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

by Alonzo L. Hamby

  There was talk of divorce—how serious and whether first broached by Franklin or Eleanor is uncertain. Lucy Mercer, a devout Catholic at a time when the church did not recognize marriages to divorcées, probably never could have married Franklin. But Sara surely would have been less concerned with practicalities and more with the concepts of honor and duty to family and children. Family lore has it that she played her trump card, telling Franklin that if he divorced Eleanor, she would cut him off financially, an act that would force a sharp trimming of his lavish lifestyle and write “finis” to his political career. Just perhaps Eleanor sensed that her own cool remoteness had been part of the problem.

  In the end, Franklin and Eleanor agreed to stay together, and not simply as a matter of convenience or “for the sake of the children.” It is doubtful that Franklin ever wanted to get rid of her; he simply wanted Lucy to be part of his life also. Eleanor likewise probably would have found it difficult to leave him and the stability she had found among the Hyde Park Roosevelts. The two seem to have attempted to revive their marriage, spending more time together, sharing activities, and avoiding friction.51

  Their relationship was nevertheless not free of speed bumps. Alice Roosevelt Longworth recounted with malicious glee the story of Eleanor leaving a dance at the Chevy Chase Club when Franklin, moving from one attractive woman to another, displayed no interest in an early departure. Finding that she had forgotten her house key when she got home, she sat on the front step in long-suffering Griselda fashion until her husband showed up shortly before dawn. In the wake of her wartime work, she clearly resented the resumption of a frivolous social role as wife, hostess, and less-than-elegant ornament.

  The contrast with Lucy Mercer continued to gnaw and seems never to have left her. At times she drove out to Rock Creek Cemetery to the gravesite of Henry Adams and his wife, Clover. There she communed with Grief, the moving memorial to Clover sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.52

  Franklin seems to have been puzzled and annoyed by her behavior but also willing to do what he could to satisfy her. When he obtained an assignment to return to France and oversee the winding down of the American naval presence there, he took her along. He had insisted on making the trip, arguing that the termination of contracts and sale of property were ultimately his responsibilities and that the potential for fraud and theft required his personal scrutiny. He surely was at least equally drawn by the spectacle of the peace conference in Paris. The Allies were undertaking the most important attempt to stabilize Europe since the Congress of Vienna a century earlier. He wanted to see the process firsthand.

  Received with near hysterical adulation by the victorious populations, President Wilson had arrived in Europe on December 13, 1918, and held preliminary talks with Allied leaders on the shape of the world to come. Behaving almost like a disinterested neutral, he advocated a settlement based on broadly liberal principles (democracy, free trade, self-determination for formerly oppressed ethnic groups, an end to traditional imperialism). Everything, he believed, hinged on US acceptance of a League of Nations that would subject selfish nationalism to the imperatives of a liberal internationalism. His European allies, consumed with fear of a resurgent Germany, wanted full compensation for their enormous losses in men and money.

  At home, the Republicans had won control of Congress in the midterm elections. Henry Cabot Lodge, long hostile to Wilson, would chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Theodore Roosevelt was another strong critic of the president and, despite his precarious health, seems to have seriously contemplated a run for the 1920 Republican nomination. Both fierce partisans with a personal dislike of Wilson, both TR and Lodge also held a view of foreign relations that stressed the primacy of national self-interest and balances of power. A similar worldview had animated Franklin when he joined the Wilson administration. Publicly, he had to support the president; privately, he must have shared to some degree his cousin’s skepticism. His subsequent foreign policy thinking would attempt to reconcile TR’s realism with Wilson’s idealism.

