Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (16 page)

In late October the strategy seemed to be working. One of Roosevelt’s Hyde Park neighbors told him, “I have talked quietly with a number of Republicans and think I can safely promise you 35 or 40 who did not vote for you before are willing to do so now on the good showing you made in Albany against the Murphy ring.”

The strategy was still working on election day. Roosevelt received 15,590 votes to 13,889 for his Republican opponent. “My husband was reelected thanks to Louis Howe,” Eleanor explained simply.

6.

R
OOSEVELT HAD FELT COMPELLED TO DEFEND HIS STATE SENATE SEAT
in order to maintain his political credibility, but he was hoping less for a return to Albany than for an assignment to Washington. He may or may not have appreciated that genuinely reforming New York politics—definitively defeating Tammany Hall—would require a much larger reorganization of the national political economy than could be accomplished from the New York senate. Yet he certainly understood that a stint in Washington, as part of a Wilson administration, would do far more for his career than another two years in Albany.

He had reason to think he might be in line for a federal appointment. The sixteen years since Grover Cleveland had left office constituted almost a lifetime in politics, with the result that the new administration would have to look to Democrats as green as Roosevelt to fill the scores of appointive positions in the various cabinet offices. The Democrats were especially weak on naval affairs, having surrendered that issue to the Republicans about the time sail gave way to steam. Franklin Roosevelt had never served in the navy, but his practical knowledge of the sea outstripped that of nearly every other Democrat of comparable political promise and ambition.

Josephus Daniels, Wilson’s choice for secretary of the navy, thought so. “As I entered the Willard Hotel on the morning of Wilson’s inauguration, I ran into Franklin Roosevelt,” Daniels remembered. “He was bubbling over with enthusiasm at the incoming of a Democratic administration and keen as a boy to take in the inauguration ceremonies.” Roosevelt knew that Daniels had been nominated for secretary, and he offered congratulations. Daniels thanked him and then asked if Roosevelt would like to come to the Navy Department as assistant secretary. “His face beamed his pleasure. ‘How would I like it? I’d like it bully well. It would please me better than anything in the world. I’d be glad to be connected with the new administration. 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.’” Daniels explained that he hadn’t asked Wilson about the appointment and would have to make some inquiries. But he wanted to check with Roosevelt first, to see if he wanted the job.

Daniels became Roosevelt’s first political sponsor. A North Carolinian by birth, a lawyer by education, a newspaperman by profession, a Grover Cleveland Democrat by inheritance, a Bryan Democrat by conviction, and a progressive Democrat by political necessity, Daniels had boosted Wilson early in the pages of the Raleigh
News & Observer
and later as a member of the Democratic national executive committee. Upon Wilson’s victory he fell in line for a cabinet post. In part because Daniels’s father had been a shipbuilder, for the Confederacy among other clients, but mostly because the more senior positions had gone to supporters with greater claims—William Jennings Bryan, for example, became secretary of state—Wilson assigned him the Navy Department.

Daniels knew nothing about naval administration per se and little enough about administration on any large scale. He visited the departing navy secretary, George Meyer, who offered advice. “In the Navy Department there is no chief of staff, and nothing important is done which does not go over the desk of the secretary,” Meyer said. He urged Daniels to maintain this system, and he warned against those who wanted to change it. “You will find that in the navy there are officers who wish to have an organization like that in the army or of some foreign navy.” To accede would be a grave mistake and must be resisted.

Daniels was just the person to stand up to the admirals and their allies, in particular the corporations that did business with the navy. “Daniels was one of the few living men who had the exact combination of qualities needed to grapple with the navy as it was in 1913,” an observer remarked. “He had no personal friends in the navy, and he had the Puritan’s conscience and stubbornness. He entered the department with a profound suspicion that whatever an admiral told him was wrong, and that every corporation with a capitalization of more than $100,000 was inherently evil. In nine cases out of ten, his formula was correct: the navy was packed at the top with dead wood, and with politics all the way through, and the steel, coal and other big industries were accustomed to dealing with it on their own terms. With all that, he had sound judgment of men coupled with an innate affection for a rebel.”

Daniels hadn’t known Franklin Roosevelt long, but what he’d seen convinced him that Roosevelt would make a fine deputy. They met at the Baltimore convention, where Daniels controlled the passes for newspaper correspondents. Roosevelt arrived with several upstate New York editors in tow. “He was in a gay mood, and I thought he was as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen,” Daniels remembered. Daniels handed over the passes and struck up a conversation. “At that convention Franklin and I became friends—a case of love at first sight—for when men are attracted to each other there is born a feeling that Mexicans call ‘simpática,’ a word that has no counterpart in English. A lasting friendship was born.”

After the election and their inauguration day encounter at the Willard, Daniels went to Wilson for permission to make Roosevelt his assistant. Daniels knew that Wilson sought geographic balance in his administration, and he pointed out that a New Yorker would nicely complement a North Carolinian at the Navy Department. He mentioned Roosevelt’s sailing background and added that he was “our kind of liberal.” Wilson agreed at once. “Send the nomination over,” the president said.

