Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  “I know that marriage would have taken place,” Mrs. Lyman Cotten, a North Carolina cousin of Lucy, told Jonathan Daniels, “but as Lucy said to us, ‘Eleanor was not willing to step aside.’”27 Mrs. Cotten is incorrect, not in her impression of what Lucy may have told her, but as to the facts. Franklin may have told Lucy that Eleanor would not give him a divorce, but this was not the story as Eleanor’s friends heard it or as Auntie Corinne heard it from Cousin Susie or as Alice Longworth heard it from Auntie Corinne.28 “I remember one day I was having fun with Auntie Corinne,” Alice said; “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 conference and they talked it over and finally decided it affected the children and there was Lucy Mercer, a Catholic, and so it was called off.’”

  With Eleanor the paramount, perhaps the only consideration in preserving the marriage was the children, and no doubt Franklin’s affection for his children was the major reason for his hesitation. Lucy’s guilt feelings as a Catholic and Sara’s threat were undoubtedly also influential, but for years Eleanor believed that the decisive factor with Franklin had been his realization that a divorce would end his political career.

  A long letter dated February 14, 1920, from Eleanor to Sara full of chitchat about the children and political news ended with the sentence, “Did you know Lucy Mercer married Mr. Wintie Rutherfurd two days ago?”

  In later years Eleanor confided to her most intimate friends, “I have the memory of an elephant. I can forgive, but I cannot forget.”

  22.RECONCILIATION AND A TRIP ABROAD

  “NO WOMAN MARRIES THE MAN SHE REALLY MARRIES,” JOSEPHUS Daniels declared1 at a party the Roosevelts gave in December, 1918, to celebrate the approaching marriage of Sallie Collier, Aunt Kassie’s gayest daughter. The secretary addressed himself to Sallie but it was Eleanor who paid attention. She and Franklin were now each trying to be the partner the other had hoped for when they married. He knew how deeply he had wounded her and sought to do the things that pleased her; she was making an effort to be gay, even frivolous. There was a kind of wistful camaraderie to their relationship. “Last night’s party was really wonderful and I enjoyed it,” she informed Sara, and Franklin reported the same reaction. Eleanor talked to “heaps and heaps of people” he wrote, “and I actually danced once.”2

  Sunday was still sacred to Chevy Chase and golf, but in the afternoon instead of the morning. Franklin “went to church last Sunday and goes again today, which I know is a great sacrifice to please me,” Eleanor noted. Once his casual habits of attendance at church had upset Eleanor, but now she could jest about it. When Franklin was informed that he had been made a vestryman at St. Thomas where they worshiped in Washington, Eleanor described the news as a “fearful shock” to him and expressed the hope that he would decline.3

  He spent more time with the children. He took James with him to Chevy Chase and let the youngster caddy, and helped Anna with her algebra until Miss Eastman suggested it might be better to drop algebra altogether and concentrate on arithmetic. He read Eleanor his official report to the secretary on his European trip. She thought it very good and undertook to edit the diary he had kept during the trip with a view to publication. “We had a good deal of dictating in the evening for the first time,” she wrote Sara.4 She merged into a single account diary notes, letters, and new material dictated by him, and then dictated the combined account to a stenographer in Franklin’s office. A month later they were still working on it—“luckily I’m not as sleepy as last night so I hope we can have some dictating”5—but in the end the account was only half completed and was not published until Elliott edited his father’s Personal Letters.

  With the war over, Washington was no longer the focus of excitement and action, and Franklin was restless. Town Topics, the society gossip sheet, even said he had resigned and might be slated for a diplomatic post. “Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt,” the item added, “has always been retiring and not overwhelmingly in love with Washington.” Eleanor thought that was “a funny notice, however, I’m glad I’m retiring enough not to merit any further comments.” Yet Franklin was “very discontented with his work. . . . Don’t be surprised if we are back with you next winter, if we are not in France,” she wrote Sara.6 It was to Europe that they went.

