Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  Roosevelt’s progressivism seemed more procedural than reformist. He and his rural constituency displayed no interest in labor laws. Farmers, their wives, and their children worked from dawn to dusk at least six days a week; they saw no reason why factory workers should not do the same. Members of Roosevelt’s own class expected their employees to keep long hours. Tammany leaders generally thought of themselves as self-made men and understood that state agencies providing for the needs of the poor could displace them. Franklin Roosevelt nonetheless quietly voted for the fifty-four-hour workweek after Frances Perkins persuaded Tim Sullivan to push it through the legislature over Boss Murphy’s opposition.24

  Roosevelt continued to denounce Tammany in general and Boss Murphy in particular. He also spoke out in favor of the direct primary, conservation legislation, administrative efficiency, and ballot reform. Striking a pose against waste and excessive expenditures, he actually rejected public works appropriations for his district. He generally deferred to the moral conservatism of his constituents, voting, for example, against Sunday baseball games. Yet, probably because Theodore Roosevelt had raised the issue earlier, he sponsored a legislative resolution in favor of a federal divorce law that would soften the rigid New York rules.25

  His identity as a progressive increasingly clear, he groped toward an underlying philosophy. Speaking to the People’s Forum in Troy, New York, on March 3, 1912, he advocated “liberty of the community.” Drawing on ideas popularized by Theodore Roosevelt, the phrase pointed toward a cooperative regulatory society in which the rights and interests of the many would prevail over the greed and irresponsibility of the few. Liberty of the community would mean, among other things, strong conservation programs and popular control of irresponsible trusts and monopolies.26

  Theodore Roosevelt remained a decided influence; Woodrow Wilson drew increased interest. In the course of a year, Wilson had put an impressive reform program through the New Jersey legislature: direct primary election for all political party nominations, an anti–corrupt practices act, a public utility commission, and a workman’s compensation program. Near the end of 1911, Franklin went to Trenton and spent the better part of an afternoon with him. Reserved, austere, and dominating, the governor probably reminded the younger man of Endicott Peabody. Roosevelt returned to New York and pledged to support Wilson for the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination.27

  During the legislative session of 1912, Roosevelt fought hard, and with some success, for bills to protect fish and game from overhunting, to preserve clean water resources, and to save forests from clear-cutting. Here he was especially influenced by Gifford Pinchot, the great scientific conservationist and close adviser to Theodore Roosevelt. Slowly, he was also learning the necessity of compromise in legislative politics. To many working politicians, he remained a loose cannon. He preferred to think of himself as a high-minded independent.28

  When the 1912 legislative session ended at the end of April, Roosevelt’s political situation was at once enviable and tenuous. He was known throughout New York, in demand as a speaker, and a rising star in his party. He also had the active enmity of the state’s major Democratic machine, perceived a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the organization in his own district, and feared a serious attempt to deny him renomination.

  The times still favored the identity he had crafted. Nationally and at the state level, the Republican Party was fatally divided between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. TR was running hard for the Republican presidential nomination and a third term. His candidacy generated wide enthusiasm that was partly personal but also indicative of the growing support for progressivism and reform. The Republican split established a setting for a sweeping Democratic victory if the Democratic Party could produce a compelling progressive leader.

  Franklin Roosevelt became one of the most visible and vocal figures among a motley group of mainly upstate reform Democrats supporting Woodrow Wilson. Tammany controlled the Democratic state convention with an iron fist, froze out the reformers, and named a subservient delegation to the Democratic convention bound by the unit rule to vote unanimously for the candidate of the majority. The convention met in Baltimore on June 25. Roosevelt attended as a spectator, worked for Wilson, and promoted himself in the process. Among the leading politicos upon whom he left a lasting impression was the North Carolina progressive Josephus Daniels.

  Eleanor, still a novice at politics, watched the proceedings from the galleries with increasing incomprehension and outright moral indignation when backers of Wilson’s chief rival, Champ Clark of Missouri, marched with their candidate’s attractive daughter on their shoulders. After a few days, she and the children left for Campobello, wondering if Franklin would miss them.29

  Wilson came to the convention trailing Champ Clark, a shrewd Missouri congressman who represented a rural district near St. Louis and was adept at appealing to both farmers and urban politicians. When the Democrats had taken control of the House of Representatives in the election of 1910, they had named him Speaker. His folksy demeanor and personal background seemed to make him a natural successor to the party’s venerable leader and three-time candidate for president, William Jennings Bryan.

  Unlike Bryan, Clark presented a hazy ideological profile. He had vanquished Wilson in numerous midwestern presidential primaries and come to the convention as the leading candidate. But since Andrew Jackson’s nomination in 1832, Democratic presidential nominees had required a two-thirds majority at the national convention. Wilson’s cause was not hopeless. Roosevelt and many northeastern reformers saw him as far and away the party’s best choice. Wilson’s background—born in Virginia, raised in Georgia—also brought him strong support from the then solidly Democratic South.

