Jean Edward Smith

by FDR

  57. For the text of the German proclamation, see “Memorandum of the German Government,” February 4, 1914, Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 96–97.

  58. British Ambassador to Secretary of State, March 1, 1915, ibid. 127–128. Also see The New York Times, March 2, 1915.

  59. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality 321–323 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960). For the complete text of the U.S. note, see Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 98–100.

  60. March 30, 1915, ibid. 152–156.

  61. Wilson’s remarks were made to an audience of four thousand newly naturalized citizens at Convention Hall in Philadelphia, May 10, 1915. For text, see The New York Times, May 11, 1915. For the American note to Berlin, see Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 393–396.

  62. “Resting Our Case,” The New Republic 57 (May 22, 1915). A survey of newspaper opinion is reprinted in Literary Digest 1197–1199 (May 22, 1915). Also see The New York Times, May 15, 1915. Not surprisingly, TR had nothing but contempt for Wilson’s effort to avoid war, which he alleged was supported “by all the hyphenated Americans … [by] every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead, every man whose god is money, or pleasure, or ease.” TR to his son Archibald, May 19, 1915. Theodore Roosevelt Papers.

  63. German foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow told The New York Times, “The issues involved are of such importance, and the views in regard to the Lusitania show such variance, that the German Government believed it essential to attempt to establish a common basis of fact before entering into a discussion of the issues involved.” May 31, 1915.

  64. To allay German public opinion, military and naval authorities were explicitly instructed to keep the emperor’s order secret. Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Navy’s head, and Admiral Gustav Bachmann, the emperor’s naval aide, immediately submitted their resignations, which William II refused. “My order stands. If there are political consequences, the Imperial Chancellor carries the responsibility.” Quoted in Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality 409.

  65. The text of the American note, June 9, 1915, is in Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 436–438.

  66. WJB to WW, June 3, 1915, 1 The Lansing Papers 419–421. Library of Congress. For the text of Bryan’s resignation and Wilson’s reply, see Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality 422–423.

  67. FDR to ER, June 10, 1915, 2 Roosevelt Letters 222. Numerous biographers, eager to put daylight between FDR and Daniels, suggest that Roosevelt was disappointed Daniels was not quitting as well. Nothing supports that assertion. To the contrary, Daniels did not believe Wilson’s note to Germany meant war, tried to dissuade Bryan from resigning, and was determined to remain loyal to the president, whom he adored. Taken in context of the Washington furor, FDR’s italicized comment that J. D. would not resign was a commendation of his boss. See Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 424–435.

  68. FDR to WW, June 9, 1915, Wilson Papers.

  69. WW to FDR, June 14, 1915, Wilson Papers.

  70. WW to Garrison, July 21, 1915; WW to Daniels, July 21, 1915, cited in Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality 591–594. Professor Link provides an extensive analysis of why Wilson changed his mind, which I have summarized.

  71. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 327–328.

  72. FDR to ER, August 28, 1915, 2 Roosevelt Letters 235–236.

  73. The council was composed of six members of cabinet, chaired by the secretary of war, plus a nonpartisan advisory panel made up of leaders of industry, labor, and science. Ibid. For the council’s operation, see Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 586–590.

  74. Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., 8 The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 205, 243 (New York: Random House, 1950). This was the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC). See David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 478 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  75. FDR to Daniels, February 16, 1916, Daniels Papers.

  76. The New York Times, September 3, 1916.

  77. FDR to ER, September 2, 1916, 2 Roosevelt Letters 237–238.

  78. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 425–426 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971).

  79. Elihu Root dutifully contested the nomination as a conservative alternative and trailed Hughes 253–103 on the first ballot. Hughes won the nomination 328–98 on the second ballot, and the third ballot made it unanimous. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 151 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1975).

  80. FDR to ER, June 15, 1916, FDRL.

  81. Washington Evening Star, June 15, 1916; New York Sun, rotogravure, June 25, 1916.

  82. FDR to the Navy League Convention, April 13, 1916, FDRL.

  83. 1940 Public Papers and Address 606–615.

  84. William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt 491 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

  85. FDR to ER, November 8, 1916, 2 Roosevelt Letters 273.

  86. FDR to ER, November 9, 1916, ibid. 273–274.

  87. The reference is to Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Hermann Hagedorn, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926). FDR to ER, November 9, 1916, 2 Roosevelt Letters 273–274.

  88. Quoted in Marshall, History of World War I 204; also see Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era and After 18 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946). The Zimmermann telegram did not come entirely out of the blue. In 1913–14 the German government had supplied arms to the Huerta regime in Mexico, which the United States refused to recognize. The telegram was drafted by Dr. Klaus von Kemnitz, the Latin American specialist in the German Foreign Office. Whether it was approved beforehand by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and the Supreme Command is unclear, but both were in sympathy with its contents. Friedrich Katz, Deutschland, Dias, und die mexikanische Revolution: die deutsche Politik in Mexiko, 1870–1920 337–473 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag des Wissenschaften, 1964).

