Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  The meetings of the Supreme Council were held in camera, and the participants’ discussions remained secret. So much for “open covenants, openly arrived at,” the first of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But it was just as well the sessions were closed because relations among the Big Four were tepid at best.18 Orlando correctly perceived that he was being patronized; Lloyd George, the quintessential opportunist, had difficulty adhering to a fixed course; Clemenceau was all too fixed, obsessed with the need to provide for French security; while Wilson spoke with the dogmatic assurance of a Presbyterian elder. “What ignorance of Europe and how difficult all understandings were with him,” said Clemenceau. “He believed you could do everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us … the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory.”19

  FDR played no role at the peace conference. He and Eleanor remained in Europe five weeks, during which time Franklin devoted himself to disposing of the Navy’s foreign assets. Roosevelt spoke French fluently and lubricated the discussions while Hancock and Spellacy hammered out the details.20 “The most successful thing I pulled off in Paris,” FDR remembered, was the sale of the Navy’s Lafayette Radio Station near Bordeaux, the most powerful transmitter in the world at the time. The French had been dragging their feet, hoping the United States would simply abandon the installation. According to Roosevelt, André Tardieu, the French minister responsible (and later premier, 1929–30), “offered a ridiculous sum counting on the fact that the cost of dismantling and removing it would be prohibitive.” Just when the meeting reached an impasse, a messenger handed a telegram to FDR that read, “Dismantle and ship station to America. [Signed] Daniels.” Tardieu immediately gave in and agreed to buy the facility at FDR’s asking price of 22 million francs. Roosevelt later boasted to friends that he had written the telegram himself and arranged to have it delivered to him at the meeting.21 “This is a big success,” Eleanor wrote Sara, “but don’t mention it.”22

  On February 15, 1919, the Roosevelts left Paris for Brest and the return home on the George Washington. Among their fellow passengers were President and Mrs. Wilson, who were taking a quick break from negotiations so that the president might return to Washington to sign the final flurry of legislation passed by the outgoing Sixty-fifth Congress.23 Wilson proudly carried with him the draft covenant of the League of Nations, which had just been completed. The president had insisted that the peace conference establish the League as its first order of business, and, with British acquiescence and French ambivalence, he had prevailed. “I like the League,” Clemenceau was quoted as saying, “but I do not believe in it.”24

  Aboard the George Washington Wilson remained aloof and kept more or less to his cabin. “He seemed to have very little interest in making himself popular with groups of people whom he touched,” Eleanor remembered.25 One day, to FDR’s surprise, the president summoned him for a discussion about the League and what it meant for the future. The invitation came out of the blue, and FDR recalled Wilson’s intensity. A day or so later, Franklin and Eleanor were included in a small luncheon party given by the Wilsons. For the most part the conversation was unremarkable, though Eleanor remembered two things: Wilson said that since the war began he had read no newspapers; his secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, clipped them for him, giving him only what was important.* The second was that Wilson had spoken with great emotion about the League. “The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.”26

  The George Washington’s original destination had been New York, but after she was under way Wilson advised the captain that he wished to land at Boston, where he was scheduled to speak at Mechanics Hall and introduce the League. The captain adjusted course but to his horror discovered he had no charts on board for a Boston landfall. He would have to feel his way. To complicate the task, a heavy North Atlantic fog descended as the ship slanted southward along the Massachusetts coast. “I was awakened in my berth by a shuddering noise,” FDR recalled. “Thinking the George Washington must be aground, I rushed to the bridge in my pajamas and bathrobe to discover that the ship’s engines had been reversed and cut off—that was the noise—and that she lay between two jagged rocks, with little way between, facing a shoreline with a row of summer cottages. I recognized the settlement as Nahant, where I had frequently made port, and in a general way I was able to tell [the captain] where he would find Boston harbor. He then gave the order for backing the ship out of its perilous location, and proceeded safely to Boston. President Wilson, who had not been awakened, was never told what happened.”27

