EIGHT

LUCY

You were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campobello.

—FRANKLIN TO ELEANOR, JULY 16, 1917

WHEN CONGRESS DECLARED war on April 6, 1917, the United States was a second-class military power.¹ The Army, relegated to showing the flag in Latin America and pursuing Mexican banditti, consisted of 108,399 men, a third of whom were on garrison duty in Panama, Hawaii, and the Philippines. The various state militias, recently formed into a National Guard, added but another 200,000, and there was no organized reserve.² The Navy numbered slightly more than 60,000 in all ranks, with a mere 197 ships on active service.

Within six months the Navy’s strength expanded fourfold. By war’s end nearly half a million men had joined the fleet and the number of ships exceeded two thousand. During the same time, the Army grew to 2.4 million men.³ General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, landed at Boulogne, France, on June 13, 1917. On July 4, elements of the 1st Division paraded down the Champs-Élysées. Ultimately, more than 2 million men would serve in the AEF, escorted safely across the Atlantic by the Navy’s Cruiser and Transport Force.⁴Except for sporadic firings at German submarines, the U.S. Navy did not engage the enemy in World War I. But thanks to its escort duty, when the armistice was signed the Navy could boast that not one American troopship had been lost in action.⁵

FDR, who was responsible for the Navy’s procurement, threw himself into his mobilization duties. He contracted for vast amounts of materiel and equipment (sometimes before Congress appropriated the money),⁶ pressed for the immediate enlistment of large numbers of men, ordered training camps expanded and ship construction accelerated. “See young Roosevelt about it” became a catchphrase in wartime Washington.⁷

Roosevelt’s procurement efforts were so effective that two weeks after America entered the war he received an urgent summons to the White House. In the Oval Office he found General Hugh Scott, the Army chief of staff. “Mr. Secretary,” said Wilson, barely able to suppress a grin, “I’m very sorry, but you have cornered the market for supplies. You’ll have to divide up with the Army.”⁸

Busy as FDR was, he had no intention of fighting the war behind a desk. And though he had a wife and five young children, he was determined to see action.⁹ That was the path Cousin Theodore had followed, and the old Rough Rider, who had come to Washington to volunteer his services to President Wilson, encouraged Franklin to join up.^* “You must resign,” said TR. “You must get into uniform at once.”¹⁰

Neither Daniels nor Wilson would hear of it. The war placed a premium on the qualities FDR brought to his job as assistant secretary—energy, flexibility, decisiveness, and the willingness to act on a moment’s notice—qualities they did not wish to lose. Daniels told Franklin he was “rendering a far more important war service than if he put on the uniform.”¹¹ Wilson said that Roosevelt’s place had already been assigned by the country. “Tell the young man to stay where he is,” he instructed Daniels.¹² General Leonard Wood, who evidently heard of Franklin’s desire from TR, added his voice to those urging him to remain in Washington. “Franklin Roosevelt should under no circumstances think of leaving the Navy Department,” he wrote. “It would be a public calamity to have him leave at this time.”¹³

Contrary to most Americans’ assumptions in April 1917, the war was not going well. In Russia, the army had mutinied, the czar had abdicated, and the provisional government was fast proving powerless. On April 16—ten days after the United States declared war—Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership detrained at the Finland Station in Saint Petersburg, smuggled from Switzerland by the German high command. In France, war weariness gripped the nation. The army might be counted on to defend French soil, but offensive operations were out of the question. In the Atlantic, unrestricted submarine warfare was taking a dreadful toll. Since February 1, German U-boats had sunk 844 Allied vessels. Nine hundred thousand tons of shipping had gone to the bottom in March, and April’s total was expected to be even greater. The Germans were sinking merchantmen faster than they could be replaced. Herbert Hoover, director of American food relief in Europe, reported that British warehouses held only a three-week supply of grain: once that was depleted, the islands could be starved into submission.¹⁴ “Unless we can stop these losses, and stop them soon, we must leave the war,” said Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Britain’s First Sea Lord.¹⁵

It should have been obvious that the solution to the U-boat menace was to require merchant ships to sail in convoys. Yet the Admiralty stubbornly refused. Convoy duty was inglorious. The warrior ethic of the Royal Navy demanded that submarines be hunted down: a virtual impossibility given the size of the sea and the absence of radar, sonar, and long-range spotting aircraft.¹⁶ But the mounting losses were too great to sustain. Under pressure from Prime Minister Lloyd George—who paid a dramatic visit to the Admiralty—the sea lords relented and on May 10 dispatched a trial convoy of forty ships from Gibraltar to Britain, escorted by six destroyers. All arrived safely. A second merchant convoy set out from Hampton Roads on May 29 and reached Liverpool without incident. The Admiralty recognized its error and immediately decreed that all merchant shipping to or from Britain must travel in convoy.

To provide destroyer escorts for the convoys placed an enormous strain on the Royal Navy. Several destroyer divisions—the eyes of the fleet—were withdrawn from the Grand Fleet for convoy duty, but the shortage of escort vessels remained acute. Rear Admiral William S. Sims, whom Daniels had dispatched to London, reported that unless the American fleet was “thrown into the balance,” Britain and France would “be forced to dire straits.”¹⁷ FDR shared Sims’s concern. A token force of six destroyers was sent immediately to the Celtic port of Queenstown (now Cobh), but it required a high-level British mission headed by former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and then a French mission that included Marshal Joseph Joffre, hero of the Battle of the Marne, to convince Washington of the seriousness of the situation.¹⁸

Perhaps because he was one of the few members of the Wilson administration who spoke French fluently, FDR drew the assignment of meeting the French mission at Hampton Roads and escorting it to Washington. As a result, he had “twenty-five hours of quite intimate conversation” with the members before they saw anyone else.¹⁹ He also met frequently with the British. In repeated discussions Roosevelt urged both delegations to press for all they needed from the United States. He also pledged to provide Britain with thirty American destroyers, although neither Daniels nor Wilson had authorized him to do so. In this instance FDR’s eagerness served him well. Despite some foot-dragging by the Navy high command, in July 1917 thirty-five American destroyers were on station at Queenstown. Before the war ended, a total of 370 combat vessels had been assigned to the European command.²⁰

The Balfour and Joffre missions went from Washington to New York to raise money and reinforce investor confidence. FDR’s mother, Sara, went to hear Balfour speak at Carnegie Hall (“a perfect little speech”) and the next morning attended a special service for the British delegation at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Morningside Heights. Franklin’s half-brother, Rosy, was a trustee of the cathedral and introduced Sara to Balfour. “He is both musical and religious, and wins all hearts, mine included,” she reported. Joffre proved an even greater hit. When Sara discovered that the French hero was staying nearby at the Fifth Avenue mansion of Henry Clay Frick, she asked the marshal’s aide if she might present three of Franklin’s children—Anna, James, and Elliott—to him. The marshal graciously fit them into his schedule, and Sara escorted the children up the grand marble staircase at the Frick residence “to a little bedroom, and Joffre kissed all three children. Then the perfectly charming, brave Joffre spoke to me of my son in a most lovely way. I felt quite queer and rather like shedding a tear but managed to behave decently.”²¹Sara asked Joffre for a photograph, which the marshal signed and which she immediately had framed and placed conspicuously on the mantel in the library at Hyde Park.

