by FDR
12. Wilson, like Lloyd George, spoke only English. Perhaps because he had been the president of Princeton, conventional wisdom has considered Woodrow Wilson an intellectual. Professor Arthur Link, his biographer and the longtime editor of The Wilson Papers, disputes this. According to Link, Wilson “had little command of foreign languages and almost no interest in political developments abroad before he entered the White House; he was indifferent to the great scientific developments that were transforming the philosophy and technology of the age; he knew virtually nothing about serious art and music. His reading in the field of literature was desultory, spasmodic, and erratic.… Even in his own specialties of political science, constitutional law, and English and American history, Wilson was surprisingly poorly read.… His thinking was pragmatic rather than philosophical, he had little interest in pure speculation and … he was rarely an original thinker.”
John Maynard Keynes, who worked closely with Wilson and Lloyd George in Paris, decided the president was essentially a Nonconformist minister. “His thought and temperament essentially theological, not intellectual.” J. M. Keynes, “When the Big Four Met,” The New Republic, December 24, 1919. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House 62–63 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947).
13. Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919 54 (New York: Random House, 2001).
14. “The return of a Republican majority to either House of Congress,” said Wilson, “would certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” Quoted in Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him 331 (New York: Doubleday & Page, 1921), with a facsimile of the statement as typed by Wilson.
15. The Republicans gained 30 seats in the House and 7 in the Senate. As a result, they controlled the Sixty-sixth Congress, 240–190 in the House and 49–47 in the Senate.
16. In June 1915 Lodge delivered a commencement address at Union College endorsing a league of nations. See The New York Times, June 9, 1915. Later, on May 27, 1916, he told the League to Enforce Peace that George Washington’s warning against entangling alliances was never meant to exclude the United States from joining other nations in “a method … to diminish war and encourage peace.” Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People 881 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
17. In 1915 Taft, Root, and Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell organized the League to Enforce Peace. In May 1918 Taft, Lowell, and Hughes addressed the Win-the-War for Permanent Peace Convention in Philadelphia and spoke positively about a league of nations. Ibid. Also see The New York Times, November 11, 1917.
18. Colonel House likened the discussions in Paris to a meeting of the board of Aldermen in his home town of Austin, Texas. “There are the same jealousies, rivalries, and personal problems to be adjusted, and if you lost sight of the bigger issue at Paris I could almost think I was back in Austin debating which street should be paved first.” Quoted in Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After 533 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946).
19. Francesco Nitti, Rivelazioni: dramatis personae 95 (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiani, 1948).
20. Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt 424 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
21. Letter, Nigel Law to Jonathan Daniels, quoted in Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents 155 (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
22. ER to SDR, January 14, 1919, 2 Roosevelt Letters 361.
23. The term of the lame-duck Sixty-fifth Congress expired on March 3, 1919. The Republican-controlled Sixty-sixth Congress would not convene until May 19, 1919.
24. Robert Cecil, A Great Experiment: An Autobiography 59 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). The final draft of the covenant of the League of Nations, including textual recognition of the Monroe Doctrine, was approved by the peace conference on April 28, 1919.
25. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 289–290 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
26. Ibid.
27. Quoted in Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line 156 (New York: Funk and Wagnall’s, 1968). Also see Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After 256 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946); Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle 470 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946). This was one episode FDR did not have to embellish. According to a contemporaneous report in The Boston Traveler (February 24, 1919),
The weather was thick at the time and the President’s ship and her escort were running on dead reckoning.… When the wind shifted and the fog lifted, one of the officers perched on the upper deck sang out:
“Thatcher’s Island dead ahead.”
Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, who took the bridge immediately with Captain [Edward] McCauley, had yachted in the waters in which the Washington lay and gave it as his guess just before the fog lifted that the ship and her escort were in the vicinity of Marblehead. It turned out that the secretary was very nearly accurate in his guess.
28. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 436.
29. Daniels to FDR, March 13, 14, 1919, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
30. FDR to Daniels, April 3, 1919, ibid.
31. FDR to John McIlhenny, May 23, 1919, FDRL.
32. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 60 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
33. ER to SDR, June 3, 1919, FDRL.
34. FDR to ER, July 23, 1919, 2 Roosevelt Letters 381 (FDR’s emphasis). The riot, one of twenty-five that broke out in the nation that year, was triggered by rumors that a white woman, the wife of a naval officer, had been jostled by blacks. A mob of several hundred white servicemen, supported by an estimated thousand civilians, retaliated by rampaging through black neighborhoods, shooting into apartments, and beating up men and women encountered on the street. Blacks armed themselves and fought back. The Washington Herald subsequently declared the capital “the most lawless city in the Union.”
