Roosevelt (13 page)

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,”

T
HE 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.

Public life also exacted another toll. He was away from the family much of the time—away when children came down with semi-serious illnesses, away when one of them was burned in a picnic fire. His anxiety only increased at a distance; during a polio epidemic he badgered Daniels unmercifully until the secretary allowed him to dispatch a destroyer to Campobello to take his children home by sea. His personal life, like that of other public
figures, was fair game for rumor-mongers. A story went the rounds that he had fallen in love with another woman and that Eleanor had offered him his freedom. At best the long separations were the source of difficulty. “You were a goosy girl,” he wrote his wife from Washington, “to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here
all
the summer, because you know I do! But honestly
you
ought to have six weeks straight at Campo, just as
I
ought to, only you can and I can’t.…”

The image Roosevelt presented to the world during the immediate postwar period was that of the brisk young executive. His job now called for a multitude of immediate “practical” duties rather than the glamorous actions of war, and much of the supervision of this work fell to the assistant secretary. He now became highly interested in improving the organization and administration of the federal government. Showing a keen grasp of the political context of public administration, he repeatedly urged that the President be given more control of budget-making, that Congress put its own houses in order by consolidating its appropriations activities in one general committee, that promotion be based on efficiency rather than length of service, that existing agencies be reorganized and functions redistributed, and that heads of executive departments be given more authority.

Toward politics he was cautious. “Quite frankly,” he wrote a supporter in February 1920, “I do not personally intend to make an early Christian martyr of myself this fall if it is going to be a strongly Republican year.” Yet this was precisely what he was to do.

Roosevelt spent the first few weeks of 1919 on navy business in Europe. While he helped tidy up the debris of war, Woodrow Wilson in Paris tried to lay the foundations of peace. The President was at the peak of his career; his tour of Europe had been that of an uncrowned monarch. “No one has ever had such cheers,” an observer said. “I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops, banners, but Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman—or superhuman.”

On a wintry day in mid-February Wilson left France for home. He carried with him triumphantly a draft of the Covenant of the proposed League of Nations. On the same ship was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, returning to Washington with his wife. One day the Roosevelts lunched with the Wilsons and their party. The talk was mostly an exchange of stories, but at one point the President spoke of the League of Nations. “The United States must go
in,” he said, “or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”

After their ship docked in Boston, the Roosevelts rode in the triumphal parade that escorted the President to his hotel. An estimated 200,000 Bostonians roared a welcome to the President, and even Governor Calvin Coolidge was moved to “feeling sure the people would back the President.” Watching the crowds cheer the President wildly at every station on the way to Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt felt sure that they had “grasped his ideals.”

Perhaps they had. But the Covenant was part of a treaty that had to win the votes of two-thirds of the Senate of the United States. And the Senate numbered men as proud and stiff-necked as Wilson himself, men jealous of senatorial prerogative in foreign relations, sensitive to large national-origin groups at home, keenly aware of the presidential election that lay ahead. The Senate, moreover, was under Republican management; despite Wilson’s plea to the people in 1918 for Democratic control of Congress for the sake of “unified leadership,” the voters had put the opposition party in control of both houses by slim margins.

Roosevelt watched with dismay as the President’s foes in the Senate outmaneuvered the administration in skirmish after skirmish. In February 1919 the Republicans, still a minority, filibustered vital appropriations bills to death in the last weeks of the Democratic-controlled Congress, thereby forcing Wilson to summon, months ahead of the normal session, an extraordinary session of Congress which the Republicans would control. Just before the short session ended, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge by a parliamentary stratagem presented the Senate with the “Round Robin”—a pronunciamento that the Covenant was unacceptable “in the form now proposed” to thirty-nine Republican senators or senators-elect. In July, after weeks of hard negotiating with Lloyd George and Clemenceau in Paris, Wilson laid the treaty before the Senate. In August the President expressed willingness to accept mild Senate reservations to the treaty stated in a separate resolution, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proceeded to rip the treaty. In September Wilson went to the country, gave forty passionate speeches, suffered a breakdown, and returned spent and stricken. In November the President urged Democratic Senators to vote against the Lodge reservations to the treaty, and these were defeated, but unconditional ratification failed by a vote of 38 for to 53 against.

What had happened? Early in 1919 Wilson’s fight for a League had been applauded by American and European alike; at the end of the year his hopes were in ruins. Many explanations were put forward. Italo-Americans were aroused by the refusal to let Italy have Fiume, Irish-Americans by England’s control of “six seats” in
the Assembly, German-Americans by Allied treatment of the old country. Other Americans were simply tired of Europe and its troubles; they were distracted by labor troubles, high prices, the Red Scare. The League question was caught in a bitter battle between parties. Above all, Wilson continued to talk about idealism after the cynical men at Versailles had produced a treaty of
real politik
; he continued to insist on the Covenant as he framed it long after concessions were in order.

Whatever the truth, it is notable that Roosevelt’s approach to the matter was somewhat different from the President’s. The Assistant Secretary was, of course, pro-League, but his speeches lacked Wilson’s fine moral fervor. While Wilson talked about following “the vision,” about “destiny,” about “lifted eyes,” about America’s duty, about Americans’ dreams, Roosevelt was more pragmatic, more experimental. “It is important not to dissect the document,” Roosevelt said in March 1919. “The important thing is first to approve the general plan.” Unless the United States came in, he warned, the League would become simply a new Holy Alliance. “The League may not end wars, but the nations demand the experiment.”

He was more willing to compromise than Wilson seemed to be. As early as March 29, 1919, he favored an amendment recognizing the Monroe Doctrine, but he thought the League should be tried even if desired amendments were not forthcoming. Other reservations to the League Covenant would be necessary, he warned at the end of the year. He had little hope that the League, even with United States membership, would prevent all future wars; several months after the war he still wanted compulsory military training.