The sorrow and tragedy of the war was always with her. Franklin reported that a transport had been sunk and they feared a thousand men were lost. “All through dinner I felt like Nero.” When the word came that Theodore’s youngest son, an aviator, had been killed, “Think if it were our John,” Eleanor wrote Franklin; “he would still seem a baby to us.” She grieved for Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted, “but I suppose we must all expect to bear what France and England have borne so long.”
Sir Cecil was not the only friend who passed from the world’s stage that spring. At the end of February they dined with Henry Adams for the last time; on March 27 his “nieces” found him dead.
Franklin and I went to Mr. Adams funeral at two and I felt very sad for he was a very interesting man and the house had so many associations and now all is ended. There are not too many houses or [interiors] of that kind in this country and the end of things is sad. Alice invited us to lunch next Sunday almost before the Service was over and it offended me and made me angry, it seemed to be lacking in feeling, but Franklin said we’d go.
It was not always easy for Eleanor to follow Franklin into new experiences and to entertain new people whom he considered important to his career. When he brought Felix Frankfurter home, she sensed his brilliance but was bothered by what she considered his Jewish mannerisms—“an interesting little man but very jew,” she commented.13 In her anti-Semitism she belonged to the world of Henry Adams and Spring-Rice, whose hostility to materialism and the new power of money was mingled with dislike of Jews. She had to go to a party given by Admiral Harris for Bernard M. Baruch, “which I’d rather be hung than seen at,” she complained to her mother-in-law; “mostly Jews.”14 Two days later she wrote, “The Jew party [was] appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels and . . . sables mentioned again.” Brandeis was exempted from this dislike, as were the young Henry Morgenthaus who had recently settled at Fishkill in lower Dutchess County. Even Sara approved of the Morgenthaus. “Young Morgenthau and his wife called this p.m.,” she wrote Eleanor from Hyde Park, “and while they were here Mrs. F.W.V. [Vanderbilt] came bringing 5 people, and we had a pleasant tea. Young Morgenthau was easy and yet modest and serious and intelligent. The wife is very Jewish but appeared very well.”
In May, 1918, the Red Cross proposed that Eleanor go to England to organize a Red Cross canteen there. “I really won’t go abroad,” she assured Sara, “but it is a fearful temptation because I feel I have the strength and probably the capacity for some kind of work and one can’t help wanting to do the real thing instead of playing at it over here.”15 Why did she refuse? She was not sufficiently independent to manage such an undertaking, she later wrote, adding that in her heart of hearts she felt her primary obligation was to stay with her children. She did not want to admit this, even to herself, but that is what she felt.16 And she knew the family—Grandma, Cousin Susie, Sara—would not approve.
Some were even critical when Franklin went abroad on naval business in July. “I think the family are funny not to be interested in F’s trip,” she wrote Sara,
for if it served no other purpose, it is really the only way of knowing the “real thing,” the problems over there and the men whom this war is daily changing. It is too silly to think you can sit here at a desk and realize them and adequately deal with them, even men of the highest imagination can’t and they say so. I hear it all the time.
The next day Franklin was received at Buckingham Palace. To bolster Sara, Eleanor sent her newspaper clippings about the event. Franklin “is surely making a hit,” she observed. “The enclosed is from the Washington Post. I often think that you must wish his father could be here to be proud with you of Franklin.”
She was working hard and tirelessly. Sara wanted her to come up to Hyde Park in May, but when Eleanor told the Navy Department workers that she was thinking of leaving, “they groaned. I really have no right to go unless it is a necessity.” One day when there was a rush at the canteen she cut her finger to the bone while using the bread-slicing machine. She applied a bandage and kept on working, and although she saw a doctor later, she carried a scar for the remainder of her life.
She saw Alice at a party. Alice, who amused guests by turning back somersaults, expressed an interest in working at the canteen. “I’m taking Alice down to the canteen but I doubt if she does much and they told me they were almost afraid to take her on!” There were no trains the afternoon Alice came down and she decided, said Eleanor, that “she did not like scrubbing and ironing.”
Sara’s sister, who lived in Washington, reported that “Eleanor is the ‘willing horse’ and they call upon her at all hours, all the time.” Washington was sticky and torrid that July, especially in the tin shacks in which they worked, but Eleanor made light of the discomfort: “I’ve come to the conclusion that you only feel heat when idle.”
They had eight trains on July 17, a “very hectic day” made more so because the president’s daughter Margaret came in to work with Eleanor’s shift. Eleanor had
to introduce her to officers, etc. Mrs. Wilson now has a uniform and comes and works fairly regularly and yesterday late the President came down and walked down the tracks and all around and they tell me seemed much interested. I rather wish I’d been on duty there instead of the station.
A week later she had second thoughts about the president’s wife.
We’ve become the fashionable sight and yesterday Mrs. Woodrow Wilson came to look on and brought Lady Reading [the wife of the British Ambassador] and Mrs. [Newton D.] Baker and Miss Margaret Wilson worked with us! It rather tries my soul but it is good for my bump of deference.
