This was his first political campaign, a local politician recalled, “but none of his later campaigns were entered with more will to win than was this Senatorial campaign of 1910.” He promised voters that if they elected him, he would “be a real representative,” giving his full energies to their concerns “every day of the 365, every hour of the 24. That is my promise. I ask you to give me the chance to fill it.” He pledged to return regularly to the district, traveling from one end to the other, listening to voters’ concerns. Over and over, he stressed his independence, vowing to stand against “the bosses” in either party. “I know I’m no orator,” he liked to say. “You don’t have to be an orator, Roosevelt,” someone in the audience yelled back. “Talk right along to us on those lines, that’s what we like to hear.” When the votes were tallied on Election Day, Franklin learned that he had vanquished his opponent, winning by the largest margin of any Democratic candidate in the state.
In analyzing Roosevelt’s victory, one can cite the fortuitous historical moment, the split in the Republican Party between progressives and conservatives that produced Democratic victories across the nation; one can point to the reflected glow the presidential surname lent the aspiring state senator (along with the substantial funding made possible by the family’s wealth); or summon the novelty of that red Maxwell barnstorming the country roads. But what was evident in the end was the fact that the cheerful, gregarious, disarmingly glamorous young man had out-worked, out-traveled, and out-strategized the Republicans by simply listening to the hopes and needs of whoever crossed his path. Long-visualized ambition and directed energy had finally brought him to the place where he wanted to be.
* * *
No sooner had Franklin entered the State Senate than he charged into battle against the entrenched Tammany machine that held a grip on the state Democratic Party. Just as Theodore Roosevelt had found in Judge Westbrook a vehicle to fight corruption, so Franklin found his instrument in Tammany boss Charlie Murphy’s personal choice for the United States Senate—“Blue-Eyed” Billy Sheehan, a machine politician who had made millions through collusion with the streetcar industry. Hearing that a rebel group was forming in the Assembly to block Sheehan, Franklin became the first senator to sign the manifesto pledging the insurgent band to boycott the caucus as long as it took to foil Boss Murphy’s choice.
Luck—the proximity of his dwelling to the Assembly, which made it the perfect place for the insurgents to convene—combined with Roosevelt’s personal charm and celebrated name to make the novice senator the spokesman for the twenty-member group. “I never had as much fun in my life as I am having now,” a beaming Roosevelt told reporters. Late at night, the esprit de corps among this fraternity was palpable. The “good fellowship” of his twenty comrades provided “the most pleasant feature.” With cigar smoke curling in the air, “we sit around and swap stories, like soldiers at the bivouac fire,” he said.
Invigorated by the battle and emboldened by the headlines, Roosevelt refused to compromise, even after Murphy withdrew Sheehan’s name. The substitute Murphy put forward, Roosevelt declared, was equally unsuitable. Frances Perkins, then an Albany social worker lobbying on behalf of unions, recalled how “disagreeable” and conceited young Roosevelt struck her during this period. “I can still see ‘that’ Roosevelt now, standing back of the brass rail with two or three senators arguing with him to be ‘reasonable’—his small mouth pursed up and slightly open, his nostrils distended, his head in the air, and his cool, remote voice saying, ‘No, no, I won’t hear of it!’ ” Years later, Roosevelt admitted to Miss Perkins that he was “an awfully mean cuss” when he first entered politics.
Like young Theodore, Franklin had developed a grandiose sense of his own importance—and, like his cousin, he was heading for a fall. By the end of March, nearly three months after the battle had begun, the ranks of the weary insurgents finally began to break. When Murphy put forth yet another name, that of Justice James Aloysius O’Gorman, a Tammany man with an independent streak, enough insurgents decided to go along to bring the battle to an end. Though some critics contended that “O’Gorman was no better than Sheehan,” Roosevelt “converted defeat into victory simply by calling it a victory,” declaring that Murphy had been taught moderation and shamelessly maintaining that the party had “taken an upward step.”
Recognizing, however, that his actual power within the chamber had dimmed even as his political star rose brightly, Franklin began to moderate his approach. He learned, in much the same way as Theodore Roosevelt had, to work together with different factions and strike bargains. He reached out to individual Tammany members, no longer categorically assuming that all of them were corrupt. On the contrary, many of them had forged enduring ties with the common men and women in their districts, dispensing aid, jobs, and comfort, working around the clock to satisfy their constituents’ immediate needs. Indeed, it was Bowery boss “Big Tim” Sullivan and the Tammany organization that had taken the lead in sponsoring much of the progressive social legislation that Franklin eventually supported, including workman’s compensation, the fifty-four-hour workweek, and women’s suffrage. Franklin had been a quick study in learning the art of compromise in order to get things accomplished.
