In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  That year the orphaned Dorothy Whitney, one of America’s great heiresses, met Straight when she visited Peking. He became her guide. Theirs were kindred, romantic natures. After taking her to the Great Wall one day, he realized that he had fallen in love. For two years thereafter he courted and pursued her, following her to Europe and then to the United States. She was president of the New York Junior League and a leading Long Island socialite, while Straight was, in society’s view, nobody. But his new association with the House of Morgan helped, and TR, a great figure in Long Island society as well as in the world’s affairs, interceded on Straight’s behalf. Willard and Dorothy Straight were married in Geneva on September 7, 1911.

  Straight’s work with a Morgan-led China banking consortium continued until Woodrow Wilson became President in 1913, and Wilson, who held views of his own about China policy that the bankers did not share, blocked the consortium from going forward. Straight then took up a new project—the one for which he is still remembered. He decided to found a magazine to champion the sort of ideas that TR espoused. Though he recruited the social theorist Herbert Croly to edit it, decisions were to be made on a collegial basis by a group of founders, each (even the Straights, who financed it) having only one vote. It was to be called The New Republic.

  One of the founders of The New Republic was tiny, birdlike Felix Frankfurter, a brilliant War Department lawyer about to leave the government to teach at the Harvard Law School. The unbelieving son of a poor Austrian Jewish businessman descended from six generations of rabbis, Frankfurter, born November 15, 1882, in Vienna, was brought to America through Ellis Island in 1894. His family’s move from Vienna to New York was part of the great and continuing wave of immigration that, in the three decades beginning in 1890, brought a third of the world’s Jews to the United States—a country that otherwise was entirely Christian.

  Growing up in the teeming slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he escaped from some of its hazards: he was so short that the tough Irish teenagers who roamed the streets would not stoop to beating him. In the years that followed, his amazing mind took him out of the world of the immigrants, brought him through the New York school system and the Harvard Law School with distinction, and afterward brought him to the attention of Henry Stimson, a follower of TR’s who was to become Frankfurter’s patron.

  On February 1, 1906, Stimson was appointed by TR to be U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York; and in the best Rooseveltian tradition, Stimson selected assistants on the basis of merit alone—among them Frankfurter, who as a Jew could not have obtained a job at a major Wall Street firm. Frankfurter excelled, and made himself invaluable. When Stimson ran for the office of governor of New York in 1910, Frankfurter came along as his brain-trust and speechwriter. Defeated in the elections, Stimson (with what he believed to be TR’s blessing) accepted appointment by President Taft as secretary of war, and brought Frankfurter to Washington as law officer of the War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. The doors of Washington society were of course closed to Frankfurter, but he was always welcome at the Stimsons’ home. He also formed close ties with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  In the War Department Frankfurter dealt with Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Panama and the Canal, Haiti, and what is now the Dominican Republic—the unavowed American empire over which, in his words, “we had a kind of receivership.” He was persuaded by Stimson and a newer patron and adviser, the Boston lawyer Louis D. Brandeis, not to follow his natural inclination to resign in 1912 to enlist in TR’s presidential campaign. Indeed, he stayed on through the first year of the Wilson administration, but then threw himself with enthusiasm into the launching of The New Republic as an organ of Rooseveltian opinion.

  In his available time Frankfurter wrote pieces for the new magazine, but its emerging star was young Walter Lippmann, one of its editors. Lippmann was of a Jewish family that had come two generations before from Germany but, unlike Frankfurter, he was born (in New York City on September 23, 1889) to wealth and privilege, earned by his immigrant maternal grandfather. In the words of his biographer, “Walter Lippmann was brought up to be a gentleman.” Though he grew up surrounded by other descendants of wealthy German Jews, the values that he was taught and the style of life that he lived were much like—and ran parallel to—those of Groton boys like Roosevelt. Even the religion in which he was raised (and which he rejected) was much like theirs; Reform Judaism, created to bring the Jewish religion into the mainstream of the nineteenth-century Christian world, was shorn of many traditional Jewish beliefs, laws, and rituals, and emphasized instead the timeless ethical principles that Judaism shared with Christianity.

  In 1906 Lippmann entered Harvard College, in perhaps its most illustrious class (’10) ever. Mentors included William James; teachers included George Santayana; classmates included the poet T. S. Eliot and John Reed, adventurer, journalist, revolutionist, and exemplar of the romantic life. Upon graduating, Lippmann threw himself into journalism and the writing of political philosophy. But it was his career at The New Republic that brought him into the limelight: it made him the most famous and influential political commentator in the United States, a position he was to hold almost all the rest of his life.

  TR—“the image of a great leader and the prototype of Presidents,” in Lippmann’s words—was his lifelong hero. He wrote that TR “was the first President who knew that the United States had come of age … that they had become a world power.… He was the first to realize what that means.… The first President who realized clearly that … social justice had to be sought deliberately.… Theodore Roosevelt began the work of turning the American mind in the direction in which it had to go in the Twentieth Century.” TR, he wrote, was “the first President who shared a new social vision.”

