The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Roosevelt could not have been surprised at his own defeat in the primaries. As a state senator he had argued with keen insight that direct nominations in primaries would not destroy party organizations. Differing with ardent supporters of the primary who viewed it as the cure for democracy’s ills, he predicted that few would vote and that the organization would get its own people to the polls. He favored direct nominations, however, for at least they would arouse greater interest in candidates. His own experience in 1914 amply justified his reasoning.

  His drubbing hurt Roosevelt keenly for a time, but defeat is a stringent educational process. He discovered that it took more than federal patronage to beat a strong state machine; he experienced the problems of a state-wide campaign, husbanding voice and energy; and he learned how to take defeat.

  More important, the young politician got another harsh lesson in the power of Tammany. He could win a rural upstate district against the organization, but not the whole state. And a general election in November could rarely be won unless the Democracy was united. Much as they hated each other, the machine and the independents needed each other. The moral issue, moreover, was still a fuzzy gray rather than black and white. Tammany was headed by Murphy, but it was also made up of honest men like Gerard and rising young progressives like Al Smith.

  Roosevelt learned his lesson. Never again did he take on Tammany in a knightly onslaught.

  The Assistant Secretary’s political setback was quickly swallowed in epochal events on the international stage. The assassination of an archduke in far-off Bosnia had been almost forgotten by Americans when suddenly the European powder keg exploded. On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. Roosevelt got the news while he was on the way to Reading, Pennsylvania, to dedicate an anchor of the battleship Maine as a memorial. “A complete smash up is inevitable,” he wrote his wife on the train. “It will be the greatest war in the world’s history.”

  Roosevelt had long been psychologically prepared for the smash up. He had, indeed, been through one or two dress rehearsals. During a Japanese-American war scare in 1913 he had drawn up a hypothetical war plan and had put the submarine torpedo flotilla at Newport through an emergency mobilization. When American forces occupied Vera Cruz, Mexico, early in 1914, Roosevelt had said, “I do not want war,” but he had thought the United States must “go down there and clean up the Mexican political mess … right now.” During his months in office he had ridden far ahead of Daniels in his efforts at naval preparedness.

  Now war had come and his impatience spilled over. On arriving in Washington, Roosevelt went straight to the department, “where as I expected I found everything asleep and apparently oblivious to the fact that the most terrible drama in history was about to be enacted.” He was doing the real work, he wrote his wife again a few days later; Daniels was “bewildered by it all, very sweet but very sad.” Daniels and Bryan, he said, had as much conception of what a general European war means as four-year-old Elliott “has of higher mathematics.”

  These remarks foreshadowed Roosevelt’s role during the months of “neutrality” that lay ahead. He sided with the admirals in pressing for stepped-up expansion of the navy, urged Wilson to set up a Council of National Defense, came out for universal military training. His zeal led him onto dubious ground: he maintained contacts with Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other critics of Wilson’s policies, and even passed on naval intelligence information to Republicans who used it in attacking Daniels for naval unpreparedness.

  If Roosevelt was zealous to the point of insubordination, his attitude stemmed in part from a realistic grasp of the difficulties ahead. At the outbreak of the war he realized it would probably be a long one. In contrast to some of his banker friends, he saw that lack of money would not shorten the war for any determined nation. He had a sure sense of the implications of world war for naval strategy; he held a long correspondence with Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who warned him against splitting the fleet between the Atlantic and the Pacific. He understood the need for great reserve strength in men and matériel if war should come. Week after week he toiled with the tough, irksome details of rearmament.

  “We’ve got to get into this war,” Roosevelt was telling his chief by the fall of 1916. Daniels did not need to ask on whose side. Roosevelt had been pro-Ally from the start. “Rather than long drawn-out struggle I hope England will join in and with France and Russia force peace at Berlin!” he had written on hearing that Germany had invaded France. He was elated by the Belgians’ “glorious resistance.” Wilson had asked Americans to be neutral in thought as well as action, but early in 1915 Roosevelt lamented to his wife, “I just know I shall do some awful unneutral thing before I get through!”

  Roosevelt’s aggressive stand for preparedness might have left him in an exposed position, but events came to the rescue. Following the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 Secretary Bryan resigned his office rather than go along with Wilson’s protests against German submarine policy—protests he feared might have to be made good by war. A year later preparedness was in full swing; the Naval Appropriation Act of that year would have made the United States Navy in time the largest in the world. In the 1916 election the administration closed ranks. Whatever his private doubts of the past, Roosevelt hotly defended Wilson and Daniels against the Republican accusation of unpreparedness. “Misquotations and misrepresentations—yea, lies—have been used by the President’s opponents,” he declared in a speech in Providence. “I say lies because this is a good ‘Roosevelt’ word to use.”

  Furious at Wilson’s “tame” policy toward Germany, Theodore Roosevelt ditched the Progressives in June 1916 and came out for the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes. Their ranks reunited, the Republicans seemed sure to win the presidency as Election Day neared. The first returns bore out such predictions, and Franklin Roosevelt, like Wilson, went to bed sure that Hughes had won. But the next day the returns from the West told a different story: it was the “most extraordinary day of my life,” Roosevelt wrote his wife excitedly. Final returns gave Wilson 9,129,606 popular votes over Hughes’s 8,538,221, making a difference in the electoral college of 277 to 254.

