Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  After sixteen years in the wilderness, the Democrats had returned to power—not old-school, high-caste, hard-money Cleveland Democrats but a coalition of agrarian populists, urban workers, middle-class progressives, and all ranks of southerners, who voted Democratic for the same reason most blacks voted Republican: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War.5 The southern tilt of the Democratic party was more pronounced than ever, and with the GOP hopelessly divided, it was the South that called the tune.6

  To head the Navy, Wilson had chosen Josephus Daniels, the populist editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, who had managed his campaign publicity in the South. Partially to achieve regional balance, Daniels chose FDR as his assistant secretary, and the president submitted Franklin’s nomination to the Senate on March 12, 1913. He was confirmed unanimously five days later. No hearings were held. Roosevelt, who had been waiting anxiously, promptly took the oath of office. It was March 17, his eighth wedding anniversary, and he immediately wrote Eleanor, who was at home in New York with the children:

  My own dear Babbie:

  I didn’t know until I sat down at this desk that this is the 17th of happy memory. In fact with all the subdued excitement of getting confirmed and taking the oath of office, the delightful significance of it all is only beginning to dawn on me. My only regret is that you could not have been with me but I am thinking of you a great deal.7

  The desk at which FDR wrote was the same mahogany behemoth Cousin Theodore had salvaged from a Navy storeroom sixteen years earlier. Festooned with hand-carved warships bulging from the side panels, it had originally been made for Gustavus Fox, the Navy’s assistant secretary during the Civil War. TR had been thirty-eight at the time he was appointed; Franklin was barely thirty-one—the youngest assistant secretary in the history of the Navy, twenty years junior to Secretary Daniels, half the age of most flag officers, and forty-five years younger than Admiral George Dewey, hero of the battle of Manila Bay, the ranking officer on active duty.

  Government was small in 1913, and the entire Navy Department was housed on two floors of the old State, War, and Navy Building, adjacent to the White House. An architectural monument in more ways than one (the stone walls were four feet thick), the opulent Second Empire style of the building epitomized the conspicuous consumption of America’s Gilded Age.8 Roosevelt’s office on the third floor was almost as large and ornate as the connecting corner office Secretary Daniels occupied. Both enjoyed large French doors opening onto a balcony that overlooked the South Lawn of the White House, which FDR could see easily when seated at his desk.9

  “Dearest Mama,” Franklin wrote after he settled in. “I am baptized, confirmed, sworn in, vaccinated—and somewhat at sea! For over an hour I have been signing papers which had to be accepted on faith—but I hope luck will keep me out of jail.” Absentmindedly, he signed the handwritten note to his mother with his full official signature, “Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Sara noted the gaffe and did not miss a beat: “Try not to write your signature too small,” she joked. “So many public men have such awful signatures.”10

  The Navy that Daniels and Roosevelt took charge of in 1913 had mastered the transition to modern weaponry but was hobbled by an administrative structure substantially unchanged since 1842. The fleet consisted of 259 ships, including 39 battleships and heavy cruisers, manned by 63,000 officers, sailors, and marines, with an annual budget of $144 million—roughly 20 percent of all federal expenditures.11 The British Admiralty ranked it third in the world (behind Great Britain and Germany), but the numbers concealed the antiquated design of most of the American vessels.12 The fleet was also divided into three independent formations (Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic), each with a separate command structure. Promotion was strictly by seniority, advancement was slow, and there was no overall commander analogous to Britain’s First Sea Lord.

  The barnacled logistical apparatus, originally patterned after the administrative boards of the Admiralty in the age of sail, had proved impervious to change. The department was organized into eight quasi-independent bureaus (Navigation, Ordnance, Equipment, Steam Engineering, Construction and Repair, Yards and Docks, Supplies and Accounts, Medicine and Surgery), each headed by a powerful chief who was legally responsible to Congress, not the secretary of the Navy or, for that matter, the president. The bureau chiefs, most of whom were admirals who had held their posts for years, conducted their business in splendid isolation from one another and with little regard for the department as a whole.13 They often duplicated one another’s work, competed furiously for appropriations, and steadfastly resisted any organizational change that would diminish their authority.

