Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (25 page)

Though the sensory impact of the battlefield was overwhelming—“the smell of dead horses is not only evident but very horrid,” Roosevelt wrote—he insisted on pushing closer to the active fighting. “We drove into Fère-en-Tardenois and met here the artery of communications for this sector: camions, artillery, and moving troops filled the road in both directions, but the stream never stopped. We turned sharply north just as a series of exploding shells followed by little white puffs indicated a Hun plane, probably doing photographic work.” They passed large piles of live shells dumped by the Germans in their haste to retreat; in one place a circle of felled trees, their broken crowns pointing away from a crater at their center, showed where another such dump had been before it exploded. Roosevelt’s party crossed a small stream and entered the shattered village of Mareuil. “Just as we were descending from the motors, a loud explosion went off very close by. Some of the party jumped perceptibly, realizing that we were within easy range of the Hun artillery. It was, however, only one of our own 155s so cleverly camouflaged in a tree just off the road that we had not noticed its presence.” Roosevelt insisted on examining this gun and some others, and he fired one of the 155s against German positions far over the horizon.

The next day Roosevelt drove to Verdun, the site of the tremendous 1916 siege and battle. Shell holes still pocked the road, which construction crews worked to repair. Villages along the way had been blasted beyond restoration. “All this was nothing, however, to the sight that met our eyes when we looked down over the town. Great gaps showed where buildings had once stood. Detached and jagged walls were everywhere, and of the houses still standing not one roof remained intact. It was a scene of colossal destruction.” The town remained within reach of German artillery, and so its garrison of four thousand troops huddled in tunnels sixty feet beneath the ancient citadel at the town’s highest point.

Roosevelt toured the tunnels and shared lunch with the commandant and his staff, who showed him about the town afterward. “The first thing that met our eyes on one of the walls was the memorable original signboard which was posted near the entrance to the citadel during the siege, and on which the thousands of troops going forward to hold the line read the words which, for the French people, will sum up for all time their great watchword of four years: ‘Ils ne passeront pas.’”

Roosevelt’s party crossed the Meuse River to the battlefield itself. They were given helmets and gas masks, just in case. Nowhere had the fighting been more violent than here, but at first it didn’t show. “There were no gashes on these hills, no trenches, no tree trunks, no heaps of ruins—nothing but brown earth for miles upon miles.” Closer inspection, however, revealed that the monotony was the result of shelling so intense that it obliterated all preexisting features of the terrain. “When you look at the ground immediately about you, you realize that this earth has been churned by shells, and churned again. You see no complete shell holes, for one runs into another, and trench systems and forts and roads have been swallowed up in brown chaos.”

R
OOSEVELT’S EXPERIENCE
in France shaped his perceptions of war and added to his mental album of lessons for an aspiring president. It also made him decide to resign from the Navy Department and seek active service. The war was winding down, but he might get in a few licks before it ended. Neither the president nor anyone else could criticize him for leaving his post; he had done his duty in Washington, and with distinction. He had a right to fight.

His plan was to return to France as part of a naval artillery unit—a battleship battery mounted on railcars. Such an assignment might not be the stuff of heroism, but it would allow him to see action. With luck he might be decorated, even lightly wounded. A president-in-the-making couldn’t ask for more.

Roosevelt’s excitement at this prospective turn in his career caused him to ignore the first twinges of illness as he raced around tying up the loose ends from his inspection tour. He told himself he could catch up on his rest on the ship home. He climbed the gangway under his own power but collapsed in his cabin, more debilitated than he had realized. The pandemic of influenza that was starting its sweep around the world—it would kill more than fifty million before it burned out—had infected many of the soldiers Roosevelt had mingled with, and it followed him aboard the
Leviathan.
Quite possibly he suffered a touch of the flu himself; if so, his case was one of the mild ones. Of greater concern was a bad case of pneumonia. Both his lungs began to fill with fluid, and though he coughed incessantly, he couldn’t clear them. Doctors in those days had no medication for pneumonia; rest, liquids, and ample nourishment were the standard prescription. Roosevelt received all of these, but his immune system had been compromised, and he struggled simply to hold his ground.

He was confined to bed the whole voyage to America. A wireless message from the ship alerted the Navy Department that the assistant secretary was ill; the
Leviathan
should be met by orderlies with a stretcher. The department relayed the news to Eleanor, who shared it with Sara, and both women came to the dock in New York. Sara directed the orderlies to her house on Sixty-fifth Street. Roosevelt’s condition stabilized there, but his recovery proceeded slowly. He relocated to Hyde Park; not for a month was he on his feet and ready to return to work.

He delivered the report of his inspection tour to Daniels and prepared to offer his resignation to the president. He visited the White House armed with arguments he thought Wilson wouldn’t be able to resist. The one thing he hadn’t counted on was the first objection the president raised: that the war was about to end. Wilson revealed in confidence that the Germans were suing for peace. Long before Roosevelt could reach the front, the fighting would be over.

