On September evening in 1918, while unpacking an overseas bag for her husband, who had returned from a fact-finding tour of war-torn Europe with double pneumonia, Eleanor Roosevelt came upon a cache of love letters from her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Later Eleanor would write that the bottom fell out of her world. She did what any high-minded wife would have done at the time: She offered her husband his freedom. Guilty, grief-stricken, but besotted by the lovely Miss Mercer, Franklin accepted his wife’s offer. After six months in Reno, which had recently replaced Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as America’s foremost divorce mill, Eleanor, mindful of the shame and potential scandal that stalked a divorcée, withdrew to a small safe circle of wellborn friends and relatives. Franklin, dismissed from his position by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who had hounded his own brother-in-law from the family newspaper and the state of North Carolina for a similar offense, took the second Mrs. Roosevelt back to Hyde Park. He could not, however, return to his beloved Springwood, overlooking the Hudson; his mother, who held the purse strings, had disinherited him, as she’d threatened to do if he disgraced the family with a divorce. He lived out his days in the general vicinity, pursuing a series of agricultural and forestry experiments. Fourteen years later a Depression-wracked nation elected Newton D. Baker its thirty-second President. In the annals of twentieth-century history, Franklin D. Roosevelt merits a brief listing as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. Eleanor Roosevelt is not mentioned at all.
The story is true, up to a point. Eleanor Roosevelt did offer her husband a divorce, but Franklin declined. He loved Lucy, but he ached to be President. “It is better to marry than to burn,” St. Paul said, and opened an alternative path to salvation for those who could not embrace celibacy. In Franklin Roosevelt’s case, it was better to stay married than to burn. Everyone knew the American people would not elect a divorced man to their highest office.
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