  In turn TR wrote, when Lippmann was twenty-five, that he was the “most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States.”

  THE COMING GENERATION in turn-of-the-century America knew the United States was growing much bigger, the world was growing much smaller, and their country might well be drawn into the affairs of hitherto-distant parts of the globe. Whether across the Atlantic or across the Pacific, the United States bumped up against the ambitions of European powers, but some of the young men who one day were going to become American leaders felt that a choice might have to be made as to whether their country’s next frontier lay on the far side of the one ocean or of the other.

  Like Americans before them, they received an education steeped in religion; indeed, many of them were schooled by churchmen. But new institutions like Groton and Taft were called into being by the felt need to teach children and grandchildren of the Gilded Age that the unprecedented creation of wealth in the United States to which they would become heir brought with it a responsibility to serve society. The message preached by the Endicott Peabodys was that of noblesse oblige.

  TR, who believed that nobility was a quality earned rather than inherited, preached a parallel but different sermon: he exhorted young Americans to choose a life of exertion and danger. American pioneers and Civil War Americans had been given no option but to live such lives; what was new and extraordinary in American life at the end of the nineteenth century was that young people had other choices. TR urged young Americans to rise to the level of their forefathers by voluntarily undergoing the hardships and courting the risks that earlier generations had faced.

  The young were proud that they could believe TR, an American, was the greatest public figure in the world, and that Europeans thought so, too. But many of them did not understand his thinking, others disagreed with it, and a great many others, who believed they wanted to follow his example, lacked the courage to do so when the occasion arrived.

  In TR’s vision the United States was becoming a great power like the others. His young admirers tended to continue believing instead that America was a unique country, that Americans were the bearers of a political message for mankind, and that in foreign p
olicy the United States pursued principles while other countries pursued interests.

  What the young seem to have found so appealing in TR was that he called on them to distinguish themselves. Like outstanding young people in all generations, many of those who were to become America’s leaders felt a sense of personal mission; but they also felt—as earlier generations did not—that in their lifetime their country would be called on to play a new and larger role in world affairs. Their belief that their privileged birth as Americans brought with it responsibilities carried over at some point into the belief that America’s newly earned great wealth and growing power required the United States to provide not merely a moral example, but also moral leadership, for the rest of the world.

  Born in a candlelit, horse-drawn world, they were to be called upon one day to design the nuclear age. Many of them had started political life as TR’s children. They were about to take their first steps away from him in 1913, as eloquent, enigmatic, reform-minded Woodrow Wilson became the first President to ride to his inauguration in an automobile, ushering in a new and modern era.

  * Roosevelt’s father had been a Democrat. It made political sense for him to join that party, too. True, his hero TR was a Republican; but TR had sons of his own who might want to enter politics in their father’s party, and it would be awkward to appear to be their rival.

  † Nonetheless he enjoyed the college experience, became editor of the student newspaper, the Crimson, and was elected chairman of the 1904 class committee.

  PART TWO

  THE SUMMONS TO GREATNESS

  5

  FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT COMES TO TOWN

  IN MARCH 1913, in the first days of the Woodrow Wilson administration, young New York state senator Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the nation’s capital to take his first Washington job. He had been appointed assistant secretary of the navy. Josephus Daniels, the rumpled, small-town North Carolina politician and newspaperman who had become navy secretary, believed the appointment was his idea; he remembered running across Roosevelt in the lobby of the Willard Hotel on Inauguration Day and asking the charming New Yorker, “How would you like to come to Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy?” But even before Wilson chose Daniels to be secretary, he turned down someone who wanted to be assistant secretary, saying that the position would be offered instead to Roosevelt. Roosevelt himself had angled for the job. And the Democratic political boss of New York, anxious to rid himself of the independent-minded state senator, is said to have engineered the appointment. “Go, Frank, go,” cried the overjoyed New York Senate president pro tem when he heard the news; “I’m sure you’ll be a big success down there.”

  It was as though the appointment had been foreordained. Roosevelt himself seems to have believed that it was meant to be. An avid sailor, he had always loved the sea, and as a child had hoped to join the navy. But the significance of the appointment was that he was pursuing the destiny he hoped and believed was his: he was following in the footsteps of TR. Henry Cabot Lodge had managed to secure TR’s appointment as assistant secretary of the navy with the conscious purpose of setting him on the road to the presidency—and it had worked. It was no secret that Roosevelt planned to follow the same path.

  TR wrote a congratulatory note, saying, “It is interesting that you are in another place which I myself once held.” Josephus Daniels remarked in his diary, “His distinguished cousin TR went from that place to the Presidency. May history repeat itself”; and Daniels’s newspaper ran a photo of Roosevelt captioned “He’s following in Teddy’s footsteps.” The editor of the liberal New York Evening Post wrote, “I am truly glad of your appointment.… May it lead straight onward for you as it did for T.R.—but not by means of that barbarism known as war.”