While Franklin was in Europe she finally had the family chauffeur, Huckins, teach her to drive. She was able to drive their Stutz to the canteen with Huckins on the running board, but just when she learned to handle it, the axle broke. She then used their older Buick, but its brakes “don’t hold very well so I’ve just escaped street cars occasionally. However, Huckins says I’m doing finely.” When General Headlam, head of a British military mission, came up from Washington to visit West Point and stayed at Hyde Park, Eleanor drove him about in the Ford, “once nearly dumping him but otherwise all serene.” By the end of August she was driving her children and assorted relatives up to Tivoli and back. She was also making a new effort to learn to swim, and thought she might at last succeed.
Sara was happy to have her daughter-in-law at Hyde Park, if only because it meant that Franklin’s letters to Eleanor from Europe would be promptly read to her. Please, Eleanor implored her husband, “when you don’t write Mama, send messages to her otherwise I have to invent and that is painful! . . . I hate not being with you and seeing it all. Isn’t that horrid of me!” She envied him his opportunities and she was lonely, but she hoped he could accomplish “a good deal . . . for I know that is what you really want.”
Franklin delayed his departure from Europe because he wanted to avoid the Democratic primary at the beginning of September. The previous summer he had made his peace with Tammany, to the distress of Eleanor and Sara. Just before he had left for Europe he had had to squelch a plan to nominate him for governor that Tammany was prepared to sponsor, and in the process had come out for upstater William Church Osborn, an old comrade in the political wars against Tammany. A letter from Eleanor reported that Louis Howe was in an agitated state because Franklin’s support of Osborn was interfering with his appeasement policy toward Tammany. Howe told her, Eleanor reported, that
he alone kept you from being nominated for governor and now he doesn’t know what to do as you came out for Osborn and he is staying in the race and Al Smith wants your endorsement and he, Mr. H. could get no answer as to what the White House wanted you to do, etc! My guess is he’s making himself one little nuisance. However, I soothed him by suggesting that as you were out for Osborn you’d have to stick till he withdrew which would doubtless be soon.
As Howe had foreseen, however, Osborn declined to withdraw from the primary and came t
o Howe to solicit Franklin’s help. Howe told him that Franklin would be out of the country, and therefore out of politics, for a long time, and asked Eleanor to pass the word to Franklin confidentially that “the President and Mr. Daniels think that the political situation will be considerably eased if he does not reach this country until at least a week after the primaries, which are sometime in the first week of September.”
In a speech in Paris Franklin said that he intended to volunteer for the Navy, and a letter to Eleanor from Brest explained that his place was “not at a Washington desk, even a Navy desk.” He added that he expected to be back in the States about September 15.
She next heard that he was ill in Paris, “so I expect it has been a little too strenuous but the trip back if devoid of incidents will be restful!” His illness was more serious than she knew. On September 19, the Leviathan docked and Eleanor received a call to come to the pier with a doctor. She summoned Dr. Draper, and two hours later an ambulance drew up at Sara’s Sixty-fifth Street house and four Navy orderlies carried Franklin inside. His illness was diagnosed as double pneumonia.
As a consequence, she and Franklin did not get back to Washington until October 18, and a few weeks later the war was over. “This has been an exciting day,” Eleanor wrote on November 11, 1918.
The Secretary got me a ticket for the gallery so I heard the President make his speech to Congress and F. went on the floor with Mr. Daniels. The galleries were packed and it was most inspiring. At the mention of Alsace-Lorraine’s evacuation the whole place rose and cheered and the French wept. There was not as much enthusiasm for feeding the Central Powers!17
“The feeling of relief and thankfulness was beyond description,” she later wrote.18
At the war’s end her attention shifted from the canteen to the wounded, who were being returned to military hospitals. There were men who would never be well enough to go home again, and Christmas no longer was exclusively a family party. Her children, Sara noted, “had a Christmas tree and supper with 12 soldiers from Mrs. Lane’s Convalescent Home and 12 sailors from the Naval Hospital.” Each man was given a cornucopia of candy, a box of cigarettes, and a tie. “Sec. and Mrs. Lane there and Mrs. (Gladys) Saltonstall played violin and everyone sang.”
Except for Eleanor, everyone in the household—all the children, Franklin, and most of the servants—was felled by the influenza epidemic that swept through Washington that winter. Eleanor worked round the clock, putting to good use all the lessons she had learned from Miss Spring. When the children were asleep, she hurried off to assist the Red Cross unit set up to provide help for government offices whose employees were absent with the flu.
After everyone recovered, Eleanor and Franklin went to Europe (more will be said about this journey later) and when they returned on February 24, Eleanor thought her work was “practically over.” But soon afterward she agreed to take charge of the Red Cross recreation room at the Naval Hospital. She visited the hospital wards daily, handing out cigarettes, bringing flowers, saying a word of cheer. Her new duties also included reviewing appeals from families of sailors and marines who were in need of help.