Like Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, FDR was bubbling with new ideas to confound the enemy. His most notable wartime achievement was the laying of a North Sea antisubmarine mine barrage—a chain of underwater high-explosive charges stretching 240 miles from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway. Roosevelt did not conceive the plan, but he promoted it so vigorously that Admiral Frederic R. Harris, the Navy’s expert in construction matters, said that if not for Franklin “there would have been no North Sea mine barrage.”^22*

Long before the United States entered the war, Wilson had asked Daniels, “Why don’t the British shut up the hornets in their nests? They are hunting hornets all over the farm and letting the nest alone.”²³ The British had investigated but rejected the idea of constructing an antisubmarine barrier across the North Sea: the distance was too great, the water too deep, the undersea mine too unreliable a weapon, and the cost prohibitive. But Roosevelt persisted, and by October 1917 the Navy had developed a mine that did not require physical contact but could be detonated when a long, electrified antenna was brushed by a metal object. This meant that far fewer mines would be required than originally estimated and could be linked more easily. On October 3, on his own initiative, FDR authorized the manufacture of 100,000 of the modified mines. Daniels signed on, and Wilson, who despaired of London’s unwillingness to try anything new, added his formal approval two weeks later.²⁴ Daniels ordered Admiral Henry T. Mayo, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, to London for the sole purpose of obtaining British approval, and under Mayo’s unrelenting advocacy the Admiralty acquiesced. As FDR put it, the sea lords said, “We think your plan is a bit wild-eyed but go ahead if you want.”²⁵

In February 1918 a special convoy of two dozen vessels sailed for Scotland with 11,000 tons of TNT, 50,000 feet of wire cable, and casings for nearly 100,000 mines. The actual mining commenced in June, and by October some 70,000 mines had been sown at a cost of $80 million.²⁶ The war ended before the barrage could be fully tested, but at least four and possibly eight U-boats are thought to have been destroyed by it. Other estimates run as high as twenty-three.²⁷ Admiral Sims called the barrier “one of the wonders of the war” and partially credits it with the collapse of the German Navy’s morale, but the evidence is sketchy.²⁸

Joseph P. Kennedy, perhaps an unlikely source, testifies to FDR’s decisiveness during the war. Kennedy was then assistant manager of Bethlehem Steel’s Fore River shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. At the request of the Navy Department, the Fore River yard had constructed two battleships for Argentina. The ships were ready, but the Argentine government was unable to pay, and Charles Schwab, the legendary chairman of Bethlehem, refused to release them. FDR requested a meeting, and Schwab sent Kennedy to Washington in his place.

Franklin received Kennedy cordially. “Don’t worry about the matter,” he said reassuringly. “The State Department will collect the money.”

Kennedy said that wasn’t good enough. Mr. Schwab would not release the ships until they were paid for. “That’s absurd,” FDR replied. He and Kennedy sparred a few rounds, and then Roosevelt escorted his guest to the door. He had been happy to meet Kennedy, he said, but the Navy wanted the ships released immediately. Again Kennedy declined.

When Kennedy reported the conversation to Schwab, they agreed to ignore Roosevelt’s demand, and the battleships remained securely berthed in Quincy. Less than a week later, four Navy tugboats nosed into the Fore River yard, loaded to the gunwales with combat-ready marines. As startled shipyard workers looked on, the marines took possession of the vessels at bayonet point and towed them into the harbor, where Argentine crews waited to receive them. A chastened Kennedy stood by helpless. “Roosevelt was the hardest trader I’d ever run up against,” he said later. “I was so disappointed I broke down and cried.”²⁹

In 1917 the courtship between Tammany and FDR intensified. As assistant secretary, FDR was well placed to reward the Democratic faithful, especially those members of Congress with Navy yards in their district, and particularly someone as powerful as the Brooklyn-based chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, John J. Fitzgerald—who also happened to be Tammany’s spokesman in the House. Franklin was learning the subtleties of congressional politics, and Fitzgerald was a gifted tutor. Since their set- to in 1914, FDR and Fitzgerald had become staunch allies, Fitzgerald supporting the Navy budget down the line and Roosevelt obliging the chairman with myriad personal favors. In 1915, as a sign of affection, Franklin arranged for Fitzgerald’s two young sons to take part in laying the keel of the battleship California at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then, with remarkable warmth, offered to join the congressman in his reelection campaign.³⁰ When Congress was in session, Fitzgerald stopped by FDR’s office every week or so to ask a favor or two concerning the Brooklyn yard. “Usually Roosevelt would grant the requests,” he recalled, “but sometimes he would say, ‘The old man [Daniels] is against this and I can’t do anything.’ ” But almost always, FDR sent the chairman away happy. “He was a very, very cooperative man,” said Fitzgerald.³¹

Tammany noted Franklin’s change of heart. In mid-June 1917, Congressman Daniel J. Riordan, who had succeeded to the Lower Manhattan seat vacated by “Big Tim” Sullivan, called on Roosevelt to present an invitation from Charles Murphy asking him to give the keynote address at Tammany’s upcoming Fourth of July celebration, one of the grand rituals of the organization. “I guess if we can stand having you, you can stand coming,” joked Riordan.³²

FDR accepted the invitation on the spot. And so it was on July 4, 1917, that Roosevelt found himself ensconced at Tammany headquarters on Fourteenth Street, celebrating the 128th year of the organization’s existence. The band of the “Fighting 69th,” New York’s renowned Irish regiment, provided the music; the Tammany glee club belted out the melodies, and Franklin joined the overflow audience in a lusty rendition of “Tammany Forever.” It was the type of rally FDR did best, frolicking with former enemies and ingratiating himself with the Wigwam’s senior leadership. The New York Tribune reported that Charles Murphy had invited Franklin “to give him ‘the once over’ ” and was not disappointed in what he saw.³³ Immediately speculation arose that Roosevelt would lead the New York Democratic ticket in 1918, contesting the governorship against the two-term incumbent, Charles S. Whitman.

