Roosevelt (12 page)

Gerard threw his hat in the ring—but from a distance. He said that his duties would not permit his return to campaign. He knew he could afford to leave his affairs in Murphy’s hands. Roosevelt demanded of Gerard whether he would be controlled by Murphy if elected senator; the ambassador did not reply. The assistant secretary said that a man who would leave his military post of duty was not fit to be a senator; he said nothing about his own absence from his navy post while the conflagration was blazing up in Europe.

Despite this blow, and despite his pessimism as to the outcome, Roosevelt conducted a strenuous campaign. Ranging through upstate New York, he repeatedly attacked Murphy and demanded that Gerard stay at his post. Securing labor endorsements from his union
friends in Washington he had tens of thousands of copies of the endorsement—some unhappily lacking the union label—handed out at plant gates. Under Howe’s guidance he wrote friendly letters to dozens of newspaper editors, at the same time arranging for advertising. But he rarely could find mass audiences; the primary, which took place late in September 1914, during the first great battles of the war, did not attract much attention.

“He is quiet and unassuming,” one editor wrote, “has the demeanor and poise of the student, and with his youthful scholarly face and soft accent, he gives no indication of the stubborn attitude that his friends claim he can assume on occasion.… Some of his utterances were planned with the skill of an old campaigner.…” But the editor—a Republican—was not overly impressed. Roosevelt had not made his position on the “great questions of the day” at all clear in his speech, he said, and compared to retiring Senator Elihu Root he cut a sorry figure as a great statesman.

Back in headquarters Howe was fighting the patronage battle. By a last-minute manipulation of jobs he hoped to hold friends firm and win over recalcitrants among the small bands of Democrats who would bother to vote. When Roosevelt asked one of his appointees, John B. Judson, for support and Judson replied candidly but pleasantly that he could not back him, Howe was ruthless. He could not “too strongly urge the importance of sudden and swift reprisal in this case.” Wherever possible Judson’s friends must lose their appointments and his “bitterest enemies” be given jobs. An influential Democrat might be induced to break with Judson if given control of some patronage, and anti-Judson newspapers must be used. Roosevelt agreed that the deserter should be punished.

All in vain. On primary day the absentee Gerard beat Roosevelt 210,765 to 76,888, with 23,977 votes going to a third candidate. Murphy’s candidate, Glynn, defeated Hennessy by a somewhat heavier vote. Roosevelt had the consolation of winning over a third of the state’s sixty-one counties, including Dutchess County by a sweeping vote, but Democrats were sparse in most of these counties. Tammany had shown its strength even upstate, where Gerard ran better than two to one. All in all, it was a bad beating for the young politician.

Roosevelt promptly cabled Gerard his congratulations, adding that he would campaign for him if the ambassador would declare his unalterable opposition to Murphy’s leadership. Gerard smoothly replied that of course he would represent the whole party and people and no faction or individual if elected, and Roosevelt made some speeches for him. In the November elections, however, both Gerard and Glynn lost to their Republican rivals. “I am sorry …” said Roosevelt, “but not entirely surprised.”

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.
”

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.