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

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  His duties brought him into close contact for the first time in his career with a working-class constituency that was usually Democratic in local elections but less so at the national level. Put off by the populist inflationary policies and rural ethos of William Jennings Bryan, workers had found the patrician conservatism of Grover Cleveland Democrats such as James Roosevelt equally repellant. At the turn of the twentieth century, Republicans persuasively marketed themselves as the party of prosperity, a sound dollar, stable prices, and, especially under Theodore Roosevelt, a “square deal” for the working man.

  Franklin Roosevelt’s experience with labor unions and the skilled and semiskilled workers who constituted most of their membership was scant. Louis Howe understood their importance and provided a lot of guidance. Roosevelt picked up the lessons quickly, speaking with groups of workers and conferring with union leaders, who protested irregular work schedules and work “speed-ups” by navy bosses who invoked the principles of efficiency expert Frederick Taylor. Roosevelt renounced “Taylorism” and typically met labor demands halfway. The union bosses usually settled for that, valued their relations with the assistant secretary, and broadcast their successes to the membership. Roosevelt could present himself as following in the tradition of his famous cousin, working for the welfare of all and sympathetic to the legitimate needs of workers. He could boast of few major work stoppages on a watch of more than seven years.26

  To his newfound affinity with labor, Roosevelt added an adversarial attitude toward “the trusts” with which the navy did business. Political progressivism, whether rural-populist or urban-middle-class in its origins, had long condemned huge corporations as killers of opportunity for individual enterprisers, oppressors of workers or farmers, and monopolistic price fixers. Theodore Roosevelt had condemned them as “malefactors of great wealth.” In their attitudes toward big business, Franklin Roosevelt and Daniels agreed. They discovered, however, that low bids were not necessarily the best bids and that fighting even blatant price fixing by resorting to foreign suppliers was both politically and practically problematic.27

  As a first-rank industrial power, the United States supplied arms to other nations. One of these was Argentina, a potential great power in the early years of the twentieth century and an aspirant to naval hegemony in the South Atlantic. In 1909, Bethlehem Steel had secured a contract to build two dreadnoughts for the Argentines. At the beginning of 1915, the first, the Moreno, had been completed, but the builder, a Bethlehem subsidiary, demanded payment of $3 million beyond the contract price of $12 million for unforeseen work and expenses. By mid-February, a thousand Argentine sailors were quartered at the US government’s Philadelphia shipyard, waiting to take possession. At the request of the Argentine ambassador, Secretary Daniels sent Roosevelt to settle the controversy.28

  Roosevelt found himself dealing primarily with Charles Schwab, the great captain of industry who had founded Bethlehem Steel. Tactfully but forcefully, he left no doubt of who possessed overriding authority. He told Schwab that the government, having taken “such an active part in obtaining the contracts,” had a strong interest in a timely delivery to Argentina. He also suggested that Bethlehem had an equally strong incentive: “It is probably no secret to you that the Argentine Government has been thoroughly dissatisfied over the seizure of a number of its ships and munitions of war being constructed in Europe at the time of the outbreak of war last Summer, and if the Argentine Government can be made to feel secure in this country I have no doubt that there will be many opportunities given us for increased business.” Within days, the dreadnought was floated from its Camden berth and turned over to the Argentine crew.29

  Daniels, congenitally suspicious of large corporations, strongly favored taking as much business as possible away from big interests and doing naval construction in government shipyards. Roosevelt was far more equivocal and, as his letter to Schwab demonstrated, open to the idea that government and big business could enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. He thereby followed the example of TR, who believed that the trusts required regulation for the common good but were nonetheless examples of productive efficiency. Interested in a strong US Navy above all, Franklin Roosevelt wanted the service to have some manufacturing capacity, which could be expanded in time of war, but he equally desired a strong private shipbuilding industry. Appreciating the huge overhead costs of heavy manufacturing, he also thought it useful to have a measure of the “actual cost of manufacture” against which to assess the pricing practices of private enterprise. In the much different context of electricity production twenty years later, he would speak of the need for a “yardstick.”30

  The move to Washington had not lessened Roosevelt’s New York political ambitions. He stayed with his game plan of gaining Washington experience, then running for a major elective office in his home state. Largely successful in establishing himself as a strong and effective assistant secretary of the navy, he remained a significant presence in the New York reform Democratic movement. With Theodore Roosevelt’s example in mind, he was palpably impatient for a shot at statewide elective office, but he faced a complex and difficult environment.

  In the 1912 elections, Democrat William Sulzer, an erratic, Tammany-backed “populist,” had won the governorship largely because the Progressive Party had split the Republican vote. Having broken with the machine and failed to get backing from reformers, Sulzer was impeached and ousted from office. His successor, Martin H. Glynn, possessed little popular appeal. By early 1914, the tide of opinion in the state strongly favored the Republicans.