Back in Washington, FDR labeled the speculation “utterly wild” but kept his ear to the ground. In the autumn and winter the Tammany tom-toms beat a steady call for Roosevelt. “Your name is frequently used around New York, looking a little to the future, and it is always a pleasure to hear it,” wrote the up-and-coming Jimmy Walker in November 1917.³⁴ Shortly afterward, John M. Riehle, a prominent Tammany chieftain who headed the National Democratic Club, publicly endorsed FDR, as did William Kelley, leader of the Brooklyn organization. When the Tammany stalwart Thomas J. MacManus (The MacManus), who had served with FDR in the legislature, offered his support, it was clear the Organization was getting its ducks in a row. Roosevelt was “a corking good man,” said MacManus. “I am for him.”³⁵

Franklin remained noncommittal. He said he was gratified to have so many supporters and was “greatly surprised to find many of these friends in somewhat unexpected quarters,” but he declined to announce his candidacy. When asked about his intentions, Roosevelt stressed the patriotic importance of his work in Washington and said it would not be right for him to leave while the war lasted. But he left the door ajar. “It would be foolish and idle for any man to say what he would or would not do in the future, particularly when the entire situation, international and political, may change overnight.”³⁶

In June, President Wilson added his voice to those urging FDR to run. “Tell Roosevelt he ought not to decline to run for Governor of New York if it is tendered to him,” he advised Daniels.³⁷ But Roosevelt, with Howe’s advice and Daniels’s support, decided against a run for the governorship. “I have made my position entirely clear,” he wrote Wilson, “that my duty lies in my present work—not only my duty to you and to the country but my duty to myself—If I were at any time to leave the Assistant Secretaryship it could only be for active service.”³⁸ Roosevelt’s motives were mixed. So long as the war continued, he believed his place was to serve the war effort, either as assistant secretary or in uniform. To abandon his post would be tantamount to desertion. He also thought 1918 would be another Republican year. Whether he could unseat a popular incumbent was far from clear. Having lost one statewide race, Roosevelt did not want to lose another. What could not be foreseen was that the war would be over by election time and the political equation would have changed. The Democrats nominated Al Smith in FDR’s place in 1918, and Smith went on to win a stunning upset victory over Governor Whitman.³⁹ In later years, Roosevelt claimed to have engineered Smith’s nomination.^* “I see that you have been called the ‘best equipped’ man” for governor, FDR wrote Smith on the night of the Democratic primary. “May I tell you that this is not only true, but that I trust that the people of the State will realize that this is not a mere phrase—it is based upon actual fact.”⁴⁰

As with Franklin, the war gave Eleanor the opportunity to move beyond her limited social circle. Her first four years in Washington as wife of a member of Wilson’s subcabinet had been almost as circumscribed as her life had been in New York, restricted to paying formal calls and leaving visiting cards, entertaining and being entertained, while supervising a household that grew larger each year. When war came, Eleanor found herself in great demand outside that narrow world, and like Franklin she threw herself into her new role with an enthusiasm she had not experienced since her days as head girl at Allenwood. She became an indefatigable organizer of Red Cross volunteers. Scarcely a troop train could pass through Union Station without Eleanor being there with a bevy of assistants to hand out coffee, sandwiches, and hand-knitted woolen socks.⁴¹

Despite her wide exposure, some prejudices died hard. Eleanor never felt completely comfortable with the Roman Catholic clergy and the Irish politicians with whom FDR consorted, and her tolerance for those of the Jewish faith grew slowly.^* Eleanor was distressed in January 1918 when she was obliged to attend a gala given by the British Embassy to honor Bernard Baruch, then head of the War Industries Board. It would be “mostly Jews,” she wrote Sara, and “I’d rather be hung than seen there.” Afterward she reported, “The Jew party was appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels, and sables mentioned again.”⁴²

Several months later Eleanor was surprised when FDR brought the young Harvard professor and Washington consultant Felix Frankfurter home for lunch. She found Frankfurter unappealing. “An interesting little man,” she wrote Sara, “but very Jew.”⁴³ Later she would refuse to read Maurice Low’s interpretive biography of Woodrow Wilson because the author was “such a loathsome little Jew.”⁴⁴ Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor’s elegant biographer, noted, “ER’s caustic comments concerning Jews remained a routine part of her social observation for many years, diminishing as her friendship with Baruch and other Jews flourished.”⁴⁵

FDR did not have that problem. Although his half brother, Rosy, was a notorious anti-Semite, neither Sara nor Franklin’s father, James, was infected with the virus. James had numerous Jewish friends, including August Belmont and Henry Morgenthau, Sr., and he told Sara on several occasions that although he was not Jewish, “if he were he would be proud of it.”⁴⁶ FDR enjoyed ethnic jokes and often told them himself, but he drew the line at sectarian slurs, especially if directed at particular individuals. And he recognized early in his career that he needed support across the religious spectrum. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., his neighbor in Dutchess County, was one of Franklin’s closest friends. They shared the interests of gentleman farmers, comparing notes on everything from breeds of dairy cattle to selective timbering. “Two of a kind,” FDR inscribed across a photograph of him and Morgenthau seated together in an open convertible. When he became governor, Roosevelt appointed Morgenthau chairman of New York’s Agricultural Advisory Commission and then called him to Washington in 1933 to head the newly established Farm Credit Administration. The following year Morgenthau succeeded William H. Woodin as secretary of the Treasury, a post he held for the duration of the Roosevelt administration.

Throughout his career FDR drew heavily on members of the Jewish faith for their skill and expertise. Judge Samuel Rosenman joined Roosevelt’s staff in 1928 as his chief aide and speechwriter and remained in that capacity until the president’s death in 1945. Sidney Hillman, Ben Cohen, and David Niles were in and out of the White House, advising the president and carrying water for the New Deal. Jews constituted roughly 3 percent of the population when FDR was president, yet they represented about 15 percent of his top appointments.⁴⁷ Roosevelt set the tone with his masterly reply to a pointed query about his ancestry: “In the dim past [my ancestors] may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.”⁴⁸ FDR’s response to the Holocaust was nuanced and complex, and certainly not everything America’s Jewish community desired, but that in no way diminishes his commitment to social justice or the breakthrough that the New Deal represented. Until 1933, Washington had been run by WASP descendants of old-stock Americans. Roosevelt opened government to those of talent regardless of pedigree.

The war years also saw Franklin and Eleanor grow distant. FDR put in longer hours at the Navy Department. Eleanor was drawn increasingly into volunteer work, and their summers were spent apart, Franklin at his post in Washington, ER and the children at Campobello. After the birth of their sixth child, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, on March 13, 1916, the evidence suggests that Eleanor and Franklin adopted abstinence as the only sure means of birth control. That was common at the time. The Episcopal Church (as well as the Roman Catholic) forbade birth control, and it was illegal in many states by statute.⁴⁹ Sara had adopted the practice after Franklin’s birth, and in the refined circles in which the Roosevelts moved, contraception was almost never discussed.^*

An only child, Franklin had wanted six children—the same number that had romped through Cousin Theodore’s home at Sagamore Hill. That desire had been one of the reasons he had been rejected by the young Alice Sohier in 1902, before his courtship of Eleanor. Whether he mentioned this same desire to Eleanor is unclear, but she had now given birth to six children (one of whom had died in infancy), and the Roosevelts would have no more.

The Roosevelt siblings are in agreement on the matter. Anna, who was closest to her parents, said her mother told her that “sex is an ordeal to be borne.” After John’s birth, “that was the end of any marital relationship, period.”⁵⁰ James, more circumspect, wrote, “It is possible that she [ER] knew no birth-control methods other than abstinence when she determined to have no more children.”⁵¹ Elliott said that from John’s birth

until the end of Father’s days, my parents never again lived together as man and wife.