  89. Housatonic, sunk off the Scilly Islands, was carrying contraband and was a legitimate target. But the German U-boat fired without warning, which became the basis of the American complaint. All twenty-five members of the crew were rescued. The New York Times, February 4, 1917.

  90. Daniels’s message, in a private code he and FDR used, stated, “Because of political situation please return to Washington at once. Am sending ship to meet you and party at Puerto Plata tomorrow morning.” FDR, “Trip to Haiti and Santa Domingo, 1917,” FDRL.

  91. Ibid.

  92. Harrison J. Thornton, “The Two Roosevelts at Chautauqua,” 28 New York History 55 (January 1947).

  93. Daniels autobiography, Daniels Papers; also see Wilson Era: Years of War 23.

  94. Washington Evening Star, March 10, 1917. The Chicago Post urged Daniels’s replacement by his “virile-minded, hard-fisted, civilian assistant. Uncuriously enough his name is Roosevelt.” Chicago Post, March 20, 1917.

  95. FDR to Edwyn Johnstone, November 22, 1916, FDRL.

  96. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War 23.

  97. Wilson was the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person, and the Supreme Court, respecting the separation of powers, normally did not attend when the president’s State of the Union message was read. It departed from tradition in 1917 under Chief Justice White’s leadership to show its support for Wilson and war. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War 31–33.

  98. For the text of Wilson’s speech, see The New York Times, April 3, 1917. Martin Luther’s words were “Ich kann nicht anders [I can do no other.],” refusing to recant in 1518.

  99. Diary of Thomas W. Brahany, chief clerk, White House executive office, entry for April 2, 1917. Typescript at FDRL.

  100. FDR, press statement, April 3, 1917, FDRL.

  101. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 87 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).

  102. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War 34.


  EIGHT | Lucy

  The epigraph is from a letter FDR wrote to Eleanor from Washington in the summer of 1917. The emphasis is FDR’s. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 280, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).

  1. The vote for war was 82–6 in the Senate and 375–50 in the House. La Follette, Norris, and Vardaman were joined by Senators A. J. Gronna of North Dakota, William Stone of Missouri, and Harry Lane of Oregon in voting against the war. La Follette, Norris, and Gronna were Republicans; Vardaman, Stone, and Lane, Democrats. In the House, Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana voted against war, as she would do again on December 8, 1941.

  2. A key element of Elihu Root’s 1903 military reforms provided for the equipping and training of the various state militias by the federal government. Under the National Defense Act of 1916, the militias were reconstituted as the National Guard and made to conform organizationally to the regular Army. The guard expanded rapidly in 1917–18 and ultimately provided seventeen divisions (Twenty-sixth through Forty-second) to the AEF.

  The 1916 act also provided for a Reserve Officers Training Corps, but there were no organized reserve units until the act was amended in 1920, and even then they were largely paper formations. Department of the Army, The Army Almanac 308–310, 323–324 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).

  3. Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present 736 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).

  4. Robert William Love, 1 History of the U.S. Navy 512–513 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1992).

  5. The Navy lost 48 vessels in World War I: 14 to German U-boats, 5 to mines, 16 to collisions, and 13 to other causes generally associated with poor seamanship. The largest vessel lost, the Cyclops, a 19,000-ton collier, “mysteriously disappeared” on April 21, 1918, with the loss of all 293 aboard. For a list of the vessels lost, see The Army Almanac 188.2.

  6. “It is perfectly true that I took the chance of authorizing certain large expenditures before Congress had actually appropriated money,” said FDR in 1920. “I felt confident that Congress would pass the emergency appropriations for which we asked.” Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 140 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).

  7. Time, May 28, 1923.

  8. FDR related the incident to Ernest Lindley while he was governor of New York. Given Roosevelt’s penchant for hyperbole, one should approach the quote with caution. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 140.

  9. Josephus Daniels recalled that “Around the [Navy] Department it was said that inasmuch as his cousin Theodore left the position of Assistant Secretary to become a Rough Rider … Franklin actually thought fighting in the war was the necessary step toward reaching the White House.” Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace 130 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

  10. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 429 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971). All four of TR’s sons volunteered for service as enlisted men, but Pershing chose to allow them to serve in the AEF as officers. “It’s rather up to us to practice what father preaches,” said Quentin, the youngest, who became a pilot and was killed in aerial combat. TR, Jr., won the Distinguished Service Cross and twenty-six years later led the First Division ashore at Normandy. Both he and Archie were wounded in the First World War. Kermit, who served in the British Army, won the Military Cross for gallantry.

  11. Daniels, Years of Peace 130.

  12. Quoted in Davis, Beckoning of Destiny 460.

  13. Cited in Langdon Marvin to FDR, July 17, 1917, FDRL.

  14. Arthur J. Marder, 4 From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow 142–143 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); Love, History of the U.S. Navy 484.

  15. Jellicoe’s comment was made to U.S. Rear Admiral William Sims, who had been designated by Daniels to head the American naval efforts in Europe. William S. Sims, The Victory at Sea 9 (New York: Doubleday, 1920).