  Back in the United States, the Roosevelts grappled with the future. “We’ve had an interesting trip,” Eleanor wrote her Aunt Bamie, “and F. thinks he succeeded very well with his demobilization of all possible stations in Europe.… He says he now expects to go into business this summer for a time so we may be in New York next year and there may be a little more time which we can call our own.”28

  But first Washington beckoned. Secretary Daniels left for Europe in mid-March to attend an Allied naval conference and was gone for two months, again leaving FDR in charge. The Navy’s demobilization was almost complete, and aside from adjusting to Republican control of Congress there was little other than routine housekeeping to occupy the acting secretary. Nevertheless, Daniels left detailed instructions to cover every contingency. The secretary was especially concerned that the admirals running the various bureaus not take advantage of his absence to push their pet projects through Congress. “They will probably present you with letters to sign and send to the new chairmen of the Naval Affairs Committees,” he told FDR. This, Daniels said, you must not do. “It would be very well … for you to have a drawer and put them all in it so that we can make a study of them, and we will discuss them when I get back.”29

  Franklin was careful to stay on sides. “Ever since you left,” he wrote Daniels, “things have been so quiet here as to be almost terrifying. Literally nothing has happened outside of routine work, which, however, has been positively voluminous.”30 The workload was indeed heavy. The Navy remained the only cabinet department with just one assistant secretary. Whenever Daniels or Roosevelt was absent, the entire administrative workload fell to the other. By FDR’s account he worked fourteen hours a day and thrived on it. When Daniels returned in late May, Franklin wrote his old golfing partner John McIlhenny, “I have had a perfectly delightful two months, running things with a high hand and getting things done that were never done before. Last Saturday the Secretary got back and now I shall have a little leisure.”31

  If the Navy Department had returned to normal by late spring, the city of Washington was anything but. Labor unrest gripped the nation. Prices were high, jobs were scarce, and thousands of returning servicemen clamored for work. Four million Americans went out on strike in 1919, one out of every five industrial workers. Organized labor strove to expand union membership, management resisted fiercely, and both sides carried their cases to Washington. John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers demanded that the government nationalize the coal mines immediately; mine and mill owners responded with court injunctions ordering strikers back to work. As agitation increased, violence became widespread, and Washington was not spared.

  On the evening of June 2, 1919, a powerful bomb ripped the façade of the R Street home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, directly across the street from the Roosevelts’. The bomb was the work of a committed anarchist, who was blown up by his own device. Franklin and Eleanor were down the block when the bomb went off, returning from a late party. The blast shattered windows within a hundred-yard radius. Eleven-year-old James was the only Roosevelt child home at the time. Franklin raced upstairs and found him standing in his pajamas, barefoot amid the splintered glass, watching the scene below. “I’ll never forget how unnerved Father was when he found me standing at the window,” James reca
lled. “He grabbed me in an embrace that almost cracked my ribs.”32

  With James safe, Franklin went across the street to assist the Palmers, who had escaped injury. He drove Mrs. Palmer and her daughter to the home of friends and then helped police gather up pages and pages of anarchist literature scattered by the blast. “Now we are roped off,” Eleanor reported to Sara the next morning. “The police haven’t yet allowed the gore to be wiped up on our steps and James glories in every bone found! I only hope the victim was not a poor passerby instead of the anarchist.”33

  The following month the city was torn by a bloody four-day race riot that left fifteen dead and hundreds injured. The Washington police proved powerless, and eventually the military was deployed to restore order. “The riots seem about over today,” Franklin wrote Eleanor on July 23. “Only one man killed last night. Luckily the trouble hasn’t spread to R Street and though I have troubled to keep out of harm’s way I have heard occasional shots during the evening and night. It has been a nasty episode and I only wish quicker action had been taken to stop it.”34

