatic enough to see that divorce was a dead end. How and what he told Lucy Mercer we do not know, but soon afterward she married the fabulously wealthy Winthrop Rutherfurd, a widower with five children. But that wasn’t the end of the story between Franklin and Lucy. That played out until the very end, and she was present—though unseen—at all four of his presidential inaugurations.15
* * *
AFTER THE ARMISTICE ON NOVEMBER 11, 1918, Roosevelt went to Europe once more, to wind down the Navy’s presence and bring the sailors back home. This time, Eleanor went with him. They had come to some mutual understanding that she would henceforth be his helpmate, so to speak, as well as the mother of his children. She excelled in both these realms and they became, in the esteem of the Roosevelt biographer Frank Freidel, “the greatest husband-and-wife political partners in American history.”
Among the divvying up of whole sections of the globe under the Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I, Woodrow Wilson managed to secure passage of an alliance called the League of Nations, which the president had himself conceived and believed would put an end to future wars.
Homeward-bound on the liner George Washington, Wilson summoned Roosevelt to his cabin and sold him on the idea of the League of Nations, which even then the president saw imperiled by a Republican Senate that would have to ratify it. Wilson told Roosevelt that if the United States rejected the organization it would “break the heart of the world.” The young assistant secretary of the Navy did not need much selling. He was keen for the idea and signed on.
The president liked Roosevelt immensely and saw a great future for him in Democratic politics. And his prospects seemed very bright in the year 1920, when he found himself on the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate with Ohio governor James Cox.
It was a bad year for Democrats, however. There were shortages of almost everything, even after the war ended. Inflation, labor strikes, and waves of race riots swept the country, along with increasing fear of Bolshevism exported from Lenin’s Russia. In fact, there was already a nascent Communist movement in the United States, principally in the labor unions and characterized by bombings and assassinations. Known as the Red Scare, it hit close to home for the Roosevelt family on the eve of one of his trips to Europe.
After a nearby dinner party, Franklin and Eleanor were rounding a corner leading to their house when a huge explosion erupted across the street on the front porch of the home of the U.S. attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, who had been conducting a highly publicized series of federal raids against Communists and other agitators. The explosion not only tore off th
e front of the Palmer home but blew up the bomber as well, hurling body parts along the block, including a severed collarbone chucked onto the Roosevelts’ lawn and brought in next morning to the breakfast table by eleven-year-old James Roosevelt.*3 Republican Warren G. Harding won the election by a landslide, sinking Wilson’s dream of American leadership in the League of Nations, as well as Roosevelt’s hopes for an easy rise in his political status.
Roosevelt was nevertheless well placed politically. His eyes had been on the governorship of New York, but his friend Al Smith was currently serving in that capacity and demonstrated no signs of departing. So Roosevelt went back into his old law practice and bided his time. Other opportunities arose, including the U.S. Senate. But Roosevelt, who had bigger fish to fry, thought that was something of a dead end.
Then came the summer of 1921 and the polio epidemic—and the fateful trip to Campobello Island. After the fever had subsided and Roosevelt’s paralysis became clear, Sara, who had taken charge, decided it was vital to move him back to New York City. A special train car was arranged and he was taken by boat, on a stretcher, to the mainland and hustled aboard before any press people could see his condition. Various doctors were summoned to examine him, and various pronouncements were made regarding the possibilities of his recovery. Roosevelt remained stoic through it all and waited for the time that he could begin a program to rehabilitate himself.
First, he set a goal to walk on crutches. But even before that, a pair of steel braces weighing fourteen pounds had to be fabricated for his lower legs, because the muscles were so damaged as to be insupportable without some kind of buttress or stay to prop them up. Sara lobbied for him to settle into Hyde Park and live in comfort the life of an invalid. But between the exhortations of Eleanor and Louis Howe (who, much to Sara’s chagrin, had come to live with the family) as well as Franklin’s own indomitable personality and love of politics, he became determined to make himself well enough to seek public office.
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