The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  All of the Roosevelts sided with England and her allies from the moment the first gun was fired. “Even I long to go over into the thick of it and right the wrong,” Franklin told an old British friend. “England’s course has been magnificent—Oh, if that German fleet would only come out and fight!” But as an official in the Wilson administration, Franklin had to keep such thoughts to himself.

  Theodore Roosevelt did not. “More and more,” he wrote, “I come to the view that in a really tremendous world struggle, with a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.”

  German troops march into Brussels, August 20, 1914. “The infantry marched singing, with their iron-shod boots beating out the time,” an American witness wrote. “At times two thousand men were singing together in absolute rhythm and beat. It was like the blows from giant pile-drivers.”

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  Theodore Roosevelt broods on a beach within the Breton National Wildlife Refuge off the coast of Louisiana, set aside by him while president. Now, convinced that the United States must enter the war just beginning in Europe, he remained a private citizen, powerless to act.

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  Fifth Cousin by Blood, and Nephew by Law!

  In the spring of 1915, as the war intensified, Theodore Roosevelt found himself in a Syracuse courtroom—on trial for libel. In a recent speech, he’d said that when it came down to a struggle between “popular rights and corrupt and machine-ruled government,” the interests of the Republican and Democratic bosses of New York were “fundamentally identical.”

  The Republican boss, William Barnes, immediately sued Roosevelt for libel. TR cast about among old friends and allies for those willing to testify to the truth of his charge. Most backed away, unwilling to risk the wrath of one boss or the other.

  Franklin was different. During the 1911 state senate battle over Billy Sheehan, he’d seen collusion between the bosses of both parties firsthand and was more than willing to say so in court on behalf of the man who continued to be his hero. When a lawyer asked Franklin what relation he was to the former president, he grinned. “Fifth cousin by blood,” he said proudly, “and nephew by law!” “I shall never forget the capital way in which you gave your testimony,” the ex-president told Franklin afterward.

  The trial continued, and Theodore Roosevelt was asleep in his Syracuse hotel room on the night of May 7th when the telephone rang. A newspaperman was calling. A German submarine had sunk the British passenger ship Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. More than 1,100 men, women, and children had drowned, including 128 American citizens. Did Roosevelt have a comment? Two German Americans sat on the jury that would decide Roosevelt’s fate. But he could not keep from speaking out. “This represents not merely piracy,” he told the reporter, “but piracy on a vaster scale of murder than the old-time pirates ever practiced.… It seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.”

  It took the jurors two days, but in the end all twelve exonerated Roosevelt—who went right back on the attack.

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Two views of the defendant in the courtroom: Roosevelt was such a voluble, intimidating witness in his own defense that the plaintiff’s lawyer begged the judge to make the ex-president “confine himself to words and not answer with his whole body”—to stop treating him like a “mass meeting.”

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  Leaving the courthouse, Roosevelt tips his hat to the well-wishers who gathered outside every day to get a glimpse of him.

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  Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt make their way to the Syracuse courthouse, the only known photograph of FDR in close proximity to the man he most admired on earth. The man between them is one of TR’s attorneys, William H. Van Benschoten.

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  “Enlist,” a poster published by the interventionist Boston Committee of Public Safety, shortly after the Germans sank the Lusitania with hundreds of civilians aboard

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  The Visitor

  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had houses in New York City and Washington, D.C., and on Campobello Island. But for their four children—Anna, James, Elliott, and the second Franklin Jr.—it was Springwood, their grandmother’s house at Hyde Park, that provided sanctuary from their parents’ increasingly turbulent world. “Hyde Park was very definitely my most favorite place in life,” Anna recalled. “Hyde Park was home and the only place I ever thought was completely home.”

  In 1915, Sara Delano Roosevelt greatly expanded Springwood to accommodate her growing family and the nurses and maids that traveled with them. The house now included so many bedrooms she sometimes called it “our hotel.” The renovated first floor, modeled after the country houses of the Roosevelts’ aristocratic friends in England, was meant to be a showcase for her son and his collections: his stuffed birds; his naval prints and books; his albums filled with stamps.

  When he was there, Franklin acted just as his own father had: he rode with his children, swam and sledded, and took them iceboating on the Hudson.

  But his visits with the family were always brief. “I do so wish the holiday had been longer and less interrupted while it lasted,” he once wrote Eleanor. “I felt Tuesday as if I was really getting back to earth again—and I know it is hard for us both to lead this kind of life—but it is a little like a drug habit—almost impossible to stop.”

  Eleanor liked the new Springwood at first. It was “very home-like and for the chicks,” she told a friend, “… ideal.” But it remained her mother-in-law’s home, she remembered many years later, and “I was only a visitor.”

