Historical Notes: A Great Romance

When State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved from Albany to Washington in 1913 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he took up residence with his wife and young children in a comfortable rented house on N Street in Georgetown. After a few months, 30-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt, even then a woman of wide and active interests, found it difficult to manage a household while keeping up with the capital’s intellectual and social whirl. She hired a social secretary to work, as she later recalled, “three mornings a week.” Her new helper was tall, strikingly attractive Lucy Page Mercer, 22, the daughter of a socially impeccable Maryland family that had lately fallen on hard times. To Roosevelt, then 31, Lucy Mercer became far more than a mere employee. In fact, says a World War II aide of the late President, F.D.R. and Lucy began a romance that was to span 30 years.

The aide, Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, whose father Josephus had been Roosevelt’s boss as Secretary of the Navy, makes this claim in his new book The Time Between the Wars. The story of the romance is not exactly new. Columnist Westbrook Pegler insinuatingly linked F.D.R. with Lucy in the 1940s as part of his vendetta against the Roosevelts. In The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that “Eleanor may have sensed something” about her husband’s “friendly affection” for Lucy, whom Schlesinger described as “a sweet, womanly person, somewhat old-fashioned in manner but gay and outgoing.” Finally, Daniels himself, in his 1954 book The End of Innocence, told of “rumors” involving the pair. But it remained for Daniels’ new book to squarely designate Lucy as F.D.R.’s other love.

“Wharton World.” The F.D.R.-Lucy relationship, writes Daniels, was “an affair which almost broke his marriage to Eleanor.” So tense did life on N Street become that in 1917 Mrs. Roosevelt put off going to the family’s retreat at Campobello Island off the Maine coast, and then “evidently, when she was gone, wrote of her sense of unwantedness.” In a return letter from Washington, F.D.R. assured her: “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 Campo.” Eleanor stayed, but she could hardly have been reassured when F.D.R. candidly wrote her of Potomac cruises with Lucy and others. By the time they arrived in Washington, the Roosevelts already had three children, Anna, 7, James, 5, and Elliott, 3. Franklin Jr. was born in 1914, and their last child, John, in 1916.

After Daniels’ book appeared last week, a close friend of Lucy Mercer’s, Mrs. Eulalie Salley, 82, declaring that “to hint that there was anything scandalous in their relationship is perfectly ridiculous,” said: “Of course he was in love with her. So was every man who knew Lucy.” Mrs. Salley believes nonetheless that Roosevelt would have divorced Eleanor to marry Lucy, “but Lucy was a staunch Catholic and would never have married a divorced man.” As Daniels points out in his book, there were other factors mitigating against a Roosevelt breakup, including F.D.R.’s “political ambition plus the mores of the sort of Wharton world in which he was born.” Furthermore, Mama seemed to be onto the romance and, says Daniels, Sara Delano Roosevelt “evidently saw threat to the standards of her family and society.” In a letter to her son, she defended “the old-fashioned traditions of family life” and expressed the hope that F.D.R. would realize “that I am not so far wrong.”

Intriguing Romance. The romance cooled in 1918, and then, writes Daniels, “supposedly he ended forever his relations with Lucy Mercer.” In 1920, five months before Roosevelt became the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Vice President, Lucy Mercer was wed to a man 30 years her senior, Winthrop Rutherfurd, a New York society figure whose first wife—a daughter of former Vice President Levi Morton—had died in 1917 after bearing him five children. Lucy bore him one daughter.

Rutherfurd came from much the same blueblood milieu as the Roosevelts, was a descendant of both Peter Stuyvesant, the first Governor of New York, and John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts. His father was first a law partner of William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, and later a leading astronomer. One of his own descendants, Grandson Lewis Rutherfurd, last month married Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy’s half-sister, in the biggest society wedding of the year.

Rutherfurd himself had an intriguing romance as a youth. In 1895 he had been secretly engaged to Railroad Heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose marriage to the Duke of Marlborough was annulled years later by the Sacred Rota of the Roman Catholic Church on the ground that she had loved Rutherfurd but had been forced to marry Marlborough by her domineering mother.

“Nothing Shameful.” A year and a half after Lucy’s marriage, F.D.R. was stricken with polio. Writes Daniels: “However complete or incomplete had been the reconciliation between Eleanor and Franklin after their marriage was threatened, now he was hers to serve and to save.” Nonetheless, F.D.R. and Lucy were to be “attached by ties of deep and unbroken affection to the day he died.” By all accounts, F.D.R. thereafter kept in frequent contact with Lucy. For example, says Daniels, he “quietly arranged for special tickets and a special car for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd at his Inauguration” in 1933. He also visited the Rutherfurds’ stately winter home in Aiken, S.C., several times, and the Rutherfurds called at the White House. Daniels says that Lucy visited the Little White House at Warm Springs, Ga., on several occasions. In fact, though her presence was unpublicized at the time, she was with Roosevelt there on the day he died—April 12, 1945. To the very last, according to Daniels, Mrs. Roosevelt was “bitter and jealous of Lucy.”

Mrs. Rutherfurd died in a New York City hospital in 1948, in her 58th year. Last week her daughter, Mrs. Robert W. Knowles of Aiken, called Daniels’ disclosures “quite a surprise to me.” It was quite a surprise to a lot of people, and more details are bound to come out in the future. Daniels, for one, who called the liaison “nothing shameful” and “the beautiful affair of a great lady and a gentleman,” intimated that he is considering following up his coup with a full-length account of “one of the great love stories of American history.”