FDR & Eleanor Roosevelt

In September 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt was unpacking her husband's luggage after he returned ill from a wartime trip to Europe. She found a packet of love letters. They were from Lucy Mercer, her social secretary, and they made clear that the affair had been going on for some time.

Eleanor later said that she offered Franklin a divorce. Sara Roosevelt, his mother, intervened: a divorce would destroy his political career. Louis Howe, his political advisor, agreed. Franklin chose to stay. But Eleanor extracted terms. She would remain his wife, continue the public partnership, maintain the family. But the marriage as she had understood it was over.

The discovery and its aftermath did not end the Roosevelts. It redefined them. Eleanor had been, before this, a shy and socially anxious woman who organized herself primarily around her husband's needs and her mother-in-law's approval. The betrayal, and the conditions she set after it, were the beginning of her becoming herself.

Eleanor was thirty-four years old when she found the letters. She had grown up orphaned by eight, raised by a severe grandmother, profoundly lonely in the years before her marriage. The marriage to Franklin had seemed like arrival. The discovery of the letters was its collapse. What she built from the wreckage was more substantial than what had been there before.

The Eleanor Roosevelt who emerged in the 1920s and accelerating through the 1930s was a different figure from the woman who had organized her existence around her husband's ascent. She had developed her own political interests, her own network, her own public voice. She was involved in labor organizing, women's rights, civil rights work that was considerably to the left of where her husband's political calculations placed him.

The relationship with Lorena Hickok, the Associated Press reporter who covered Eleanor beginning in 1932, has been the subject of sustained historical debate about its nature and extent. The letters between them, thousands of pages, are among the most intimate in the historical record. Hickok's letters to Eleanor were destroyed by Hickok before her death. Eleanor's letters, held in the FDR Library, were sealed until after Hickok's death in 1968 and contain language that is unambiguous in its expression of love.

Whether the relationship was physically intimate is a question the historical record cannot definitively resolve and may not be the most important one. What the letters establish is that Eleanor had a primary emotional attachment outside her marriage, that it was deeply felt, and that it informed the person she was during the years she was the most publicly significant First Lady in American history.

Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio in August 1921, at age thirty-nine. The illness left him paralyzed from the waist down. He spent years in various water therapies attempting to recover function that never fully returned. He eventually walked, with braces and assistance, and managed his public life so carefully that the majority of Americans never fully understood the extent of his physical disability.

The polio changed the dynamic of the marriage in ways that are still being worked through by historians. Eleanor became, during the long years of his recovery, an extension of his political presence when he could not be present himself. She traveled, spoke, reported back. She became, in this role, politically educated in a way that the previous decades of social attendance had not provided.

The shift in physical capacity did not create equality between them. Roosevelt retained all the formal power and all the patrician confidence that had characterized him before the illness. But it created a dependency that had not existed before, and with it, a different kind of partnership. He needed her in ways he had not needed her before, which gave her a leverage and a latitude she had not previously had.

The most documented and most legible part of their relationship is the political partnership of the White House years, 1933 to 1945. Eleanor used her role to push issues onto the administration's agenda that would not otherwise have been there: anti-lynching legislation, the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the integration of the armed forces (which she advocated for long before it happened). She was further left than her husband on nearly every domestic issue. He was a pragmatist and a coalition manager. She was a moralist.

The tension between them was productive. His political instincts constrained her from positions that would have been publicly untenable; her advocacy kept alive the moral dimension of what the New Deal was supposed to be. The administration that resulted was shaped by both of them in ways that cannot be cleanly separated.

She was also, throughout, conducting her own political life independently of him: her press conferences, her newspaper column, her radio broadcasts, her advocacy work that continued regardless of whether it created difficulties for the White House.

Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia. He was there with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, the woman who had been the cause of the 1918 crisis. Eleanor had not known he maintained contact with Lucy. She was not present at his death.

The discovery of Lucy's presence was, by Eleanor's accounts, another blow. She had believed the terms of 1918 included a severance of that connection. Whether this was an explicit understanding or an assumption is unclear. The fact of Lucy's presence at his death, and Eleanor's absence, is the coda of the marriage.

The partnership survived thirty-two years from the 1918 crisis. It produced a presidency that restructured the American economy and welfare state, helped defeat fascism in Europe, and established a United Nations framework. It also produced an Eleanor Roosevelt who became, after Franklin's death, one of the most significant human rights advocates of the twentieth century, a person whose political formation had been shaped in part by the specific crucible of this marriage.

The Roosevelt marriage is sometimes held up as a model for reinvented relationships, for partnerships that survive betrayal, for the practical over the romantic. It is not a comfortable model. It required enormous personal cost from Eleanor in particular, operating inside a formal arrangement that did not provide what she needed emotionally while carrying enormous public weight.

What it does model is the possibility of building something genuinely consequential from the remains of what a relationship was supposed to be. The project they built together was real, was larger than either of them, and would not have been possible in the same form without both of them. Whether that is sufficient compensation for what was lost in 1918 is a question Eleanor answered for herself, and the answer is embedded in the life she built.

- Black, Allida M. Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1996. - Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1: 1884-1933. Viking, 1992. - Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2: The Defining Years, 1933-1938. Viking, 1999. - Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Simon & Schuster, 1994. - Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship. Norton, 1971. - Roosevelt, Eleanor. The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Harper & Brothers, 1961.

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Interpretive opinion based on the public record. Not a clinical assessment or diagnosis of any individual.