Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (22 page)

His hesitance paid off in a manner he couldn’t have anticipated. While the world waited on Wilson, revolutionaries in Russia toppled the czar. Nicholas II had always been the odd man out in the anti-German alliance; his auto cratic regime, more reactionary even than those of Germany and Austria-Hungary, prevented the British and French from proclaiming theirs a war for liberal values. The unrepresentative character of the Russian government gave Wilson pause in weighing intervention; the American president insisted on fighting for principle, and he couldn’t discern any principles he and Nicholas shared. Consequently, the overthrow of the czar in March 1918 (February by the unreformed Russian Orthodox calendar) and the proclamation of a provisional government committed to republican rule came as a tremendous relief to Wilson, removing the last impediment to a clear-conscienced embrace of American belligerence.

The Zimmermann telegram was a bonus. In hopes of distracting the Americans, Berlin tried to lure Mexico to its side, promising the Mexican government a restoration of territories Mexico had lost to the United States in the 1840s, in exchange for Mexican support against the Americans. The German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, made this astonishing offer in a January 1917 telegram that also called on Mexico to help persuade Japan to jump from Britain’s side in the war to Germany’s. British agents intercepted the telegram, deciphered and translated it, and in February delivered it to the U.S. government, fully aware of the impact it would have on American public opinion. The inevitable anti-German reaction, combined with Berlin’s submarine campaign, eliminated what little remained of sympathy for the German cause.

On April 2, 1917, Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress. The president retraced Germany’s increasingly egregious violations of American neutrality, contending that these more than justified a declaration of war. Yet he made plain that in his judgment war was not simply a response to injuries past and present but an instrument for ensuring a better future. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” Wilson said. “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

Congress might have granted Wilson’s request for a war declaration at once, but the sweep of his idealism took some of the lawmakers aback. They debated the matter, and though the ultimate vote was overwhelmingly in favor, it required two days to achieve. All the same, when Wilson signed the war declaration on April 6, he knew he had the backing of the great majority of the American people.

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of executive leadership, Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t help admiring Wilson’s mastery in allowing support for war to build. Americans in August 1914 had recoiled in horror from the very thought of intervention; now, in April 1917, their representatives voted 455 to 56 in favor of war. Roosevelt had never stopped thinking that he himself might be president one day, and despite the impatience he had vented over American unpreparedness, he had to admit that Wilson had accomplished a remarkable feat, one any future president could hardly improve upon.

When he thought of himself as a future president, Roosevelt returned to the script he had mapped out a decade earlier. The stage directions now called for him to resign from the Navy Department to enlist in the active military. That was what Uncle Ted had done at the comparable moment in 1898, and Franklin knew enough of history and politics to realize that it was the Rough Rider, not the former assistant secretary, who went on to become governor, vice president, and president.

Roosevelt considered following the script. He made noises about seeking active duty. But he soon decided against it. In the first place, men whose opinions he valued told him he would be crazy, even derelict, to leave Washington, where his actions in the Navy Department might materially influence the outcome of the war, to serve in the trenches or on some ship, where his actions couldn’t matter beyond the reach of his rifle or the view from his bridge. “Franklin Roosevelt should, under no circumstances, think of leaving the Navy Department,” Leonard Wood, TR’s commanding officer in Cuba, told a mutual friend, for Franklin’s benefit. “It would be a public calamity to have him leave at the present time.”

In the second place, the present war was a different beast than Uncle Ted’s war. A day’s fighting by a few thousand troops in front of Santiago largely determined the result of the contest with Spain; after nearly three years of bloodletting by several million troops, the outcome of the European war remained in the balance. Even if Franklin hadn’t already appreciated how drastically war had changed between 1898 and 1917, he would have learned the lesson very quickly from Theodore’s experience when he tried to reprise his Rough Rider role. TR began raising a division of volunteers, only to have his actions vetoed by Wilson, who explained that this war required regular, disciplined troops, not the volunteer, freelancing units of the Spanish-American War. Wilson was playing politics, ensuring that his Republican rival not become a hero again. But he was also being sincere. Any war directed by progressives must be orderly, impersonal, and scientific.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Franklin’s decision to depart from the Roosevelt script showed that despite sharing a name and some superficial traits, he was a different kind of man than Uncle Ted. Theodore, too, had been told that abandoning the Navy Department for the cavalry would be irresponsible, but he refused to listen. He couldn’t help himself. Since childhood he had been obsessed with strength, with manliness, with the military. He had tested himself in every way imaginable—on the athletic field, in the pursuit of dangerous animals, on the political stump—except for the one way that mattered most to him: on the field of battle. He was too much the patriot and the politician to have admitted it, but he almost certainly would have preferred performing heroically in a losing national cause to doing nothing distinguished in a victory.

Franklin Roosevelt labored under no such obsession. He was ambitious, but he lacked his cousin’s insatiable need to be moving, doing, testing, confronting. Theodore understood the demons that had driven his brother Elliott to drink and dissolution, because he sometimes felt them closing in on him. What a later generation would call depression ran in Theodore’s branch of the Roosevelt family, as the self-destructive behavior of Elliott and various other kinsfolk demonstrated. Theodore refused to let the demons catch him. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he wrote, revising Horace. His whole exhausting life was, among other things, a race against that black care.