  Franklin proposed to the secretary that a civilian should go to Europe to direct the liquidation of the naval establishments there, and if he were sent, Eleanor should accompany him. “Today the Secretary told Franklin he could sail about the 19th but I still feel it is uncertain,” wrote Eleanor, but she nevertheless quietly finished her Christmas shopping “as I felt if we were going I wanted to have everything ready.”7 Daniels, who was not enthusiastic about the idea, signed his orders reluctantly, perhaps as much in the interests of the marital truce as in those of the Navy. “Franklin says we may sail on the 28th and I can probably go.”8 She thought the children, who were recovering from the flu, would be well enough by then. “I never hated to do anything so much and yet I think I’d worry more about Franklin if he went alone. It is rather a horrid world I think.”9

  One of the few things they did in New York before they boarded the U.S.S. George Washington was to review the triumphant U.S. fleet in a blinding blizzard. A photograph of Eleanor on the bridge of the reviewing ship, one of the most extraordinary of the thousands taken of her, showed a face ravaged and severe, purged of all softness as if she, not Franklin, was the one who had survived a wasting illness. The night before they sailed Franklin, Eleanor, and Sara dined at the Colony Club with Captain Edward McCauley, the George Washington’s skipper. Franklin was “full of enthusiastic anticipation of the adventure before us,” he recalled, and in spite of her qualms Eleanor also looked forward to the journey. On New Year’s Day they embarked. “Very comfy and well settled in our suite,” she noted in the diary that she began to keep.

  It was an eventful moment to be going to Europe. Four years of slaughter had ended, leaving 9 million soldiers dead, 22 million wounded, and immeasurable civilian devastation. Mankind’s eyes were now on the Paris Peace Conference, where almost all the great and mighty on the Allied side were in attendance. Wilson, the most powerful of them all, had become the inspired spokesman for a new order of things. Eleanor had seen the president a week before he sailed, at “a really historic party at the French Embassy. The President and Mrs. Wilson came and the Ambassador spoke and then the President and everyone drank to Strassbourg and the President. The National Anthems were played and with all the uniforms and pretty dresses it was a brilliant scene and as Caroline said it will be nice to tell our grandchildren about.”10

  Both Eleanor and Caroline had been critical of Wilson, but both were becoming true believers. Caroline left an account of her change of heart, which became complete when she heard Wilson’s address to a joint session of Congress just before he sailed for the Peace Conference:

  It began the night that I heard him speak at the French Embassy. . . . On Monday last, this experience was more than ever vivid. I was poignantly moved by the ordeal he was facing. I prayed with all my strength for his support, and I felt as though some spiritual aid was really reaching him through my prayers. My conclusion is that in the ordinary things of life he makes continual blunders, has poor judgment of men and affairs, is self-conscious, uncertain, but in the really big things he has a real vision and inspiration which make him a great leader, in fact the only man who can lead the way in the upbuilding of a new and better world out of the chaos of the old one. . . . 11

  Eleanor thought Wilson had a remarkable understanding of man in the mass but little of men as individuals. She considered him an inept politician and had criticized his appeal to the country in the November elections to return a Democratic Congress, an appeal which had boomeranged. She thought self-righteousness made him too parti
san.12 But like Caroline she was unhappy over Wilson’s blunders because she cared deeply for his ideals.

  Eleanor was thirty-five when she sailed for Europe, her first trip abroad since her honeymoon fourteen years earlier.13 The ocean, like much else, had lost most of its terrors: “Quite a blow and some roll,” she noted in her diary; “I feel proud to be so good a sailor so far.” It was indeed a “blow”; Livingston Davis, Franklin’s partner in Chevy Chase convivialities as well as his assistant for operations and personnel, also kept a diary on that trip. “A heavy sea,” he noted that same day; “whole dining room wrecked by heavy roll, also my breakfast landing on top of waiter’s head.”