Mother had performed her austere duty in marriage, and five children were testimony to that. She wanted no more, but her blank ignorance about how to ward off pregnancy left her no choice other than abstinence. Her shyness and stubborn pride would keep her from seeking advice from a doctor or woman friend.… It quickly became the most tightly held secret that we five children ever shared and kept.⁵²

It was in the summer of 1916, shortly after the birth of John Aspinwall, that FDR took up with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s part-time social secretary. ER and the children were at Campobello, and Franklin was spending another summer alone in Washington. Lucy was nearby, unattached, and incredibly attractive. The long, tender love affair between Franklin and Lucy remained shrouded in secrecy until well after the president’s death. Eleanor never mentioned it in her extensive autobiographical writings; Franklin said nothing; and Lucy was among the most private of persons. The families knew, the White House staff was aware, and many in the press had more than an inkling of the relationship. In those days the private lives of public persons were strictly private.⁵³ Journalists respected that, the public was not consumed with people watching, and the three protagonists—Eleanor, Franklin, and Lucy—conducted themselves with honor, dignity, and discretion.

Arthur Schlesinger put the romance into perspective: “If Lucy Mercer in any way helped Franklin Roosevelt sustain the frightful burdens of leadership in the Second World War, the nation has good reason to be grateful to her.”⁵⁴

Lucy Mercer came into the Roosevelt family in the winter of 1914, when Eleanor, overwhelmed by her social obligations as wife of the assistant secretary of the Navy, hired her three mornings a week to assist with correspondence and help unravel the mysteries of Washington society. Lucy was twenty-three, the impoverished daughter of high-living socialites who had recklessly spent their way through a substantial fortune. She had been raised in Washington, just a few doors from the Roosevelt home on N Street, educated at a convent in Austria, and, despite the hard times on which her family had fallen, was listed in the Social Register in both New York and Washington. She attended the same parties and dinners as the Roosevelts, was accorded the deference bestowed on aboriginal families in the District of Columbia, and found ready employment as a social secretary, a genteel calling that virtually made one a member of the family.

The Roosevelt children adored her. Anna remembered Lucy’s warm smile and friendly greeting. Elliott called her gay, smiling, and relaxed. “She was femininely gentle where Mother had something of a schoolmarm’s air about her, outgoing where Mother was an introvert. We children welcomed the days she came to work.”⁵⁵

Lucy was nearly as tall as Eleanor, fair, slender, and with the same blue eyes and light brown hair, but was far more graceful and at ease with herself. Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled Lucy as “beautiful, charming, and absolutely delightful,” with a really lovely face and “always beautifully dressed.”⁵⁶ A friend, Aileen Tone, who held a similar position with Henry Adams, remembered seeing Lucy seated on the Roosevelts’ living room floor, the family’s bills, letters, and invitations spread around her in neat piles, “making order of them in a twinkle.”⁵⁷ Another friend remembered her smile, “the most beautiful and winning I have ever seen.”⁵⁸ Still another remembered her warm, mellow voice in contrast to the “shrill arpeggios” into which Eleanor’s sometimes climbed.⁵⁹ Roy Jenkins (Lord Jenkins of Hillhead), FDR’s most recent biographer, may have said it best when he described Lucy as a young lady of delicate charm, “a quintessential Jane Austen heroine, cast up one hundred years late on the shores of the District of Columbia rather than those of Dorset or Devon.”⁶⁰

Franklin was thirty-four, nine years older than Lucy, but still so youthful-looking that a cranky Wisconsin congressman ordered him to stub out his cigarette while he waited to testify before a House subcommittee, mistaking him for a junior clerk.⁶¹ His appeal for the opposite sex was now considerable. Arthur Murray, Great Britain’s assistant military attaché, spoke of Roosevelt as “breathing health and virility.”⁶² Bamie called him “my debonair young cousin,” and her elderly husband, Admiral Sheffield Cowles, teased Franklin that “the girls will spoil you soon enough. I leave you to them.”⁶³

In 1915, when Franklin attended the Panama Pacific Exposition with his friend Assistant Secretary of State William Phillips, a San Francisco society matron proclaimed them “the most magnetic young men I ever saw. I had no idea that the Democratic party ever recruited that type of person.”^64* A Washington doyenne remembered FDR from his time as assistant secretary as “the most desirable man” she had ever met.⁶⁵ Alice Roosevelt Longworth, when she learned of Franklin’s interest in Lucy, confessed that she marveled he hadn’t strayed earlier.⁶⁶

The romance began innocently enough. Franklin was again in Washington alone for the summer and continued his usual round of social engagements. Lucy was often present at those functions, and FDR, as was his wont, flirted brazenly. Lucy, who in many ways was as strong-willed as Eleanor, flirted back. One thing led to another, and soon Franklin was inviting her for cruises aboard the Navy’s yacht Sylph and long drives in the Virginia countryside. The cruises were always well attended by a host of guests, but the drives were strictly private.

“I saw you twenty miles out in the country,” Alice Longworth teased Franklin, “but you didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.”

“Yes, she is lovely, isn’t she?”⁶⁷

FDR was happy in Lucy’s company and she very much in his. Unlike Eleanor, Lucy was uncritical in her affection and saw no need to direct his activities or admonish his behavior. She knew instinctively how to please him, to bolster rather than challenge him. Elliott recalls that Lucy had “the same brand of charm as Father, and there was a hint of fire in her warm dark eyes. In the new circumstances of Father’s life at home, I see it as inevitable that they were irresistibly attracted to each other.”⁶⁸

Friends recognized that as well. A number, such as British Embassy counselor Nigel Law and Franklin’s Harvard classmate Livingston Davis, often provided cover, posing as Lucy’s escorts, while others, such as Alice Longworth and Edith Morton Eustis, provided safe houses for the couple to meet. “Franklin deserved a good time,” said Alice. “He was married to Eleanor.”⁶⁹ Alice, though she had been Eleanor’s maid of honor, had little good to say about her cousin in those years, and her decision to provide succor for Franklin and Lucy was spiked with malice—perhaps because her own marriage to Nicholas Longworth had turned sour.