  In 1903 Secretary of War Elihu Root brought the Army, which had a similar structure, reluctantly into the twentieth century. The power of independent branch chiefs such as the adjutant general and the chief of engineers was broken, a general staff system established, and the entire uniformed service brought under the command of a single military head, designated chief of staff to the secretary of war. As president, TR had attempted to reorganize the Navy along similar lines but had been defeated by congressional opposition precipitated by the bureau chiefs.14

  Because of the autonomy of the bureaus, the Navy was considered the most difficult cabinet department to administer.15 FDR was a vocal critic of the freestanding bureaus—they worked at cross-purposes to the department, he told the House Budget Committee in 1919—but it was not until after the attack on Pearl Harbor that he succeeded in bringing them under executive control.16

  Roosevelt’s duties as assistant secretary were not defined by statute.17 Traditionally, the secretary of the Navy worked with the president on policy matters, dealt with Congress, and watched over the fleet. The assistant secretary handled the Navy’s business affairs, rode herd on the bureaus, supervised civilian personnel, and negotiated contracts. But, as FDR said, “I get my fingers into just about everything and there’s no law against it.”18 When TR had occupied the post, he had taken advantage of Secretary John D. Long’s one-day absence from the department to flash the historic signal to Commodore Dewey to move against the Spanish fleet in the Philippines, and Franklin, whenever Daniels was away, enjoyed twitting reporters about potential parallels.19 “There’s another Roosevelt on the job today,” he would say with a grin. “You remember what happened the last time a Roosevelt occupied a similar position?”20

  Daniels and Roosevelt made an odd couple. Yet they served together harmoniously for virtually the entire eight years of Wilson’s presidency. The strengths of one complemented the weaknesses of the other, and FDR learned from Daniels the folksy art of Washington politics. The fact is, Josephus Daniels was the only person to whom Franklin Roosevelt was ever directly subordinate. It was Daniels who made the decision to appoint him; it was Daniels who brought him to Washington; and it was Daniels who treated him as a father might treat a prodigal son whenever FDR wandered off the reservation. Daniels’s motives were primarily political. Aside from regional balance, the name Roosevelt was solid gold in every wardroom in the fleet. Daniels also recognized that an energetic assistant with an amateur’s knowledge of the sea would make his job easier. And though he did not know FDR well, he had liked him from their very first meeting and saw in him the future of the Democratic party.21 Roosevelt, who throughout his life called Daniels “Chief,” never forgot the debt he owed him.22 Upon taking office in 1933, one of FDR’s first acts as president was to appoint Daniels ambassador to Mexico, a post in which he served with distinction until 1941.23

  FDR cut a splendid figure as assistant secretary: tall, athletic, well spoken, enthusiastic. Daniels called him “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen.”24 The secretary, by contrast, was short, pudgy, slow-moving, and deliberate. Always slightly rumpled, he nevertheless dressed with studied southern formality—a tailored black frock coat in winter, white linen and seersucker in the summer. His pleated shirts were always white, his ties always black, and his high-top shoes always we
ll polished. He wore broad-brimmed hats to shield his face from the sun and to the uninitiated looked like a stock figure from central casting.25

  Courtly and modest, Daniels had an amiability that concealed an iron will and a remarkably wide-ranging intelligence. He was a tireless worker, a shrewd judge of people, and a longtime rebel against established authority. He suspected that what every admiral told him was wrong, and, as one observer noted, nine times out of ten he was correct.26 Daniels could be as stubborn as a country mule, and he was also without fear. Two months after taking office he went for a training flight with Lieutenant John H. Towers, the pioneer Navy aviator, in a rudimentary open-cockpit, 75-horsepower flying machine at the breathtaking speed of sixty miles an hour—the first high-ranking government official to fly in an airplane. Asked by President Wilson why he had risked his life in such a contraption, Daniels said it was his duty to sign orders for naval officers to fly and “I would not assign any man to any duty I would not try myself.”27