Even as he did so, Daniels interviewed New York’s senators regarding Roosevelt. Democrat James O’Gorman, by custom of the upper house, could block a Democratic appointment from his home state. But O’Gorman had only praise for the man whose insurgency had resulted in his election. New York’s senior senator, Republican Elihu Root, lacked a veto, being from the opposition party, yet he appreciated Daniels’s courtesy in consulting him. Root knew Theodore Roosevelt well, having sponsored him for New York governor in 1898 and served as his secretary of war, and he had strong opinions about the Roosevelts. As Daniels recalled: “When I told him that the President had in mind naming Franklin Roosevelt as assistant secretary, a queer look came on his face. ‘You know the Roosevelts, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front…. They like to have their own way.’” Daniels assured Root he could handle Franklin Roosevelt. “I told the Senator that I would hate to have an assistant who did not have a mind of his own. I told him I wanted an assistant who would help pull the load and I had no fear of a strong man as assistant secretary. I would wish no other kind.”

Roosevelt’s nomination sailed through the Senate, and he moved into his office—the same one Uncle Ted had occupied—in the State, War, and Navy Building just west of the White House. One day not long after his installation, he and Daniels posed for photographers on an upper-floor porch looking down on the executive mansion. The prints came back, and Daniels showed the best one to Roosevelt.

“Franklin,” he asked, “why are you grinning from ear to ear, looking as pleased as if the world were yours, while I, satisfied and happy, have no such smile on my face?”

Roosevelt seemed surprised at the question and offered no answer except that he always tried to look good in pictures.

“I will tell you,” Daniels continued. “We are both looking down on the White House and you are saying to yourself, being a New Yorker, ‘Some day I will be living in that house’—while I, being from the South, know I must be satisfied with no such ambition.”

P
ARTLY BECAUSE HE
had his eye on the White House, Roosevelt cultivated the navy brass more carefully than Daniels did. The admirals appreciated that he plumped for more and better ships whenever possible. Since its establishment in 1900, the general board of the navy had contended that America’s enlarged world role required a bigger fleet. The board was chaired in 1913 by George Dewey, the hero of the Manila Bay battle that opened the Spanish-American War, and America’s most distinguished naval officer, and it proposed an aggressive building program of four battleships, sixteen destroyers, and two submarines each year for the next several years. Josephus Daniels respected Dewey, but he didn’t hesitate to cut the board’s request by half when he presented his budget recommendations to Congress.

Roosevelt took care not to contradict his boss directly, but he made plain that he thought Dewey rather than Daniels had the better sense of what American security required. Skeptics in Congress and around the country suggested that smaller ships, designed for coastal defense, would meet the nation’s needs; Roosevelt rejected this argument as woefully short-sighted. “Invasion is not what this country has to fear,” he said. “In time of war, would we be content like the turtle to withdraw into our own shell and see an enemy supersede us in every outlying part, usurp our commerce, and destroy our influence as a nation throughout the world?” Of course not. “Yet this will happen just as surely as we can be sure of anything human if an enemy of the United States obtains control of the seas.” America’s vital interests spanned the globe, and America’s power had to span it too. “Our national defense must extend all over the western hemisphere, must go out a thousand miles into the sea, must embrace the Philippines and over the seas wherever our commerce may be.” American vessels must be state of the art. “Dreadnoughts are what we need,” Roosevelt declared. Dreadnoughts were the most powerful battleships of the day. “The policy of our Congress ought to be to buy and build dreadnoughts until our Navy is comparable to any other in the world.”

To a later generation, one accustomed to American military preeminence, Roosevelt’s proposed standard—“comparable to any other in the world”—would appear unexceptionable. But in the second decade of the twentieth century it was radical to the point of revolutionary. For a century Britannia had ruled the waves, insisting on a navy the equal of her principal competitors’ combined. Not even Dewey’s general board advocated challenging Britain’s supremacy. But partly because Roosevelt saw farther than the seventy-six-year-old Dewey, whose strategic vision was dimming, and partly because he wanted to make a name for himself, the assistant secretary staked out an extreme position on naval construction.

He strove to claim credit for each step taken toward his goal. In March 1914 he hammered the first bolt, a ceremonial silver fastener, into the keel of a new dreadnought being constructed at the Brooklyn navy yard. The ship was designated Number 39 during construction; it would be christened as the U.S.S.
Arizona.
The keel laying had been scheduled to start earlier, but Roosevelt ordered its postponement till he could arrive. “It was an impressive moment,” a reporter explained. “And there was none in the throng who did not realize that the banging of the hammer meant the actual beginning of construction of the biggest ship ever built in New York.”

Besides displaying his concern for American security, Roosevelt’s hammering signified his appreciation of the importance of the Navy Department as an employer. For the crowd at the Brooklyn yard, the new battleship represented thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in wages. These meant a great deal to those who received them and scarcely less to those who dispensed them. Of such were political loyalties fashioned. Roosevelt hadn’t been a year in his post, and already he was showing a gift for the art of government spending. He suffered no pangs of conscience that the navy provided jobs; dreadnoughts weren’t pork barrels. All the same, when the jobs were being handed out, he insisted on reminding the recipients, and their voting friends and kin, that they had him to thank.

But delivering jobs made him, in effect, an employer, with all the potential for upsetting labor that being an employer entailed. Many of the shipyards were unionized, requiring Roosevelt to deal with the union leaders, who were hardly the kind of people he had grown up with or met at Groton and Harvard. Most of them saw him as a college boy who could be cowed or a bureaucrat who might be ignored, but hardly as an ally in their struggle for higher wages and better working conditions for their members and more power for themselves.