Edith Eustis, one of five attractive daughters of former vice president Levi Morton, was a Dutchess County neighbor of the Roosevelts and had known Franklin since childhood.⁷⁰ She admired his work in Washington and adored Lucy, a cousin of her husband, William Corcoran Eustis. Their elegant Washington mansion, Corcoran House, had been built in the earliest days of the city for Lucy’s ancestor Maryland Governor Thomas Swann. It stood at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and H Street, directly across from Lafayette Park, astride the route Franklin walked each day to and from the Navy Department.^71*

Eleanor sensed something amiss that summer. Franklin’s letters were intermittent and perfunctory, and he visited Campobello for only ten days, an aberration for someone who enjoyed the island so much as he. A polio epidemic raging along the East Coast kept Eleanor and the children at Campobello for four months instead of the usual two (the island proved to be insulated from the disease), and she did not return to Washington until after the election in November. “From a life centered entirely in my family,” she wrote many years later, “I became conscious that there was a sense of impending disaster hanging over all of us.”⁷² The comment in her autobiography is interlaced between references to the growing menace posed by imperial Germany in late 1916, and it is easy to believe that ER was referring to the international situation. Elliott and others believe she was referring to something more personal. “By ‘all of us’ she meant not the country at large, but her family. She was talking about trouble much closer to home.”⁷³

The relationship between FDR and Lucy intensified in 1917. On June 24, ten weeks after the United States entered the war, Lucy enlisted in the Navy as a yeoman (female) and was assigned secretarial duties in the office of the assistant secretary. To believe FDR did not have a hand in the assignment is to believe in the tooth fairy. Franklin did not flaunt his infatuation with Lucy, but he made no secret of his affection for her. He began to put in longer hours at the Navy Department and often did not arrive home until after midnight.⁷⁴

That summer Eleanor delayed her departure for Campobello as long as feasible. She and Franklin had words, there were arguments and upsets, but it was all vague. FDR was eager for her to take the children out of the Washington heat; Eleanor was reluctant to leave Franklin alone in the city. Finally, on July 15, she packed up her family and went off to Campobello. FDR wrote her en route, part apology, part smoke screen: “[Y]ou were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But honestly you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo.… I know what a whole summer here does to people’s nerves and at the end of this summer I will be like a bear with a sore head … as you know I am unreasonable and touchy now—but I will try to improve.”⁷⁵

Scarcely had Franklin written than The New York Times published an earnest interview with Eleanor that made matters worse. Under the headline “How to Save in Big Homes,” the Times snidely described the Roosevelt ten-servant household on N Street as a model of wartime thriftiness: “Mrs. Roosevelt does the buying, the cooks see that there is no food wasted, the laundress is sparing in her use of soap, and each servant keeps a watchful eye for evidence of shortcomings on the part of the others; and all are encouraged to make helpful suggestions in the use of ‘leftovers.’ ” Eleanor was quoted as saying that “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable.”⁷⁶

FDR responded with biting sarcasm:

All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband to the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires! Please have a photo of the family, and ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.

Honestly you have leaped into public fame, all Washington is talking of the Roosevelt plan and I began to get telegrams of congratulations and requests for further details from Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Francisco and other neighboring cities.⁷⁷

Eleanor was mortified. “I do think it was horrid of that woman to use my name in that way,” she replied. “I feel dreadfully about it because so much is not true and yet some of it I did say. I never will be caught again that’s sure and I’d like to crawl away for shame.”⁷⁸ The flap ended quickly. It was ER’s first experience at the hands of the press, and she had no idea how her candor could be exploited. She was never “caught again,” and never again referred publicly to her household staff.^*

In early August FDR came down with a serious throat infection that hospitalized him for four days. Eleanor rushed to his side and remained in Washington for almost two weeks. They evidently quarreled again, and Eleanor insisted he come to Campobello by the end of the month.⁷⁹ “I hated to leave you yesterday,” she wrote on August 15. “Please go to the doctor twice a week, eat well and sleep well, and remember I count on seeing you on the 26th. My threat was no idle one.”⁸⁰

The precise nature of ER’s threat is unknown, but the context is clear. Some authors suggest she meant to bring the children back to Washington immediately if FDR did not appear.⁸¹ Elliott, who edited his father’s papers, is more explicit: “There was no mystery; she threatened to leave him.”⁸²

Whatever the case, FDR made it to Campobello in time to forestall a crisis, and that autumn the Roosevelts moved into more spacious quarters at 2131 R Street. “Whether ER was consciously aware at this time that FDR spent as many hours as possible with Lucy Mercer, we shall never know,” wrote Blanche Wiesen Cook. But members of the family knew, so did many of ER’s Red Cross co-workers, and, in Cook’s words, so did “almost everybody else of importance in Washington. Certainly on some level she knew it all, the way lovers always know, unconsciously and through every cell of their being, when somebody else has preempted some big or little piece of their beloved’s heart.”⁸³

One important figure in Washington who had become aware was Josephus Daniels, FDR’s family-minded chief at the Navy Department. On October 5, 1917, Yeoman Lucy Mercer was summarily discharged from the service “by Special Order of the Secretary of the Navy.” No explanation was provided. No reason was given, and Lucy’s conduct was rated outstanding. Daniels was a man who, in his son’s words, “never let it be known that he knew what he did not want to know.”⁸⁴ He never indicated in his diary or by word of mouth that he had ever heard of Lucy Mercer. But he could not have failed to notice the chemistry between his assistant secretary and his comely yeoman aide, nor could he disregard the warnings flashed by his wife, who was well aware of the Washington gossip.⁸⁵

Daniels was old-fashioned about the sanctity of marriage and the sin of divorce. When his brother-in-law, who ran the Raleigh News & Observer in his absence, announced his intention to divorce and remarry, Daniels peremptorily fired him and ran him out of state. The “Chief” loved Franklin as a son. He held Eleanor in deep respect. And he could recognize trouble when he saw it. A divorce would have been political suicide for FDR. Even a scandal would be hard to live down. To prevent that, Daniels evidently decided it was best for Miss Mercer to move on.

During the next six months Eleanor and Franklin saw little of each other. He continued to put in long hours at the Navy Department and saw Lucy when he could, while ER devoted every day to the Red Cross. “I loved it. I simply ate it up,” she wrote later.⁸⁶ For Eleanor, her war work was an essential distraction that kept her mind occupied. Feeling alone and increasingly isolated, she instinctively turned to Sara for reassurance. The relationship between Eleanor and her mother-in-law had never been easy. But with her marriage threatened, ER found Sara a dependable ally. Sara’s unyielding insistence on family tradition, her unstinting advocacy of virtue and noblesse oblige, even her deep-seated conservatism appealed to Eleanor as she faced the crisis she did not yet fully comprehend.

In the winter of 1918 Eleanor wrote Sara almost every day. She mentioned nothing directly but spoke often of the need to confide, to talk intimately: “I miss you and so do the children. As the years go on, I realize how lucky we are to have you, and I wish we could always be together. Very few mothers I know mean as much to their daughters as you do to me.”⁸⁷ Sara responded with equally fulsome praise. The two women were never closer. On March 17, 1918—Franklin and Eleanor’s thirteenth wedding anniversary—Sara sent a congratulatory telegram. Eleanor wrote movingly in reply:

I often think what an interesting happy life Franklin has given me and how much you have done to make our life what it is. As I have grown older I have realized better all you do for us and all you mean to me and the children especially and you will never know how grateful I am nor how much I love you dear.⁸⁸

In the summer of 1918 FDR finally managed to get to the front in France. The Senate Naval Affairs Committee was heading to Europe, and Daniels wanted Roosevelt to get there first and correct anything that might attract its criticism.⁸⁹ Franklin chose to make the Atlantic crossing aboard the USS Dyer, a newly commissioned destroyer rushed into service without a shakedown cruise to escort a convoy of troopships through the war zone. He reveled in every moment, from the storm that smashed the crockery in the wardroom to an engine breakdown and the alarm bells signaling a U-boat attack that never materialized. As Roosevelt retold the story through the years, the German submarine came closer and closer until he had almost seen it himself.

