by FDR
SIX | Anchors Aweigh
The epigraph is from Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 20 (New York: Viking Press, 1946), discussing FDR’s formative years in Washington.
1. Wilson was a terrible golfer. He almost never broke 100 and sometimes needed fifteen putts to finish a hole. But he played relentlessly. Don Van Natta estimates that Wilson played as many as 1,600 rounds while president, roughly twice as many as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Golf, said Wilson, was “the perfect diversion” from the pressures of the Oval Office. Don Van Natta, Jr., First off the Tee 135–151 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
Bryan announced the no-alcohol policy at an April 21, 1913, farewell dinner he hosted for Lord Bryce, who was retiring as British ambassador. Bryan told the guests that when Wilson asked him to be secretary of state, he had asked whether that would necessitate serving liquor and had been told to use his own judgment. “We have always been teetotalers,” said Bryan, and “could not depart from this custom without contradicting our past.” William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan 351 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1925).
2. The term “New Freedom” derives from a collection of Wilson’s campaign speeches, arranged and edited by William Bayard Hale and published by Doubleday in early 1913. In retrospect, writers rarely distinguish between TR’s New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and lump the two together as manifestations of the progressive wave that swept the country in the early twentieth century. In fact, the election of 1912 turned on the difference. Both movements sought to benefit the common man, but each reflected a different stream of thought. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism embraced the Hamiltonian tradition of a strong central government, dominated by executive power, that intervened vigorously in the economy on behalf of the many. Taken literally, it exhorted voters to put national needs ahead of sectional or individual advantage. Wilson’s New Freedom, by contrast, hewed more closely to Jeffersonian states’ rights, minimized the role of the federal government, and sought to achieve prosperity purely through regulation of the market place. It stressed individual liberty rather than collective action. Once in office, Wilson gradually accepted a greater role for the national government than he had originally espoused. FDR’s New Deal was much closer to TR’s New Nationalism than to Wilson’s New Freedom. See Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom 242–243 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), and the sources cited therein.
3. Josephus Daniels dates the decision to segregate the federal government to a cabinet meeting on April 11, 1913. According to Daniels, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, a former Texas congressman who helped swing the Lone Star State behind Wilson at Baltimore, raised the issue, complaining of the distaste white mail clerks felt at working with blacks: “It is very unpleasant for them to work in a [railway mail] car with Negroes where it is almost impossible to have different drinking vessels and different towels, or places to wash and he was anxious to segregate white and Negro employees in all Departments of the Government. The President said he made no promises in particular to Negroes, except to do them justice, and he wished the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.” No member of the cabinet objected, then or later. With Wilson’s approval, cabinet officers immediately began to segregate their departments, though no formal executive order was ever issued. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels 32–33, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). Also see Kathleen Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History 158–173 (April 1959); Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly 61–79 (March 1968).
4. W. E. B. DuBois, “An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson,” The Crisis, September, 1913. Booker T. Washington, who had not supported Wilson, expressed a similar sentiment to the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard on August 10, 1913: “I have recently spent several days in Washington, and I have never seen colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.” For Washington’s view of the 1912 election, see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 353–355 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). When Washington attended Wilson’s 1901 inauguration as president of Princeton, he was the only honored invitee who was not accommodated in a faculty house.
5. Josephus Daniels, who ran Wilson’s publicity organization in the South during the campaign, made the party’s position crystal clear in an editorial in his Raleigh News & Observer a month before the election. The South, he said, was solidly Democratic because of “the realization that the subjugation of the negro, politically, and the separation of the negro, socially, are paramount to all other considerations in the South short of the preservation of the Republic itself. And we shall recognize no emancipation, nor shall we proclaim any deliverer, that falls short of these essentials to the peace and welfare of our part of the country.” Raleigh News & Observer, October 1, 1912.
6. The newly empowered Southern Democrats demanded that Washington’s streetcars be segregated, that Congress enact a miscegenation statute for the District of Columbia, and that all black appointees be dismissed, especially those in a position “to boss white girls.” As the newly appointed collector of internal revenue in Atlanta asserted, “There is no Government position for negroes in the South. A negro’s place is in the cornfield.” Atlanta Georgian and News, October 7, 1913.
7. FDR to ER, March 17, 1913, FDRL. Eleanor wired to congratulate Franklin. “I ordered your 17th of March present as we couldn’t do anything else together.” FDRL.
8. The State, War, and Navy Building, now refurbished as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, is the finest remaining example of what architectural historians call “General Grant style,” a reference to the monumental federal buildings constructed during Grant’s presidency, most of which were designed by Alfred B. Mullett. For an assessment, see Elsa M. Santoyo, ed., Creating an American Masterpiece: Architectural Drawings of the Old Executive Office Building, 1871–1888 (Washington, D.C.: Executive Office of the President, 1988); Donald H. Lehman, Executive Office Building (Washington, D.C.: General Services Administration, 1964). For an iconoclastic view, see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation 9 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Mr. Acheson’s criticism stems from his service as assistant secretary of state under FDR in the 1940s.
