Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  On May 7, a German U-boat sunk the great British passenger liner Lusitania, with the loss of 1,198 lives, including those of 128 Americans. Most of the neutral world considered the event a war atrocity. Wilson, much to the outrage of Theodore Roosevelt and surely to the dismay of Franklin, declared in a speech on May 10 that there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. All the same, the president and Lansing, again working around Bryan but getting his signature, prepared a sharp note to the German government, demanding an end to the sinking of merchant ships and liners. When the response proved unsatisfactory, they drew up another tough communication, which this time Bryan refused to sign. One month to the day after the sinking of the Lusitania, the secretary of state resigned; Wilson promptly named Lansing his successor.

  “What d’ y’ think of W. Jay B.?” Roosevelt asked in a letter to Eleanor, who was at Hyde Park. “It’s all too long to write about, but I can only say I’m disgusted clear through. J.D. will not resign.” Daniels clearly felt war could be avoided and was determined to steer the president in that direction. Wilson was still intent on neutrality. Germany provided him a victory by informally agreeing to stop sinking passenger ships, but then negated much of the goodwill its new policy might have generated by pursuing clumsy espionage and sabotage activities in the United States and Canada. Still sympathetic toward Britain and increasingly hostile to Germany, the president and Secretary Lansing clung to neutrality through 1916 and even hoped to mediate an end to the war.8

  Roosevelt sent a whimsical memo to Josephus Daniels probably toward the end of 1915:

  Secnav—

  1. I beg to report

  (a) That I have just signed a requisition (with 4 copies attached) calling for purchase of 8 carpet tacks.

  Astnav.

  Daniels returned it with the following notation: “Why this wanton extravagance? I am sure that two would suffice.”9

  The document had a larger meaning, readily apparent if one substitutes the word “dreadnoughts” for “carpet tacks.” It revealed the good-natured way in which the two men handled their growing fundamental differences of opinion. Throughout 1915 and into mid-1916, Daniels continued to support naval growth at the rate of two new dreadnoughts per year, even as the submarine menace and the high-handed enforcement of the British blockade created heavy pressures for a stronger navy program. On February 3, 1916, in the middle of a major speaking tour through the isolationist Midwest, President Wilson asserted that the United States needed “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.” By the end of March 1916, Roosevelt had progressed from advocating four dreadnoughts a year to an impossible eight.10

  Relations with Germany ranged from difficult to grave. For a time, war seemed likely after a U-boat sank the French packet Sussex on March 24, 1916, killing several Americans. Germany pledged no more such attacks, and the crisis passed. Secretary of War Lindley Garrison developed a plan for a major expansion of the regular army and the replacement of state National Guard forces with a large, nationalized “Continental Army” reserve. Naval expansion drew substantial support, and Daniels reluctantly fell in line. In state after state, however, the bulk of Democratic progressives and influential National Guard officers bitterly opposed Garrison’s program.11

  On February 10, with his proposal blocked in Congress, Garrison resigned. Franklin Roosevelt was prominent among those mentioned as his possible successor. A Washington Post story declared, “No appointment would be welcomed with greater joy on the part of War Department officials.” On March 7, Wilson named former Cleveland mayor Newton D. Baker, who acquiesced in a far more modest military expansion. Roosevelt continued, more safely and freely than ever, to be the leading big-navy advocate in the administration.12

  One of his projects had been the establishment of a naval reserve program, a modest effort at best that drew a relatively small but enthusiastic group of volunteers, many of them upper-class young men. Roosevelt spoke to a group of them at a dinner in New York on June 23, 1916. In introducing him, the master of ceremonies drew raucous cheers by remarking, “I know it would not hurt your feelings if the word ‘Assistant’ were crossed out of this man’s title.” Preparedness had acquired a mass following. Roosevelt had become one of its most visible proponents.13