  On January 1, 1919, the Roosevelts boarded the USS George Washington, a renamed German passenger liner impressed into the US Navy as a transport ship headed for Europe. Commanded by Captain Edward McCauley, Roosevelt’s aide on his trip to the Continent six months earlier, it had taken President Wilson to France. On January 6, the ship received word by radio that Theodore Roosevelt had died suddenly. Eleanor and Franklin both realized that, as she put it, “a great personality had gone from active participation in the life of his people.”53

  In France and briefly in Britain, Roosevelt inspected installations, toured the front lines, and handled some major negotiations on the sale of facilities and equipment. Eleanor visited military hospitals and traveled with him, except when he went to war zones from which women were still banned. Mostly, they were in Paris, established at the Ritz, socializing with friends, family, and various eminences involved in the peace conference. On the surface, they were a dynamic, still-young couple, united in affection and purpose. The French capital was for the moment the world’s most exciting city. “It is full beyond belief and one sees many celebrities and all one’s friends,” Eleanor wrote to her mother-in-law. “People wander the streets unable to find a bed and the prices are worse than New York for everything.”54

  On February 15, she and Franklin, along with President Wilson, boarded the George Washington for the return trip home. The president carried with him the initial draft of the Treaty of Versailles; embedded within it was the covenant of the nascent League of Nations. Wilson understood that Senate ratification would be difficult. Determined to fight, he declared, “The United States must go in or it will break the heart of the world.”55

  Franklin must have sensed that he was nearing a new chapter in his life. His time with the Navy Department would likely be behind him in a year. The next challenge was beyond prediction.

  The return to the United States was his twenty-fourth Atlantic crossing. He could never have imagined that he would not make another for twelve years.

  Chapter 7

  Victory in Defeat

  1919–1921

  At 11:15 p.m. on June 2, 1919, as they returned from one of their many social engagements, Franklin and Eleanor heard a powerful explosion, followed by sirens. Still two or three blocks from home, they ran frantically and found Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house, directly across the street from theirs, seriously damaged, its front door blown out and its walls buckled. The bloody pieces of an unlucky bomber littered the pavement. The blast had shattered all the Roosevelts’ front windows but inflicted no bodily harm. Police were just arriving at the scene. James, eleven years old, stood barefoot at his bedroom window in his pajamas, broken glass all around him. In later years, he recalled his father grabbing him and administering a hug that almost cracked his ribs, then his flustered, nearly hysterical mother asking him why he was up at so late an hour. Franklin hurried across the street and found the Palmers unscathed.

  Anarchist leaflets, apparently carried by the bomber, lay amid the gore. The bomb was one of eight set off at approximately the same time in eight different cities across the country. They caused only one death—that of the Washington perpetrator—but the terror factor far overshadowed the actual outcome.1

  The Roosevelts had returned from France a few months earlier with what could only be a sense of triumph about victory in the war, President Woodrow Wilson’s leading role at the peace conference, and the safer future that lay ahead. The Palmer bombing reflected a grimmer reality: an overheated economy at home, labor strife, race riots, specters of bolshevism and anarchy, and bitter partisan division over the president’s cherished League of Nations. During the next year, Palmer would head an indiscriminate federal effort to arrest and deport radicals. A downward spiral was beginning. The collapse of the Wilson administration would be the first event in a decade of challenge and adversity.

  For the rest of
1919 and the first half of 1920, Roosevelt worked on the transition from war to peace with the goal of strengthening a navy that he hoped would become second to none. The United States, he claimed with a straight face, had to be able to face down Great Britain if necessary, although he was more likely worried about Japan. Determined to restart suspended dreadnought projects as quickly as possible, he displayed no patience when the large steel companies submitted identical high bids for armor plate. Using still effective war powers, he requisitioned 14,000 tons of armor plating at a market price to be determined later. Confronted with labor restiveness as postwar price inflation took off, he professed sympathy for the real problems of shipyard workers but also opposed strikes and advocated compulsory arbitration.2