  Daniels and William Jennings Bryan were intimate friends of long standing. They were also the two most radical members of Wilson’s cabinet. For seventeen years they had worked to free the common man from the clutches of trusts, railroads, robber barons, and whatever other vested interest appeared on the horizon. Daniels served as Bryan’s publicity director in each of his presidential campaigns, and the two shared a contempt for anything that smacked of wealth and special privilege. Together they sought to promote the values of an old-fashioned, rural, small-town America: pacifist, prohibitionist, and religiously fundamental. They opposed sin with the same vehemence that they opposed the plutocracy of the Republican party and often found it difficult to distinguish between the two.

  Daniels brought these values to the Navy Department and aroused the wrath of the naval establishment in so doing. TR thundered that Wilson was guilty of “criminal misconduct in entrusting the State Department and the Navy Department to Bryan and Daniels.”28 While Bryan sought to paper the world with arbitration treaties, Daniels dreamed of disarmament, saw the Navy in terms of Wilsonian neutrality, and was more concerned with the welfare of the enlisted men entrusted to his care than building battleships or expanding the officer corps.29

  In 1913 the Navy Department was its own little world. Henry L. Stimson, Taft’s outgoing secretary of war, said it receded from the realm of logic “into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God and Mahan his prophet.”30 That did not deter Daniels. He defined civilian control as civilian command and with Wilson’s support exercised it relentlessly. Daniels abolished the board of four admiral aides that stood between him and the department; limited the term of bureau chiefs to four years; and required deskbound officers to put to sea. He visited naval facilities from coast to coast, often breaking ranks to shake hands with enlisted men lined up for inspection; overrode reluctant admirals and ordered the fleet to cross the Atlantic in winter; and took issue with hallowed naval nomenclature that called left “port” and right “starboard.” At Daniels’s direction, FDR signed General Order No. 30 on May 5, 1913, requiring that directional instructions to the helmsman henceforth be given as “right” and “left.”

  Daniels also jettisoned the Navy’s choker-collar uniforms, took engineering officers out of dress whites, and instituted a promotion system based on merit. But his overriding concern was to break down what he considered artificial barriers between officers and enlisted men. He opened the Naval Academy to enlisted applicants, added civilian instructors to the faculty, and sought to make every ship a floating “university” so that sailors would be better prepared to return to civilian life.31 Daniels halted the practice of serving wine in the officers’ mess, not only because he believed in temperance but because he thought it undemocratic. If enlisted men could not drink aboard ship, neither should their officers.32 He also banned the issue of condoms to sailors going on shore leave. “It is equivalent to the government advising these boys that it is right and proper for them to indulge in an evil which perverts their morals.”33

  FDR was on an inspection trip to the West Coast when Daniels’s temperance directive came down, but he supported it strongly. “The wine order is … on the whole absolutely right. It took nerve to do it, but tho the Secy will be unpopular in a small circle for a while, it will pay in the end.”34 There is no record of his response to Daniels’s order pertaining to condoms.

  Initially FDR thought Daniels a hopeless hayseed who would be overwhelmed by Washington politics. But as he watched the secretary seize control of the Navy Department, socialize with congressional committee chairmen like South Carolina’s irascible “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman,35 and deal intimately with Wilson in the White House, he changed his opinion.36 Two incidents in the spring of 1913 confirmed that judgment. The first dealt with command authority. The State of California had recently adopted legislation forbidding Japanese citizens from owning land in the state.37 On May 9 Japan lodged a vigorous protest with Washington. Wilson rejected the note, tempers flared, and relations deteriorated. Senior military and naval officials believed war to be inevitable. On May 14, the Joint Board of the Army and Navy, chaired by Admiral Dewey, with General Leonard Wood, the Army chief of staff, serving as vice chairman, unanimously recommended that the Navy immediately move the three large battle cruisers of the Asiatic fleet (Saratoga, Monterey, and Monadnock) from their station on the Yangtze River to the Philippines and that additional reinforcements be dispatched to Hawaii and Panama. Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison approved the recommendations on May 15, and the following day two New York newspapers carried sensational stories that the Army and Navy were preparing for war.38