In England, FDR met Lloyd George (“not very tall, rather large head, rather long hair, but tremendous vitality”) and the King (“He seemed delighted that I had come over on a destroyer”); consulted with the Admiralty; spent a weekend at Cliveden with Lady Astor (“enthusiastic, amusing and talkative as always”), and spoke at a banquet at Gray’s Inn.⁹⁰ In Paris he dined with President and Mme. Poincaré (“much like similar dinners at the White House except that here the wines were perfect of their kind and perfectly served”); spoke again with Marshal Joffre (“older and grayer than when he was in the United States”); and, the high point of his visit, met with the premier, Georges Clemenceau.

I knew at once I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France. He did not wait for me to advance to meet him at his desk, and there was no formality such as one generally meets.… He is only 77 years old and people say he is getting younger everyday. He seemed delighted at the present rate of progress. [T]he wonderful old man leaves his office almost every Saturday in a high-powered car, dashes to the front, visits a Corps Commander, travels perhaps all night, goes up a good deal closer to the actual battle line than the officers like, keeps it up all day Sunday and motors back in time to be at his desk on Monday morning.⁹¹

Roosevelt was especially impressed by French sangfroid. Despite four years of war, with the Germans literally outside the gates of Paris, they continued “the planting of the flower beds in the Tuileries and the repairing and cleaning of streets. They seem to lose their heads even less than the Anglo-Saxons—very different from what we thought four years ago.”⁹²

From Paris, FDR went to the front. After relieving an American naval attaché who sought to keep him out of the trenches, he pushed his party from one battlefield to the next. He saw Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Verdun, was briefly under enemy fire (“the long whining whistle of a shell was followed by the dull boom of the explosion”), and came within a mile of the German lines. “Such tireless energy as Roosevelt’s I have never known,” said Captain Edward McCauley, Franklin’s naval aide, “except perhaps for his kinsman, Theodore Roosevelt. I thought I was fairly husky, but I couldn’t keep up with him.”⁹³

If Franklin did not see combat, he surely experienced its immediate aftermath: the shell holes filled with water, the roofless houses and splintered trees, the stench of dead horses, “rusty bayonets, broken guns, discarded overcoats and ration tins, rain-stained love letters, men buried in shallow graves, some unmarked, some with rifles stuck in the earth bayonet down, and some, too, with a whittled little cross and a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung on it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.” That is the way Franklin described Belleau Wood, a memory he would cite again and again.⁹⁴

From France, FDR went briefly to Italy, hoping to resolve the complicated command structure in the Mediterranean. In Rome he met with his naval counterparts and urged that the Italian fleet take action against the Austrians as soon as possible. At one point he questioned the wisdom of keeping the main Italian battle fleet riding at anchor in Taranto harbor for more than a year, with no drill or target practice.

“Ah,” said the Italian chief of staff, “but my dear Mr. Minister, you must not forget that the Austrian Fleet have not had any either.”

“This is a naval classic which is hard to beat,” FDR wrote afterward, “but which perhaps should not be publicly repeated for a generation or two.”⁹⁵

From Italy back to France, then briefly to England before boarding the troopship USS Leviathan in Brest on September 8 for the return home. “Somehow I don’t believe I shall be long in Washington,” he wrote Eleanor before sailing. “The more I think of it the more I feel that being only 36 my place is not at a Washington desk, even a Navy desk. I know you will understand.”⁹⁶

Whatever Franklin’s wish for active service, the Atlantic crossing of the Leviathan in September 1918 was certainly one he preferred to forget. Another Spanish influenza epidemic swept Europe and the United States that year, taking more than 20 million lives. Leviathan was hit hard. Virtually the entire ship’s complement was struck down, Franklin included. Many of the officers and men were buried at sea, while Franklin hovered semiconscious in his bunk, his condition exacerbated by the onset of double pneumonia. The Navy Department kept a wary eye on Leviathanas it made its way to New York. Secretary Daniels telegraphed Sara of Franklin’s condition, suggesting that she and Eleanor (who was in Hyde Park) meet the ship when it docked on September 19.

“When the boat docked and we went on board,” Eleanor recalled years later, “I remember visiting several of the men who were still in bed. My husband did not seem to me so seriously ill as the doctors implied.”⁹⁷ The fact is that Franklin’s condition was still grave: he was so weak he had to be carried off the ship to an ambulance and borne up the stairs of Sara’s house on East Sixty-fifth Street by four muscular orderlies. While it is possible that Eleanor’s recollection may reflect her feelings at the time, it is more likely to have been colored by the bitterness that set in shortly afterward.⁹⁸

In the course of unpacking Franklin’s luggage, Eleanor discovered a neatly bound packet of love letters from Lucy Mercer. “The bottom dropped out of my world,” Eleanor remembered. “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”⁹⁹

Family recollections differ as to what happened next. The two versions are not mutually exclusive. The Roosevelts believe that Eleanor offered to step aside so that Franklin might be with the woman he loved but that Lucy, being Catholic, could not bring herself to marry a divorced man with five children.¹⁰⁰ Lucy’s relatives contend that she was perfectly prepared to marry Franklin but that “Eleanor was not willing to step aside.”¹⁰¹

What is generally accepted is that Eleanor did indeed offer “to give Franklin his freedom.” Her Aunt Maude had recently divorced, and divorce was certainly preferable to remaining where she was not wanted.¹⁰² It is also likely that Franklin was prepared to leave. But what neither he nor Eleanor reckoned with were Sara’s reaction and the counsel of Louis Howe. Both intervened decisively to hold the marriage together.

For Sara, divorce was unthinkable. If FDR really wished to leave his wife and five children for another woman and bring scandal upon the family, she said, she could not stop him. But if he did so she “would not give him another dollar,” nor could he expect to inherit his beloved Hyde Park. And for Eleanor, well, it was perfectly all right for her to talk about giving Franklin his freedom, but what about the children? Who would take care of them?¹⁰³

For Howe, it was a question of Franklin’s career. Daniels would certainly have fired him, and the electorate would be unforgiving. Any hope of future elective office was out of the question. If FDR had presidential ambitions (and certainly Howe did on Franklin’s behalf), he would have to choose between his career and Lucy Mercer.

Howe evidently played mediator. Sara had pulled Franklin and Eleanor back from the brink, but it was Howe, speaking separately with each, who brokered the settlement. He persuaded Eleanor that FDR could not go on successfully without her; and he convinced Franklin that to continue in politics he needed his wife.¹⁰⁴ FDR agreed never to see Lucy again—that was Eleanor’s price for reconciliation—and with Louis Howe’s help the two stitched together one of the most remarkable partnerships the world has ever known.