  Sara ran everything. She called her grandchildren “our children.” She weighed them, dressed them, saw to their manners, showered them with gifts, and offered what Anna remembered as “consistent, warm, spontaneous love”—the kind of love Eleanor had never known when she was a girl and now found hard to provide to her own children. “Up to a point,” she once wrote, “it is good for us to know that there are people in the world who will give us love and unquestioned loyalty.… I doubt, however, if it is good for us to feel assured of this devotion without the accompanying obligation of having to justify this devotion by our behavior.”

  Sara had firm views about her daughter-in-law, as well. “If you’d just run your comb through your hair, dear,” she once told Eleanor in front of dinner guests, “you’d look so much nicer.”

  On March 11, 1916, Eleanor gave birth to John Aspinwall Roosevelt. She had now borne six children, five of whom had lived. There would be no more. She was thirty-one years old. The decade during which, she said, “I was always just getting over a baby or about to have another” was over. She was ready to resume a life of her own, to find a new kind of fulfillment, on her own terms.

  Eleanor Roosevelt at Springwood, photographed by her daughter, Anna. “It was my husband’s home and my children had a sense that it was their home,” Eleanor remembered. “But for me … it was not home.”

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  Springwood rebuilt, photographed by Margaret Bourke-White. The expansion of the Roosevelt home to better suit a rising statesman was planned by Franklin and his mother: “Do not speak of it to Eleanor,” Sara told her son while plans were being drawn up. “It is too uncertain and I want to surprise her if I do it.”

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  Sara ran her household from the claustrophobic parlor she called her “snuggery.” She could see who was coming and going from here, gave instructions to her servants, and received morning visits from her grandchildren.

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  On the Springwood terrace. Sara puts a protective arm around her grandson Franklin Jr., 1917. “We quickly learned,” James recalled, “that the best way to circumvent ‘Pa and Mummy’ was to appeal to Granny.” When their parents objected, Eleanor recalled, “she looked at u
s quite blandly and said she hadn’t realized we disapproved. She never heard anything she did not want to hear.”

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  Anna and James attend a suitably decorous tea party on their grandmother’s lawn.

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  John and Franklin Jr. with their harvest. “Granny’s idea of teaching … self-sufficiency,” James remembered, “was to provide the land, the seeds … and lots of advice, then purchase my crop at prices 50 percent above market value.” When FDR gently objected that 150 percent of parity seemed unrealistically high, his mother looked hurt and said that surely “dear James should be encouraged in his display of initiative.”

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  Roosevelt children in their grandmother’s rose garden

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  The Cry of a Broken Heart

  Theodore Roosevelt hoped somehow to obtain both the Progressive and the Republican presidential nominations in 1916. But the Old Guard of his old party had not forgiven him for 1912. And, while most Americans sympathized with Britain and France, they still remained reluctant to get involved in a far-off war.

  The Republicans chose instead the austere, mildly progressive Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Roosevelt privately called him “the bearded lady.” But the next day, when Roosevelt’s name was placed in nomination at the Progressive Party convention, he sent a telegram from Sagamore Hill declining the honor and urging his followers to abandon their new party and vote Republican.

  The delegates were stunned. When the telegram was read, William Allen White recalled, “for a moment there was silence. Then there was a roar of rage. It was the cry of a broken heart such as no convention ever had uttered in this land before.… I had tears in my eyes.… I saw hundreds of men tear the Roosevelt picture or the Roosevelt badge from their coats, and throw it on the floor.”

  In November, Wilson would win a narrow victory on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” “We are passing through a streak of yellow in our national life,” Roosevelt told his sister. The Progressive Party disintegrated without its hero. Some members returned to the Republicans; some became Democrats. A number of the social and economic reforms Roosevelt and the Progressives had championed had already become law thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s shrewd political skills: a new antitrust statute, workmen’s compensation, a ban on most child labor, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Trade Commission.

  But making a reality of other planks in the old Progressive platform would have to wait for another time—and another Roosevelt.

  Men and boys march from Oyster Bay to Sagamore Hill, part of a parade of some three thousand self-proclaimed “pilgrims” intent on persuading TR to run again for president in 1916.

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  A Democratic cartoonist depicts Roosevelt as a militaristic flying machine about to swoop down on the White House.

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  McKee Barclay, cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun, captures the bitterness Progressives felt when Roosevelt declined their presidential nomination and openly supported the Republicans who had scorned him four years earlier. “Around me,” Oswald Garrison Villard wrote from the Progressive convention, “men of the frontier type could not keep back their tears at this self-revelation of their idol’s selfishness, the smashing of their illusions about their peerless leader.”

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  A Very Exclusive War

  Even the sinking of the Lusitania had not persuaded Wilson that entry into the war was inevitable. “There is such a thing as being too proud to fight,” he had declared, and then had engaged Germany in a long exchange of diplomatic messages that had further infuriated Theodore Roosevelt.

  But the president had also agreed to double the defense budget in the interest of what he now called “preparedness.” Theodore Roosevelt called it “half-preparedness.”