  Eleanor’s sure-footedness compared with 1905 was more than nautical. She entered into all shipboard activities, went to the movies, joined in the singing led by a YMCA man, turned out daily for the “abandon ship drill,” and was present for every meal. If a man interested her, she sought him out. She talked with Walter Camp, who exercised the men daily. “I like him,” she wrote, and it was for her benefit as well as Franklin’s that he came to their suite to show them his back exercises. Charles M. Schwab, the steelman, was another passenger. When Wilson had named him head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation in the spring of 1918 Eleanor considered the appointment “the first sign that the President [was] waking up” to the need for stronger leadership in war production. He and Franklin spoke to the crew, and Eleanor noted that she had “a little walk and talk with him.” Bernard Baruch, who had once been a Roosevelt dinner guest, was another illustrious shipmate. Since he was seasick most of the voyage he stayed below, and Eleanor’s diary did not refer to him until they reached Paris, when he sent her “a lot of roses.” There were Chinese and Mexican delegations aboard on their way to the Peace Conference. “At four Eleanor gave a tea to the Chinese mission,” Livy (Davis) noted. “Most of the conversation was in French.”

  Theodore Roosevelt had died while they were en route. “I feel it must have been sudden and I am so sorry for Aunt Edith and the boys in Europe,” Eleanor wrote. She was sorry, too, that the last few years had been so full of disappointments for Uncle Ted. In Europe, when Wilson was informed of the passing of his old antagonist he dictated a cool message of condolence to Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and remarked to his intimates that Roosevelt had no constructive policy to his record. Eleanor’s evaluation of her uncle’s role was more just: “Another great figure off the stage,” she wrote sadly in her diary.

  The news about Uncle Ted’s death came while she was reading The Education of Henry Adams, which she had given Franklin for Christmas. Theodore was for her a symbol of “active participation in the life of his people,” while Adams symbolized withdrawal from life. “Very interesting,” she commented on the Adams book, “but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little.”

  “A wonderfully comfortable and entertaining trip,” Eleanor summed up the voyage as the George Washington approached the port of Brest. After the landing ceremonies, demobilization business claimed the men of the party, while Admiral Henry B. Wilson took Eleanor and Mrs. Thomas J. Spellacy, the wife of the U.S. attorney from Connecticut who was Franklin’s legal adviser on the mission, on a drive through the town and its environs. “Every other woman wears a crepe veil to her knees,” Eleanor noted. An exhausted Mrs. Spellacy begged to be allowed to sit in the car during the last part of their tour of the city and naval base and stayed behind when Eleanor walked with the admiral to a shop that sold the work of war widows.

  The next day they were in Paris. Eleanor had never seen anything like it, she reported. “It is full beyond belief and one sees many celebrities and all one’s friends.” In one respect her outlook had changed little since her honeymoon visit; the women still scandalized her. “The women here all look exaggerated, you wonder if any are ladies though all look smart and some pretty.” Now, however, puritan ethic was fortified by social outrage. “In contrast to this element are the women in plain black and deep mourning that one sees in all the streets.”

  She and Franklin went to tea with Mrs. Wilson at the Palais Murat, and it seemed to Eleanor that all of Washington was congregated there. She attended a luncheon given by Admiral Benson’s wife, at which Mrs. House and Mrs. Lansing were also present, and noted, “Much talk of the President’s not having been to the front yet and Mrs. Wilson only having seen two hospitals.” Eleanor helped remedy the latter complaint, according to Miss Benham, Mrs. Wilson’s social secretary, who wrote that Eleanor “swept Mrs. Wilson up into her project of visiting the war wounded in the hospitals.”14 Although the president had not yet visited the front, Eleanor did so on the way to Boulogne with Franklin. It was a journey through recently fought-over battlefields that, said Franklin, “we shall never forget.” Eleanor, he added, had a “very achy side and shoulder” but insisted “on doing everything and getting out of the car at all points of interest.” The land was gashed by trench systems and scarred by barbed-wire entanglements. “Ghastly,” Franklin exclaimed at the Somme battlefield. “In the bigger places the Cathedral is always destroyed, and the town more or less, mostly more,” Eleanor noted. “The streets are all clear, all is neat and clean but you feel as though ghosts were beside you.” Their army guides, who had been through the fighting at St. Quentin, described the attack the previous September in the face of massed machine guns and the breakthrough in the Hindenburg line at the St. Quentin Canal. “An almost incredible feat,” said Franklin. “How men ever did it I cannot imagine,” wrote Eleanor. When they finally arrived at Amiens for the night, they were informed that express orders forbade ladies to go to the front, “but as I’d been,” wrote Eleanor, “there was nothing to do about it!”