  “It is rumored,” joked the happy and relieved Assistant Secretary of the Navy a few days later, “that a certain distinguished cousin of mine is now engaged in revising an edition of his most noted historical work, The Winning of the West.”

  WAR LEADER

  On January 9, 1917, the Kaiser presided nervously over a fateful crown council at his headquarters in a Silesian castle. During the previous year the war had gone badly for Germany and her allies: the Allied lines had sagged under the massive blow at Verdun, but held; after Jutland the German navy did not dare to risk another heavy encounter with the British; the Allied blockade was sapping Germany’s economic strength. There was only one way out, the military chiefs argued: unrestricted submarine warfare. For over two years the diplomats had fought successfully against this drastic policy on the ground that it would drive the United States into the war. At this meeting the military won. Shortly, orders were flashed to U-boat commanders to start unrestricted warfare February 1.

  Roosevelt was in Santo Domingo early in February 1917 when the radio reported Germany’s announcement. Daniels called him home immediately. Anxious weeks followed as the country moved indecisively toward war. Roosevelt pressed for action. Early in March he asked Wilson’s permission to have the fleet fitted out for war. “No,” said the President, as Roosevelt remembered it later, “… I do not want the United States to do anything in a military way, by way of war preparations, that would allow the definitive historian in later days … to say that the United States had committed an unfriendly act against the central powers.” But soon reports were coming in of American ships torpedoed, and a united cabinet advised Wilson to ask Congress to declare war.

  On a rainy April night Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt listened to Wilson’s eloquently solemn war message. Eleanor went home “still half
dazed by the sense of impending change.” The address, said her husband to the press, “will be an inspiration to every true citizen no matter what his political faith, no matter what his creed, no matter what the country of his origin.”

  The die cast, Roosevelt plunged into war administration with vigor and aplomb. Much had to be done—vast extension of procurement and recruitment, stepped-up naval construction, quick defense measures, the fashioning of a naval plan of action, coordination with the merchant marine, careful arrangements with the British and French on deployment of ships, and a host of other matters. Handling big jobs in a big way inspirited him. He liked to act quickly, even if it meant not always acting wisely. Emory S. Land’s comments about his suggestions on ship design—“He was a great trial and error guy, but he did have some good ideas”—characterized his activities in general.

  War mobilization did not end the need for Roosevelt’s political approach to administration. Seeking to gain a discount on copper from Daniel Guggenheim late in 1916, Roosevelt won his goal by warning Guggenheim that a price cut would show the public that businessmen were not interested in preparedness simply for selfish reasons. When wage disputes arose during the war he talked face to face with union chiefs. Contracts were awarded efficiently but not always on a strictly nonpolitical basis.

  One of Roosevelt’s attempted political maneuvers would have rendered unnecessary a historic episode during the breathless weeks before Wilson’s call for war. Wishing to provide navy guns for merchantmen crossing submarine-infested waters, Roosevelt discovered that he could not sell guns to private owners, but he decided that under an old law he could lease them. He so informed Wilson through Daniels, but the President would not exploit the loophole. Instead he asked Congress for the necessary authority—only to have the bill killed by a filibuster on the part of a “little group of willful men,” as Wilson called them. Roosevelt must have watched with wry satisfaction when the President later ordered guns on merchantmen without congressional authority—and he could hardly have forgotten the incident in preparing his Lend-Lease step in 1940.

  Roosevelt needed all the political craft he could muster to put through some of his proposals. One of these was to lay a mine barrage between Scotland and Norway to keep U-boats out of the Atlantic. The cost was so staggering and technical difficulties so formidable that Roosevelt ran into opposition from both the British Admiralty and Admiral William S. Sims in London. However, the invention of an electric antenna firing device, the dispatch of a high-ranking admiral to pilot the project through naval channels in London, and Roosevelt’s continual pressure finally broke the log jam. The project finally proved wholly practical, although it was started too late to have more than a minor role in antisubmarine warfare.

  In the months before the war Roosevelt’s impatience with Daniels’ deliberate ways reached a new height. “J. D. is too damned slow for words,” he wrote to his wife in November 1916. The Assistant Secretary did not, however, lend any support to an organized campaign spearheaded by the Navy League to make Roosevelt Secretary during Wilson’s second term. He had no use, he said, for a subordinate who was constantly thinking up ways of stepping into his boss’s shoes; he knew, too, that Daniels was personally and politically close to Wilson. After hostilities started, conflict tended to revolve more around methods than objectives, but in private Roosevelt still was sharply critical of his chief. At one point he helped the American novelist Winston Churchill draft a series of criticisms of naval administration which Churchill presented personally to Wilson. Roosevelt’s idea of getting a job done was to grab scissors and slash away at red tape; he did not fully realize that much of the red tape was simply the complicated line of clearance and consultation that Daniels, dealing with a multitude of decision-makers, had to wind up before effective action could be taken.