Franklin broke the news to Lucy but could not bear to tell her the truth. Instead, he put the blame on Eleanor: she would not agree to a divorce. Lucy said it did not matter. As a Catholic she could not have married a divorced man. Both were white lies, told by lovers to spare each other’s feelings. Lucy’s mother, an equally devout Catholic, had divorced and remarried, and there is little reason to believe that Lucy would not have married the man who had risked everything for her.

“She and Franklin were very much in love with each other,” remembered Mrs. Lyman Cotten, Lucy’s North Carolina cousin and confidante. “I know the marriage would have taken place but as Lucy said to us, ‘Eleanor was not willing to step aside.’ I am also sure that she thought that the religious opinions of the two could have been arranged. Nothing is easier in the Roman Catholic Church than an annulment, especially among those occupying high places.”¹⁰⁵

Eleanor emerged from the ordeal a different woman. “I knew more about the human heart.… I became a more tolerant person … but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives.”¹⁰⁶ Mrs. Roosevelt commenced the metamorphosis from a private to a public person. The marriage survived, but love and trust were gone. She forgave Franklin and they continued to live together, but their relationship had changed. Independent and increasingly self-confident and outspoken, Eleanor was now her own person. For her, the Lucy Mercer affair was a watershed. “I have the memory of an elephant,” she told a friend. “I can forgive, but I cannot forget.”¹⁰⁷

Franklin, for his part, changed as well. He took care to protect his wife’s feelings and to preserve outward proprieties. He would never allow anyone to criticize Eleanor in his presence. He spent more time with the children, gave up golf on Sunday mornings, and did his utmost to rebuild the marriage, albeit at arm’s length. Like Eleanor, he matured and became more serious.

Historians and biographers attribute FDR’s political coming of age to the searing effect of polio. Many of Franklin’s friends believed his bitter disappointment in love had an earlier and equally profound effect. Corinne Robinson Alsop, Eleanor’s cousin, thought that before Lucy, Franklin was without depth. “He had a loveless quality, as if he were incapable of emotion. It is difficult to describe, but to me [the affair] seemed to release something in him.” Another who knew Franklin wrote that after losing Lucy he emerged “tougher and more resilient, wiser and more profound, even prior to his paralysis.”¹⁰⁸

There was no scandal. Not until the 1960s was FDR linked publicly with Lucy Mercer.¹⁰⁹ Harvard Professor Frank Freidel, writing the first multivolume biography of FDR in the early 1950s, dismissed the story in a footnote. Such rumors, wrote Freidel, “seem preposterous. They reflect more on the teller than FDR.”¹¹⁰ James MacGregor Burns, in his captivating Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, published in 1956, alluded to wartime rumors in Washington but refuted them in a paragraph.¹¹¹ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Roosevelt, mentions Lucy Mercer and FDR’s affection for her but resists going further.¹¹² The first to attempt a full account of the romance was Jonathan Daniels, FDR’s presidential press aide and the son of Josephus Daniels, first in The End of Innocence, then in Washington Quadrille, published in 1968.¹¹³ Eleanor Roosevelt confirmed the story in her long series of interviews with Joseph Lash, summarized by Lash in 1972 in his loving portrait Eleanor and Franklin and embellished in Love, Eleanorten years later.¹¹⁴

Franklin did not see Lucy again until 1941, although they never really lost contact. In 1920, Lucy married Winthrop Rutherfurd, one of the wealthiest and by all accounts one of the most respected members of East Coast society. A direct descendent of Peter Stuyvesant of New York and John Winthrop of Massachusetts, Winthrop (“Winty,” his friends called him) was an avid sportsman who divided his time between a country estate in Allamuchy, New Jersey, an elegant town house in New York, and Ridgeley Hall, his winter home in Aiken, South Carolina. In his youth, Rutherfurd was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in New York and had successfully courted and won the affection of Consuelo Vanderbilt, only to have Consuelo’s mother break off the engagement and compel her to marry the ninth Duke of Marlborough.¹¹⁵ Winthrop later married another considerable heiress, Alice Morton, a daughter of Vice President Levi Morton (and sister of Lucy’s friend Edith Eustis). Alice died in 1917, leaving Rutherfurd a widower at fifty-five with six children to care for. After Lucy’s romance with Franklin broke off, Edith Eustis evidently brought her and Winty together, and they were married shortly afterward. He was fifty-seven, Lucy was twenty-nine.

The Rutherfurds lived together in happy contentment, dividing their time among their estates, the various social seasons, fox hunts, kennel shows, and travel abroad. Lucy helped raise the Rutherfurd children and soon had a daughter of her own. “Seldom have I seen a mother more beloved and respected than was Lucy by her stepchildren,” wrote the Russian portrait painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff.¹¹⁶ Lucy and Franklin maintained a formal correspondence, writing to extend greetings or condolences on special occasions. Other letters, if there were any, have been lost, destroyed, or safely sequestered. But there is no doubt the affection lingered. FDR quietly arranged for Lucy to watch each of his inaugurations from a White House limousine, and about 1940 he began calling her once or twice a week, sometimes speaking in his almost forgotten French to avoid being overheard. Lucy evidently called him as well, and the White House switchboard had standing orders to put Mrs. Rutherfurd directly through to the president.¹¹⁷

In the spring of 1941 Lucy and Franklin began to see each another again. She was given the code name “Mrs. Johnson” by the Secret Service, and her name appears frequently on the White House register.¹¹⁸ FDR enjoyed taking Lucy for afternoon drives through Rock Creek Park, and when Eleanor was away she would be invited by Franklin’s daughter, Anna, to dine with the president. FDR, Jr., home on leave from the Navy, reports bounding into the Oval Office unannounced to find his father having his shriveled legs massaged by an unfamiliar woman whom the president introduced simply as “my old friend, Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd.”¹¹⁹

There was “never anything clandestine about these occasions,” Anna recalled. “On the contrary, they were occasions which I welcomed for my father because they were light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation for a beloved father and world leader in a time of crisis.… Lucy was a wonderful person. I was grateful to her.”¹²⁰

Winthrop Rutherfurd died in 1944 after a long illness, and thereafter FDR would sometimes stop the presidential train en route from Washington to Hyde Park to visit Lucy at her Allamuchy estate. Once she accompanied him for a weekend at Shangri La, the president’s Catoctin Mountain retreat (now Camp David); they spent a week together at Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Hobcaw Manor; and FDR enjoyed nothing so much as driving Lucy along the meandering country roads near Warm Springs. She was with him there on April 12, 1945, and her face was the last FDR saw before he died. What attracted Franklin to Lucy? The writer Ellen Feldman sums it up nicely:

Lucy Mercer had a talent [to] make other people happy. I am not talking about giving up a career to stay at home and raise children, or nursing an aged parent, or other instances of worthy self-sacrifice. I mean a contagious genius for living joyously. Her descendants speak of the insouciance with which she met early hardship.… They mention her soft heart.… They speak of her need to make surroundings beautiful, and days bright, and loved ones glad to be alive.¹²¹