  “Eleanor laid out with pleurisy,” Livy recorded when they reached London. Admiral William S. Sims met them at the station and took them to the Ritz, and when Muriel Martineau, one of Eleanor’s bridesmaids and Franklin’s cousin, came to see them, she immediately called a doctor, who ordered a protesting Eleanor to bed. Franklin and his staff had a great deal to do in London, but he came back to the hotel for lunch and later for tea, and at the end of the day dined at the hotel, “bringing me my dinner. He has been too sweet in looking after me,” Eleanor recorded. In the next few days she ran a temperature, admitted to feeling tired and even conceded she might have a touch of influenza, but when Franklin insisted on taking her temperature and, finding that it was over 100, would not let her go out, she was furious. “He made me back out to my rage.”

  After she recovered she had reunions with those of her Allenswood schoolmates who were in London. They recalled the years that were among the happiest in her life, and although she was deeply fond of them she had progressed beyond them in the breadth of her interests and sympathies. Lady Gertrude of Osberton came to call. Eleanor’s honeymoon stay at Osberton had been a nightmare; now she was at ease and self-assured. Lady Gertrude was “a dear old Lady” but Eleanor had scant sympathy for her lament that Osberton was ruined because the woods had to be cut down to pay the death duties. And she was amused by Lady Gertrude’s distress that her grandson, who had been a prisoner of war, had married his nurse, a Polish woman; “of course one would prefer an Englishwoman even though she was nice and had twice saved his life,” Lady Osberton said.

  Yet interlaced with judgments and reactions that showed how much Eleanor had grown since her honeymoon days were avowals of allegiance to Sara that were as affectionate as those of 1905. “I do hope we never have to separate again. As I grow older I miss you and the children more and more. I think instead of becoming more independent I am growing into a really clinging vine!” Her old puritan conscience was as outraged in London as it had been in Paris. She and Franklin dined with a British admiral, and she was shocked: “Just wait till I get home and tell you what these respectable people now let their daughters do, your hair will curl as mine did!” Franklin, however, was intrigued. One lady so fascinated him, Eleanor wrote, that it was with difficulty she “dragged” him home at eleven o’clock. “We h
ave nothing like some of their women or some of their men!”

  She learned anew how cold London could be in the winter. “I don’t wonder they consume much wine here, they have to in order to rise above the cold houses or the cheer would indeed be cold cheer!” She wore spats, a flannel petticoat, and her heavy purple dress “all the time” and never felt even “mildly warm.” She was disappointed in herself for minding: “Decidedly we are growing effete at home from too much comfort and I always thought myself something of a Spartan!”

  Franklin left on the thirty-first of January for Brussels and the Rhineland without Eleanor; it would be easier for everyone, he told her, not to have women along in the occupied areas. “I hate to miss the trip to Brussels and Coblentz,” she wrote in her diary, “and to have him going off without me.”

  She stayed on in London with Muriel Martineau and then returned to Paris, but it was depressing without Franklin. “I hope he arrives. Somehow I feel lost and lonely in a strange town alone and I do get so blue. I suppose it must be the result of pleurisy!” She decided that activity was the best cure for melancholy.

  She and Aunt Dora, who all through the war had refused to abandon her beloved Paris, visited the Val de Grâce Hospital. “It is here that Morestin operates and he has been so successful with the horrible face wounds,” she wrote. The sight of shattered faces devastated her, and much as she tried she could not help but feel revolted “even though one does not show it.” Aunt Dora seemed to love hearing about the various operations, but it made Eleanor feel ill. She even found the plaster casts oppressive, and “could hardly bear to look at the men with the horrible face wounds.” But she did.