  But, as Roosevelt was fully conscious, it was by means of war that TR had done it. Two months before the Spanish-American War began, TR had ordered the fleet to Manila with orders to be ready to attack. When Daniels briefly left town two days after taking office, the new assistant secretary reminded reporters, “There’s a Roosevelt on the job today.… You remember what happened the last time a Roosevelt occupied a similar position?” Speculating soon afterward on what he would do should war come, he said, “I suppose that I … must follow in the steps of T.R. and form a regiment of rough riders.”

  Assistant secretary of the navy in 1897, TR had left to lead the Rough Riders in 1898, took office as governor of New York in 1899, was elected Vice President of the United States in 1900, and became President in 1901. From his appointment as assistant secretary of the navy, it was only fifty-three months until TR’s swearing-in as President. It would have been a tight schedule for Roosevelt to follow—especially as there was no war on the horizon. Indeed, in world affairs the United States peacefully sailed “on a summer sea.”

  APPROPRIATELY, ROOSEVELT’S OFFICES in the massive State, War and Navy Departments Building* were next to the Executive Mansion—“the White House,” as TR called it, and as it has been called ever since. The machinery of American foreign and military policy was small-scale enough at the time so that the State, War and Navy Departments Building’s ten acres of floor space could house all three departments. The baroque granite building was under the superintendence of the War Department. Captain Douglas MacArthur, whom the army briefly placed in charge in 1913 just after Roosevelt’s arrival, left his mark outside it by adding concrete planters to brighten the facade.

  The outgoing assistant secretary briefed Roosevelt on his new duties, many of which were routine. An enormous number of papers required his signature, which his mother, critical of his handwriting, admonished him to improve: “not … too small, as it gets a cramped look.…” Writing to her on his first day in office, he claimed to have signed whatever was put in front of him; the new assistant secretary of the navy joked that he was “somewhat at sea!”

  Although he found time for frequent rounds of golf, his official duties kept him busy. With the help of Louis M. Howe, his faithful aide from Albany days whom he had brought with him to Washington, he helped prepare the departmental budget and supervised supply, procurement, and the navy’s shipyard and dock facilities, with their thousands of civilian employees and problems of labor relations.

  President Wilson at times called Roosevelt to his offices to deliver specific instructions. Occasionally, the former political science professor in the White House lectured him as well; Roosevelt later recalled that Wilson told him, “It is only once in a generation that people can be lifted above material things. That is why conservative government is in the saddle two-thirds of the time.”

  Though somewhat in awe of the President, Roosevelt (as his many biographers have pointed out at length) failed to appreciate the strengths of his immediate superior, Secretary Daniels. Typically, soon after taking office Roosevelt wrote to his wife that he had been obliged personally to take over from the secretary some matters about which Daniels’s opinions were “half-baked”—adding grandly that he was sure the older man, too, eventually would have arrived at the right conclusions had he only given himself “the time to learn.” Roosevelt was not disposed to be anybody’s subordinate, let alone that of a small-town, small-time bumpkin such as Daniels pretended to be. (On first meeting Daniels, Roosevelt thought him “the funniest looking hillbilly I had ever seen.”) Roosevelt was too young to perceive the shrewdness (shown in avoiding pitfalls and in dealing with congressmen) and masterfulness (shown in putting power-seeking naval officers in their proper place) that lay hidden behind Daniels’s seemingly artless, simple-country-boy manner. Roosevelt’s frequent acts of disloyalty were always overlooked, and his failings and indiscretions, always forgiven, by a chief who acted more like the best of fathers.

  One of the many differences between them was that Roosevelt lived an animated social life in Washington, while Daniels and his close friend and ally, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, teetotalers and churchgoers both, were essentially family people, disinclined to frivolity. Th
ey in any event would have been out of place—wrong clothes, wrong manners, wrong political party—in the homes into which Roosevelt was invited; for Washington society was Republican, and welcomed the assistant secretary not as a Democrat, but as a Roosevelt.

  TR’s inner circle took him in as one of their own. He and Eleanor were entertained by the capital city’s leading hostess, dazzling Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and by the witty British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. They were allowed to call upon Henry Adams—which in Washington was the supreme social distinction. They were sought out by TR’s early political partner, proud and powerful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who thereafter disregarded the secretary of the navy when he wanted a favor—he had a nephew in the navy for whom he wanted a promotion—and communicated directly with the assistant secretary, who was happy to oblige.

  One of the others who asked his help was Joseph C. Grew, a Groton boy two years ahead of him and a fellow club member of Fly at Harvard, who had joined the foreign service and been posted to the U.S. embassy in Berlin. Grew was afraid that he would lose his job to a Democrat; for President Wilson, intensely partisan, tended to reward his own. Roosevelt corresponded with Grew, but at that time Germany seemed a world away from his concerns as an ambitious young politician in his first year of office in Washington.

  JOSEPHUS DANIELS was not only a teetotaler but a pacifist. His appointment realized the worst fears of the professional navy and its civilian supporters as to what might happen if Democratic populists were to come into power. Roosevelt was conveniently out of town and unavailable for comment when the secretary brought Prohibition to the fleet, decreeing that naval officers henceforth were to be deprived of their alcohol ration. Nonetheless, he served as a shield protecting the secretary on the military preparedness issue.