  16. Arthur Marder, the leading historian of naval warfare in the early twentieth century, reported that a “strange dogma had emerged [in the Royal Navy] that to provide warship escorts to merchant ships was to act essentially ‘defensively’ (because it protected ships from attack), which was ipso facto bad, and that to use naval forces to patrol trade routes, however futile the result, was to act ‘offensively’ against the warships of the enemy, and this was good.” Marder, 4 From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow 157–158.

  17. Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy 355 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).

  18. It is Navy lore that Commander Joseph K. Taussig, commanding the destroyer squadron, was asked upon his arrival at Queenstown when his ships would be fit for duty. “We are ready now, sir,” Taussig is supposed to have replied, although a witness recalled Taussig as saying, “Ready when fueled.” Love, 1 History of U.S. Navy 487.

  19. FDR to Livingston Davis, April 28, 1917, FDRL. Also see FDR to Daniels, February 25, 1921, in Carroll Kilpatrick, Roosevelt and Daniels: A Friendship in Politics 72–74 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952). The head of the French mission was former premier René Viviani, but it was Marshal Joffre who attracted the most attention.

  20. Love, History of the U.S. Navy 498–500.

  21. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 79–80 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.

  22. Quoted in Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 160–161. “Certainly my own interest in the project was due to [Roosevelt’s] enthusiasm and encouragement,” said Harris.

  23. Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After 83 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946).

  24. Wilson vented his displeasure to officers in the ward room of the Pennsylvania on August 11, 1917. “Every time we have suggested anything to the British Admiralty the reply has come back that it had never been done that way, and I felt like saying, ‘Well nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.’ ” Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 474.

  25. FDR, Memorandum on Submarine Situation, 1917, FDRL.

  26. The mines were laid by eight specially equipped vessels built with three decks to hold the mines and modified railroad tracks so that as the ships traveled at full speed the mines could be put on the rails and dropped at twelve-second intervals. Each mine contained 300 pounds of TNT and was fitted with an anchor and a buoy that deployed automatically when it hit the water. The mines were set at 300-foot intervals in three tiers, the first at 45 feet, the second at 160 feet, and the third at 240 feet. The barrier was many miles wide, requiring several hours for a submarine to traverse it. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 158–159. Also see Morison, Admiral Sims 414–417.

  27. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 158–159.

  28. Sims, Victory at Sea 308.

  29. Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: An Uneasy Alliance 45–46 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980).

  30. FDR to John J. Fitzgerald, September 3, 1915; Fitzgerald to FDR, September 8, 1915, FDRL.

  31. Frank Freidel, interview with John J. Fitzgerald, June 17, 1948, FDRL.

  32. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 193 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

  33. New York Tribune, February 11, 1918. For a contemporaneous report of the celebration, see The New York Times, July 5, 1917.

  34. James J. Walker to FDR, November 30, 1917, FDRL.

  35. New York Tribune, May 28, 1918.

  36. FDR to Fred J. Sisson, May 7, 1918. The letter contains the notation “unsent.” FDRL.

  37. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, June 18, 1918, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).

  38. FDR to Wilson, July 8, 1918. Also see FDR to John Mack, June 18, 1918, FDRL.

  39. With more than 2 million votes cast in the 1918 gubernatorial election, Smith defeated Whitman by fewer than 15,000 votes. Smith re
ceived 1,009,936 to Whitman’s 995,094. Charles W. Ervin, running on the Socialist ticket, received 121,705.

  40. Quoted in Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 165. “I feel confident that you would bring to the governorship not only an unsurpassed knowledge of the administration of State affairs, but a single-minded purpose to carry on these affairs for the liberal and progressive good of the State as a whole.” FDR to Al Smith, November 5, 1918. FDRL.

  41. Eleanor’s role as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I is described by Joseph P. Lash in Eleanor and Franklin 208–219 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) and in ER’s This Is My Story 250–263 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).

  42. ER to SDR, January 14, 1918; January 16, 1918, FDRL.

  43. ER to SDR, May 12, 1918.

  44. Maurice Low, Woodrow Wilson: An Interpretation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918). Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

  45. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 317 (New York: Viking, 1999). ER’s friendship with Baruch began when they sailed for Europe on the same ship in November 1918. Throughout the 1920s Baruch supported Eleanor’s concerns financially, and by the 1930s ER was referring to him as “one of the wisest and most generous people I have ever known.” Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 256 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).

  46. Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL, quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 251n.

  47. Thomas A. Krueger and William Glidden, “The New Deal Intellectual Elite,” in The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful 344, Fred Cople Jaher, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

  48. FDR to Philip Slomovitz, March 7, 1935, FDRL.

  49. The Comstock Act, passed by Congress on March 3, 1873, was primarily an anti-obscenity measure that closed the mails to “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” printed matter. It also made it a crime to disseminate information or devices relating to birth control. Its birth control provisions were challenged by Margaret Sanger following her arrest for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic in 1916 (People v. Sanger, 118 N.E. 637 [N.Y. 1918]), and was not completely overturned until United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries in 1936.