Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (23 page)

Roosevelt’s initial efforts went nowhere. London continued to resist the mine blockade—or mine barrage, as it was formally called—as a waste of limited resources. The technical difficulties remained overwhelming. “Project has previously been considered and abandoned,” the British admiralty curtly declared.

The situation changed during the summer of 1917. As Roosevelt had anticipated, the war brought out the best in American ingenuity. An inventor named Ralph Browne visited Roosevelt’s office with blueprints for an antisubmarine weapon he called the “Browne Submerged Gun.” Roosevelt doubted the efficacy of the weapon as a whole, but the trigger mechanism looked promising. Long wires dangled from surface floats; when anything metal—the hull of a submarine, for instance—touched the wires, it closed an electrical circuit and detonated the gun. Substitute a mine for the gun, Roosevelt reasoned, and suddenly closing the North Sea became much more feasible.

Roosevelt repitched the barrage, first to Daniels, who liked the idea, and then to Wilson. “I am very sorry to bother you,” Roosevelt wrote the president disingenuously, before telling him what he ought to do to get the project moving. “Some one person in whom you have confidence should be given the order and the necessary authority to execute the plan without delay…. He, working with an Englishman clothed with the same orders and authority, will succeed if success is possible.” The project ought to receive the highest priority. “This is a bigger matter than sending destroyers abroad or a division of battleships, or building a bunch of new destroyers—it is vital to the winning of the war.”

Wilson was intrigued. The president had long believed that “shutting up the hornets in their nest,” as he put it, made more sense than chasing them one by one across the open ocean. He gave Daniels the floor at a cabinet meeting the next day and let the navy secretary present the case for the barrage. “I told W. W. it was very difficult but was the only plan possible to shut off the submarines,” Daniels wrote in his diary. “It might cut off 1/2 and that would be important. Very costly and difficult, but all things are possible.” Wilson weighed the matter and gave his approval. With the American president aboard, the British dropped their opposition.

Roosevelt hurled himself into the project. He had anticipated Wilson’s approval and arranged to purchase a hundred thousand of the new firing mechanisms; these had to be fitted to the same number of mines, which themselves had to be manufactured. Orders went out to several hundred contractors for steel, high explosives, wire and cable, electrical circuitry, railcars to move the raw materials to assembly plants and from the plants to seaports, ships to carry the equipment across the Atlantic, and other ships to position the mines. New procedures for mine laying, in waters up to six hundred feet deep, in weather as foul as anywhere on the seven seas, had to be devised on the spot. Gradually the entire chain of fabrication, delivery, and placement took shape, and during the summer and autumn of 1918 the intrepid mine layers slipped seventy thousand mines beneath the surface of the North Sea. (The mine layers had to be intrepid, as the underwater bombs had a habit of detonating spontaneously while being laid.) They would have deployed that many again had the war’s end not terminated the project.

The effect of the barrage on the outcome of the conflict was hard to determine. Though it was never completed, it killed four U-boats for certain, and possibly four more. This was a small fraction of the total number of German submarines sunk. Yet Admiral William Sims, for one, called the mine barrage “exceedingly important” in ending the war. “That submarines frequently crossed it is true,” he said. “There was no expectation, when the enterprise was started, that it would absolutely shut the U-boats in the North Sea. But its influence in breaking down the German morale must have been great.” Sims considered what the submarine crews experienced in approaching the minefield. “The width of this barrage ranged from fifteen to thirty-five miles; it took from one to three hours for a submarine to cross this area on the surface and from two to six hours under the surface. Not every square foot, it is true, had been mined…but nobody knew where these openings were, or where a single mine was located. The officers and crews knew only that at any moment an explosion might send them to eternity. A strain of this sort is serious enough if it lasts only a few minutes; imagine being kept in this state of mind anywhere from one to six hours!”

Roosevelt, applying similar logic, later claimed for the North Sea barrage a large part of the credit for the discontent that culminated in the mutiny of the German navy at the end of the war. As a prime mover of the barrage, Roosevelt had cause to exaggerate its influence. And he probably did exaggerate. But whether the effect was large or small, it was clearly positive. And Roosevelt could definitely take credit for that. “If Roosevelt had not been there, the North Sea barrage would never have been laid down,” Admiral Frederic Harris explained.