  Meanwhile, Franklin organized a fifty-thousand-man Naval Reserve, relentlessly drove shipyards to greater efforts, laid the keels of new battleships, complained again and again about Secretary Daniels being “too damned slow for words”—and surreptitiously slipped damaging information about his boss and the administration’s defense efforts to the ranking Republican on the House Military Affairs Committee. If the public ever turned on the administration for having been too slow in preparing for war, Franklin was determined that he would not be blamed. And he shared his cousin Theodore’s conviction that the United States not only would, but should, get into the war.

  By early 1917, the battle lines had been frozen for nearly three years, along a line that stretched 450 miles from Belgium to Switzerland. In an attempt to strangle British supply lines and break the deadlock, Germany began waging unrestricted submarine warfare on all vessels, including American merchant ships.

  Wilson severed relations with Germany. Then, an intercepted German telegram to the Mexican president promised that in exchange for help in the event of war with the United States, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico would be returned to Mexico. Wilson still seemed reluctant to take further action. “My God, why doesn’t he do something?” Theodore Roosevelt said. “If he does not go to war with Germany [now] I shall skin him alive.”

  On March 18, the Germans torpedoed three American merchant ships. Wilson polled his cabinet as to what he should do. All ten members voted for war. Josephus Daniels cast his vote with tears in his eyes.

  On the evening of April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson finally asked Congress for a declaration of war. “It is a fearful thing to lead this most peaceful people, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars.… But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts.”

  Franklin sat next to Secretary Daniels on the House floor. Eleanor was in the gallery, listening “breathlessly,” she remembered, and then “returned home still half-dazed by the sense of impending change.”

  Franklin, eager to do his part and mindful always of TR’s example, volunteered to serve overseas. President Wilson told him to stay where he was. “Neither you nor I nor Franklin Roosevelt,” Wilson told Josephus Daniels, “has the right to select the place of service to which our country has assigned us.”

  A few days later, Theodore Roosevelt called at the White House to see Wilson and to try—like Franklin—to get into the war. The Allies were desperate, he said. It would take time to build and train an American army. He was sure he could raise a division of volunteers virtually overnight, just as he had during the Spanish-American War, then lead it into battle and inspire the Allies to hold on. All his previous criticism was now “dust in a windy street,” he assured Wilson. All he wanted to do was help. Wilson was kind but noncommittal. “He is a great big boy,” Wilson told an aide after Roosevelt had left. “There is a sweetness about him.… You can’t resist the man.” But he had the secretary of war formally turn him down. Theodore Roosevelt was half blind, in bad health, out of touch with military developments—and an amateur. “The business now at hand,” Wilson said later, “is undramatic, practical and of scientific definitiveness and precision.”

  Roosevelt was deeply wounded. “This is a very exclusive war,” he told a friend, “and I have been blackballed by the committee on admissions.”

  A French soldier hit at Verdun, one of nearly 100,000 casualties suffered during the ten-month battle

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  At Plattsburgh on the shore of Lake Champlain, the Colonel preaches his brand of militant preparedness to hundreds of well-to-do young men—college students, businessmen, his own son, Ted Jr., and his son-in-law Richard Derby—who, at their own expense, underwent officer training in readiness for American intervention in the Great War.

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  FDR and Rear Admiral William S. Sims, American naval liaison with the British Admiralty. Sims had once been Theodore Roosevelt’s naval aide and shared his former chief’s scorn for Secretary Daniels and President Wilson. Franklin agreed with both Sims and TR that the administration he served was arm
ing far too slowly.

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  Reporters surround Theodore Roosevelt at the White House after he offered his service as a soldier to Wilson. “The president received me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,” TR told them. He was sure Wilson would come to a decision “in his own good time.” He did, and the answer was no.

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  Flanked by civilians and Boy Scouts, Theodore Roosevelt signs a pledge to buy war bonds at a Manhattan rally, 1918. After Wilson rejected his offer to command troops in Europe he volunteered to fight for France or Britain. They turned him down, too. “I need not grumble about fate,” he told his son Ted. “I had my day, and it was a good day.”

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  You Must Do What You Think You Cannot Do

  The war was my emancipation and education,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “Instead of making [social] calls, I found myself spending three days a week in a canteen down at the railroad yards, one afternoon a week, distributing free work for the Navy League, two days a week, visiting the naval hospital, and contributing whatever time I had left to the Navy Red Cross and the Navy Relief Society. I loved it. I simply ate it up.”

  The war liberated all of what Eleanor called her “executive ability.” In order to undertake the war work that consumed her, she had to organize her busy household to function without her. She often rose at five in the morning and spent twelve hours without a break at the Union Station Red Cross canteen making coffee and jam sandwiches for the doughboys passing through. “Sometimes I wondered if I could live that way another day,” she wrote. “Strength came, however, with the thought of Europe and a little sleep, … you could always begin a new day.”