In hindsight, the most enduring impact of the Sheehan battle lay in the fact that the widespread coverage of this young Democratic crusader against Tammany had caught the eye of the newly elected Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson. Within two weeks of his inauguration, Wilson offered the state senator the coveted post of assistant secretary of the navy. “How would I like it: I’d like it bully well,” an excited Roosevelt replied. “It would please me better than anything in the world. All my life I have loved ships and have been a student of the Navy, and the assistant secretaryship is the one place, above all others I would love to hold.” Sara believed that her son’s deep attraction to the ocean was hereditary. Her Delano grandfather had captained American clipper ships, renowned for their beauty and speed, to the Orient. As a boy, Franklin “always thrilled to tales of the sea.” At the age of thirteen, he had told his father he wanted to go to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but Mr. James persuaded him “man-to-man” that it would be too hard on his parents for their only son to be away as much as a naval career would demand. While at Harvard, he had kept his interest in the Navy alive by trolling secondhand bookstores to build a collection of books and manuscripts on naval history that eventually comprised some 2,500 volumes. Little wonder that the proffered post was the one he desired above all others.
Moreover, the post as assistant secretary of the navy placed Franklin on the next rung on the ladder to the presidency he had uncannily visualized as a twenty-five-year-old, when he confided his vaulting ambitions to his fellow law clerks. Observers noted when the appointment was announced that he was following, lockstep, Theodore Roosevelt’s path. Indeed, Theodore recognized the parallelism in his congratulatory note to Franklin. “It is interesting that you are in another place which I myself once held. I am sure you will enjoy yourself to the full.”
* * *
As assistant secretary of the navy, working for seven years under Secretary Josephus Daniels, a former newspaper publisher with long experience in Democratic Party politics, Franklin had to learn for the first and last time in his political career how to operate as a subordinate. The situation proved challenging for the young man, who, despite his unfolding leadership skills, remained deficient in one essential quality—humility.
Josephus Daniels, two decades older than Franklin and a neophyte in naval protocol and language, approached his new job tentatively. A courtly southerner, able to swap yarns and relax with colleagues, Daniels worked with deliberation to build solid relationships with key congressmen and senators. Franklin, an activist by nature, and a passionate believer in an expanded Navy ready for action in an increasingly volatile world, considered Daniels “an old fuddy duddy,” who, he told Eleanor, “was too damn slow for words.” One evening at a dinner party, Fran
klin made several derogatory remarks about Daniels. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane cautioned. “Mr. D is your superior. And you should show him loyalty or you should resign.” Franklin heeded Lane’s advice. He held his tongue in public and eventually came to appreciate the great value of the warm relationships Daniels had managed to cultivate with members of the appropriations committees responsible for the Navy’s funding.
As secretary of the navy, Daniels was responsible for overall naval policy, the disposition of the fleet, and congressional relations. While Daniels handled policy, Franklin, his sole assistant secretary, was charged with administering the giant Navy Department, which employed 65,000 men, with a budget representing 20 percent of federal expenditures. He was responsible for procuring supplies and equipment, supervising docks, navy yards, and personnel. And beyond the daily bureaucratic tasks under his purview, he was determined to move the entrenched bureaucracy forward, to build bigger and better-equipped ships, and to reorganize the work of the civilian personnel to strengthen the Navy’s readiness for battle should the necessity arise.
What enabled this thirty-one-year-old with virtually no management experience to meet the double challenge of administering the department he inherited, while initiating a transformative process of moving it forward in a different direction? To be sure, having the vision to know where he wanted to go, to see a different future for the organization, was the essential first step. But how did he actually succeed in making it happen? And how, despite his contentious start with his superior, Daniels, was he able to forge a productive working relationship and lifelong friendship that eventually benefited both men?
For answers, one cannot resort solely to Franklin’s celebrated “first-class temperament,” but rather confront the speed and rule-bending originality of his intellect, which, at work within a complex organizational arena for the first time, proved anything but “second-rate.” All his life people had underestimated (and would continue to misjudge) Franklin’s native intelligence. The academic yardsticks used at Groton, Harvard College, and Columbia Law failed to measure his distinctive, problem-solving capacity, to gauge his aptitude for seeing how disparate things connect, or to credit the quickness with which he absorbed information. These unique aspects of his mind were often camouflaged by his outward geniality and the easy charm of his demeanor, leading members of his social circle to consider him a lightweight.
Those who witnessed young Roosevelt in the Navy Department, however, clearly understood that they were in the presence of a striking intelligence. “A man with a flashing mind,” was how one rear admiral described him. “It took my breath away,” he said, “to see how rapidly he grasped the essentials of a situation,” how thoroughly he absorbed “the details of the most complicated subjects.”
To gain a dynamic up-to-date picture of the size and capacity of the current fleet and the disposition of the 65,000 military and civilian personnel, Franklin had fixed to his office wall a large map of the world. Colored pins denoted the position of every ship in the fleet. Whenever a ship moved, the pins were moved. Other pins indicated the numbers of people employed at various navy yards, docks, and supply centers, allowing him to see what was transpiring. From the start, he formed a mental image of the Navy as a living organism rather than a moribund bureaucracy filled with “dead wood”; he envisioned a vast organization comprised of people working in places and working in jobs that could be grown into a Navy “second to none.”