F
OR ALL HIS
efforts on behalf of the mine barrage, Roosevelt spent less time fighting the Battle of the Atlantic than various skirmishes of the Potomac. The struggle against Germany drew Americans together, but it hardly eliminated differences of opinion among them. Some initially supposed that since maritime troubles had drawn the United States into the war, American participation might be confined to the high seas. When the Wilson administration made clear that this was not to be so, that American soldiers would join the French and British in the trenches of the western front, and that many of these soldiers would be conscripts, even members of Wilson’s own party complained. “In the estimation of Missourians,” Champ Clark declared, “there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.” But Congress went along with the administration, authorizing a draft and otherwise mobilizing the country for war.

Many of the progressives, judging themselves lovers of peace, had assumed they would be the wrong sorts of people to run a war. Wilson told Josephus Daniels in 1914, “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war.” But to their surprise, and in some cases to their dismay, the progressives discovered that they were the ideal war administrators. The reformist temperament in American life has always hidden a coercive streak: if people won’t shape up voluntarily, they should be encouraged, even compelled, to do so. American abolitionists didn’t rely on persuasion to free the slaves; they fought a civil war. American prohibitionists didn’t merely denounce demon rum; they outlawed it—in several states by 1917, and very shortly in the country as a whole.

Upon American entry into the war, Wilsonian progressivism turned coercive overnight. The draft was the first triumph of coercion over voluntarism—although the president, unwilling to acknowledge what he and Congress were doing, denied that conscription was coercive. He called it simply “selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.” As additional coercions followed, neither the president nor other members of the administration bothered to disguise them. The War Industries Board mobilized American industry behind the war effort, replacing Adam Smith’s invisible hand with the plainly visible hands of federal officials who directed the operation of major parts of the nation’s economy. Before the war ended, the government essentially seized the American railroad industry and ran the rails from Washington. The Committee on Public Information marshaled American opinion, enlisting hundreds of professional writers and tens of thousands of “four-minute men”: fast-talking speakers whose job was to keep support for the war at what one CPI directive called “white heat.” The Espionage and Sedition Acts directly forbade any obstruction of the war effort, even by mere words. Eugene Debs, the socialist leader, was arrested for denouncing the draft, convicted, and sent to prison—where he remained in November 1920, when he received nearly a million votes for president.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t write any of the laws or larger regulations of the period, but he observed their effects, approved of most of them, and participated in the implementation of some. He enlisted his own publicist, the American novelist Winston Churchill, to spur the sluggards in the Navy Department, including Josephus Daniels at times, to swifter action. (In later years, after the British Winston Churchill came to figure in Roosevelt’s life, a certain retrospective confusion of the two Churchills inevitably occurred.) Roosevelt fed Churchill information that Churchill used in magazine articles, to frequently good—in Roosevelt’s opinion—effect.

As part of his effort to increase the number of patrol boats, Roosevelt encouraged his yachting friends to sell or donate their vessels to the navy. Many did so willingly, but others refused or demanded exorbitant payment. Roosevelt denounced such ingrates as impediments to the war effort. Congress agreed, concluding that if the bodies of ordinary Americans could be drafted, so could the yachts of the wealthy. The legislature gave Roosevelt authority to seize the vessels, which he did with obvious pleasure. His personal contribution to the program was the
Half Moon II,
which joined the navy during the summer of 1917.

A
NOTHER
R
OOSEVELT CONTRIBUTION
was more frivolous. The
New York Times
ran an article about efforts to conserve food, according to guidelines issued by the federal Food Administration. The story featured Eleanor Roosevelt, who explained what she, her family, and their servants were doing to cut back. “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable,” she said. “Since I have started following the home-card instructions, prices have risen but my bills are no larger.”

Franklin winced on reading the piece and twitted Eleanor. “I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer, and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!” he wrote. “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.”

Eleanor didn’t think the incident funny at all. “I’d like to crawl away for shame,” she wrote Franklin.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1918 Roosevelt traveled to the front. The German gamble of the previous year had failed as the Americans and British improved their convoy techniques on the Atlantic and the German ground offensive stalled in the mud of northern France. The Germans tried again the following spring and drove to within artillery range of Paris. But they could get no closer, and with each passing month more American troops arrived—green troops, but well equipped and backed by America’s unequaled economic power.