  Daniels was outraged. He had not signed on, he disapproved of the recommendation, and he saw the press leak as a deliberate attempt to force his hand. He told his operations aide, Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, that there would be no movement of ships without his or the president’s order. Daniels said he did not think war was inevitable and that such a move by the Navy would scuttle efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement. He said that in his view the board had exceeded its authority, but he would lay the matter before the president.

  Wilson backed Daniels, and that should have ended the discussion. But the admirals, accustomed to having their way under Taft and TR, appealed the decision. Wilson came down hard. It was the duty of the military to follow orders, not to challenge them, he told Fiske. The president thereupon ordered the Army and Navy Board not to meet again without his express authorization. The war scare subsided, and the board remained in limbo for the next two and a half years until, with World War I lapping at America’s shores, Daniels recommended that it be reconvened.39

  The second key event for FDR involved the Navy’s contracting authority. Daniels hated monopolies, and the collusion among American steel companies bidding for Navy contracts aroused his special ire. FDR enjoyed telling how in the spring of 1913 he was present when Daniels met with representatives of Bethlehem, Carnegie, and Midvale Steel, each of which had submitted an identical bid for the armor plate to be used in constructing the battleship Arizona. Daniels threw the bids out and asked the companies to submit new figures by noon the next day. “I loved his words,” FDR recalled, reflecting on the pained expressions of the businessmen as they left and his and Daniels’s pleasure at their distress. But at noon the next day the steel men returned with exactly the same figures. Daniels threw those out as well and told FDR to take the next train to New York and meet with Sir John Hatfield, the leader of a British steel consortium who had just arrived in the United States. Hatfield submitted a substantially lower bid, which the American companies agreed to meet. Daniels told Congress that the Navy had saved $1,110,084 (roughly 10 percent of the total cost) as a result.40

  For the first six months FDR led a bachelor’s life in Washington, living first at the Willard, then at the Powhatan Hotel, an aging landmark at the corner of Eighteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, little more than a block from his office. He joined the ultraexclusive Me
tropolitan Club (Wilson was not tendered an invitation), the Army-Navy Club, the University Club, and the Chevy Chase Country Club—these in addition to the New York clubs to which he already belonged: the New York Yacht Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the City Club, the Racquet and Tennis Club, and the Harvard Club—to all of which he paid dues regularly.41 Eleanor was in New York with the children, then at Campobello for the summer. Franklin visited for the July Fourth weekend and ordered one of the Navy’s largest battleships, the 22,000-ton North Dakota, to stand off Eastport, Maine—just across the narrow strait from Campobello—for the Independence Day celebration. The Roosevelts entertained the officers on the island, and FDR, who relished the pomp and ceremony attached to his office, later went aboard ship. He would not dress formally, he told the captain, but would appreciate the seventeen-gun salute to which he was entitled since his Campobello neighbors would expect it.42

  Shortly thereafter, FDR ordered the destroyer Flusser to take him to the naval base at nearby Frenchman’s Bay for an inspection. The Flusser was commanded by Lieutenant William F. Halsey, Jr., the famous Bull Halsey of World War II. Roosevelt asked Halsey’s permission to pilot the ship through the treacherous Lubec narrows between Campobello and the mainland. With some misgiving, Halsey agreed. Handling a 700-ton destroyer under full power is a lot more complicated than sailing a pleasure boat. According to Halsey, “a destroyer’s bow may point directly down the channel, yet she is not necessarily on a safe course. She pivots around a point near her bridge structure, which means that two-thirds of her length is aft of the pivot, and that her stern will swing in twice the arc of her bow. As Mr. Roosevelt made his first turn, I saw him look aft and check the swing of our stern. My worries were over. He knew his business.”43*