  Boss Murphy instructed his delegation to vote for Clark. The ploy backfired badly. Bryan, never a friend of Tammany, denounced Clark as a tool of disreputable urban machines and Wall Street financiers. When Tammany staged a floor demonstration for Clark, Roosevelt and several dozen Wilsonians muscled in and seized the New York standard. As the convention deadlocked, Clark’s support ebbed. Wilson prevailed on the forty-sixth ballot. Elated, Franklin telegraphed Eleanor, “Wilson nominated this afternoon all my plans vague splendid triumph.”30

  The New York Wilsonians, Roosevelt prominent among the leadership, returned home to establish the Empire State Democracy, a progressive alternative to Tammany. The organizational meeting featured vituperative attacks on Boss Murphy and his minions and declared an intention to run a reform Democratic ticket in the fall.

  Insurgent politics, then as now, was a combustible blend of absolutist principle and ego-fed ambition. Cooler heads—among them Wilson’s closest New York backers—understood that a Democratic split would likely throw New York to Theodore Roosevelt, running as the candidate of the new Progressive Party. Recognizing the need for party solidarity, Franklin Roosevelt resigned from the Empire State Democracy, pleading his selection as a regular Democrat to the state convention. Several other notables did the same. Murphy pledged maximum support for the Wilson candidacy. The New York Democrats thereupon closed ranks in the common pursuit of victory. Roosevelt’s own move from hotheaded dissent to calibrated regularity signaled the lessons he had learned.31

  He had to work for his own reelection. In what was becoming a career pattern, the weeks-long summer vacation at Campobello dwindled to patches of days snatched here and there. His role as an insurgent had not gone down well with Democratic regulars in his district, especially those who expected the state senator to find them public jobs. He scoured the territory by automobile, making his case to good effect. Ed Perkins and other Poughkeepsie Democrats resented how he had damaged relations with Tammany, but in the end the district committee nominated him without opposition.32

  The race, he knew, would be hard, but the Republican split gave him a good chance. In mid-September, back in New York City, he and Eleanor came down with typhoid fever. She recovered rather quick
ly. He did not, although it was his second encounter with the dreaded disease (the first had come when he was seven, and it had taken him a long time to get better then). The infection lingered, leaving him run-down and feverish for weeks. It became clear that he would be unable to do much, if any, campaigning. Desperately, he looked for someone who could organize the effort and serve as a trusted advocate.

  During the insurgency, he had from time to time drawn on the advice of Louis McHenry Howe, a veteran journalist with long-standing ties to anti-Tammany Democrats. A shabby little man who eked out a living as a stringer for the New York Herald and other newspapers, Howe was eleven years older than Roosevelt. Shrewd and seemingly practical to the point of cynicism, he was by conviction an idealist who understood that a successful political career required programmatic compromise, organizational talent, and reliable funding. Slightly built with a face scarred by a childhood accident, asthmatic with a weak heart, and a chain-smoker invariably appearing to be in ill health, he seemed the stereotypical incarnation of an ink-stained wretch—or, as he became known, a “medieval gnome.” By conventional standards, he was a ne’er-do-well, hard-pressed to support his wife and daughter, and increasingly unable to spend much time with them. Eleanor at first found him impossibly off-putting; Franklin quickly came to see him as an indispensable adviser and political manager.33

  Appointed Roosevelt’s campaign manager at $50 a week plus expenses, Howe traveled the district, promising jobs to local influentials, buying advertisements in local newspapers, authoring letters to be sent with his candidate’s signature to constituent groups, and developing appeals to gain the crucial farm vote. Devoted to Roosevelt, he addressed his boss as “Beloved and Revered Future President.” On Election Day, the Beloved and Revered One defeated his Republican opponent 15,590 to 13,889, with 2,628 for the Progressive Party’s candidate. Although less than an absolute majority, the victory was nonetheless impressive.34

  The statewide and national results mirrored Roosevelt’s fortunes. Thanks to the Republican split, the Democrats swept New York. Woodrow Wilson took the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt finished second, and the hapless President Taft came in third. The Democrats won firm control of Congress. Franklin Roosevelt might go back to Albany for another term as an insecure state senator, or he could look to Washington.

  In January 1913, Franklin Roosevelt conferred with President-Elect Wilson and William Gibbs McAdoo, the prominent New York attorney, banker, and street railway manager whom Wilson already had designated as his Treasury secretary. Then, or perhaps later, they offered him a choice between two visible and powerful positions: assistant secretary of the Treasury or collector of the Port of New York. The Treasury post would have made him a key operative in the development of the most important financial legislation in American history, the Federal Reserve Act; the collector post would have placed under his control a huge mass of federal patronage jobs and given him the opportunity to build a strong personal political organization. Declining both, he returned to Albany, armed with a raft of bills designed to establish him as a zealous guardian of the interests of New York farmers. However, he almost certainly indicated to Wilson and McAdoo his interest in becoming assistant secretary of the navy, the department’s second-ranking civilian and chief operating officer.

