Eleanor and Franklin (47 page)

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 to 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

T
HERE 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 mother-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

Eleanor employed Lucy Page Mercer, then twenty-two, in the winter season of 1913–14 to help with social correspondence three mornings a week. Lucy, an efficient social secretary and a charming person, soon became a household familiar. By later 1914 Franklin was writing Eleanor in Hyde Park that he had arrived safely in Washington, gone to the house, “and Albert telephoned Miss Mercer who later came and cleaned up.” (Albert was the Roosevelt chauffeur and general handyman.)

Sara approved of Lucy. In the spring of 1915 when she came down to stay with the children during Franklin and Eleanor's trip to the San Francisco Exposition, a letter that reported such news as “Babs [Franklin Jr.] is splendid, had his one big movement,” also included an enthusiastic reference to Eleanor's social secretary: “Miss Mercer is here, she is
so
sweet and attractive and adores you Eleanor.”
³

Sara's approval was in character—Lucy, descended as she was from the Carrolls of Maryland, had an irreproachably patrician background. Her mother had been a famous Washington beauty and her father was Major Carroll Mercer, one of the founders of the Chevy Chase Club, where Franklin played golf, and a pillar of the Metropolitan Club, another favorite haunt of Franklin's. But the family had fallen on hard times and the marriage had broken up, so Lucy's mother had brought her up to be able to earn a living as a social secretary—a job, Jonathan Daniels has written, for young ladies of “impeccable social standing and slim purses.” Lucy did her job well, said Aileen Tone, who performed similar functions for Henry Adams. Lucy would sit down on the floor of the living room, Aileen recalled, strew bills, letters, and invitations about, and in the twinkling of an eye have everything in order. “She was a charmer,” Aileen added. Lucy Mercer's loveliness, good taste, and exquisite manners enabled her to maintain her footing socially. When Eleanor was short a woman for a dinner party or luncheon, she invited Lucy. Men fell in love with Lucy—“every man who ever knew her,” some said; she was good-looking enough “to be generally admired,” one of the young men at the British Embassy said, and her voice had the quality of dark velvet. She knew how to please a man, to make his life easy and agreeable, to bolster instead of challenge him.