  After intense debate and negotiation, Congress on August 15, 1916, gave Wilson the huge naval program he had requested. Roosevelt’s advocacy had been significant in providing an initial impetus, but Daniels’s loyalty to Wilson and his effective lobbying of the southern Democrats in the House were more vital in securing its passage. Contracts had to be awarded and price disputes settled. Daniels would secure funding for a government armor plant in 1917, but it had to be built. The navy program called for ten new dreadnoughts and a substantial increase in cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. The potential of the American economy for military manufacturing was almost unlimited; the existing capacity was heavily strained. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, other priorities would force postponement of construction of all but one of the dreadnoughts. Only three would ever be completed, none in time for wartime duty.14

  Twenty years later, looking at a foreboding world from the vantage of the Oval Office, Roosevelt would remain skeptical of wishful thinking about peace, still believe strongly in a big navy, and understand the difficulties of dealing with complacent public opinion and antimilitary congressmen.

  During the last half of 1916, Roosevelt found himself caught up not just in issues of naval preparedness but also in Woodrow Wilson’s hard fight for reelection. The president’s achievements were impressive by any standard. He had maintained US neutrality and kept the nation at peace in a war then generally recognized as the most costly and horrible ever fought. His program of military preparedness, if less aggressive than the defense hawks wanted, had put the United States on a course that would enable it to defend its interests in a hostile world. His record of domestic reform eclipsed Theodore Roosevelt’s achievements. With the economy recovered from the initial shocks of the European war, he presided over a roaring prosperity buoyed by war orders from Britain and France. Still, his policies were controversial, and the Republicans were the nation’s normal majority party. They had nominated a formidable candidate in Charles Evans Hughes, the former governor of New York and respected Justice of the Supreme Court. Theodore Roosevelt, who had hoped for the Republican nomination, folded his Progressive Party, supported Hughes, and delivered speech after speech denouncing Wilson’s diplomacy as weak and ineffective.

  Franklin Roosevelt played a relatively minor role in the campaign. He spoke only in the Northeast and confined his talks to defending the administration’s management of the navy. He seems never to have mentioned the administration’s domestic progressivism, which was outside his own area of responsibility and perhaps not an attractive issue with audiences who came to listen to an assistant secretary of the navy.

  On election night, Roosevelt, like almost all Democrats, went to bed thinking that Hughes had won. Two days passed before Wilson emerged as the victor, primarily because he had carried Ohio and California by paper-thin margins. The tightness of the results obscured the potential they held for the Democratic Party, which until 1916 had been primarily a coalition of the South and the West. By positioning himself as a progressive president and a friend of organized labor, Wilson had taken the initial steps toward a political realignment that would achieve its final shape under his assistant secretary of the navy twenty years later. However indefinite the specifics in his mind, Roosevelt remained attached in at least a general way to the cause of reform. Writing to Eleanor, he declared, “I hope to God I don’t grow reactionary with advancing years.”15

  Wilson’s success in keeping the country out of the European war while trying to mediate an end to it had a lot to do with his victory. But even after suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties at the Somme and Verdun, the Allies and the Central Powers seemed d
etermined to fight to a finish. Germany flirted with the possibility of unrestricted submarine warfare; Britain still interfered with American maritime commerce and confiscated cargoes. Still, the president decided that peace deserved one last effort.

  On January 22, 1917, Wilson delivered a dramatic address to the US Senate, calling for a “peace without victory” as the prelude to a reformed world order built around principles of natural rights, self-government, and free commerce. The speech won widespread praise but had no practical effect. Nine days later, Germany informed the United States that it would begin sinking any and all shipping entering the war zone around the British Isles. The United States immediately severed diplomatic relations. The nation suddenly found itself on an irreversible slide.