  The attack on Attorney General Palmer precipitated a widespread crackdown on suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks, known historically as the Red Scare of 1919–20. Primed by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, government authorities under the attorney general’s direction launched an attack on civil liberties unequaled in peacetime since passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts at the end of the eighteenth century.35 Law enforcement officials illegally raided homes and union offices, aliens suspected of radicalism were deported, and thousands of innocent citizens were hounded for their beliefs. On a single night in January 1920 more than four thousand suspected Communists were arrested in thirty-three different cities.36 The Palmer raids yielded almost nothing in the way of arms or revolutionaries but triggered a climate of fear that engulfed the nation. The New York state legislature, its better judgment swept away by a tidal wave of reaction, refused to seat five elected Socialists from New York City. In Washington, the House of Representatives twice refused to tender the oath of office to Socialist Victor L. Berger, elected overwhelmingly by the voters of Milwaukee.37

  FDR showed no interest in Palmer’s Red-baiting crusade. Indeed, at the same time that Congress and the New York legislature were expelling Socialists from their ranks, he upbraided Rear Admiral S. S. Robinson, commandant of the Boston Navy Yard, for discharging three machinists because they were Socialists. “Now, my dear Admiral,” Roosevelt wrote, “neither you nor I can fire a man because he happens to be a Socialist. It so happens that the Socialist party has a place on the official ballot in almost every state in the union.”38

  When an old grad sought to enlist Franklin’s help to cleanse the Harvard faculty of dangerous radicals (FDR was now a member of the university’s board of overseers), he ignored the request. The radical in question was Harold Laski, a young instructor in the Government Department who had recently advocated nationalizing the country’s railroads. “If Mr. Laski were teaching mathematics,” wrote Paul Tuckerman, ’78, “the argument for academic freedom would have some force … but he teaches our sons, not mathematics but government, and what reverence for our government and institutions can a professional Bolshevik teach? Why not clean house and get rid of this foreign propagandist?”39 President A. Lawrence Lowell stood by Laski, and the Harvard board stood by Lowell. Laski returned to England shortly afterward to accept a position at the London School of Economics and went on to become an internationally renowned scholar and chairman of the British Labour party.

  While Franklin was busy at the Navy Department, Eleanor took the first steps to make a life for herself outside the home. “Everyone is concerned about strikes and labor questions,” she wrote Isabella Ferguson in September 1919. “I realize more and more that we are entering on a new era where ideas and habits and customs are to be revolutionized if we are not to have another kind of revolution.”40

  On behalf of the Red Cross, Eleanor undertook to inspect St. Elizabeth’s, the nation’s mental hospital in Washington, where hundreds of battle-shocked servicemen were confined. “I cannot do this,” she remembered thinking to herself, but she went anyway. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” she wrote later, supplying her own emphasis.41

  Once a week for the remainder of their time in Washington, Eleanor visited the hospital, distributing flowers and cigarettes, stopping to talk with the troubled men. When she discovered there were not enough attendants to provide proper care, she lobbied her friend Franklin K. Lane, secretary of the interior, in whose bailiwick St. Elizabeth’s fell. Lane declined ER’s invitation to visit the hospital—“the last thing he wanted to see was a hospital for the insane”—but he ensured that appropriations for St. Elizabeth’s were increased.42 Eleanor arranged for the Red Cross to build a recreation facility for the men, cajoled money from the Colonial Dames of America for occupational therapy, and organized a retail shop where patients could sell their handmade wares.

