Eleanor and Franklin (49 page)

For some her very goodness was a goad. The romance between Franklin and Lucy did not escape Alice's keen eyes. She saw Franklin out motoring with Lucy, and called him afterward. “I saw you 20 miles out in the country,” she teased. “You didn't see me. Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.”
²⁴

“Isn't she perfectly lovely?” he replied.

Alice encouraged the romance. Franklin dined at Alice's when Eleanor was out of town, and she also invited Lucy. It was good for Franklin, Alice maintained. “He deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor.”
²⁵
Moreover, since she considered Eleanor “overly noble,” Alice was not beyond enjoying a little one-upmanship at Eleanor's expense. Alice and Eleanor had run into each other at the Capitol, but Eleanor had left Alice at the door, she reported to Franklin, “not having allowed her to tell me any secrets. She inquired if you had told me and I said no and that I did not believe in knowing things which your husband did not wish you to know so I think I will be spared any further mysterious secrets!”

When Franklin returned from his 1918 trip to Europe in September stricken with double pneumonia, Eleanor took care of his mail, and in
the course of doing so she came upon Lucy's letters.
²⁶
Her worst fears were confirmed. Her world seemed to break into pieces. After her wedding there had been a period of total dependency and insecurity from which she had slowly begun to emancipate herself. But Franklin's love was the anchor to which her self-confidence and self-respect were secured, and now the anchor was cut. The thought tortured Eleanor that, having borne him six children, she was now being discarded for a younger, prettier, gayer woman—that her husband's love belonged to someone else. The bottom, she wrote, dropped out of her world. She confronted her husband with Lucy's letters. She was prepared to give her husband his freedom, she told him, if after thinking over what the consequences might be for the children he still wanted to end their marriage.

He soon discovered that divorce might have disagreeable consequences in addition to the effect upon the children. Sara was said to have applied pressure with the threat to cut him off if he did not give up Lucy. If Franklin was in any doubt about what a divorce might do to his political career, Howe was there to enlighten him. Lucy, a devout Catholic, drew back at the prospect of marriage to a divorced man with five children. Eleanor gave him a choice—if he did not break off with Lucy, she would insist on a divorce. Franklin and Lucy agreed never to see each other again.

“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

“N
O WOMAN MARRIES THE MAN SHE REALLY MARRIES
,” J
OSEPHUS
Daniels declared
¹
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 L
etters
.

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 partisan.
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.”