FDR - Jean Edward Smith [106]
NINE
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1920
It was a darned fine sail.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
ON JANUARY 2, 1919, Franklin and Eleanor boarded the USS George Washington in New York, heading for Paris.1 The armistice had been signed in November, and FDR was to initiate the dismantling of the Navy’s vast European establishment. This included fifty-four shore installations stretching from the Azores to the Shetlands, twenty-five port authorities, and mountains of supplies, plus a vast array of claims, contracts, and government agreements arising from operations abroad. His party included Thomas J. Spellacy, a genial Irishman who was United States attorney for Connecticut, as legal adviser; and Commander John M. Hancock, chief of Navy purchasing.*
For Franklin and Eleanor it was a reconciliation of sorts—Eleanor’s first visit to Europe since their wedding trip in 1905—and an opportunity to heal the hurt of the past autumn. After Eleanor discovered Franklin’s romance with Lucy Mercer, she grew morose, suffered headaches, and had days when she doubted her will to live. “This past year has rather got the better of me,” she wrote her friend Isabella Ferguson. “I still have a breathless, hunted feeling.”2
Several times each week Eleanor drove herself to Rock Creek Cemetery on the outskirts of Washington to sit alone and contemplate the remarkable statue Henry Adams had commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt in his wife’s memory. Eleanor found solace communing with that shrouded figure of grief and in later years would usually visit the cemetery whenever in Washington.3* Henry’s wife, Clover Adams, a pioneer woman photographer, had committed suicide by drinking potassium cyanide, deeply distressed at her husband’s infatuation with their friend and neighbor, Elizabeth Cameron, the beautiful young wife of Senator J. Donald Cameron of Pennsylvania.4 To learn more about the Adamses, Eleanor gave Franklin a copy of The Education of Henry Adams, which had been privately printed in 1906 and had just been reissued for general purchase. They took it aboard the George Washington, and Eleanor read it during the crossing. “Very interesting,” she noted of Henry Adams, “but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little.”5
Four days out of New York, Franklin and Eleanor were informed by radio that Theodore Roosevelt was dead. Both were stunned. TR had just turned sixty-one and, though he had recently been hospitalized, seemed to be regaining strength for another run at the White House in 1920. The Republicans had retaken control of both houses of Congress in November, Wilson was vulnerable, there was no apparent Democratic successor, and once again the GOP appeared united. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, a bitter critic of TR in past years, believed he would be nominated by acclamation on the first ballot.6 The former president died of a pulmonary embolism while asleep at Sagamore Hill. “Death had to take him in his sleep,” commented Vice President Thomas R. Marshall. “If Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”7 TR was not old, said Franklin, “but I cannot help think that he himself would have had it this way and that he has been spared a lingering illness.”8 Eleanor wrote Sara that she was concerned about Aunt Edith, “for it will leave her very much alone. Another big figure gone from our nation and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”9
Paris in January 1919 was a city of contrasts. Reminders of the war were everywhere: captured German artillery pieces lined the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde; limbless men and demobilized soldiers begged for change on fashionable street corners; and almost every other woman was dressed in black, mourning a departed loved one. Along the grand boulevards the glorious chestnut trees were gone, cut for firewood during the last desperate winter. Paris itself had been spared, but there were severe shortages of