In the months following the president’s death, Eleanor came to accept Lucy’s return to Franklin’s life and Anna’s role in making her visits possible. Sorting through FDR’s effects at Hyde Park, she came upon a small watercolor of her husband painted by Lucy’s friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff. She instructed that it be sent to Lucy.¹²² Anna also called. “Your telephoning the other night meant so much to me,” wrote Lucy. “This blow must be crushing to you—to all of you—but I know that you meant more to your father than any one and that makes it closer and harder to bear.… I have been reading over some very old letters of his—and in one he says ‘Anna is a dear fine person—I wish so much that you knew her’—Well, now we do know one another—and it is a great joy to me and I think he was happy this past year that it was so.”¹²³ Anna kept Lucy’s letter in her bedside table for the rest of her life.¹²⁴

^* The day Congress declared war, TR went to Washington to ask that he be allowed to raise a division of volunteers and lead it to France. Georges Clemenceau, not yet premier, supported the proposal. The battle-weary soldiers of France needed a miracle to restore their spirits, he wrote Wilson. “Send them Roosevelt.” But the president and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who received TR cordially, wanted no part of the idea. Wilson had decided to fight the war with a conscript army, in which there was no place for volunteers. “To make an exception of Colonel Roosevelt would have been to strike at the heart of the whole design,” wrote Wilson’s secretary, Joe Tumulty.

Wilson found TR more engaging than he had anticipated: “He’s a great big boy. There is a sweetness about him that is compelling.” But aside from the political and military risks of having TR on board, the Colonel was in poor health and half blind, and had been out of touch with military developments for twenty years. Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President 371–373 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973); Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him 288–289 (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921).

^* FDR pressed the mine barrage, oblivious to the infraction of the law of nations as well as earlier protests lodged by the United States against British and German efforts to mine the high seas. On August 13, 1914, Secretary of State Bryan had warned the British that the laying of submarine mines was in violation of Article 1 of the Hague Convention of 1907. “The Secretary of State is loath to believe that a signatory to that convention would willfully disregard its treaty obligation, which was manifestly made in the interest of neutral shipping.” Diplomatic correspondence on the issue continued through the remainder of 1914 and early 1915, and on February 15, 1915, the United States sent identical notes to Germany and Great Britain expressing hope that the two belligerents “may through reciprocal concessions, find a basis for agreement … that neither will sow any floating mines, whether upon the high seas or in territorial waters.” U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914, Supplement 454–473; 1915, Supplement119–120; 1916, Supplement 3–7.

FDR’s memo to Daniels outlining the project (October 29, 1917), as well as his letter to President Wilson (October 29, 1917), made no mention of the earlier American protests or the law of nations. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 293–294, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).

^* In 1938 FDR related the episode to the Wilson biographer Ray Stannard Baker:

About the middle of June [1918] the political situation in New York flared to the front.… Charles F. Murphy, who had the final say in the City, and sufficient support in several large upstate cities to give him control of the convention, had come to realize that a New York City candidate would stand little chance of election if forced through by the City Organization. The secretary of Tammany Hall, Mr. Thomas Smith, came to Washington to see me with the message from Mr. Murphy that he would be very glad to support me for the governorship as there seemed no other upstate candidate who was well-known in every part of the state and who, at the same time, had a definite connection with war service. I told Mr. Smith I was extremely sorry but that I could not even consider accepting the nomination. Mr. Smith went to New York and returned a few days later to ask me to give Mr. Murphy some recommendations of upstate candidates. A careful check of the field convinced me that the best-known Democrat in the State was Alfred E. Smith.… It was pointed out by Mr. [Thomas] Smith and Mr. Murphy that Alfred E. Smith was not only a Tammany man but a Catholic. My reply was the demand for his nomination for Governor could well originate with upstate delegates and that in war-time, the church to which he belonged would not be raised as an issue in any community.

I communicated with many of my friends among Democratic leaders upstate suggesting to them that they should start an organized movement for the nomination of Alfred E. Smith.

FDR to Baker, October 24, 1938, Baker Papers, Library of Congress.

^* By 1916 Franklin had shed whatever anti-Catholic bias he might have inherited. Not only had he formed strong bonds with the Irish politicians of New York City, but many of the clergy would become his close friends, including Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, and especially James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. Somewhat to Sara’s chagrin, the Roosevelts were in fact distantly related to James Roosevelt Bayley, an Episcopal convert to Catholicism who had been Gibbons’s predecessor as archbishop of Baltimore, and to Bayley’s aunt, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, America’s first Catholic saint. In later years FDR enjoyed recounting Cardinal Gibbons’s reply when asked whether he subscribed to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Gibbons acknowledged that he did, adding with a twinkle that he had met the Holy Father many times “and each time he called me ‘Jibbons.’ ”

One might note that except for his mother and Eleanor, the three women closest to FDR during most of his adult life were his secretaries Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, and Lucy Mercer, all of whom were Roman Catholics. For the Gibbons quote, see Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles 137 (New York: Doubleday, 1979).

^* As Alice Roosevelt Longworth recalled, “Most of my contemporaries were far too shy even to ask their doctors about such matters. I think most American doctors at the time would have been horrified, fearing lawsuits.… I still have a letter written to me shortly after I was married by my sister-in-law, Nan Wallingford, who was the mother of three. In it she begged me to send her ‘one of those cunning, labor-saving devices’ so that she might save her ‘tottering reason.’ ” Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 57 (New York: Doubleday, 1981).

^* FDR accompanied Vice President Thomas R. Marshall to officially open the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition at San Francisco. While on the West Coast he inspected Navy installations and took his first dive in a submarine. Shortly before, the American submarine F-4 had failed to surface after a dive off Pearl Harbor with the loss of all on board. The public was stunned, and FDR, who was worried about Navy morale, went aboard submarine K-7 in Los Angeles. Despite heavy seas he ordered it to dive and go through its paces. Roosevelt greeted the press afterward, elated: “It was fine and for the first time since we left Washington we feel perfectly at home.” Los Angeles Tribune, March 29, 1915; Josephus Daniels, Years of War and After 256; Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR 204 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

^* Corcoran House, along with the Hay-Adams houses and Decatur House, was one of Washington’s most noted residences. Daniel Webster had lived there when he was secretary of state but found himself unable to support it afterward and sold it to W. W. Corcoran, founder of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Eustis, a Corcoran grandson, was a fabled huntsman who preferred his estates in Leesburg, Virginia, and Aiken, South Carolina, to living in Washington. In 1920 he sold the house to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whereupon it was demolished and a new headquarters building for the Chamber was erected on the site. Washington: City and Capital 655–656, Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937).

^* Although deeply embarrassed, ER remained resolute in her determination to save food. Elliott reports that throughout the war his mother always had a spare place set at the table for “Mr. Hoover” (Food Administrator Herbert Hoover) to symbolize for the family their need to conserve. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 87 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).