9. FDR and Daniels posed for a picture on that balcony shortly after they took office (see illustrations). FDR was caught smiling broadly, and Daniels noted his expression. “We were both looking on the White House,” said the secretary, “and you are saying to yourself, being a New Yorker, ‘some day I will be living in that house’—while I, being from the South, know I must be satisfied with no such ambition.” Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace, 1910–1917 129 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
10. FDR to SDR, March 17, 1913; SDR to FDR, March 18, 1913, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 170–171, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap. 1950).
11. Navy Department, Ships’ Data: U.S. Naval Vessels 6–14 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914); Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present 711, 736 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965). To convert 1913 dollars, multiply by 18. Thus, $144 million would equal $2.592 billion in 2006.
12. 19 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. 310–311 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1911). The United States’s first two modern battleships, the Nevada and Oklahoma, were laid down at the end of TR’s presidency but were not launched until 1914 and not commissioned until 1916. They and their sister ships Pennsylvania and Arizona, obsolescent but serviceable, continued on active service until Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Arizona and Oklahoma were sunk, the Nevada was run aground, and the Pennsylvania, in dry dock, was heavily damaged. Edward L. Beach, The United States Navy: 200 Years 429–430 (New York: Henry Holt, 1986).
13. Testifyi
ng before the Select Committee on the Budget of the House of Representatives in 1919, FDR said, “We feel that the present bureau system concentrates too much dog-in-the-manger policy on the part of each bureau as against every other bureau, that they are not all working sufficiently for the common end of the Navy Department, and that they are working too much for the particular good of their own particular bureau.” Transcript, October 1, 1919, FDRL.
14. Daniels steadfastly resisted all efforts to make the bureaus responsible to the chief of naval operations, believing that would “Prussianize” the Navy. As Daniels saw it, such a reorganization would make the secretary of the Navy a figurehead sitting on top of the Washington Monument without a telephone. “I would be ashamed to draw the salary, and I would go home,” said Daniels. FDR did not share Daniels’s view. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 241–243.
15. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 606 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
16. Transcript, October 1, 1919, House of Representatives Select Committee on the Budget, FDRL. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR preempted traditional congressional support for the bureaus with a masterly two-step maneuver. On December 20, 1941, he appointed Admiral Ernest J. King to the newly established post of commander in chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH), and placed the bureaus under him (Executive Order 8984). In March 1942, Roosevelt named King to be chief of naval operations (CNO) as well, in effect combining the two posts (Executive Order 9096). That gave King command of the entire Navy, similar to the authority General Marshall exercised as Army chief of staff. It was wartime, and no one on Capitol Hill questioned the president’s decision. And in the Navy no one dared question King—a hard-drinking, self-styled sonofabitch who gave no quarter. For King’s discussion of the transition, see Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record 349–359 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952).
17. Paragraph 2 (1) of section 415 of the Revised Statutes of the United States provided that there be “an Assistant Secretary of the Navy … and he will perform such duties as may be prescribed by the Secretary.”
18. Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After 253 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946).
19. As acting secretary of the Navy on February 25, 1898, TR cabled Dewey:
ORDER THE SQUADRON, EXCEPT THE MONOCACY, TO HONG KONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OF DECLARATION OF WAR SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. KEEP OLYMPIA UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS.
ROOSEVELT
20. New York Sun, March 19, 1913. Beginning with TR, five Roosevelts (Theodore, 1897–1898; Franklin, 1913–1920; TR, Jr., 1921–1924; Theodore Douglas Robinson [son of Corinne Roosevelt, TR’s sister], 1924–1929; Henry L., 1933–1936) have served as assistant secretary of the Navy. TR’s birthday, January 27, was officially celebrated as Navy Day from 1922 until the unification of the services in 1949.
21. “He was young then and made some mistakes,” Daniels wrote many years later. “Upon reflection, although I was older, I made mistakes too.” Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 129.
22. On November 9, 1932, Daniels, who had always written to FDR as “Dear Franklin,” posted a letter to the president-elect with the salutation “My dear Chief.” Roosevelt would not hear of it. “My dear Chief,” he replied. “That title still stands! And I am still Franklin to you.” And so it continued until Daniels’s death. Quoted in Joseph L. Morrison, Josephus Daniels: The Small-d Democrat 167 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). The extensive twenty-two-year correspondence between FDR and Daniels was collected and edited by Carroll Kilpatrick and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1952 under the title Roosevelt and Daniels: A Friendship in Politics.
23. Rex Tugwell, an early brain truster, remembers the deference FDR exhibited toward Daniels on the train carrying the president-elect’s party from Albany to Washington for the inauguration in 1933. “Rex, this is the man who taught me a lot that I needed to know,” said Roosevelt as he introduced Daniels to Tugwell. Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt 105 (New York: Doubleday, 1957). For Daniels’s contribution as ambassador to Mexico, see E. David Cronon, Josephus Daniels in Mexico (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960).
24. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 124.
25. When FDR first met Daniels at the 1912 Baltimore convention, he thought he was the “funniest looking hillbilly I ever saw.” William D. Hassett, “The President Was My Boss,” The Saturday Evening Post 38–39 (October 31, 1953).
26. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 117 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
27. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 290–292. Also see Brian Johnson, Fly Navy: The History of Maritime Aviation 25 (London: David & Charles, 1981).
28. TR to California governor Hiram Johnson, November 16, 1914. This was TR’s famous “speak softly and carry a big stick” letter in which he said, among other things, that Bryan and Daniels were “the two most wretched creatures we have ever seen at the head of those great departments [State and Navy].” 8 The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt 846, Elting E. Morison, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
29. Daniels shared the racism of the Wilson administration; the enlisted men he was concerned about were white. Shortly after assuming office, he wrote that there was no discrimination in the Navy: “All Negroes are messmen.” Later he expressed surprise to Eleanor that the Roosevelts employed white servants and suggested they be replaced by blacks. Daniels’s views changed over the years, and by the time the New Deal came to power he and Eleanor stood shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for black equality. Daniels to J. J. Adkins, May 27, 1913, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress; Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence 79–80 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954). Also see Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 204 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
30. Stimson’s reference is to Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), whose book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 became the Bible for advocates of naval expansion. Quoted in Beach, United States Navy 421.
31. “I soon observed as I voyaged on the Navy ships,” Daniels wrote, “that sailors and marines had spare time that was not employed. I also learned that many of them were lacking in elementary education. Some did not even have knowledge of the three R’s.… I determined to strengthen the Navy as an educational institution with schools on every ship.… Opposition did not deter me, and I issued instructions that schools should be open to every enlisted man and marine, that attendance should be compulsory, and that young officers should do the teaching (General Order 53, issued October 1, 1913). I followed it up with detailed instructions [General Order 63, December 16, 1913] and a magazine article entitled: ‘The Navy’s Universities Afloat.’ ” Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 253–254.
32. The rum ration for sailors was abolished under Andrew Jackson, and in 1899 John D. Long, McKinley’s secretary of the Navy, prohibited the sale or issue of all alcoholic beverages to enlisted men. In the first years of the twentieth century, prohibitionist sentiment was such that battleships named for dry states (e.g., Mississippi) were christened with lemonade rather than champagne.
33. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 148 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). I was unable to find the text of Daniels’s condom order in the archives of the Navy Department but did locate an October 10, 1917, letter from Raymond A. Fosdick, chairman of the Navy’s civilian advisory panel, to Daniels in which Fosdick referred to the secretary’s order banning the distribution of “Individual Prophylactic Packets.” Fosdick complained that Commander Berryhill, chief medical officer at the Mare Island Naval Station in California, was critical of Daniels’s order. Berryhill, said Fosdick, believed “men were animals and needed sexual activities, and the only sensible way was to have a red light district wit
h the women examined periodically.” Fosdick recommended that Berryhill be transferred, and Daniels complied the following week. Daniels to Fosdick, October 17, 1917. Both letters in the Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
34. FDR to Louis Howe, April 9, 1914, Howe Personal Papers, quoted in Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 118 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). Many years later, FDR could not resist taking credit for the order. “The Chief took the blame, but he didn’t formulate the order at all,” Roosevelt told press secretary William Hassett. “I did it.” If FDR did formulate the order, the evidence is elusive. Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence 129 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954).
35. The sobriquet derives from a Tillman speech in 1896 in which he proposed to stick a pitchfork in the broad posterior of Grover Cleveland. Daniels accumulated a unique record as secretary of the Navy: during his eight-year tenure, Congress approved every request he made except for the large construction program he submitted after the armistice in 1918. Paolo E. Coletta, “Josephus Daniels,” in Coletta (ed.), 2 American Secretaries of the Navy 530 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980).
36. Wilson and Daniels remained close throughout their eight years in Washington. Professor Arthur Link, Wilson’s principal biographer, attributes it to the fact that “Daniels was willing to give friendship on Wilson’s terms. There was nothing calculated about the North Carolinian’s devotion and loyalty; he simply loved the President and supported him without question. Wilson returned Daniels’s love and trust with an affection equally warm … and the more Daniels’s critics raged, the stronger Wilson’s affections grew.” Wilson: The New Freedom 125.
37. In 1923 the Supreme Court upheld the California statute, holding that the right of Japanese aliens to own land was not secured by treaty. Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197 (1923). But twenty-five years later, in Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633 (1948), the Court found the law in conflict with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a view subsequently adopted by the California Supreme Court in Sei Fujii v. State, 242 P. 2d 617 (1952).