“I am taking two ladies of Navy Department Red Cross Auxiliary to St. Elizabeth’s this p.m.,” she wrote Sara at the end of March. “We have 400 men in the insane asylum there and the Chaplain asked that we go to see the Doctor in charge and find out what could be done for them as very few organizations take any interest in them and many of the men are not insane but shell shock patients.”19 The chief doctor took them through the two naval wards, and pity filled Eleanor’s heart. St. Elizabeth’s, a federal hospital, was starved for funds, short of attendants, lacking equipment. The men were locked in and moved restlessly around their cagelike porches; they were not permitted to go outside for exercise or sports. Eleanor told the doctor that the Navy Red Cross would supply newspapers, games, a phonograph, and records for a Navy recreation room that the Red Cross would build.
St. Elizabeth’s was under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department, headed by Eleanor and Franklin’s friend, Franklin Lane, who feared that the program Eleanor and her friends had devised for the Navy boys in the hospital would be considered discriminatory. “It is more and more clear to me,” he wrote her, “that we could not have the Navy men treated better than the Army men or the civilians without causing a great deal of trouble.” There was a time when Eleanor would have let the matter rest there, but now she asked why the government should not improve the whole hospital, military and nonmilitary. She wanted Lane to visit St. Elizabeth’s to see conditions for himself, and although he declined, he appointed a departmental investigatory commission, whose report to the House Committee on Appropriations confirmed the inadequacy of the care provided at St. Elizabeth’s. A larger appropriation was voted and the doctors were able to transform the hospital into a model institution.
Far from decreasing, her public activity was so great that, Eleanor lamented late in 1919, she hardly had time to breathe. She had a hand in obtaining rest rooms for the girls who worked in the Navy Department; she was responsible for a ball for the benefit of Trinity Parish; she even agreed to sit in a booth at the New Willard Hotel to help the membership drive of the American Women’s Legion. Theodore Roosevelt had died in January, 1919, and a Women’s Memorial Committee was being organized. She agreed to work hard for it if someone else took the chairmanship, stating, “This is positively the last thing I’m going to do!”
But there were compensations. On New Year’s Eve a Staten Island mother wrote her:
I want to thank you as the mother of one of the boys who was in the Naval Hospital at Washington from the first of April until July 8th for the kind words—the little favors—the interest you took in my son, which was so much appreciated by him and also his mother.
Perhaps you can’t recall the boy. He lay in the T.B. ward. . . . He always loved to see you come in. You always brought a ray of sunshine with you, always had something to say to him. . . .
Eleanor acknowledged that being able to help gave her a deep sense of satisfaction. “One of the boys in the Naval Hospital died today,” she wrote Sara, “and the little wife who is to have a baby in October and the mother had to borrow money to come to him so the Navy Department Auxiliary is going to refund it and I must go to see them this p.m. It is nice to be able to do such things isn’t it?”20
In 1920, when Franklin accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president and Eleanor resigned from the Navy Relief Society, the board of managers adopted a resolution praising her for her “valuable services, . . . unfailing interest in the work of the society, . . . patience, good judgment, tact, and amiability.”
Once during the war when Sara had been deploring the fact that the war caused a decline in moral standards, Eleanor had remarked that she might be right, “yet I think it is waking people to a sense of responsibility and of obligation to work who perhaps never had it before.” She was one of the awakened.
She said, when she was asked to go to work for the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial, and she repeated it in one form or another throughout her life: “I begin to feel that only a hermit’s life will ever give me joy again.” But her commitment to public activity had been made. The sleeping princess, as Archibald MacLeish later wrote, had been awakened.21 She would never again be content with purely private satisfactions, and for the rest of her life she would look at the injustice of the world, feel pity for the human condition, and ask what she could do about it.
21.TRIAL BY FIRE
THERE WAS ANOTHER REASON WHY THERE WAS NO TURNING BACK to a wholly private life for Eleanor: her discovery of the romance between her husband and her social secretary, Lucy Page Mercer. In the shaping of Eleanor Roosevelt the Lucy Mercer affair, while neither hammer nor anvil, was the flame whose heat hastened and fixed the change from private into public person. Franklin’s love of another woman brought her to almost total despair, and she emerged from the ordeal a different woman. Ended was the subordination to her moth
er-in-law and to the values and the world Sara represented; emergent was the realization that to build a life and interests of her own was not only what she wanted to do but what she had to do. “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” she wrote twenty-five years later, “and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time. I really grew up that year.”1
She forgave her husband and they continued to live together, but their relationship was different. She no longer allowed herself to be taken for granted, either as a woman or an instrument of his purposes. And because—to paraphrase Santayana—she felt great things greatly and had the power to relate them to the little things she felt keenly and sincerely, her life became an inspiration to women everywhere. Her relationship with her husband not only stands as one of the most remarkable in American history but had considerable effect upon its course.
The depth of Eleanor’s feeling about the Lucy Mercer episode can be gauged by the fact that it is one of the few events that she did not mention in her books and about which she found it difficult to speak. Occasionally in later life Eleanor discussed it with a few of her closest friends, including the writer of this book, when she saw they were puzzled by some of her domestic arrangements or when she thought her own experience might help them disentangle their own problems of love and marriage, but even then she was very reluctant to speak of it. If it were not central to an understanding of husband and wife it might be passed over with the same reticence, but it must be dealt with, even though the story is known only in outline.2
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