  On the surface, Wilson took his time building a cabinet, and many backroom discussions likely preceded public announcements. His letter formally inviting Josephus Daniels of North Carolina to be his secretary of the navy was dated February 23; Daniels’s response was dated February 25. Inauguration Day arrived with no designee for assistant secretary. According to Daniels in his autobiography, he and Wilson had not discussed the post. Daniels had met Roosevelt at the Baltimore convention and found him engaging and impressive—it was “love at first sight,” he recalled. Another meeting in New York during the campaign reinforced the impression. There can be little doubt that Roosevelt got across his interest in naval affairs. They ran into each other again at the Willard Hotel in Washington just hours before Wilson was due to take the oath of office. Daniels got right to the point: “How would you like to come to Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy?” Roosevelt answered, as Daniels remembered, “How would I like it? I’d like it bully well. It would please me better than anything in the world.”35

  Franklin Roosevelt had come a very long way in a short time. He had made his share of blunders as a working politician, but they paled before his other, special qualities—good looks and a fine voice, energy, undeniable talent, and the appearance and presence of a leader. Washington would be a crucial test.

  Chapter 5

  Riding in Front

  Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913–1914

  After receiving President Woodrow Wilson’s assent to Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment as assistant secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels asked the New York senators for their support. James Aloysius O’Gorman delivered a chilly agreement. The other Empire State senator, Elihu Root, one of the nation’s most respected Republicans, had no objection, but he delivered a warning: “You know the Roosevelts, don’t you? Whenever a Roosevelt rides, he wishes to ride in front.” Daniels told his diary, “I listened and replied that any man who was afraid his assistant would supplant him thereby confessed that he did not think he was big enough for the job.”1

  Josephus Daniels had risen from humble beginnings to become one of the South’s leading Democrats and the publisher-editor of one of the region’s most influential newspapers. He knew that he had brought aboard an ambitious, first-rate young man of a wholly different background. He may not have realized how much of a handful he had taken on. Roosevelt certainly did not fully appreciate that he had come to work for a formidable and resourceful boss.

  Daniels and Roosevelt assumed office at a pivotal time in the history of the US Navy. Torpedo-armed submarines had just become a part of every national fleet. New dreadnought-type battleships powered by fast turbine engines and carrying large, accurate guns had relegated their predecessors to near obsolescence. The new technology required an ambitious and expensive building program in those nations that aspired to preeminence on the high seas. At the beginning of 1913, Britain, with twenty-six dreadnoughts, and Germany, with seventeen, were the world leaders. The US Navy had eight, Japan four. Each country had additional dreadnaughts under construction.2

  In Washington Franklin followed very much in the footsteps of Uncle Ted. He envisioned the United States becoming a global power with a naval reach beyond the Western Hemisphere. He had little concern about Britain, which had sought good relations with the United States for nearly two decades. By contrast, episodic tensions with Germany and Japan had created adversarial attitudes on both sides. Well read in naval affairs and international relations and convinced that the United States was destined for world leadership, the new assistant secretary was determined from the time he took office to push aggressively for a big navy.

  Roosevelt’s post was the culmination of a lifelong love of ships and the sea. He relished the formal ceremonies of boarding a vessel, receiving a seventeen-gun salute, and inspecting the crew. He was also an avid sailor, curious about whatever vessel he was on, far more knowledgeable than most civilian officials, and generally liked and admired by professional navy officers.3

  Josephus Daniels, twenty years older than Roosevelt and a head shorter, had come of age in hardscrabble post-Reconstruction North Carolina. Amiable in manner and appearance, he spoke with the accent of the upper South and dressed in a style his son would later describe as “slightly archaic.” A devout Methodist and ardent prohibitionist, he forbade the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the officers’ mess on naval vessels. Roosevelt recalled years later that his new chief initially struck him as “the funniest looking hillbilly” he had ever seen. Daniels was nonetheless tough and accustomed to command.4

  As editor and publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer, Daniels had aligned himsel
f with populist and progressive forces within the state, protesting the supposed depredations of railroads, bankers, and big corporations. But his progressivism was for whites only. Racism floated in the air he had breathed from childhood on, but his brand was relatively benign. In the world of the early twentieth century, most northern Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt included, did not object.

  Daniels’s political hero was William Jennings Bryan, the Nebraska populist-Democrat for whom the Roosevelt family had maximum low regard. A paladin of the outlook and values of rural America, Bryan combined a socially conscious Christian Protestant fundamentalism with advocacy of prohibition of alcoholic beverages and a fiery political radicalism. Attuned to the interests of rural debtors, he had long advocated a drastic monetary inflation. A few days short of his fifty-third birthday when he joined Wilson’s cabinet, he was rapidly balding and had developed a considerable paunch. Of average height, he somehow seemed taller and more imposing with his booming golden voice, carefully developed oratorical skills, and devotion to the needs of the common people.5

  In deference to Bryan’s preeminence within the Democratic Party, President Wilson had appointed him secretary of state, despite his lack of qualifications for the post. At heart, Bryan was an isolationist. Temperamentally a Christian pacifist, a critic of post–Spanish-American War imperialism, and an advocate of universal disarmament, he had no desire to see American military power and global influence expanded. Within the cabinet, he and Daniels constituted a two-man bloc at odds with Roosevelt’s most fundamental opinions about America’s mission in the world and the imperative of a strong military.