  Roosevelt impulsively threw himself into this unpromising political situation. The governor’s office seems to have interested him at first, and some reform Democrats promoted him for it, but President Wilson shied away from an open endorsement and patronage backing. By midyear, Franklin had decided to try for the US Senate seat being vacated by Elihu Root. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, required popular election of US senators, and New York had adopted primary elections for party nominations. He would be able to make full use of his campaigning skills.31

  Initially hoping for a Democrat-Progressive coalition, he told Eleanor, “I might declare myself a candidate for U. S. Senator in the Democratic and Progressive Primaries.” TR, determined to take one last shot at establishing his new party as a stand-alone force, gave him no encouragement. Josephus Daniels told him flatly that he probably could not win the Democratic primary and, if he did, would likely lose in the general election. Nonetheless, Franklin entered the Democratic primary, scheduled for September 28. New York, he said, would have to decide whether the state would be “on the side of reactionary politics and politicians, or on the side of intelligent progress and honest administration of government.”32

  Roosevelt no doubt hoped that Tammany would run a machine hack against him or perhaps put up no candidate at all. But, as O’Gorman had demonstrated, the organization had respectable friends. On September 7, Tammany announced its candidate, James W. Gerard, a much esteemed attorney and jurist who was US ambassador to Germany.

  Citing the diplomatic urgencies of the full-scale European war that had just broken out in August, Gerard stayed in Berlin. Roosevelt, who also faced considerable official responsibilities, spent two and a half weeks barnstorming through upstate New York. He got no encouragement from President Wilson, who remained concerned with party unity. Pressed to define just what kind of a Democrat he was, Roosevelt tried once again to plant a foot in both camps: “I am a regular organization Democrat of Dutchess County, a New York State Democrat and a National Democrat. I am not an anti-Tammany Democrat, but, in this campaign, as in many others, I have taken a consistent position against the control of the Democracy of this State by Charles Francis Murphy, believing that he is a handicap to our Democracy.”33

  On Election Day, 1914, the voters chose Gerard 210,765 to 76,888. Roosevelt could only pretend he had made an important point, swallow hard, smile,
and give the winning ticket his wholehearted endorsement. In November, Republicans swept the statewide races. TR’s efforts notwithstanding, the Progressive Party vote was insignificant. Henceforth, Franklin Roosevelt would avoid open jousting with Tammany, which had proven itself an indispensable reservoir of Democratic votes.

  Tammany itself had begun to move toward alliances with reformers on social welfare legislation. Murphy empowered progressive-inclined Tammany loyalists such as Al Smith and Robert Wagner to join social reformers in a common cause. Roosevelt got with the program. In 1915, he delivered a florid endorsement of Smith’s candidacy for sheriff of New York County (Manhattan). The following year, he facilitated an offer of the city’s postmastership to Wagner, who declined it to pursue, and win, a seat on the state supreme court. By 1917, Franklin Roosevelt was keynote speaker at Tammany’s annual July Fourth celebration.34

  The 1914 debacle may have convinced Roosevelt that progressives would have to develop a power base within one of the established parties. He quite probably also grasped that a progressive-dominated party needed the votes of urban workers, and Tammany and other big-city machines were vehicles for delivering them. But the content of his own progressivism remained hazy.

  The Wilson administration had accomplished great things: a general lowering of the protective tariff, an income tax, the Federal Reserve System, a major strengthening of the antitrust laws, and an agricultural extension service to provide assistance to farmers. More would come in 1916, with the appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, outright farm subsidies, a workman’s compensation program for federal employees, an eight-hour day for railway employees, and a federal anti-child-labor law. Roosevelt supported all these measures. But he engaged with none of them.

  He remained in Washington, with the navy as his primary, increasingly important responsibility. The vast war on the European continent would quickly spill over into the high seas, consume most of his attention, and provide him with new causes.

  Chapter 6

  Armageddon

  The Great War, 1914–1919

  Franklin Roosevelt’s political career had begun against what seemed a remote international background of great-power tension. The European order unwound rapidly and catastrophically in the summer of 1914 following the assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serbian extremist. After a month of diplomatic maneuvering, ultimatums, and counter-ultimatums, most of Europe was at war, with a Central Power alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary poised against Serbia, Belgium, France, Britain, and Russia. Turkey would quickly join the Central Powers. Japan would declare war against Germany with an eye to acquiring German concessions in China. So, eventually, would Italy, with its interest in acquiring the Austrian Tyrol. In the beginning, few imagined the catastrophic four-year bloodletting that lay ahead.

  Roosevelt was one of them.

  As was customary, Eleanor had taken the children to Campobello—both parents feared the summer infantile paralysis epidemics that ravaged large American cities. Franklin, managing a wide range of routine business while keeping a watchful eye on the chaotic Mexican Revolution, spent a few days with his family toward the end of July. On July 28, he got the news that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. On July 31, he delivered a speech in Reading, Pennsylvania. On August 1, returning directly to Washington by train, he penned a brief note to Eleanor, predicting “the greatest war in the world’s history.”1

