FRANKLIN & LUCY
President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life
by Joseph E. Persico C 2008
Random House New York
REVIEW by Christine Trzyna
The gist of this story is that by the time the polio crippled FDR was in the White House, he had entertained a long term affair with Lucy Mercer ( later Rutherford), a woman of class but without funds, whom Eleanor his wife had hired to be her secretary. Eleanor discovered the affair, wasted away physically, and negotiated a "stay married" deal with FDR's mother, who was holding the money bags. Agreeing to live separate lives, they did so, with the same acknowledgement of their privacy as the press gave FDR to greatly hide the fact that he could not walk or stand unaided. Lucy Mercer, cut off from Franklin, made her own wealthy society marriage, and meanwhile at the White House staff accommodated Eleanor and Franklin's new love interests; In his case a young woman name Missy LeHand who lived there and in her case a lesbian journalist who gave up her career to be with Eleanor, Lorena Hickok.
This book does not "proof" that "lesbian" relationship stating that in Victorian times and in social classes where men and women were kept apart, it was not extraordinary for women to have emotional relationships and write "I love you," in letters. Letters exist. Many have been destroyed. But there were many. Just as we might e-mail today, these women wrote and posted letters to each other most every day, sentimental and feeling, full of assurances that they understood how each other felt, perhaps using language that suggested rather than being explicit.
The suggestion here is that despite Missy and other love interests if not affairs, it was Lucy Mercer Rutherford that was the love of FDR's life.
To change the subject to the economy of the time, when the stock market went down about 90% and 33 % of all Americans were out of work and there was a banking crisis and the Great Depression began - kind of like NOW - page 225 reminds us of what FDR did as president.
"That inauguration day, after he had been sworn in, Roosevelt turned to face a sea of umbrellas and began speaking of the trials that vast numbers of his countrymen still faced. "I see millions of families," he said, "trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by so called polite society half a century ago. I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children. I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions. I see one third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished. It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope - because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposed to paint it out."