  Wilson initially responded by arming American merchant ships. Roosevelt soon became involved. Only the government could provide the big six-inch guns required to destroy a submarine, and federal law forbade their sale. Roosevelt quickly obtained a legal opinion that they “may be loaned provided a suitable bond be given.” A Senate filibuster in the waning days of the Fifty-Ninth Congress blocked legislative authorization, but on March 9, five days after beginning his second term, Wilson permitted the armament loans by executive order. The president, Secretary Daniels, and Roosevelt all surely realized that a deck gun would provide scant defense against torpedoes launched from beneath the surface. Daniels confided to his diary that he feared he was signing a death warrant for young Americans and moving the nation toward war.16

  That March, Roosevelt made visits to the navy yards in Boston and New York. In New York, he spent an hour with Wilson’s close adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, outlining the “principal weaknesses of [the] Navy,” which included Daniels’s procrastination, the anti-British attitudes of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William Benson, and the failure to initiate immediate joint planning with Britain and France. He then visited the Brooklyn Naval Yard and deemed it ill prepared for war. Dining that evening with TR, General Leonard Wood, J. P. Morgan, Elihu Root, and other notables not known for their friendliness toward the administration, he got a sense, especially from his cousin, that the government might be moving in the right direction but needed to act with more vigor and clarity. “I backed T.R.’s theory—left for Wash[ington]. Told J. D. things not satisfactory Boston & worse N.Y. He said nothing.”17

  On March 18, three armed American merchant vessels steamed into the war zone and were promptly sunk with the loss of many seamen. By then, British intelligence had intercepted and given to the United States a secret German diplomatic cable offering an alliance to Mexico and promising the return of Texas and other territory lost to the United States in the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. The March revolution in Russia forced the abdication of the czar and established a democratic government. It was now possible to think of the war as a contest between the forces of popular democracy and those of militaristic reaction.18

  Roosevelt was among those present on the evening of April 2, 1917, when Wilson appeared before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war. Understanding that the American public expected a grand rationale, the president asserted that joining the European conflict was necessary to make the world safe for democracy. His appeal rang with authenticity. It also gave Roosevelt a deep and lasting impression of what was necessary to bring the American people into a war and keep them behind it.

  The war made only minor differences in the lives of the Roosevelts. In the fall of 1916, they had left Aunt Bamie’s comfortable old house on N Street for a more commodious one at 2131 R Street, just a few blocks away on the other side of DuPont Circle. Franklin frequently brought associates to the house for lunch and discussed confidential business with them, allowing servants to enter the dining room only when summoned with a small silver bell.

  Eleanor continued to preside over a busy household and an intense social schedule. She seems to have struggled with bouts of depression. Many years later, Elliott recalled her breaking down in tears just before she was to receive guests at a dinner party. “I just can’t stand to greet all those people,” she told Franklin. “I know they think I am dull and unattractive. I just want to hide.”19

  She threw herself into war work, organizing knitting groups to make sweaters, scarves, and gloves for servicemen, helping to manage a Red Cross canteen at Union Station, and making hospital visits to sick and injured naval personnel. One of her coworkers was Lucy Mercer, no longer regularly employed by the family but still a presence in the Roosevelts’ life. During the summer of 1917, when Eleanor and the children were away at Hyde Park and Campobello, Franklin frequently mentioned her in his letters as part of a group with whom he enjoyed his free Sundays.20

  At home Eleanor instituted rules to conserve food that the War Food Administration adopted as a model for American households. The New York Times wrote a small piece on the achievement. Unfortunately, her choice of words made the project vulnerable to parody: “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable.” Franklin could not pass up the opportunity to rib her: “I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires. Please have a photo taken showing the family, the ten cooperating servants, the scraps saved from the table and the hand book. I will have it published in the Sunday Times.”21

  Such mortifications aside, Eleanor undoubtedly found her exhausting duties fulfilling. Dutiful but (by all indications) cool as a wife, she was also a remote mother, perhaps demonstrating the maxim that people are prone to repeat even unhappy aspects of their upbringing. “When I was young I determined that I would never be dependent on my children by allowing all my interests to center in them,” she wrote nearly two decades later. She achieved self-validation by throwing herself into good causes for the benefit of humankind.22