  “I am trying to forget that there is such a thing as politics,” Roosevelt said early in 1918. But he could not. Friends kept urging him to run for governor. More important, Tammany was making overtures.

  This surprising development was largely a result of a change in Roosevelt’s own approach to Tammany. He had not forgotten the lessons of 1914 and the years before. Quietly he had adopted a policy of live and let live. In 1915 he did patronage favors for some of the very Tammany congressmen who had attacked him so bitterly the previous year. In 1916, taking his cue from Wilson, he followed a party harmony policy in both the state and national election. He showed the utmost cordiality toward Smith, Wagner, and other progressive-minded Tammany men. Peace was consummated on the Fourth of July, 1917, when Roosevelt, at Tammany’s invitation, gave the main talk in the Wigwam and was photographed with his old adversary Murphy. By the spring of 1918 he had received reports that at least a dozen New York City leaders were for him, perhaps even Murphy himself. Actually, Tammany had no sudden love for Roosevelt, but saw him as a man who could win upstate votes.

  Roosevelt quite likely could have had the nomination—and the election. But in June 1918 he indicated decisively that he did not want to run.

  His heart lay somewhere else. He was keenly aware that one vital element was missing in his political career. At a time when hundreds of thousands of men were in uniform, he was not. He was not even overseas. Uncle Ted, desperately eager himself to fight in France, had urged him to get into the war, but Daniels would not let him go. The next best thing was to get near the fighting, if only as a civilian. He finally induced the Secretary to send him on an official mission to inspect navy bases and confer with Allied leaders. Eager for adventure, Roosevelt departed early in July 1918 on a destroyer bound for Europe.

  It was an exciting and satisfying trip. Zigzagging across the Atlantic Roosevelt’s destroyer experienced nothing more than a few false alarms, but even these furnished the basis for future yarns. In England he met and talked with Lloyd George (“What impressed me most was his tremendous vitality,” he said later), Lord Balfour, Winston Churchill (neither made much impression on the other at the time), Clemenceau, Orlando, and a host of famous admirals and generals. It was no mere junket. He spent a good deal of time going into humdrum details of contracts, supplies, and personnel. He tried, none too successfully, to straighten out a ticklish diplomatic and military tangle over the operations—or lack of them—of the Italian navy.

  And finally he saw war. This was his main goal in the trip; it is significant that the only time he lost his poise was when a naval attaché tried to detour him around the fighting areas; Roosevelt persecuted the poor man for months afterward. He toured the sector where Marines had fought, describing the war-torn area with a vivid eye for detail. He saw fighting at a distance. Most exciting of all, he came under sporadic artillery fire.

  It was exciting—but he still was not in uniform. He left for home in September determined to ask Daniels for a commission. Exhausted by his trip, however, he fell ill with influenza and pneumonia, and had to be taken ashore on a stretcher. He took weeks to recover, and time was running out. Around the end of October he went to Wilson with Daniels’ permission to request a commission. It was too late, the President told him—he had received the first overtures for an armistice, and he hoped the war would be over soon.

  Roosevelt was keenly disappointed but he tried to make the best of it. “Though I did not wear a uniform,” he wrote later to a Grotonian who was preparing a World War tablet at the school, “I believe that my name should go in the first division of those who were ‘in the service,’ especially as I saw service on the other side, was missed by torpedoes and shells.…”

  He was not nearly as disappointed as a young Austrian soldier who on November 11, 1918, lay weeping on a hospital bed in Prussia—weeping for the first time, he said later, since the death of his mother. He wept not because he had missed the war (he had fought bravely for four years, had been gassed and wounded) but because Germany was defeated and prostrate. At this time, Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “I resolved I would take up political work,”

  FOUR


  Crusade for the League

  THE WAR YEARS HAD a maturing effect on Roosevelt. Long hours, tough decisions, endless conferences, exhausting trips, hard bargaining with powerful officials in Washington and abroad turned him into a seasoned politician-administrator. Much of the time he was aggressively pushing forward, spurring his superiors and subordinates to action. This was easy for him—the hard part was patiently following the circuitous path that led to action. Much of the work was painstaking and inglorious.

  Physically the years showed their marks. Faint lines appeared on his forehead; the smooth, almost soft face of the Albany years was a bit leaner and more furrowed. His hair was thinning above the temples. Dark shadows—a family characteristic—showed under his blue eyes. Yet he kept his essentially youthful appearance. Still lean and supple, he could play fifty-four holes of golf on a hot summer day; he could vault over a row of chairs with ease. “A beautifully built man, with the long muscles of the athlete,” said Walter Camp, the celebrated Yale coach whom Roosevelt brought to Washington to set up a physical fitness program for the navy.

  His family responsibilities had increased too. His children now numbered five. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., had been born in August 1914 and John Roosevelt in March 1916. The family lived in Washington most of the year, with the invariable sojourns in Campobello during the summer and frequent visits to Hyde Park in between. A flock of servants—sometimes as many as ten—attended the family. Roosevelt’s salary and investments together brought him about $27,000 a year, but life was expensive, and occasionally his mother helped him out.