One of the most explosive episodes dramatized in Eleanor and Franklin is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secret relationship with Lucy Mercer, a young woman who had worked as Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary. The affair developed during the years when Franklin was rising through Democratic politics and serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In 1918, Eleanor discovered intimate letters between Franklin and Mercer in his luggage. The revelation shattered the marriage’s private emotional life and led Eleanor to consider divorce—an extraordinary prospect for a politically ambitious man in the rigidly conventional world of the early twentieth century. Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, strongly opposed a divorce and reportedly threatened to cut Franklin off financially, while political and family pressures made a formal separation seem disastrous. The Roosevelts ultimately remained married, but their relationship changed permanently: Eleanor became increasingly independent, building a public career of her own, while the marriage functioned more as a political and familial partnership than a conventional romantic union.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1910s
The 1918 Discovery of Franklin Roosevelt’s Affair with Lucy Mercer
Eleanor and Franklin / 1910s
One of the most explosive episodes dramatized in Eleanor and Franklin is Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secret relationship with Lucy Mercer, a young woman who had worked as Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary. The affair developed during the years when Franklin was rising through Democratic politics and serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In 1918, Eleanor discovered intimate letters between Franklin and Mercer in his luggage. The revelation shattered the marriage’s private emotional life and led Eleanor to consider divorce—an extraordinary prospect for a politically ambitious man in the rigidly conventional world of the early twentieth century. Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, strongly opposed a divorce and reportedly threatened to cut Franklin off financially, while political and family pressures made a formal separation seem disastrous. The Roosevelts ultimately remained married, but their relationship changed permanently: Eleanor became increasingly independent, building a public career of her own, while the marriage functioned more as a political and familial partnership than a conventional romantic union.
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