  Identifying himself as a progressive more vociferously than ever, Roosevelt publicized some of the lessons he thought he had learned from Washington’s conduct of the war. Most notably, he argued in favor of a centralized budgeting system for the entire government and establishment of a Bureau of the Budget. He also commended the British system of maintaining respected, nonpartisan, permanent undersecretaries in government departments. At heart, he remained a TR progressive who had not yet reconciled the values of the more forward-looking elements of a northeastern elite with those of a Democratic Party still rooted geographically in the South and the West and intellectually in Jeffersonian localism. He also loyally supported President Wilson on the Treaty of Versailles and its most visible provision, the League of Nations. This stand ruptured his cordial, if distant, relationship with Wilson’s primary antagonist, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.3

  Like the senator (and Theodore Roosevelt), Franklin Roosevelt had long believed that military power and national interests were the decisive forces in international relations. This maxim constituted the basis for Lodge’s “reservations” about the treaty; the senator was determined to make it part of a revised agreement. TR had favored a league that would enforce the peace and serve as an adjunct to American power. Franklin probably shared these sentiments and would have been amenable to a compromise. As a member of the administration, however, he backed the president to the hilt.

  Neither Lodge nor Wilson displayed an interest in compromise. Their mutual hostility dwarfed much larger questions of national policy. In September 1919, Wilson, already visibly unwell, embarked on a nationwide speaking tour designed to secure Senate ratification of the treaty without Lodge’s desired revisions. Three weeks into the trip, he suffered a stroke and was rushed back to Washington partially paralyzed. His wife and his physician provided no information about his condition while keeping him secluded not only from the public but from most administration officials and Democratic leaders. On November 19, the Senate rejected the treaty by a 38–53 vote. By the end of the year, the administration was rudderless, with a semirational president locked into a rigid no-compromise position.

  Writing to a friend, Eleanor said, “I wish the President had been more willing to accept reservations. Still I do wish he could have had the League. I want it behind us & a free hand for all the many domestic problems.” She probably relayed Franklin’s feelings as much as her own. The Roosevelts did not improve their popularity with Wilson by entertaining the eminent British diplomat Sir Edward Grey when he was in Washington on a mission to persuade the president to accept the Lodge reservations. “F D R persona non grata with W,” Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary on February 21, 1920.4

  Daniels’s entry came just a week after Wilson had dismissed Secretary of State Robert Lansing—who had been denied communication with the president—for calling and presiding over cabinet meetings without his consent. The incident intensified a widespread sense that the administration was adrift. In late 1919 and early 1920, many of the men who had managed the war resigned.5

  Turmoil across the country underscored a widespread sense of national malaise: a police strike in Boston, a general strike in Seattle, crippling work stoppages in the coal and steel industries, bombs sent through the mail, the establishment of the Communist Party of America, Palmer’s mass roundups of radicals. Passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and its enforcement mechanism, the Volstead Act, outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, injecting another bitterly contested issue into American politics and dividing Democrats far more than Republicans. In March 1920, with Wilson holding firm to his no-compromise position, the Senate again failed to muster the required two-thirds majority for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.

  Roosevelt, Daniels, and others who stayed on in their posts surely felt they were on a sinking ship. In fact, the secretary of the navy and the assistant secretary spent much of 1919 and 1920 encircled by hostile Republican congressmen and offended naval officers who hoped to bring down one or both of them on charges that ranged from unpreparedness for the war to corruption, waste, mismanagement, and tolerance of vice. Daniels was their primary target, but Roosevelt, as the department’s chief operating officer, was an increasingly tempting secondary objective.