Franklin Roosevelt knew nothing of that sort of inner struggle—at least not in 1917. His thirty-five years on earth had been as blessed as any man could wish. His family wealth and connections, the love and devotion of his parents, his good looks and natural charm made life easy. He waltzed from triumph to triumph, scarcely breaking a sweat. The principal complaint against him was precisely that success came so easily. No one disliked him; this was nearly impossible. But it wasn’t difficult to envy him, and enviously call him shallow for never having supped at disappointment or drunk of despair.

And so, in his shallowness—or innocence or simple well-adjustment—he decided not to risk becoming cannon fodder to scratch a psychic itch that wasn’t even his own. He stayed at the Navy Department, determined to ensure that the American fleet did its part to secure the victory he, with Wilson now and so many others, considered essential to the survival of democracy.

10.

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UT IF HE WASN’T GOING TO CHARGE UP THE
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RENCH EQUIVALENT
of San Juan Hill, he could still apply his considerable energy—his share of the Roosevelt zest—to assaulting the hills at hand. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun for the United States even before the American war declaration, when German U-boats started sinking American merchant vessels. Roosevelt snatched up the gage and determined to punish the German fleet.

This was no small task. For strategic and political reasons, the British had declined to share with a neutral American government the extent of the damage German submarines were doing to British and French shipping. Once the United States entered the war, Roosevelt and other administration officials were shocked to be told that the Germans were sinking nearly a million tons per month. At this rate, the German gamble—on strangling Britain and France before American power came to bear—might well succeed. The first priority, the one on which the war currently hung, was to counter the U-boats.

Opinions differed on the best defense against the submarines. The admirals of the British and American navies preferred a steady-as-she-goes policy of fighting the U-boats with the ships and tactics at hand. Destroyers were the antisubmarine vessels of choice; they could escort convoys of troop transports and freighters, keeping the prowlers away and killing them when they got too close. This approach risked little; it also promised relatively little beyond what it was already accomplishing. The entry of the United States into the war increased the number of available destroyers but didn’t offer any radical solution to the submarine problem. Britain’s admirals were especially conservative; skeptics accused them of putting the safety of the British navy before the security of the British empire.

Those skeptics included Franklin Roosevelt. In time the world would discover that Roosevelt’s reflexive response to emergency was action. Many other men, many other leaders, liked to ponder their options carefully before acting; Roosevelt typically acted first and pondered later. In part this approach revealed an activist temperament; he was a doer rather than a thinker. In part it followed from a belief that in a crisis almost any action was better than none and that errors, which were inevitable in any case, could be corrected as easily on the run as standing still.

To the status quo thinking of the admirals, Roosevelt riposted two novelties. The first involved small patrol boats that could increase the number of eyeballs searching for enemy submarines. Only a few shipyards produced the big steel ships that formed the backbone of the American navy, but scores of builders could turn out lesser wooden craft. Roosevelt envisioned hundreds of the patrol vessels, in two models: 110-footers with three engines, and 50-footers with single engines. The admirals looked askance at even the larger of the boats, fearing they’d steal resources and attention from the real ships; they dismissed the smaller ones as flotsam beneath the dignity of any blue-water man.

Josephus Daniels for once allied with the admirals, primarily because he distrusted the profit motive of the boat-builders more than he doubted the bureaucratic self-seeking of the gold braids. He didn’t prevent Roosevelt from fighting for the patrol boats, but he frowned on the whole business. “How much of that sort of junk shall we buy?” he wrote in his diary after a typically vigorous Roosevelt appeal. The answer to Daniels’s question was several hundred of the patrol boats, which Congress—sensitive to the needs of those many small boat-builders—seconded Roosevelt in declaring essential to the war effort.

Roosevelt’s other novelty was even more controversial. To his sailor’s eye, the German success with submarines was almost inexplicable. Germany is hardly landlocked, but its seafront affords it access only to the Baltic and North seas, which
are
geographically constrained. The British and French navies seemed to have fairly well blocked up the Strait of Dover with mines, nets, and patrols, preventing the U-boats from skirting Britain’s southern shore en route to the open Atlantic. Roosevelt reasoned that if the British and the Americans could do the same to the broader channel between Scotland and southern Norway, the submarines would be stymied. Those caught within the North Sea blockade would be unable to get out; those stuck outside would starve for want of fuel and ammunition.

The idea wasn’t original with Roosevelt. The British had considered it before the Americans entered the war, only to reject it as infeasible. Too many mines were required, the water was too deep for successful mooring, and no mining project so ambitious had ever been attempted, let alone accomplished. Yet Roosevelt pushed forward on what he called his “pet hobby,” convinced that answers would turn up if sufficient intelligence and money were applied. He argued that a few hundred million dollars would purchase sufficient mines and nets to close the northern outlet of the North Sea to all but the boldest and luckiest of U-boat captains. The British and Americans didn’t have to stop every sub; merely by lengthening the odds against safe passage they could tip the balance in the war of the sea.