35. The tenor of hysteria is reflected in the numerous articles written during this period by the attorney general. One such appeared in The Forum in February 1920, in which Palmer warned of the dangers of the Red menace: “Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution” would devour “every American institution. It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking at the alter of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bells, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace the marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of our society.” A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” The Forum 19 (February 1920).
36. Morison, History of the American People 883.
37. The 1918 results from the Fifth Congressional District of Wisconsin show Berger, the Socialist candidate, with 17,920 votes; Joseph P. Carney, Democrat, 12,450; and William H. Stafford, Republican, 10,678. Following the refusal of the House to seat him, Berger was indicted in U.S. District Court for sedition, tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in prison by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1921, Berger v. United States, 255 U.S. 22, after which the government withdrew all charges. Berger stood for election to Congress again in 1922 as a Socialist and was overwhelmingly elected. This time he was seated, and he served in Congress from March 4, 1923 until his death in 1929. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, “The Socialist Party Convention,” in Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution 349–356 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
38. FDR to Rear Admiral Samuel S. Robinson, December 30, 1919, FDRL.
39. Paul Tuckerman to FDR, FDRL.
40. ER to Isabella Ferguson, September 16, 1919, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
41. Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living 29–30 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
42. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 257–258.
43. ER to SDR, October 28, 1919, FDRL.
; 44. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 304.
45. Albert Fried, ed., A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson 395 (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
46. To mock Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Lodge introduced fourteen reservations, the most serious of which merely reasserted the constitutional power of Congress to declare war. Later, in a bow to his Irish constituents in Massachusetts, Lodge added a fifteenth reservation urging the independence of Ireland. David Hunter Miller, legal adviser to the American delegation in Paris, noted that the reservations would have no effect upon the League’s structure or function and urged that they be accepted. The text of the Lodge reservations can be found in most diplomatic histories, e.g., Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States 653 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). The Hunter Miller comment is in Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson 284 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958). The best analysis of the Senate debate remains Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1945). Also see John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World 234 ff. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
47. Transcript, FDR to New York Bar Association, March 8, 1919, FDRL.
48. Transcript, FDR address at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, June 25, 1919, FDRL.
49. FDR speech in Atlantic City, June 21, 1919, in 2 Roosevelt Letters 379–380.
50. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 261; Ward, First-Class Temperament 482; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 591 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972).
51. FDR to Judge Henry M. Heymann, December 2, 1919, FDRL.
52. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 219 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
53. The Nineteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress on June 4, 1919, became part of the Constitution on August 18, 1920, when it was approved by Tennessee, the thirty-sixth state to do so. As for his support among women, Hoover was endorsed by such household staples as Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post as well as The New Republic, which called him a “Providential gift to the American people for the office of pilot during the treacherous navigation of the next few years.”
54. Louis B. Wehle, Hidden Threads of History: Wilson Through Roosevelt 81–82 (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
55. FDR to Hugh Gibson, January 2, 1920, FDRL.
56. Wehle, Hidden Threads of History 82.
57. Ibid.
58. ER to SDR, March 7, 1920, FDRL.
59. Herbert Hoover to Frank Freidel, October 11, 1951, quoted in Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 57 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
60. James K. Libbey, Dear Alben: Mr. Barkley of Kentucky 99 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1979).
61. Elliot A. Rosen, “Not Worth a Pitcher of Warm Piss,” in At the President’s Side: The Vice Presidency in the Twentieth Century, Timothy Walch, ed., 45 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997).
62. FDR’s friend Tom Lynch somehow got hold of the battered New York standard and in 1932 presented it, suitably inscribed, to FDR, who proudly hung it in his study at Hyde Park where it remains. Interview with John E. Mack, FDRL.
63. Edward George Hoffman, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention 140–141 (Indianapolis: Bookwalter, Ball, 1920).
64. Grenville Emmett to Langdon Marvin, July 8, 1920. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 27 (New York: Viking, 1946).
65. James Cox, Journey Through My Years 232 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946).
66. Ibid.
67. Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention 420–450.
68. Josephus Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War and After 554–555.
69. Lippmann to FDR, July 8, 1920; Hoover to FDR, July 13, 1920; Lane to FDR, July 15, 1920, FDRL.
70. “This is not goodbye,” Franklin wrote Daniels. “That will always be impossible after these years of the closest association. All my life I shall look back—not only to the work of the place—but mostly on the wonderful way in which you and I have gone through these nearly eight years together. You have taught me so wisely and kept my feet on the ground when I was about to skyrocket—and in it all there has never been a real dispute or antagonism or distrust.”