  Over a two-year period, Franklin faced investigations that centered on three charges: improper navy deals with oil companies; mismanagement of the navy prison at Portsmouth, New Hampshire; and personal approval of an investigation of “vice” (homosexuality) in the service that authorized investigators to provide irrefutable proof by actually engaging in sex with the men they subsequently arrested. Nothing much came of any of the inquiries. The vice investigation was potentially the most explosive; Roosevelt vehemently denied knowledge of its methods. In July 1921 a Senate Naval Affairs subcommittee issued a report censuring him and Daniels but produced no evidence that either man had behaved improperly. The partisan tone was obvious; the report was a one-day sensation, quickly forgotten.6

  The most imposing challenge came from Admiral William S. Sims, commander of US naval forces in Europe. At the beginning of 1920, Sims dispatched a long and bitter seventy-eight-point memorandum to Secretary Daniels. Leaked to the Washington Post, the document depicted a Navy Department mired in bureaucratic lassitude, ignorant of the requirements of transatlantic warfare, reluctant to cooperate with allies, and generally unprepared for a major conflict. The Senate Naval Affairs Committee launched an investigation.7

  Sims’s angry manifesto made many of the points that Franklin Roosevelt had voiced semipublicly for years. For a time he and the admiral had been quiet allies. On February 1, 1920, Roosevelt delivered an address in Brooklyn expansively describing the nation’s lack of naval preparedness at the beginning of the war and the steps he had taken to deal with it. In the absence of clear authority, he declared, he had “committed enough illegal acts to put him in jail for 999 years” and evaded impeachment only because he had made the right guesses. He further claimed that Admiral Sims had been sent to London as the American head of the Allied naval effort at his recommendation.8

  Many of Roosevelt’s assertions contained kernels of truth, which he grossly magnified in an honest belief that he had been the only dynamic force in the Navy Department. His enormous confidence and self-regard irked many but seemed perfectly natural to him. His attitude also demonstrated a tendency toward the dramatic that, throughout his life, had a way of breaking free of reality. Daniels was understandably outraged and may have considered asking the president to fire him. Roosevelt, for his part, quickly understood that there was no payoff for abandoning Daniels and dropped whatever impulse he may have had to align himself with Sims, who, after all, near the end of his lengthy letter, had obliquely attacked the North Sea mine barrage as an expensive diversion of valuable resources.9

  Attacking the Senate investigation in early June, Roosevelt defended civilian control, denounced “holier-than-thou” critics, and declared, “Frankly, what is the most serious trouble with the Navy now, as it has been in the past, is Congress.” By then, he had not only repaired relations with Daniels but positioned himself as a strong and effective spokesman for the administration. His charm, p
hysical profile, and articulateness all created more admirers than detractors. By early 1920, he seemed more than ever a man born to govern and a potential candidate for national office.10

  In May 1919, the New York Sun—conservative and Republican but edited by Charles A. Dana, an old friend of Franklin’s parents—suggested Roosevelt as a possible successor to Wilson. A New York friend, Judge Henry Heyman, probably acting with the assistant secretary’s knowledge, had anonymously sent materials promoting his qualifications for the office to numerous metropolitan newspapers. When one recipient publication pointedly noted that Heyman’s packet bore a Washington postmark and implied that it had been generated in the Navy Department, Roosevelt asked Heyman to cease.11

  Roosevelt surely saw the Oval Office as his ultimate goal, but he also understood that 1920 was too soon to run. A vice presidential candidacy, however, had allure, offering national attention, a chance to get acquainted with leading Democrats across the country, and little chance of blame if he performed well in a losing cause. He may for a time have envisioned himself as a running mate for wartime food administrator Herbert Hoover, a political independent who had won nearly universal acclaim for his service. The two men had a remote but politically friendly relationship, facilitated by Hoover’s support of TR’s Progressive Party candidacy in 1912. “I wish we could make him President,” Franklin wrote privately at the beginning of 1920. Shortly afterward, Hoover publicly declared himself a Republican, thereby making it impossible for the Democrats to nominate him.12

  Through the spring of 1920, Democratic prospects steadily shrank. Prohibition sharply divided the party. The continuing deadlock over the League of Nations demonstrated the administration to be incapable of compromise and accomplishment. President Wilson remained sick, isolated, and nearly invisible to the public. Postwar inflation drove up the cost of living. By the end of June, as the party’s convention met in San Francisco, the postwar economic boom was turning into a painful bust.