With a glance at his wall map, Roosevelt noted dozens of useless navy yards, originally designed for the maintenance of sailing vessels presently operating at great loss due to patronage and political pressure. Rather than closing these obsolete yards, he conceived of a new plan. He would convert each one into a specialized industrial plant for the manufacture of vessels and equipment needed for an expanded modern navy. The old Brooklyn Navy Yard would specialize in radios to outfit the fleet. Ropes and anchors and chains for battleships would become the province of the Boston yard. Cruisers would be built in Philadelphia, submarines and destroyers in Norfolk. This new mode of reorganization gave Roosevelt a reputation as an “economizer.” More importantly, such consolidation was a necessary step to ready a peacetime navy for a potential war.
From the start, Roosevelt assembled a personal staff to assist him not only to manage the existing bureaucracy but, at the same time, to introduce new ideas and methods. Aware that he needed an assistant to whom he could entrust the routine aspects of the job, he kept Charles McCarthy as his private secretary. McCarthy, who had served in several previous administrations, embodied the traditions and rituals of the naval status quo. Within short order, Roosevelt secured McCarthy’s respect and affection. “It is only a big man and real executive,” McCarthy told Roosevelt, “who can distinguish between the minor details of such an office, which you have properly left to those in whom you have had confidence, and the bigger problems which you have so ably handled yourself.” Winning the veteran bureaucrat’s admiration made it easier for Franklin to gain the cooperation of the traditional bureaucratic cadre as he moved to change and reform the institution.
To help implement the transformative agenda of putting the Navy on a new readiness footing, Roosevelt brought in his own man, forty-year-old Louis Howe, an outstanding reporter for the New York Herald, whose strange appearance inspired a range of hyperbolic descriptions as a “gnome-like” creature, “a singed cat” with thinning hair and “luminous eyes,” clothed in wrinkled suits perpetually covered with cigarette ashes. Howe had first encountered Roosevelt during the campaign to boycott Sheehan’s appointment to the U.S. Senate. Such was the immediate attraction between the two men that they would become not merely the closest of friends but indispensable to one another. Thereafter, Howe dedicated his life to Roosevelt. For the next quarter-century they seldom spent more than a couple days apart. While the genial and optimistic Roosevelt was generally averse to confrontation, Howe was tough and cynical by nature, happy to battle opposing people head-on. Never shy about his opinions, Howe could “deflate Roosevelt’s pride, prod his negligence,” and tell him flatly when and where he had gone astray. Remaining largely behind the scenes, he let Roosevelt absorb credit when things went well and readily accepted blame when they did not.
The methods Roosevelt used to propel a sluggish bureaucracy toward a more expansive and prepared status would become his characteristic way of dealing with constraints in the years ahead. He insisted that when something had to be done, there was always a way to do it, whether it involved bypassing regulations, cutting through red tape, or breaking precedent. “He was a great trial and error guy,” Admiral Emory Land recalled of Roosevelt during this period. He would fling things against the wall, seeing if they would stick; if they didn’t, he would acknowledge his mistake and try something else. When regulations prevented the government from selling naval guns to merchant ships, for example, he devised a scheme for loaning them with “a suitable bond” instead of offering them for sale, a seed that would germinate into the historic Lend-Lease program during World War II.
In addition to the fertility of his imagination and the suppleness of his techniques for circumventing strictures was his willingness at times of urgency to employ questionable means to achieve his goals. He placed official orders for millions of dollars’ worth of guns, supplies, and equipment prior to congressional approval of the funds. He persuaded manufacturers to commence filling the orders on the basis of his word alone. Indeed, he once theatrically declared that if his brash maneuvers proved illegal, he was willing “to go to jail for 999 years,” for he was certain that his insistence on preparedness would ultimately save his countrymen’s lives.
His readiness proved of paramount importance. Not unlike his cousin Theodore’s preparation for conflict with Spain (contrary to the policy of President McKinley and his naval superior, John Davis Long), Franklin had laid the foundation for America’s entry into the Great War years in advance
. After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and the entrance of the United States into the war two years later, however, he no longer risked the charge of insubordination but rather basked in the status of a visionary. Indeed, so successful had he been in stockpiling supplies for the Navy that an admiring President Wilson brought him into a meeting with the Army chief of staff and, “with a twinkle in his eye,” said: “I’m very sorry, but you’ve cornered the market for supplies. You’ll have to divide up with the Army.” In the end, the foresight that led Franklin to fight for his preparedness campaign redounded not only to the credit of his boss, Josephus Daniels, but to the entire Wilson administration as well.
As a training run for his later leadership roles, Roosevelt’s administrative experience in the Navy Department proved invaluable, developing not only his management skills, but his abilities to deal with labor. Within weeks of taking office, he visited civilian workers in the Washington Navy Yard who had felt neglected by the Navy brass and the government over the years. “We want to get down and talk across the table with you,” he told them, assuring them they could come to him at any time “with complaints,” or simply to “talk things over.” He delivered the same message to workers in every yard and every dock he visited, telling disgruntled American Federation of Labor machinists that his door would always be open. During his tenure as assistant secretary, there was not a single strike by the thousands of civilian workers in the Navy Department.
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