This news elated the world as soon as it was made public, but it left Roosevelt ambivalent. Though he shared the relief that the bloodletting was over, by now he really wanted to see action. With decent luck, there would never be such a war again. Yet this meant that there would be no comparable chance for the peculiar distinction that comes with military service. Other men—other politicians—would be able to tell their war stories and display their ribbons and medals. At such moments Roosevelt would have to remain silent.

H
E HAD ANOTHER,
more personal reason for regretting not being able to return to the front. Roosevelt’s inspection tour in France and Britain gave Lucy Mercer reason to write him regularly for the first time. The Delanos tended to be collectors, and Roosevelt, like his mother, never threw a letter away. On his return to America, his luggage contained Lucy’s letters. He had intended to unpack his bags himself, but the pneumonia that prostrated him left his kit in other hands. While he drifted in and out of consciousness, Eleanor unpacked her husband’s suitcases and found the letters.

“The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” she told her friend Joseph Lash years later. “And I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.” Her comment was revealing, especially the part about honesty, which indicated that Lucy’s letters, while a shock, weren’t a surprise. They simply compelled her to acknowledge what she had implicitly denied till now: that her husband loved another woman.

What to do? That was the question for Eleanor—as for so many other wounded spouses throughout history. Should she leave or stay? To leave would free her from a situation that had grown emotionally intolerable. In an era that gravely disapproved of divorce, it would be humiliating, but perhaps no more humiliating than what she had been through, facing the snickers and suggestive glances of those who knew what she now had to acknowledge. Leaving would also expose the children to the opprobrium of the broken home. They wouldn’t starve—her own inheritance, Sara’s concern for her grandchildren, and the courts of New York would see to that. But they would grow up marked by disgrace, which to Eleanor’s way of thinking would be almost as bad as starving. Leaving might well ruin Franklin too. What divorced man had succeeded in politics? None that Eleanor had heard of. Nor had any made a respectable reputation in law or business. Franklin’s fate wasn’t her first consideration at this point, but, if only for the sake of the children, she couldn’t ignore it. Anyway, she didn’t stop loving him just because he had wounded her.

Yet to stay was scarcely more appealing. Could she ever trust him again? Could she ever trust herself? She had been rescued from her childhood insecurities by his love, but now, after she had painstakingly come to believe in herself, she discovered she hadn’t been rescued at all. The knowledge was devastating.

She couldn’t decide alone. She had to consult Sara, whose meddling had been a cause for resentment but whose intense concern suddenly seemed a source of strength. She and Sara and Franklin met in the only suitable place for such an interview: the great library in the house at Hyde Park. What was said there was never recorded. But Alice Roosevelt Longworth later told of a comment by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, her and Eleanor’s aunt. “Always remember, Alice,” Corinne said, “that Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom.”

If Eleanor did, Franklin must have pondered accepting it. Some months earlier, when the strain on the marriage had become intense, the possibility of divorce apparently arose in another conversation with Eleanor and Sara. He said something that prompted Sara, in a follow-up letter to him and Eleanor, to lecture him on his duties to family and tradition. “One can be as democratic as one likes, but if we love our own, and if we love our neighbor, we owe a great example,” Sara wrote. “Do not say that I
misunderstood.
I understood perfectly. But I cannot believe that my precious Franklin really feels as he expressed himself.”

Now, at the moment of crisis, Sara summoned arguments more powerful than appeals to family honor. “If divorce were the answer, she would cut off Father’s money as punishment for his offense,” Elliott Roosevelt wrote, relating the version accepted by the children. Franklin’s own inheritance might support him, but it wouldn’t sustain two households. As a working lawyer or business executive he might manage to provide for Eleanor and the children, as well as for himself, but he would have to abandon his political hopes—which in any case would be shattered by the divorce.

Additional reasons were adduced against divorce, including the fact that Lucy was a Catholic. This presumably precluded marriage to a divorced man. But the Catholicism in Lucy’s family didn’t run deep, as her parents’ breakup demonstrated. She might well have chosen Franklin over orthodoxy, had matters come to that.

They didn’t. If Franklin had indeed been tempted to follow his heart out of his marriage to Eleanor, he decided upon Sara’s ultimatum to follow his ambition back in. Eleanor insisted that he promise never to see Lucy again. He couldn’t possibly object, and he gave the required pledge. The children, who were better placed than anyone else to know, inferred an additional condition: that she and Franklin would never resume conjugal relations. Not for years would the younger children appreciate the significance of their parents’ separate bedrooms. But none of the five ever detected a breach in the emotional wall the separation raised in the middle of their family.

11.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF 1918, ON THE EVE OF THE ALLIED VICTORY IN THE
war, Woodrow Wilson committed the greatest blunder of his presidency. He should have known better, if any president should have, for he had studied politics his whole adult life. Had he been advising a president other than himself, he would have warned against making congressional elections a referendum on the administration’s war policies. He would have predicted a sixth-year slippage in party support, for it was the norm among second-term presidents as the inevitable accumulation of bent and broken promises took its toll. And he most definitely would have argued against urging voters to put foreign affairs first as they selected their congressmen. Voters had never done so in the past; it tempted fate to ask them to alter historic habits.