  At the height of the Red Scare, Eleanor made her first contact with feminist organizations interested in improving working conditions for women. In late October 1919 representatives of nineteen nations convened in Washington for the First International Congress of Working Women. Because many of the delegates could not speak English, Mrs. Roosevelt and other multilingual Washington wives volunteered as translators. “It was of course, a very advanced and radical gathering,” Eleanor wrote Sara, “but I found it interesting and amusing.”43

  Eleanor invited a number of the women home for lunch. The U.S. delegation included many early activists in the American labor movement: Margaret Dreier Robins, Rose Schneiderman, Maud Swartz, Julia O’Connor, Fannia Cohn, and Leonora O’Reilly. “I liked all of the women very much indeed,” said Eleanor, “but I had no idea how much I was going to see of them in the future.”44

  After four months of additional negotiation, President Wilson returned to Washington on July 8 with the freshly minted Treaty of Versailles. Two days later, he presented it to the Senate. The treaty, he said, had come about “by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way.”45

  The Senate was divided. A dozen or so irreconcilables, primarily populists from the South and West, favored rejection. Most Democrats supported the president and wished to accept the treaty outright. In the middle was a large group of Republicans led by Lodge who favored approval provided reservations to protect American sovereignty were registered. Unlike amendments, reservations do not change the text of a treaty but clarify how it will be interpreted. It is a well-established diplomatic practice for countries to add such qualifications, and if Wilson agreed, the chances were that the Senate would approve the treaty overwhelmingly. Secretary of State Lansing and the Senate’s Democratic leadership urged the president to accept the reservations, but Wilson refused.46

  Convinced that God and the people were with him, the president chose to make a direct appeal to the electorate. On September 2, 1919, Wilson set out by special train to canvass the West. His health was failing. He had already suffered a mild stroke in Paris in April and was haggard and drawn. His face twitched, his hands trembled. During the next twenty-two days the president would travel 8,200 miles through fourteen states, delivering more than forty speeches. On September 25 Wilson spoke at Pueblo, Colorado. That evening he suffered a total physical collapse. The tour was canceled, and the president returned to the White House. The following week Wilson had a massive stroke that paralyzed his left side. For two months he hovered between life and death, barely able to scrawl a shaky signature on documents his wife presented to him. After that his mind became clear enough to follow what was happening and he was able to dictate letters. But he never fully recovered.

  On November 6 Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, the Democratic floor leader in the fight for the League, was admitted to the president’s bedside. Without the Lodge reservations, he told Wilson, he could not muster even a bare majority for the treaty, much less the two thirds re
quired for approval. Wilson refused to accept the inevitable. “Let Lodge compromise,” he told Hitchcock. Two weeks later the Senate voted on the Treaty of Versailles and the opponents won. Brought up for reconsideration at the next session, it once more failed to achieve a two-thirds majority. On March 19, 1920, the Senate formally returned the treaty to the president, noting its inability to give its advice and consent.*

  Like most Democrats, FDR supported the League but did not see it as the be-all and end-all of public life. “Last spring I thought the League of Nations merely a beautiful dream, a Utopia,” he told the New York Bar Association in March 1919. “But in June I went abroad [and] found in Europe not only a desire to beat the Hun but a growing demand that out of it all must come something else.”47 Three months later he warned the graduating class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute that “the United States would commit a grievous wrong to itself and to all mankind if it were even to attempt to go backwards toward an old Chinese wall policy of isolation.”48 But unlike Wilson he did not object to Lodge’s reservations and believed the president should compromise to get the League accepted. The details were less important than the final product. “I have read the draft of the League three times,” he declared, “and always find something to object to in it, and that is the way with everybody.”49

  The British, the French, and most cabinet officers shared that view. In September 1919, the British government dispatched former foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey (Viscount Grey of Fallodon) to Washington to plead with Wilson to accept the Lodge reservations. Wilson refused to receive him. When the Roosevelts entertained Lord Grey and his staff at Christmastime, they became non gratae in the eyes of the White House.50 The consequence for FDR was negligible because by January 1920 the Wilson administration had come unglued and it was every man for himself. Colonel House was no longer consulted; Secretary of State Lansing had been dismissed; Franklin Lane resigned at Interior, as did Carter Glass at the Treasury, frustrated at their inability to communicate with Wilson. Daniels wished to resign as well but remained out of personal loyalty to the invalid president.