Daniels’s reply was equally heartfelt: “Love at first sight is rare with men, but sometimes I flatter myself in believing that I have some of woman’s intuition, and on the day the President asked me to become Secretary of the Navy I told my wife I would recommend your appointment as Assistant Secretary.… [W]ith mutual regard and mutual consecration, we have spent seven and a half years in the service of our country. We little thought then of the great responsibility we were assuming.… I always counted on your zeal, your enthusiasm, your devoted patriotism, and efficient and able service.… [W]e will be brothers in all things that make for the good of our country.” FDR to Daniels, August 6, 1920 (FDR’s emphasis); Daniels to FDR, August 7, 1920. 2 Roosevelt Letters 388–389.
71. Ibid. 402.
72. FDR speech at Waukegan, Illinois, August 12, 1920, FDRL.
73. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., joined the GOP attack. “Franklin is a maverick. He does not wear the brand of our family,” the president’s son told a band of former Rough Riders at Sheridan, Wyoming, September 16, 1920. The New York Times, September 19, 1920.
74. Quoted in Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 278.
75. Harold L. Ickes, 1 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 699 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).
76. Press releases, FDR addresses at Helena, Montana, and Butte, Montana, August 18, 1920. Stenographic transcript, speech at San Francisco, August 23, 1920, FDRL.
77. The New York Times, August 19, 1920. Harding added that this was “the first official admission of the rape of Haiti and Santo Domingo by the present Administration. To my mind, moreover, it is the most shocking assertion that ever emanated from a responsible member of the government of the United States.” Ibid., September 18, 1920.
78. Ibid., September 3, 1920; New York Telegraph, August 28, 1920.
79. Cox and Roosevelt received 781,238 votes in New York to Harding’s 1,871,167. By contrast, and thanks to Tammany’s efforts in New York City, Al Smith polled 1,261,812 versus 1,335,878 for his Republican opponent. The Democratic national ticket did even worse in California (24.3%), Illinois (25.5%), Iowa (25.5%), Minnesota (19.4%), North Dakota (18.3%), South Dakota (19.8%) Washington (21.1%), and Wisconsin (16.2%). Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 286 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1975).
80. Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
81. “It’s becoming almost impossible to stop F. when he begins to speak,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “Ten minutes is always 20, 30 is always 45, and the evening speeches are now about 2 hours! The men all get out and wave at him and when nothing succeeds I yank his coat tails! Everyone is getting tired but on the whole the car is still pretty good natured.” ER to SDR, October 19, 1920, FDRL.
82. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 110.
83. Ibid., 109–110.
84. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 285.
85. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 258.
86. FDR to Cox, November 6, 1920; FDR to Mathew Hale, November 6, 1920; FDR to Willard Saulsbury, December 9, 1920; FDR to Early, December 21, 1920. FDRL. In 1933 Roosevelt appointed Cox a delegate to the World Monetary Conference in London. Thereafter he offered him various government appointments, all of which Cox graciously declined.
87. ER to FDR, April 11, 1921, FDRL.
TEN | Polio
The epigraph is from the “Character of the Happy Warrior” written by William Wordsworth in 1806. Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes (1807): A Facsimile (London: British Library, 1984).
1. Missy to ER, August 5, 1921, quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 267 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
2. SDR to ER, July 20, 1921, FDRL. Franklin and Elea
nor were appalled when they learned of Sara’s flight. “Don’t do it again,” FDR cabled. But Rosy and his wife were delighted. “We put her up to it before she left,” he wrote. “I knew Franklin would have a fit!! I think it a splendid thing for her to have done and will make her feel years younger.” James Roosevelt Roosevelt Papers, FDRL.
3. Quoted in Earle Looker, This Man Roosevelt 111 (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Anna Roosevelt, “How Polio Helped Father,” Woman 54 (July 1949); Ross T. McIntire, White House Physician 31 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946).
7. John Stuart Martin, “When the President Disappeared,” American Heritage (October 1957). For Dr. Keen’s account, see W. W. Keen, The Surgical Operations on President Cleveland in 1893 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1928).
8. ER to James Roosevelt Roosevelt, August 14, 1921, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 412–413, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
9. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 328–329 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
10. ER to James Roosevelt Roosevelt, August 18, 1921, 2 Roosevelt Letters 413–414.
11. Dr. William W. Keen to ER, August 26, 1921, FDRL.
12. Frederic A. Delano to ER, August 20, 1921, FDRL.
13. Dr. Lovett’s groundbreaking study, The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis, was published in Philadelphia in 1916 by Blakiston. For the history of polio in the United States, and the cure inspired by FDR, see David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
14. ER to James Roosevelt Roosevelt, August 23, 1921, 2 Roosevelt Letters 414–415 (ER’s emphasis).
15. Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 590 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