  The following day, he wrote at greater length, betraying impatience and perhaps arrogance, but also displaying keen insight into the threat the European war posed to American interests and prescience about the future. He had found the Navy Department “asleep and apparently utterly oblivious to the fact that the most terrible drama in history was about to be enacted.” Secretary Josephus Daniels felt “chiefly very sad that his faith in human nature and civilization and similar idealistic nonsense was receiving such a rude shock.” Daniels and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, he thought, were under the delusion that the country could declare neutrality and pursue business as usual, with no understanding that the war would inevitably “give rise to a hundred different complications in which we shall have a direct interest.” It was critical to concentrate the navy’s fighting power and have it ready for use. He rejected predictions that the war would end soon because the bankers on both sides would refuse to finance it. “Money in spite of what the bankers say is not an essential to the conduct of war by a determined nation.” He could not resist a final thought that reflected both his personal sentiment and a sense that the war would be fought to a finish: “Rather than long drawn-out struggle I hope England will join in and with France and Russia force peace at Berlin!”2

  Roosevelt’s attitude was out of step with the dominant strain of progressivism in the Democratic Party. Bryan and Daniels, representing the mostly rural South and West, were neutralist-pacifist and quasi-isolationist in their worldviews. The big-city Democrats, mostly led by predominantly Irish and viscerally anti-British machine bosses, provided no strong counterpoint.

  Franklin, by training and background, was far more in tune with Uncle Ted’s sense of the United States’ unavoidable involvement in world politics. Both men were receptive to an alliance with the world’s other great English-speaking nation, Great Britain. Theirs was in many ways a conservative viewpoint with a dark view of human nature, accepting conflict as inevitable in the affairs of nations. Franklin’s outlook stemmed not just from the influence of TR but also from the beliefs of his father and mother, the Calvinist values that remained a presence in his family, and the preaching of Reverend Endicott Peabody.

  Though pro-British in sentiment, President Woodrow Wilson reacted immediately by proclaiming neutrality. War on the European continent posed no obvious threat to American interests. Moreover, the polyglot ethnicity of America’s population discouraged taking sides. The president urged Americans to remain neutral in thought as well as in deed.

  Roosevelt made no attempt to do so, but he largely kept his preference to himself. Instead, for the next two and a half years he made himself the point man within the administration for naval expansion and preparedness. The endeavor brought him to cross-purposes with Daniels. He walked a fine line, maintaining his good personal relationship with the secretary while pulling the United States toward an unfamiliar and hitherto unwanted level of naval power. Seizing every opportunity, he conveyed one basic message: the American navy was too small and weak to defend the national interest against the world’s major powers and required a drastic enlargement. Without openly criticizing Wilson or Daniels, he managed the task with a sustained barrage of statements, congressional testimony, and public speeches.

  He sent a copy of one statement to Eleanor: “The enclosed is true and even if it gets me into trouble I am perfectly ready to stand by it. The country needs the truth about the Army and Navy instead of the soft mush about everlasting peace which so many statesmen are handing out to a gullible public.” The navy, he asserted, although it had the full strength in personnel authorized by Congress, was 18,000 men short of being able to staff all its ships. Of the service’s thirty-three first- and second-line battleships, only twenty-one could actually be deployed. Two more first-line battleships under construction would require an additional 1,000 men each. He proposed the establishment of a 50,000-man naval reserve force.3

  Speaking to the prestigious National Civic Federation in December, he asserted, “We must have warships, and the phrase ‘the control of the sea’ represents what must be accomplished by a people who would hold their own against an enemy.” The Civic Federation adopted a resolution supporting the establishment of a Council of National Defense.4

  Testifying before the House Naval Affairs Committee a week and a half later, he reiterated the need for a major naval expansion, impressing many of his listeners with his grasp of the elements of naval power. His strongest congressional sup
porter was his friend Republican representative Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts, a son-in-law of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and longtime gadfly to both parties on defense issues. From time to time, Roosevelt supplied Gardner with information on the navy’s weaknesses. Employing a take-no-prisoners style of rhetoric, Gardner regularly pilloried President Wilson while singling out Roosevelt for extravagant praise.5

  For the next two years, Roosevelt strongly advocated a big navy before groups such as the Navy League. On one such occasion, the crowd erupted into hisses at the mention of Daniels’s name. The fault, he argued, lay not with the administration but with a pacifistic and tight-fisted Capitol Hill. Moreover, he consistently asserted, ship for ship and man for man, the US Navy ranked with the world’s best; the problem was quantity, not quality. Rhetoric of this sort allowed him to stay on good terms with Daniels while disputing his chief’s policies.6

  During much of the first year of the war, the United States found itself at odds more with Britain than with Germany. The British navy ruled the Atlantic, seizing German flag vessels and searching neutral ships carrying goods to the Reich. Employing a steadily expanding definition of “contraband,” the British confiscated cargoes from many American freighters and effectively cut off German-American commerce. The Wilson administration protested the British blockade but did not see it as a cause for war.7

  In early 1915, Germany played its only strong naval card—the submarine. Declaring the seas around the British Isles a war zone, the Reich warned that the German navy reserved the right to torpedo any ship flying an enemy flag within the war zone and stated that, given the possibility of misuse of neutral flags, it could not guarantee the safety of any vessel. President Wilson, working with State Department counselor Robert Lansing, responded with a sharp note that Bryan signed reluctantly and Roosevelt must have silently applauded. It demanded observance of neutral rights and promised to hold Germany to “strict accountability.”