  She found some solace in contrasting herself with Cousin Alice. After her marriage to Nicholas Longworth had turned sour, Alice had increasingly become known for her vituperative wit. Writing in mid-1916 to her friend Isabella Ferguson, Eleanor confided her feelings about TR’s eldest daughter: “She’s a born hostess and has an extraordinary mind but as for real friendship and what it means she hasn’t a conception. . . . I sometimes think that the lives of many burdens are not really to be pitied for at least they live deeply and from their sorrows spring up flowers but an empty life is really dreadful.”23

  The declaration of war left Roosevelt with an overwhelming sense of urgency and frustration that his feelings were not widely shared. He did not understand that both the Allies and the Central Powers were on the brink of exhaustion, each vulnerable to a final, last-gasp blow from the other. Clearly, he had a vivid appreciation of America’s comparative naval weakness vis-à-vis a potentially victorious Germany. He doubtless understood that Berlin expected unrestricted submarine warfare to strangle Britain and France before the United States could achieve the mobilization necessary to tip the balance in the other direction.

  From the beginning, he involved himself in everything and anything that he might influence. His drive led once again to friction with Secretary Daniels, who had come down in favor of war with great reluctance. Roosevelt possessed perhaps less wisdom and emotional depth about the horrors to come, but his impulses were better suited to the needs of the moment. His impetuous and sometimes insubordinate behavior was the flip side of a drive and energy that addressed multitudinous problems and got things done. As Daniels’s son, Jonathan, put it many years later, his father “wanted Franklin to remain because he not only liked him, but he trusted him and depended upon him.”24

  An extraordinarily hectic year and a half followed. Roosevelt was involved in every phase of naval management and operations: finding office space for a greatly expanding bureaucracy, approving contracts, overseeing ship construction and the building of new military encampments, hammering out agreements with labor unions. Seeing himself as the N
avy Department’s take-charge man and chief cutter of red tape, he liked to tell friends that he often made decisions for which he risked imprisonment. Never timid about exercising his authority, he commandeered civilian resources when necessary—on one occasion he seized electrical generators destined for a large new Manhattan hotel and delayed its opening by three months. In all this, Louis Howe, to whom he delegated large responsibilities, and the solid professional staff he had inherited backstopped him.25

  The pace was grueling, with long days, much paper pushing, and travel to shipyards or naval bases. Many mornings began at 7:00 a.m., participating with other subcabinet officials in group calisthenics. Their trainer, legendary football coach Walter Camp, described Roosevelt as “a beautifully built man, with the long muscles of the athlete.” When he could, Roosevelt indulged in exhausting bouts of recreation. “A very busy day, consisting of steady golf, 36 holes, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. with an hour out for sandwich and rest,” he wrote to Eleanor (off again with the children at Campobello) in mid-1917.26

  Supervising the routine operations of the US Navy was an enormous job. Roosevelt was also immersed in war planning. Sometimes smashingly right, sometimes egregiously wrong, he pushed his preferences to the hilt. Possessing only minimal respect for the chain of command, he was instinctively drawn to new, experimental, and daring ideas, which rarely came from the highest seniority levels. He regarded costs as irrelevant.

  The British navy had succeeded in bottling up Germany’s surface force, but the Allies faced defeat from the Reich’s submarine campaign. The British Admiralty, seemingly unable to think past traditional doctrine, sought to get supplies across the North Atlantic by dispersing merchant ships in the hope that enough would get through. When the United States entered the war, U-boats were sinking 350 vessels a month, a rate that surely would force surrender before the United States could mobilize. Roosevelt, fully as much a product of the dominant way of thinking as the leading American and British admirals, nevertheless backed tacticians who revised it radically. Once the leading civilian exponent of the dreadnought, he almost overnight became a backer of small, agile, and comparatively lightly armed antisubmarine craft.