FDR - Jean Edward Smith [95]
Throughout his career FDR drew heavily on members of the Jewish faith for their skill and expertise. Judge Samuel Rosenman joined Roosevelt’s staff in 1928 as his chief aide and speechwriter and remained in that capacity until the president’s death in 1945. Sidney Hillman, Ben Cohen, and David Niles were in and out of the White House, advising the president and carrying water for the New Deal. Jews constituted roughly 3 percent of the population when FDR was president, yet they represented about 15 percent of his top appointments.47 Roosevelt set the tone with his masterly reply to a pointed query about his ancestry: “In the dim past [my ancestors] may have been Jews or Catholics or Protestants. What I am more interested in is whether they were good citizens and believers in God. I hope they were both.”48 FDR’s response to the Holocaust was nuanced and complex, and certainly not everything America’s Jewish community desired, but that in no way diminishes his commitment to social justice or the breakthrough that the New Deal represented. Until 1933, Washington had been run by WASP descendants of old-stock Americans. Roosevelt opened government to those of talent regardless of pedigree.
The war years also saw Franklin and Eleanor grow distant. FDR put in longer hours at the Navy Department. Eleanor was drawn increasingly into volunteer work, and their summers were spent apart, Franklin at his post in Washington, ER and the children at Campobello. After the birth of their sixth child, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, on March 13, 1916, the evidence suggests that Eleanor and Franklin adopted abstinence as the only sure means of birth control. That was common at the time. The Episcopal Church (as well as the Roman Catholic) forbade birth control, and it was illegal in many states by statute.49 Sara had adopted the practice after Franklin’s birth, and in the refined circles in which the Roosevelts moved, contraception was almost never discussed.*
An only child, Franklin had wanted six children—the same number that had romped through Cousin Theodore’s home at Sagamore Hill. That desire had been one of the reasons he had been rejected by the young Alice Sohier in 1902, before his courtship of Eleanor. Whether he mentioned this same desire to Eleanor is unclear, but she had now given birth to six children (one of whom had died in infancy), and the Roosevelts would have no more.
The Roosevelt siblings are in agreement on the matter. Anna, who was closest to her parents, said her mother told her that “sex is an ordeal to be borne.” After John’s birth, “that was the end of any marital relationship, period.”50 James, more circumspect, wrote, “It is possible that she [ER] knew no birth-control methods other than abstinence when she determined to have no more children.”51 Elliott said that from John’s birth
until the end of Father’s days, my parents never again lived together as man and wife.
Mother had performed her austere duty in marriage, and five children were testimony to that. She wanted no more, but her blank ignorance about how to ward off pregnancy left her no choice other than abstinence. Her shyness and stubborn pride would keep her from seeking advice from a doctor or woman friend.… It quickly became the most tightly held secret that we five children ever shared and kept.52
It was in the summer of 1916, shortly after the birth of John Aspinwall, that FDR took up with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s part-time social secretary. ER and the children were at Campobello, and Franklin was spending another summer alone in Washington. Lucy was nearby, unattached, and incredibly attractive. The long, tender love affair between