Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (19 page)

H
AD
R
OOSEVELT WON
election to the Senate, he would have had to alter his daily route to the office. As it was, he stuck to Connecticut Avenue, turning the heads of the office girls on that street. He also turned the head of a young woman he passed on the stair of his own house. Lucy Mercer’s father was descended from the Carrolls of Maryland, the most distinguished Catholic family in America, with roots in Lord Baltimore’s colony and a signature—Charles Carroll’s—on the Declaration of Independence. Carroll Mercer, Lucy’s father, characterized his occupation as “gentleman” on her birth certificate. Lucy’s mother, Minnie Tunis, was generally considered the most beautiful woman in Washington and was, by virtue of a large inheritance, one of the richest. Her virtues ended about there, in the thinking of the straitlaced, for after a first marriage turned sour she divorced her husband to marry Carroll Mercer. They celebrated by living in grand style, having two daughters, and squandering most of their money. Carroll Mercer fought beside Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill and came home to relocate his family to one of the comparatively modest row houses on N Street, just off Connecticut Avenue. Not long thereafter he himself moved out, leaving Minnie to rear Lucy and her sister. She accomplished the task by various means, including the kindness of other gentlemen entranced by her charms. The gossips raised a racket but couldn’t negate the effect of the beauty of Minnie and the girls, who grew up to be as attractive as their mother. The net result for Lucy, who turned twenty-two the month after the Franklin Roosevelts arrived in Washington, was that she required a job yet considered herself above most ordinary labor. Eleanor Roosevelt, for her part, felt the need for a guide through the social intricacies of the capital. Anna Cowles had known the Mercers in better days; most likely Anna was the one who suggested Lucy to Eleanor.

At first Lucy seemed a godsend. “She and Mother worked together in the living room,” Elliott recalled. “There was no other space available. Lucy would curl herself gracefully on the carpet, spreading out for sorting the letters, cards, bills and invitations that flowed in, prompted by Mother’s calls. Lucy was gay, smiling, and relaxed. We children welcomed the days she came to work.” With confident efficiency, Lucy answered the letters, acknowledged the cards, and paid the bills. Even Sara Roosevelt, to whom criticism came more naturally than praise, was smitten. “She is
so
sweet and attractive, and adores you, Eleanor,” Sara wrote her daughter-in-law.

Eleanor appreciated the help but had difficulty warming to Lucy. Eleanor had always been insecure about her looks, and bearing six children—Elliott, a second Franklin Jr., and John, after Anna, James, and the deceased first Franklin Jr.—in ten years hadn’t added to her confidence. Franklin grew more handsome with each passing year; she felt old and ugly. Lucy’s presence made her feel worse. And Lucy possessed a sparkle, a joie de vivre, that matched Franklin’s ebullience but contrasted sharply to Eleanor’s somberness. Before long Eleanor couldn’t help detecting an enthusiasm in Franklin’s hellos to Lucy she hadn’t heard for years in his greetings to her.

She couldn’t complain to Franklin without feeling petty. But she begrudged more than ever the weeks he stayed in Washington while she tended the children at Campobello. And when he postponed his departure from the capital, and then postponed it again, she found herself doubting his excuses. “I will wire you tomorrow or Tuesday whether I can go up next Sunday or the following,” he wrote on a Sunday in July 1914. He added, as if to assuage her unspoken doubts, “I have dined at home almost every evening.” Three days later he apologized that “it may be impossible to get off this Sunday as J. D. may go to Raleigh.” Roosevelt went on to say that work was consuming him. “I have been as usual going every second, at the office till 7:30 last night…. Dinedhere alone.” Eleanor didn’t object to Franklin’s devotion to his duties, but she couldn’t help wondering: Was it his work he found so compelling, or Lucy?

She felt that she was losing him, and she didn’t know how to respond. Every close relationship she had ever experienced had ended disastrously—in abandonment or premature death. She didn’t know that love could weather crisis, didn’t know how to fight for what she valued. As he drifted away, she gradually closed herself off, seeking to recapture the emotional self-sufficiency she had found to be her only refuge as a child.

T
HE MORE SHE WITHDREW,
the easier it was for him to rationalize his behavior. Eleanor seems never to have enjoyed the physical aspects of marital love; her daughter, Anna, later recalled her saying, just before Anna married, that sex was “an ordeal to be borne.” Franklin had long set his heart on six children, following the lead of Uncle Ted; after her sixth child, Eleanor may have decided enough was enough. Had she enjoyed sex she and Franklin might have employed one of the methods of contraception then available; since she didn’t enjoy it, she may have employed the most basic method of all. Perhaps she articulated an embargo against intimacy; perhaps she simply let Franklin know, by her lack of interest, that she wanted nothing more of it.

Her coolness might have come as a disappointment to Franklin; it might, alternatively, have provided an excuse for him to do what he was tempted to do anyway. Washington had always been hard on family life, from the earliest days of the republic when travel was difficult and most members of Congress left their wives at home. Women plying the oldest profession had spotted an opportunity and found enough patrons among the members to maintain a lively trade. The growth of the executive branch during and after the Civil War increased the permanent population of government officials, but Congress still came and went, as, at greater intervals, did those executive branch employees not protected by the civil service reforms. The result, even during the second decade of the twentieth century, was that life in Washington reflected a peculiar transience among the governing classes. In the swirl of receptions and dinners, existing attachments frayed and new ones readily formed.

A man on the make like Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have to look far to find models of infidelity—not far at all. Nick Longworth’s extramarital adventures grew more notorious with each passing month. Alice knew of the affairs but ignored them till one evening she discovered Nick and her close friend Cissy Patterson coupled on the floor of her bathroom. Alice was surprised, though less about Nick than about Cissy, who was supposed to be having an affair with Senator William Borah. After a memorable tryst between Cissy and Borah at one of Alice’s parties, Alice’s maid recovered some distinctive hairpins from the floor of the library. Alice sent them to Cissy with a note: “I believe they are yours.” Cissy answered, “And if you look up in the chandelier, you might find my panties.”

Alice decided that two (or more) could play that game, and she pursued Borah. The “stallion from Idaho,” as he was known around Washington, reciprocated her interest, and their affair soon stoked the gossip engines of the capital. “Everybody called her ‘Aurora Borah Alice,’” Hope Miller, a member of Alice’s set matter-of-factly recalled many years later. Eventually Alice became pregnant. Most of her acquaintances assumed Borah was the father—including Nick, who vetoed Alice’s initial choice of a name for the baby girl. Alice, in perhaps her most brilliantly malicious stroke of humor, wanted to name the child Deborah. Nick drew the line. He would raise the baby, he said, and in the event doted on her far more than Alice did. But he wouldn’t have a child under his roof named “de Borah.” Alice settled for Paulina.

What Franklin Roosevelt made of all this is impossible to say. By the time the most scandalous parts became known, he was in no position to comment on other people’s affairs. But he doubtless told himself that flirtations were the norm among Washington’s summer bachelors, and if women found him attractive, who was he to push them away? Hostesses were happy for Lucy Mercer to fill Eleanor’s empty place at dinner; Lucy’s social antecedents, not to mention her manners and looks, were such as to elevate the tone at almost any table. When the flirtation began to turn more serious is equally hard to say. Perhaps it did so gradually, perhaps with a swiftness that took the lovers’ breath away. But whether sudden or slow, Franklin’s attachment to Lucy eventually overtook his love for Eleanor.

The affair was a secret chiefly from those who weren’t supposed to know. Alice Roosevelt caught on early. “Lucy was beautiful, charming, and an absolutely delightful creature,” she recalled. “I would see her out driving with Franklin, and I would say things like, ‘I saw you out driving with someone very attractive indeed, Franklin. Your hands were on the wheel, but your eyes were on her.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, she is lovely, isn’t she?’” Alice encouraged the affair, for her own complicated reasons. “He deserved a good time. He was married to Eleanor,” she said later. Alice probably felt that Franklin’s affair in some way excused her own. On at least one occasion she appears to have taunted Eleanor by saying she had a secret that ought to interest her. But Eleanor, wishing neither to give Alice the satisfaction she obviously coveted nor to have her own fears confirmed, declined to be enticed into asking what Alice’s secret was.

Yet the secret—or half secret—took a toll on Franklin and Eleanor’s immediate family. Elliott afterward wrote of a “vague hostility” that suffused the household. He was a young child then; perhaps he recalled things accurately, or perhaps he imputed later feelings to the earlier time. Quoting his mother’s published recollection regarding the same period, that “there was a sense of impending disaster hanging over all of us,” Elliott remarked that readers naturally assumed she was talking about the troubled state of world affairs. “But by ‘all of us’ she meant not the country at large but her family. She was talking about trouble much closer to home.” Speaking for himself, Elliott adopted language of a later era in describing a “cold war” between his parents.

Franklin and Eleanor fought—not directly over Franklin’s affair, which remained unspoken, but over other matters. She blamed him when he didn’t arrive at Campobello on schedule. She accused him of ignoring her letters. “You never answer a question, and nothing I ask for appears!” She insulted Lucy gratuitously by trying to pay her for volunteer work. She gloated in the knowledge that her insult had hit the mark. “She is evidently quite cross with me!” she wrote Franklin. Finally, after another period of procrastination in his departure from Washington for Campobello, she delivered what appears to have been an ultimatum. “I
count
on seeing you the 26th,” she wrote. “My threat was no idle one!” Elliott, reading this letter later, had little difficulty discerning its meaning. “There was no mystery,” he said. “She threatened to leave him.”

Meanwhile Eleanor did something she hadn’t done since the early years of the marriage: she consciously cultivated Sara. Perhaps Eleanor understood that an explosion was imminent and wanted to protect herself—and her children—against it. Perhaps she guessed that Sara would take her side, at least this once. “I miss you and so do the children,” Eleanor wrote her mother-in-law in a typical letter from the period. “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.” A few weeks later she declared, “I wish you were always here! There are always so many things I want to talk over and ask you about, and letters are not very satisfactory, are they?”

9.

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT WASN’T ALONE IN NOT SEEING A
E
UROPEAN
war coming. Americans made Woodrow Wilson their president with only the vaguest notion of where he stood on world affairs. “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs,” Wilson remarked confidentially just before his inauguration. As a professor of government and history, Wilson had studied European affairs for decades and, with most experts, had come to the conclusion that a major war in Europe was nearly impossible. Border scrapes—the international equivalent of barroom scuffles—would occur, but none of the great powers had any incentive to burn the bar down. Even if a big war somehow got started, it couldn’t last long, for the powers would run out of the money required to keep modern armies in the field.